Multiplat Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Bioshock was pretty heavy handed taking the piss out of Libertarianism/ Rand's "Objectivism", which was also very topical in 2007, and everyone thought it kicked arse.
Because it was well done.
Did not play, but it lines up with everything i heard so i am not sure what was it's relevance to my post.
 
Well, I'm certainly not in my 20's. I clicked on a thread about a game, I incorrectly assumed the culture war stuff would be in the culture war thread.
Nearly every thread on Sherdog becomes a War Room esq thread within a few pages anymore. Fuckers could turn the Booty Lovers thread into a left vs right thread.
 
Nearly every thread on Sherdog becomes a War Room esq thread within a few pages anymore. Fuckers could turn the Booty Lovers thread into a left vs right thread.

Which cheek is more attractive?

Left cheek vs right cheek?
 
Trick question, your face should be in that ass and then it doesn't matter

If that's an option I'm an independent.

Instead of a Middle-of-the-Roader, I'm a Motor-boater.

vince-vaughn-motorboat.gif
 
That heavy handed politics isn't a negative if the game's actually good, even if it features (political satire of) Rand style speeches as part of the world building.
The funniest thing about this is a few years back I noticed an article by the executive editor of The Gamer magazine, a woke hipster female named Jade King, arguing that Bioshock Infinite has aged perhaps more poorly than any other revered game.

BioShock Infinite Has One Of The Worst Stories In Video Games (Feb-20, 2022)​

Jade King said:
It’s still a great game, but its ambitious story was so overwrought with pompous ideology and righteous ideas that it fell victim to its own lofty idea of what intelligent narrative exploration is supposed to look like. One of the defining takeaways is that freedom fighters are just as flawed as their racist oppressors because they also resort to violence in order to further their cause. Not that it matters, because Booker DeWitt is a human army who will march through them in a storm of bullets and hellfire regardless. Violence begets violence, and it doesn't matter if you're fighting for equal rights or for a world where racism isn't a thing. That's a little fucked when you think about it, but gamers like to feel smart, so BioShock Infinite became a hallmark of narrative brilliance for a time.

But history hasn't been kind to it, with the game undergoing a critical re-examination in recent years with fans and critics alike revisiting what worked and what didn't across Irrational Games' troubled sequel. It has a lot in common with Cyberpunk 2077, having been subject to a number of pre-launch trailers and press demos that were far from the layered experience we would eventually get. It's possible that a lot of the complicated narrative threads and player choice were lost in its inevitable evolution into a triple-A shooter, one that put frequent gunfights and unexpected twists ahead of something designed to stick in our memories.
The dumb bitch completely missed the point of the game. It wasn't to argue that violence is always unjustified, nor that all instances of civil uprising are morally equivalent irrespective of the reasons leading to their existence, and guiding their leaders, but simply that too often those who perceive themselves as righteous are so blinded by their fanatical certainty that even in success they ultimately become the very thing they hated; the oppressed rebel becomes the violent oppressor. And, yes, that truth is observable in history on both sides of the spectrum. Many leftist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin rose only later to become icons of autocracy. Although that's really just an aside. The main course of all three games is a re-examination of America's racist history, and how we struggled to bury that.

I wrote about how sophisticated the language is in the game about a year and a half before that article. It's one of the credibly few legitimate candidates for the greatest video game story ever told.
I also have only gained a deeper appreciation for the careful mastery of the language. It's worthy of an American Lit class. It's actually upsetting how overlooked video games are by mainstream academia when you study this. Example from an in-game "voxophone" audio log:

"When you forced deep underground, well-- you see things from the bottom up. And down at the bottom of the city, I saw a fire burning. A fire's got heat aplenty, but it ain't got no mouth. Daisy...now, she got herself a mouth big enough for all the fires in Columbia."
- Daisy Fitzroy, February 12th, 1912


Like many works in popular fiction, emulating the upstairs/downstairs dynamic of late feudal British life, the city of Columbia's socioeconomic stratification is physically reflected in the city itself. Not only does the city, which perceives itself as morally superior to all others, float in the air, but the poorest working class residents imported to do menial labor live on the lowest levels of the city. This motif has deep roots in Sci-Fi and Fantasy owing to The Time Machine. Recently, Star Wars has also implemented it in Coruscant. The Matrix troped the metaphor with the irony of the city of Zion's dependence on the dumb machines powering the city from its bowels (while they fight the intelligent machines from outside). In Bioshock, the Vox Populi are a radical left-wing uprising. They protest their inequality with mass, violent destruction of the city itself, and murder of its privileged class. Ultimately, they prove as evil as their overlords. They embody a Communist revolution gone awry, but they remind me of another recent "populist" movement.

Nevertheless, Daisy remains a more sympathetic figure than Comstock, even though she eventually succumbs to become what she hates, and the Revolution to which they are most closely analogized in the story is the French Revolution, which although messy, is generally viewed sympathetically by us in the modern era. "Forced underground" specifically invokes the Underground Railroad, and thus slavery, which is what people like her signify in the game.

"And down at the bottom of the city, I saw a fire burning" conveys the physical stratification by height as I wrote in the paragraph above, but it also sets up the metaphor of fire. This is a complex metaphor. The fire represents the foundry of the city; the industrial belly which powers it like those machines in the Matrix. This is Fink's capitalist machine that devours its workers with its unrelenting assembly lines seen in the game. It invokes the imagery of the film Modern Times by Chaplin. And what do these assembly lines produce? Why arms! Weapons for profit.

Simultaneously, fire embodies the swelling rage of the disenfranchised, oppressed citizens of Columbia. Furthermore, to make this even more beautiful, this fiery rage growing within these oppressed workers is manifested in the barrels they surround like the homeless when you venture down to this lowest level. There are literal fires expressing the ideas. Magnificent.

Oh, we're not done. This complex metaphor is mirrored by another symbol in the city: the tower in which Elizabeth resides. Elizabeth is the innocent, idealistic girl who lives a life of luxury, but imprisoned within a gilded cage. The tower takes the form of the archangel of Columbia herself. Elizabeth lives at the top of the tower, like Rapunzel, or other kidnapped princesses in fairy tales where the girl is locked away at the top. Like so many feminist icons of literature from the past century, despite her education, and her status, she is not free. Yet, what is at the bottom of the tower? The Siphon. This is the machine that deprives her of her reality-warping power: that feeds on her to let Comstock control and wield that power himself. Here we see the parallel between the Siphon and Fink's industrial motor.

Back to the Voxophone. "A fire's got heat aplenty, but it ain't got no mouth." That's Daisy's way of saying rage has potential energy, but it doesn't change anything unless it is articulated. You have to tap it. You must convert it into motion-- into a movement. This is her uprising. Here we find an implied, unwritten play on words that is simply sublime. Fire "aint got no mouth", but what does fire have? A tongue. Flames are often described as tongues, and these tongues as "licking" whatever they touch: thereby burning this fuel. What do all these tongues need? A mouth. "Daisy's got herself a mouth big enough for all the fires of Columbia." Daisy foments her revolution with her speech using her literal mouth. She stokes every one of these separate flames into one massive conflagration of disobedience.

Thus, Daisy's tongue becomes a fire, the collective rage of the city, burning the city itself. Ironically, she becomes what she hates, and this is made explicit in a later voxophone when she says, "The thing people need to understand is that the antidote to fear is fear". She's the anti-FDR. Once again, this is woven into this sprawling, intricate, beautifully wrought metaphor. By becoming this huge mouth, wielding this city-sized tongue of fire, she has become a machine of consumption herself no different than the Siphon or Fink's factories.

Most people don't understand why I love video games. It's because they're ignorant. Get off Candy Crush. This is a goddamn masterpiece.

But my favorite part of all about how badly that woke bitch faceplants is when she tries to manufacture consent by ascribing her personal opinion to the gaming community writ large, "But history hasn't been kind to it, with the game undergoing a critical re-examination in recent years with fans and critics alike revisiting what worked and what didn't across Irrational Games' troubled sequel."

:rolleyes: Uh, yeah, that's why the most prestigious meta-poll ever conducted in video games, polling over 300 major figures in the videogame industry, conducted in May 2023, over a year after she wrote that article, put BioShock Infinite at #83 on its greatest games of all time.

The 100 greatest video games of all time, ranked by experts (May-10, 2023)​

83. Bioshock Infinite (2013)

100 best video games ranked by experts

Irrational Games // PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Mac

A nation overrun by religious zealotry that’s infiltrated the conservative movement and seen its populace succumb to racism and xenophobia. Couldn't happen anywhere but in Columbia, could it?
whoops-gangsofnewyork.gif
 
The funniest thing about this is a few years back I noticed an article by the executive editor of The Gamer magazine, a woke hipster female named Jade King, arguing that Bioshock Infinite has aged perhaps more poorly than any other revered game.

BioShock Infinite Has One Of The Worst Stories In Video Games (Feb-20, 2022)​


The dumb bitch completely missed the point of the game. It wasn't to argue that violence is always unjustified, nor that all instances of civil uprising are morally equivalent irrespective of the reasons leading to their existence, and guiding their leaders, but simply that too often those who perceive themselves as righteous are so blinded by their fanatical certainty that even in success they ultimately become the very thing they hated; the oppressed rebel becomes the violent oppressor. And, yes, that truth is observable in history on both sides of the spectrum. Many leftist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin rose only later to become icons of autocracy. Although that's really just an aside. The main course of all three games is a re-examination of America's racist history, and how we struggled to bury that.

I wrote about how sophisticated the language is in the game about a year and a half before that article. It's one of the incredibly few legitimate candidates for the greatest video game story ever told.


But my favorite part of all about how badly that woke bitch faceplants is when she tries to manufacture consent by ascribing her personal opinion to the gaming community writ large, "But history hasn't been kind to it, with the game undergoing a critical re-examination in recent years with fans and critics alike revisiting what worked and what didn't across Irrational Games' troubled sequel."

:rolleyes: Uh, yeah, that's why the most prestigious meta-poll ever conducted in video games, polling over 300 major figures in the videogame industry, conducted in May 2023, over a year after she wrote that article, put BioShock Infinite at #83 on its greatest games of all time.

The 100 greatest video games of all time, ranked by experts


whoops-gangsofnewyork.gif

Strange take, although I've never read The Gamer to know if that's their norm.
I certainly don't see how Bioshock Infinite's hopelessly dated just over a decade later. I do agree with that list in that I'd rate the original higher, but that's because the atmosphere and critique of utopian aspirations (immanentising the eschaton) were more original and less of a formula, even if less refined.

Not that I think good fiction becomes bad just because it's dated either, given how much I enjoy scifi that's absolutely retrofuturism at this point. From Angel of the Revolution in 1893 to Golden Age and Cold War scifi. The fact that the politics and conception of the future is very much a product of when they were written is a part of the appeal. '80s scifi like Neuromancer, Hardwired or Gravity Fails has it's mix of relevance and retrofuturism these days, but that didn't hurt video game derivations like Cyberpunk 2077.

For sure people can enjoy even poorly written, extremely preachy fiction if they agree with the politics, or hate well written fiction if they disagree with it. Just look at the popularity of Atlas Shrugged. I think good writing can usually transcend that though.
 
It will be in the wast majority of cases for AAA. i do not have an iota of doubt. It was for the last 25 years and it will be for the next 10.

Why would games differ from other fiction in that? Unless you just want mindless fun, but then a narrative driven Action-RPG doesn't seem like it'd ever be your genre.
If I was to look for problems in AAA gaming at the moment it'd be a tendency towards remakes and endless iterations on old success stories rather than take risks, releasing half finished products, and a focus on live service cash cows.
Not attempts to make games with political messaging.
For that matter even mindless fun isn't completely free of political narratives.
Admittedly I like political fiction, so I was disappointed to hear Cyberpunk 2077 focused more on the aesthetics and "rule of cool" rather than leaning hard into the original political critiques of the genre.
 
It might be a good game but I just will not be able to take the forced gay shit
 
It might be a good game but I just will not be able to take the forced gay shit
I'm 13 hours in and so far, zero gay or trans stuff except options in the character creator.

To be fair, I am not looking for it actively like a streamer looking to get outrage views. I didn't know there was an option for top surgery scars until I saw it on the Internet. It's the last option, just a yes or no in one place in the character creator. Also, I'm not sure why anybody would care.
 
Why would games differ from other fiction in that?
I said Triple A games. Of course they have less space to be hyperpolitical. For most of history big movies were not promoting obscure stuff like cosmotorianism, zoroastrianism, voluntary human extinction or anarcho-socialism within the US, A Triple A game is like a big ass blockbuster movie.

You can publish books about how Dennis Kucinich would fight aliens with socialism all day long because they are cheap to make.
 
LMAO WTF I can't believe this is real. I don't play the game, but why TF does a character just all of a sudden have a temper tantrum and say "I'm nonbinary" in a medieval fantasy RPG?

This is some obvious self insert trauma dumping by some dipshit trans storywriter. The writing is juvenile and cringe as fuck.

 
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LMAO WTF I can't believe this is real. Don't play the game, but why TF does a character just all of a sudden have a temper tantrum and say "I'm nonbinary" is a medieval fantasy RPG?

This is some obvious self insert trauma dumping by some dipshit trans storywriter. The writing is juvenile and cringe as fuck.


Funny thing, people who just play the game will see this once. People upset about a game they won't play will see this much more as they watch the clips and their favorite similarly minded streamers.

Interestingly, I don't see people complaining that everybody in the game can be a romantic interest for any gender or race. That's dumb.

DA:I did this much better. Some characters were straight, some were gay and some were bi. One was even easier or harder to romance based on what race you were. That's much better.

If you want your game to be inclusive, include people being something besides pansexual and having preferences.
 
LMAO WTF I can't believe this is real. Don't play the game, but why TF does a character just all of a sudden have a temper tantrum and say "I'm nonbinary" is a medieval fantasy RPG?

This is some obvious self insert trauma dumping by some dipshit trans storywriter. The writing is juvenile and cringe as fuck.


Tbf, it is a FANTASY game, so living out your fantasy in your head on the screen makes sense. If it was a game trying to be historically accurate to a large extent, ala Chivalry or Kingdom Come, then I could see it being more of an extraordinarily dumb move. A game with dragons and spirits and such? Meh.
 
Tbf, it is a FANTASY game, so living out your fantasy in your head on the screen makes sense. If it was a game trying to be historically accurate to a large extent, ala Chivalry or Kingdom Come, then I could see it being more of an extraordinarily dumb move. A game with dragons and spirits and such? Meh.
Lore consistency is a thing in fantasy franchises.

People would riot if a Conan movie started with Conan coming out as bisexual to his father in a cringy fashion.
 
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