Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that. People see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.
It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reciting encyclopedia articles to sound smart.
Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.
Yeah, I believe Warren Spector has said before that the premise of Deus Ex was literally “what it every conspiracy theory was true”, and not really anything deeper than that.
I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.
It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).
I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.
That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.
All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.
It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.
I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.
I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”
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Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that. People see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.
It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reciting encyclopedia articles to sound smart.
Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.
Yeah, I believe Warren Spector has said before that the premise of Deus Ex was literally “what it every conspiracy theory was true”, and not really anything deeper than that.
I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.
It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).
I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.
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Idk if Kojima truly made MGS with no politics in mind. He kinda predicted a lot of reality of the past few years with 2 and 4.
That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.
All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.
It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.
At least there aren’t walking nuclear battle tanks capable of launching undetectable nuclear strikes from any point on the globe.
Because submarines are even more terrifying and even more effective
They would be especially terrifying if you saw one following you while hiking up a mountain trail.
I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.
I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”
Today centrism is the more extreme type of political leanings.