SirPhoebos posted:

On the topic of 40K (but also sci-fi/fantasy in general) I've always found the the conceit of "these space racist humans aren't prejudice against ethnicities because they're too busy being space racist towards aliens" to be rather dubious (even if totally understandable from a marketing perspective).

SirPhoebos posted:

On the topic of 40K (but also sci-fi/fantasy in general) I've always found the the conceit of "these space racist humans aren't prejudice against ethnicities because they're too busy being space racist towards aliens" to be rather dubious (even if totally understandable from a marketing perspective).

SirPhoebos posted:

On the topic of 40K (but also sci-fi/fantasy in general) I've always found the the conceit of "these space racist humans aren't prejudice against ethnicities because they're too busy being space racist towards aliens" to be rather dubious (even if totally understandable from a marketing perspective).

It's not like 19th century U.S. was too tuckered out from genociding Native Americans and enslaving Africans to not also be hella racist towards Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Hispanics, etc.

Drakyn posted:

This has all drifted far afield from tabletop gaming politics, but I feel like it's worth noting that 'orc technology working on clap-your-hands-if-you-believe' being dubiously canonical is actually excellent, because it means that the playerbase's thinking that ork technology works because orks believe it works may possibly be true-ish because the playerbase believes it's true.

More topically, Dave Morris appears to have settled down to the occasional snide side-sniping about the whole 'my dead idol who wrote the neo-nazi novel was no nazi and anyone who thinks otherwise is the real nazis' thing, but he HAS posted one undoubtedly political and obviously false statement:

https://twitter.com/RealDaveMorris/status/1509215848984190977?cxt=HHwWgoC9gbH05_EpAAAA


lies

Josef bugman posted:

This unfettered arsehole. The ducks are a vital point of levity in what can be a very serious setting, and they are still fun to play as "straight men" to a lot of what is going on. I don't get people who get so hung up on how "silly" ducks are, when compared with elves, dwarves and halflings.

Xander77 posted:

Oh hey, his blog is back online. And my comment never got published. Where's Dave's respect for freedom of speech and differing perspectives, eh?

Dr. Video Games 0069 posted:

Is that the premise of Necromunda?

SlothfulCobra posted:

40k just a different kind of tabletop game.

Although it does make me think of how the Halo books went out of their way to establish Earth as fascist to explain how they had such a developed space military to fight the Covenant with. (but also the fascism of Earth was justified by the anti-earth rebels doing a 9/11). The games didn't have anything about Earth being fascist and were just straightforward space army fights the bad and corrupt aliens until the game series switched developers.

Archonex posted:

Which is funny, since as time has gone on it's become apparent that Halo's Earth based government is running down a checklist of evil overlord/evil fascist government tropes by the standards of other scifi settings.

What's more, the fascists in control straight up have some evil ideals that take some digging to suss out. Like killing yourself before you present a threat to the government's ruling power (One of the academies mentioned indoctrinates applicants via idolizing a general from the Rome that was told to commit suicide by the Emperor after he feared he was growing too powerful) in one of the most obvious hypocritical actions out there.

Then there's the fact that the "hero" of the game is straight up a kidnapped child by the government that was raised to be a super soldier. How did they kidnap him? By replacing him with a flash clone that would die horrifically in front of his parents after enough time had passed that they'd cover their tracks. The parents of these victims only found out later on and it got handwaved away because *plot reasons that say that Master Chief is never gonna unload a magnum into the head of a murderous fascist that isn't an alien*.


Then there's the civil war. Master Chief would straight up be the villain protag or an end game boss if the covenant hadn't showed up. The whole "the rebels are the eeeevvviil ones!" rings pretty hollow if you realize that the rebels were doing unethical poo poo to stay ahead of the even more wildly absurdly evil (Example Stealing children from the rebelling outer colonies for a literal super soldier project named after a genocidal slave state that regularly murdered their slaves. Or having their CIA equivalent engineer horrifying flesh liquefying viruses.) fascist inner colonies. Which is not inaccurate given the things that many real world rebellions had to do to stay ahead of the ones they're rebelling against. And that includes the US's rebellion against Britain. Go look up how we handled trading with pirates and smugglers for example.

Of course, the whole conflict looks even more shady from a narrative intent bent when you count the issue that the Spartans (Another fashie trope) weren't created to fight dogmatic space aliens. They were straight up created to crush rebellions like the Empire does with super soldier projects in Star Wars. The poo poo with the aliens comes afterwards, and was a complete surprise to the UNSC.


Honestly, in an alternate universe set of games where it's just the rebels versus the earth government it'd probably end up being a plot point that Reach fell when the rebels overtook it due to the UNSC MAC stations being ordered to turn 60-90 degrees towards the planet and glass it, Death Star style.

SimonChris posted:

In case there are still people wondering if M.A.R. Barker was merely pretending to be a nazi, people have been looking through the old Tekumel mailing lists:

https://twitter.com/SpindriftGames/status/1509072726438281219

CommieGIR posted:

Yeah this bugged me to no end: Halo wasn't exactly an uplifting story because it was incredibly hosed up.

Telsa Cola posted:

I don't think it ever really tried to be and the people who thought it was don't pay attention to whats actually happening. This happens with like every media.

Things like the Covenant consistently losing the ground war only to shrug and just glass the planet, or Cortanas rampancy, or a bunch of other poo poo.

Archonex posted:

Words

Absurd Alhazred posted:

And yet endless war is the premise of the game about endless battles for which you should buy and paint miniatures/run various RPG campaigns.

quote:

This is my argument against people that hate the ending of Red Dead Redemption. Spoilers if you haven't played it...John Marston, the main character, gets a thousand bullet holes in him because the feds turn on him. You are placed in the Kobayashi Maru scenario and you can't do anything but watch the guy you've played as for hours upon hours get butchered.

Then you wake up through the eyes of his now-grown-up son Jack. Your sole purpose for playing story missions as Jack is to Hunt Down the people that killed your father and get payback.

I very much hold to the fact that this is tragic. John spends the entire game trying to save his son from just this fate, and despite all the work he does and all the effort put in, Jack becomes an outlaw and a murderous gunfighter just like his father feared. Something about when I gunned down the retired fed and saw the word REDEMPTION fill the screen, it felt empty.

Now, the reason why I hold that it's *tragic* is that the player straight up chooses to do this. Jack is unaware of John's intentions, but the player has just spent a dozen hours in the eyes of a man trying to save his son. The player then chooses to pursue the path of revenge, the player gets several chances to veer off and explore the open world, but is compelled the FINISH THE STORY. Well the story ends with murdering someone in a gunfight in the name of cold-hearted revenge. Congrats, human player, you undid everything you worked for.

People refute that the game doesn't give you a choice. It does. Stop playing. No one is making you go on the story quests. Sure, there are cut scenes to watch and voice acting to hear, and we're driven by the curiosity of what comes next. But we still have a choice. And our choice leads us to committing to everything we spent the entire game trying to prevent.

I might really like that game, if you can't tell.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Aside from the scare quotes around the Holocaust, and the obvious difference between an event from two thousand years ago and an event which still has survivors walking around, moreso when this was written, this clown has either never talked to an even slightly traditional Jew, not to mention any Jew who grew up in Israel - Tisha Be'av, Massadah, "If I forget you, oh Jerusalem, may I forget my right hand, may my tongue stick to my palate" when you get married, etc - or he did talk to them and just ignored them.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Toph Bei Fong posted:

citybeatnik posted:

Ah the Spec Ops: The Line approach to video games.

SirPhoebos posted:

I never finished RDR, my impression was that John getting killed by the feds is the end of the main story, and playing as Jack is there so you can complete the rest of the open world stuff. Is that not the case?

SirPhoebos posted:

"If you didn't want to do the bad thing, then you shouldn't have played. "

"Alright, can I have my money back?"

"No."

SimonChris posted:

In case there are still people wondering if M.A.R. Barker was merely pretending to be a nazi, people have been looking through the old Tekumel mailing lists:

https://twitter.com/SpindriftGames/status/1509072726438281219

SimonChris posted:

In case there are still people wondering if M.A.R. Barker was merely pretending to be a nazi, people have been looking through the old Tekumel mailing lists:

https://twitter.com/SpindriftGames/status/1509072726438281219

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Did this clown even know a single damned thing about Jewish people or did he somehow have less knowledge of them that I have of the Chukchi?

Telsa Cola posted:

I somewhat get what you are going for but this reeks of the people who sit through an entire movie and then come out and complain they didn't like it and it was too violent or whatever and request a refund.

No you do not get a refund for the media you just consumed in its entirety.

Archonex posted:

It's not, actually.

PeterWeller posted:

And in the case of RDR and other open world games, you can continue to play without engaging with the story arc. That's kind of the conceit of open world games, especially when you consider that the mechanical point of their stories is to give you a tour of the open world they built for you to explore.

It's both a way to let you continue side missions and open world content and a continuation of the main story.

If I remember correctly, the tragedy of the last revenge mission isn't that the guy stands there and lets you shoot him--I remember that being another quickdraw--it's that he turns out to have the same desire as John: to leave behind his life of bloodshed and settle somewhere quiet with his family. So by hunting him down and killing him for killing John, you're making (and making Jack make) the same decision he did. To hammer that point home even further, you find him through his wife, using his family against him as he used Abigail and Jack against John.

E: To be clear, I'm only addressing the characterization of that last dude there. I agree with you otherwise about the ending.

Halloween Jack posted:

I would agree that there's an element of moral responsibility in storytelling, but playing through different paths in a video game doesn't make you a storyteller in that sense. It's categorically different from tabletop RPGs.

quote:

Remember how, at the end of character creation, you went “mmhmm” like the good doctor? Here’s where you angle the game to hit those issues. In the town just past, what were the characters about? What positions did they take? Which sinners did they judge harshly, and which did they show mercy? What did they say, I mean really say, about themselves and others?

Your goal in the next town is to take the characters’ judgments and push them a little bit further. Say that in this past town, one of the characters came down clearly on the side of “every sinner deserves another chance.” In the next town, you’ll want to reply with “even this one? Even this sinner?” Or say that another character demonstrated the position that “love is worth breaking the rules for.” You can reply with “is this love worth breaking the rules for too? Is love worth breaking this rule for?”

But Dogs isn’t abstract or academic! This love, this sinner, this law— those are real people, real characters I mean, in real concrete situations. Create the people and the situations, don’t pose the question in some sort of theoretical way.

Most importantly, don’t have an answer already in mind. GMing Dogs is a different thing from playing it. Your job as the GM is to present an interesting social situation and provoke the players into judging it. You don’t want to hobble their judgments by arguing with them about what’s right and wrong, nor by creating situations where right and wrong are obvious. You want to hear your players’ opinions, not to present your own.

quote:

I grew up Mormon. My main inspiration was the body of family stories and history that came down to me, and my own research into the religion’s history. My goal was to create a game that took my Mormon ancestors and their lives and faith seriously, while also taking seriously my own experience leaving the faith.

quote:

Basically, Westerns can go to hell, Utah history can go to hell, and unless i extricate Dogs in the Vineyard, it can go to hell too.

I have half a plan for a new edition and half a plan for a sequel. I think the sequel's more likely at this point, but neither are underway.

-Vincent

Archonex posted:

The marshal/FBI guy made it a point to hunt down John and threaten his family despite (and I may be misremembering this) having not been personally harmed by all of John's antics in his youth. Meanwhile, Jack has a legitimate grievance against the marshal/FBI/whatever dude

PeterWeller posted:

I kinda disagree here. Ross--I think the dude's name is Ross, gonna call him that for convenience--is not personally harmed by John's criminal past (unless something happens to him in RDR2 that I forget) but he does have a personal motivation that is arguably just as justifiable as Jack's motive: Ross believes in the rule of the state and its laws. He believes outlaws like John and the rest of the Van der Linde gang's killers are his ideological and existential foes, so he has them killed without remorse. But as ruthlessly as he pursues that goal, he does also restrain himself from going beyond it. Note that while he holds Abigail and Jack to coerce John, he never harms them and doesn't appear to have intended to ever harm them. He could pursue them when they flee Beecher's Hope, but he lets them go. John and Jack are men of the fleeting and perhaps never more than mythical wild west while Ross is a man of the modern era.

You can easily argue that John doesn't deserve to just walk away and live a peaceful life. Even if you always choose the honorable options, John will still kill hundreds of people over the course of the game, nevermind his life of crime prior to RDR1.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

The problem is that D&D races are inextricably linked with real-world peoples, nothing just popped up with no real-world analogue. A dwarf or an orc is not an alien with no recognizable attachment to how cultures and races are treated in the real world. Everything is derived from Tolkien, so for example a dwarf is at core a Jew. Tolkien struggled with whether orcs were truly irredeemable and what that would mean to the overall message of the story if they were.

That kind of nuance is largely lost on D&D and its successors.

1) If you say orcs are demons birthed from muck by the will of an evil god, and not actually people

2) but then turn around and say you can be one wouldn't that be fun

3) and then don't really do any homework on what the existence of an evil god means

...You're arriving at a strange intersection between good harmless fun and games about race wars of extermination.

This is what WoW has become about, obvious real world analogue races engaged in non-stop race war, united only briefly by missions to assassinate god.

Does it matter? These are all just games, right? It's exasperating when everything is political. The stakes and consequences in the moment are low. But as a lens to view stuff in the real world and learn more about it, many of these games are really poor and immature, sometimes with heinous messaging. We also discover that this is not always an accident when we look into who is responsible and their politics.

Schwarzwald posted:

PeterWeller posted:

The entire Mexico section of the game is pretty hosed up in general. The only decent man you meet down there is the old white dude who's a former outlaw gunslinger. Everyone else is some type of sexual predator. The leader of the revolution is as corrupt and greedy as the men he's fighting against. Even the little things you can try to do to make life a little better are quickly undermined, like that pimp is going to kill the prostitute even if you save her and sequester her away at the church.

TBF, this is Rockstar we're talking about, and all their games are incredibly cynical. Even RDR2's genuinely beautiful story of redemption is very cynical. Arthur and John will die no matter what.

NikkolasKing posted:

The last Rockstar game I played was GTAIV. Before that...Vice City Stories.

Holy poo poo you're right. There is never a happy ending for any of the less awful, more serious protagonists.

Killer robot posted:

I don't think I ever finished VCS (Though I recall the protagonist is someone who dies at the start of Vice City), but I remember the dark streak of the GTA4 ending where whoever's advice you listen to at the end is the one that ends up dying due to the consequences of your actions.

It's really interesting how much Saints Row 2 and on picked right up from the GTA3/VC/SA approach where the world is a cynical cartoon show but your personal story has a lot of focus on coming out on top and going on criming with your awful buddies, even if SA has some of where the more serious Rockstar takes go later.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Given GTA very heavily borrows from crime fiction, (in the same way their protagonists 'borrow' people's cars) it's not surprising that they tend to have bittersweet at best endings full of betrayal, bloodshed, their protagonists' actions coming back to haunt them, and/or famous last stands. And I mean, thematically, a GTA protagonist 'winning' is only really satisfying if they're the kind of comical sociopath like Tommy Vercetti (and surviving characters usually end up being losers in future entries) while the ones trying to be 'sensible' usually find themselves ending with an ironic tragedy of all their efforts coming to naught.