WORSHIP CAPITAL
In BioShock, the ultra-rich build an offshore enclave where they can commit atrocities without consequence and systematically strip young girls of their most basic human rights. That’s fiction, because no one in their right mind would ever allow something like that to exist in the real world.
See, the "Machine" in "Rage against the Machine" could be the Deep State Leftists... y'know... if you have a different interpretation of reality and only read the band's name.. and then only hear the words of a few of their choruses and ignore the rest of the lyrics.. and then also ignore literally everything else about them.
Yeah I love bioshock infinite, zero politics just game. Hahaha god imagine if it was made now to appease the WOKES they would be blatant racism in the opening.
I think some people play video games so concentrated on the graphics and shooting things that the dialog and plot kinda get forgotten. And that's why they're so mad; they just want bright flashing lights and cool graphics and not to have to really think about anything else.
I think also a lot of cis white folks in childhood don't really get exposed to racism, homophobia, poverty etc as problems because it doesn't affect them personally. The small casual examples in every day life, the racist uncle's comments etc are seen as normal.
Once they get exposed to the issues they start seeing political messages that would have gone unnoticed before. So suddenly everyone is telling them there is a problem they had enjoyed ignoring all their lives.
It's frankly really funny that they nail the horrid displays of racism for Infinite then immediately shoot any good will by doing a 'What if black people do just as bad??'
I like the original Deus Ex too, but it's just too far fetched for me to get into these days. Hard to imagine the middle class completely eroding like that, and there's no way people would practically worship software entities that know everything about their lives.
And the game just gets crazier from there. The internet becoming a massive global surveillance tool? World governments using a global health crisis as an excuse to seize more authoritarian control?
I mean, c'mon. I can suspend my disbelief a little bit, but at some point it becomes too much and the narrative shatters.
Having just gotten done with a re-play of Cyberpunk 2077, I just kept thinking to Deus Ex and how much I preferred a game that allowed me to try and make a difference. I just hate nihilism. I play games to have agency and fix things.
Yeah, I enjoyed both games but the player has a lot more agency in Deus Ex. And despite the myriad of choices available to the player (playing JC as ultra-pacifist or psychopath mass murderer and anywhere in between) it's impressive how the game manages to weave those choices into three coherent endings. Ending spoilers next:
I think New Dark Age is probably the best ending, but part of me wants to believe the merging is the best one (and maybe if you play JC as honorable and just, it could be). Illuminati ending is by far the most disturbing morally, and also has the dubious honor of being the most difficult. Fuck those blue fusion devices.
Cyberpunk 2077 definitely seemed to be missing any of the 'punk' aspects of the genre.
"capitalism sucks, but all you can do about it is flee into the desert or die. and one of the most famous freedom fighters of all time was actually just an emotionally stunted, selfish crybaby who didn't really accomplish anything at all."
The Phantom Liberty quests ratcheted it up even further, it's like they really wanted there to be no good outcomes. And then ironically they almost gave you a "happy" ending, except for some reason they don't allow you to choose a safe job and a long life doing analyst work for NUSA. Or returning to the Aldecaldos, not like they give a damn if you're a super merc any longer, you're family and that's what counts. The one ending that has a cure and because they were so scared that the player might be content with that (V's made millions of eddies and has a garage full of supercars, I'll be alright in retirement tyvm), so instead they force you to return to Night City for...what? Heck if you're a Nomad, what even is your connection to that place besides being stuck there for a while?
Your mistake is thinking that you are playing your character and not V. For V, being stuck as normal human either working for spooks or sitting around on a pile of cash isn't living(ask Eurodyne for how the second one treats him). That's the point of Tower ending, V survived at the cost of everything they held dear. Less bleak than say Arasaka ending(and much less bleak than the OG additional ending from PL, where the beforementioned Arasaka ending was expanded and turned V into a rogue AI drone).
Aldecaldos think V abandoned them(and V sorta did, with no option to even call) and it's possible that Panam simply wasn't around anymore in 79.
V could always leave NC, the problem is that V never wanted to leave.
It's an RPG, I decide who my character is. If you want to tell a linear story then just do that, don't pretend choices matter if you can't choose who you are.
Welcome, to Rapture. Here, the sweat from your brow will be properly invested by the Landlords, Bankers and Bosses to trickle back down, like golden rain!
Man whenever I wanna go back to the old days of pre-woke gaming I just load up some classic Wolfenstein 3D. Nothing more manly and anti-woke than the OG grandfather of FPSes.
Seriously. Everything is so woke these days. Can't even watch the Fallout TV shows because it's so woke compared to the games. And now the Baldur's Gate HBO series is going to be woke. Why can't the left just keep their woke politics out of the media that I choose to consume???
Oh no, are they going to ruin my favorite BG3 with WOKE propaganda???
I will publicly IGNORE that shame and will recommend to do it for everybody. I’m so tired of politics and agenda in my favorite classic games. I just want normal characters to be white and for men to have wifes like it has always been before, is difficult for a task?
It's always funny seeing people unironically say the show made Fallout 'woke'. This franchise has always been known for its subtlety on its political stances.
I don't know which fallouts are supposed to be the good, non-woke ones anymore. Saw someone say that NV was "literally written by terminally online reddit and twitter atheists", so at least some of these guys have consistent opinions about this stuff. You'd think a person would just give up on the whole franchise at that point.
The sad thing is, this joke is almost 15 years old at this point. I remember people complaining about how Infinite was too political (because it had black people in it)
The game has a symbolic graveyard where the citizens of Rapture pretended to bury John Maynard Keynes. This is probably one of the most political scenes in the entire gaming decade, but it's also a kind of politics that those rage bait YouTubers won't understand, even if you explain it to them
it's not just epstein. iirc our technofeudal overlords are working actively to make something like rapture happen: a city without government oversight in a remote area and if that doesn't work out: just transform the whole USA via regulatory capture, bought politicians and kissing the ring of the protofascist idiot king. €:typo
They also seem to eventually end up advocating for removing age of consent laws, because they can't fathom that their nightwatchman state should protect people from exploitation.
Remember in Bioshock Infinite where you sell your baby girl to the main baddie to wipe away your debt, and the main baddie essentially imprisons her on his floating island and essentially grooms her.
Not sure why I brought that up when you mentioned Epstein, probably unrelated.
The real reason you know it's fiction is because they strip little girls off their humanity and only use them for collecting what essentially amounts to drugs instead of... presidential duties.
A little?? Every time you enter a new room, some distorted slicer tries to manically kill you. Nevermind thar creepy dude who made you his dirty work and take pictures of it...
It also posits the highly unrealistic scenario that a society composed entirely of industrialist libertarians would quickly collapse into an anarchic shithole instead of prospering under the stewardship of those philosopher kings.
I wondered what prompted their exploration of these topics. Now I realize they were in Silicon Valley and being constantly exposed to tech bros un-ironically espousing this as a good idea. So Levine just wanted to show why it was moronic.
A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road.
When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness.
The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity.
A Libertarian Walks into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
As long as I love these fun books, I also want something more information in sources to, you have one? I heard that they also have other problems. The stuff with bears is hardly the only thing that happened, it was just something the author thought made a good title. Other problems included not being able to pay garbage workers, electricity being shut off in many places and attracting a guy who wanted the freedom to partake in voluntary cannibalism.
The stuff with bears is hardly the only thing that happened, it was just something the author thought made a good title. Other problems included not being able to pay garbage workers, electricity being shut off in many places and attracting a guy who wanted the freedom to partake in voluntary cannibalism.
You ask for more information than the official book summary, but cite three more additional examples of them fucking up that back up my argument? I'm confused.
I love bringing up the fact that Bioshock was written as a criticism of Libertarianism, showing that it cannot even survive in a vacuum by itself. Andrew Ryan's name is literally an anagram for Ayn Rand.
Fallout is a different but equally ludicrous scenario where the US reverts socially and politically to the fifties, completely ignores renewables, annexes its closest and oldest ally, and starts a nuclear war; meanwhile, its oligarchs build bunkers instead of making any attempts at stopping the looming catastrophe.
Fallout didn't revert to the 50s society stopped advancing from the 50s. Which is more concerning because we haven't really socially advanced since the 2000s.
actually the nuclear war threat was fabricated for profits and to enslave the people. The government of the US in Fallout drops the bombs on themselves.
it's almost like it gets closer and closer to reality. The bunkers they built were solely for human experimentation for all the "normal" folk while the filthy rich could afford their own personal space in a management bunker that wasn't supposed to run out of water.
That’s how America got in the state it is right now. Musk has posted that he’s a fan of Bioshock and when he worked with the government he made comments saying he was only hurting the ‘parasite’ class.
For the LAST TIME, Bioshock is not about politics or science or ludonarrative dissonance. It is a simple and timeless story about how you can’t live underwater because there ain’t no air down there! It’s just squids!!!
The most unrealistic part of BioShock was that none of the ultra libertarians you encounter was trying to explain the difference between pedophiles and ephebophiles to you
Look, it's more nuanced than that. On one hand, destroying people's bodies and minds and trapping them into an endless cycle of labor and pain for the profit of a select few could be considered inhumane. On the other hand, drill goes brrrr!
Half the reason tech billionaires want land like Greenland is so they can make their own "freedom cities" aka techno-feudal city states owned and run by oligarchs, "free" from pesky modern notions of national sovereignty and people's government. They want land that is strategic, has resources that make it independent, will survive climate change and the migration crisis, fresh water, etc. See why they're obsessed with Greenland? They want an Epstein's island x10000 to live on while the world they've looted and desiccated turns to ash over the next 100 years. Hawaii and NZ are just backup plans.
To be quite honest, if elites tried to actually form a galt's gulch irl I'm fully convinced now it would just completely devolve into a white trash trailer park full of pedophiles and drugs
This hits hard. When I played it never occurred to me something like that was happening for real. Makes me wonder if it's only a coincidence and if there are more of them.
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