There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp) progressive who was then subsequently harassed, but their head-scratching reading of Helldivers 2 as a “non-political” game is worth examining.
The only thing that makes sense is that these players have the shallowest of surface-level readings of the game. You are a patriotic soldier serving Super Earth. You must kill bugs and evil robots trying to hurt your brothers-in-arms and innocent citizens. There are no storylines to insert progressive causes into, everyone wears helmets so no “forced diversity.” Therefore, no politics.
Of course, this is…wildly off the mark, as Helldivers 2 is about the most blatantly obvious satire of militaristic fascism since the film that inspired it, Starship Troopers.
Professional reviewers missed the satire of the movie. Or pretended to as fake outrage sells papers better and being the loudest to scream offense means you’re the most right.
Honestly, I can’t tell anymore what’s an act, what’s shitposting being misread and what’s genuine. There’s no way to tell what’s a widely held belief and what’s a hand full of idiots in the corner being put on blast. Take Forbidden West and Stellar Blade. How many of the people making hours long rants about either actually play games? How can they? They’re spending all their time just chasing the outrage algorithm.
If they want Nazis to stop liking Warhammer, they should try putting the satire back in it. It’s been fascist sympathy for decades at this point.
Short of the Emperor coming back and correcting his title to “Dictator of the Proletariat” I don’t even know how’d they’d fix it now.
Canonize Chaos just being rebels with no demons? Horus Heresy already canonized them as being even more fashy than the Imperium. Tyranids or Necrons or whoever winning wouldn’t do shit either. The chuds would just whine about people diverting resources from the war by fighting for “rights” and “food”
See, they knew they were gonna have a Nazi problem; having one of the main characters be ‘sleazy grifter ultra american Odin on a quest to restore The Old Ways’ even though he’s transparently a total piece of shit and everyone knows it and hates him. (Especially with an actor that good playing him)
So they added a bunch of really explicit queer Fucking every season. Just gayed it UP. You think the taxi driver doesn’t do anything for the plot? He doesn’t directly. But he does keep the Nazis away for a whole season.
We just need to do this with all media! Just add long explicit queer fucking to everything, with no warning. Yeah it might be boring when the big climactic fight cuts from its beautifully choreographed martial arts set piece to some side character sucking his girlfriend’s dick outside, including foreplay and pillow talk, but I think we can agree; it’s worth it.
Conservatives think they’re the default. They don’t have an ideology, a religion, a sexuality, or an ethnicity. They’re normal. It’s everyone else who’s different.
I wonder if when extreme satire flies over someones head, outside of not consuming the media critically enough, the difference between heavy satire and pantomime can be subtle. A quick example being One Punch Man, I’d categorize that show as a Pantomime of Anime Cliches rather than satire, as while its playing up the ridiculousness of common anime tropes, its clear it’s doing so with a full love of the medium, and indeed the tropes its making fun of
That just made me think of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. With Edgar Wright simultaneously: satirizing (at times bordering on parody) the genre; paying homage to the genre; and showing their love of the genre by making an actual really good, high quality film.
The third one of that trilogy is fine, but those first two are near perfect films. You could show either of them to someone who’s never watched a cop or zombie movie or whatever, and they would still be able to enjoy them on multiple levels. It’s kind of remarkable actually.
I can’t really think of many, if any, other films that fit the same criteria. Maybe that new-ish Weird Al “biopic”?
I’m a Leftist who watched One Punch Man, doesn’t that show imply that gays are rapists and that anyone without a job most be lazy? Not very progressive…
I never got that impression that the two aspects were inseparable. And he is a very exaggerated representation of a gay man, so maybe it’s that exaggeration that hints at it making fun of those who think gay people are all flamboyant rapists.
So, I think there’s something weird about the nature of the satire in Helldivers 2 that might lead to some problems.
I don’t feel like it’s that controversial to say that the game is pretty obviously ripping off Starship Troopers. Like to a point that goes way beyond mere homage. Now I don’t view this as an inherent problem, because I don’t believe IP should be a thing, but this fact, combined with the way they’ve adapted it into a game leads to some issues.
The game basically has all the aesthetic elements of the satire of Starship Troopers: The over the top patriotism, nationalism, militarism, the devaluing of the individual and life, etc. On it’s own, this is enough for people who have already become disillusioned with the US war machine to get what it’s saying. However, to someone who’s deep in the propaganda that America is a force for good in the world that is simply fighting evil enemies who hate freedom and democracy, there is no cognitive dissonance there. Of course we’re gonna be all patriotic about fighting against some big bad enemy that’s threatening us.
Not that people didn’t also misunderstand Starship Troopers, but a key difference it has in driving it’s point home is that moment at the end of the movie when they capture one of the bugs and learn it feels fear and then they all cheer. We see that no, the bugs aren’t some unthinking monsters bent on destroying us, they’re intelligent creatures and we’re the invaders, but the people are so indoctrinated at this point that this fact doesn’t even phase them.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t really have that anywhere within the main “text” of the game. Sure, you can read some lore and get a bit of that from some conversations with NPCs on the ship, but that’s not really how people interact with games, or at least a game like this. Most people are going to load into a lobby, pick a mission, maybe mess around with their loadout, then go jump into a game where the bugs ARE horrible unthinking monsters who represent an existential threat to humanity. In the ways the game lets you interact with it, there’s no option where you make peace with the bugs or come to understand the horror of what you’re doing. The bugs are just enemies and you have an assortment of guns and bombs to interact with them.
So since the mechanics of the game itself don’t really mesh well with the message of the satire, what it relies on is either
a) You already having seen Starship Troopers or
b) You already understanding imperialism, fascism, and recognizing those traits in America’s military culture.
It’s kind of a weird place for a piece of media to be when it’s message only makes sense in the context of another similar piece of media or when the player/reader/viewer already agrees with it’s message.
It’s not terribly surprising that it hasn’t had any success breaking through to the people who need their minds changed.
There are other games, where you play the bad guys, like Payday. Now I am not knowledgeable enough about the Helldivers or Payday lore, so I cannot compare if similar points can be made there. For all I know Payday could be a group of freedom fighters against a militaristic fascist police state.
Or are there any other games of that genre, where you play the bad guys, and it is made more clear on which side you are on?
There are some others, although I don’t know that they always need to do a “this is bad btw” message. Like Paday or GTA are crime fantasies. The player gets to have fun pretending to act outside the bounds of law and/or morality and get away with it in a safe environment. In the same way you root for the thieves in a heist movie. Although in a movies usually they do more to give you reasons to like the heroes like giving them some sad backstory.
These aren’t really trying to be a political commentary on crime. They might have a component of criticizing the society that forces people into crime, but I don’t know they have anything to say about the act or the people who do it in specific. And they don’t really need to. Not just because they don’t need to send a political message, but also because the game depends on the general understanding that crime is bad and. If it didn’t have that cultural context as a backdrop, the element of the game that makes the player feel like they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t be wouldn’t be effective.
Or to make a more direct thematic comparison: Call of Duty. They’re military fantasy games. The games are pretty much unironic imperialist propaganda. They, like a lot of big budget action movies that include military hardware, get direct support from, and in exchange cede editorial control to, the US military. In these games you are cast as a heroic soldier for either the US or an ally fighting against a bunch of evil, scary foreigners who want to destroy our way of life. When the bad guy turns out to be part of the military, it’s one rogue guy/faction. The one setting that doesn’t twist real life imperialist invasions as being good is WWII. But in the broader context, by placing the fight against the Nazis next to conflicts which have largely been about resource extraction and access to markets, they project the roles of WWII, where America is the good guy and the ones they’re fighting are evil, onto those invasions.
While CoD has to do some work to characterize the enemies to avoid humanizing them, they are heavily leaning on the pre-existing cultural assumption that America is good and brings freedom and democracy to the world. So while I’d criticize CoD for being what it is, I can’t really critique its effectiveness in conveying its message. It might not win over someone who already knows what’s up, and it probably doesn’t make any difference to the complete fascist nutjobs, for most people who don’t like violence and war, but might be convinced it’s necessary for some greater good, it helps reinforce the message that the wars we’re fighting are necessary and are for the greater good.
So yeah. My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message. Sort of responding to some of the other comments: I don’t think you can reasonably expect that the majority of players playing a mission based co-op live service action game are going to stop to read lore or chat with NPCs that aren’t mechanically relevant. So if you want anything to get across, it has to happen in the course of gameplay, maybe even integrated into the mechanics. Granted, that game might not turn out to be fun to play, but that might just be a case for video games in general not being a very effective vehicle for anti-violence messaging.
Going back to those 3 groups:
For anti-imperialists, it doesn’t matter. We know already.
For straight up fascists, it doesn’t really do anything to make them re-evaluate their worldview. Maybe they might get something out of the way the lives of the soldiers is so valueless, but I kind of doubt it. But it certainly wouldn’t change their minds about their enemies being non-human and dangerous/worthy of being killed.
For the average person… they might get the overly patriotic propaganda part of it, but there are so many times when these kinds of people recognize that, but then are like “it’s just like some communist dictatorship! Good thing we’re not like that.” There’s zero self awareness. For the part of it about the nature of the enemy and the necessity of military conflict, the killer bugs and bots that we see in game really only reinforce the idea that this is a necessary conflict.
Idk. It’s fine if the game wants to just be a fun goofy shooting game, and I don’t begrudge it for trying to be something more than that even if it fails, but it’s kind of hard to give it much credit either when it basically just copied someone else’s homework poorly.
My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message.
I think one of the biggest problems with Helldivers 2 is actually the same one with Star Wars. For a fan that doesn’t really care about thinking through the implications of the lore of a game/movie, and wants to identify themselves with the game/movie franchise what is the coolest looking imagery from that game/movie that they can slap on their car as a bumper sticker and associate themselves with? The fascists.
That is actually a pretty serious problem, and saying “but the text of the art clearly points out the fascists are the baddies” doesn’t matter because fascism is a content devoid political ideology that is obsessed with the superficial aesthetics of power without any desire to examine anything past a surface level.
Great point about the bugs, though I think gamers are really dumb as fuck, and tend to have a hard time examining the political implications of games. Most really can’t understand how saying orcs or bugs are inherently Evil and deserve to die is clearly problematic, even if it is done in a lighthearted way.
The whole concept of space bugs itself is interesting in that they are a creature designed to be so aesthetically repulsive and threatening that we don’t extend empathy to it. Take for example my pet peeve with factorio, the game never examines for even one tiny nano second how fucked up it is to trash an entire planet and slaughter countless wildlife trying to stop you, just so you a single individual can go home. The wildlife are creepy space bugs, ewwww, kill them!!
None of the factory survival genre of games do and it is honestly pretty disturbing in the context of the insane amounts of damage being done in real life to our planet in the name of more and more resource extraction. It is like Helldivers without the layer of self awareness.
I understand where you’re coming from, but you’d have to really go out of your way to ignore a lot of stuff in the game to just get the gameplay without any of the dialogue or text that is absolutely dripping with satire.
It’s not that wierd or hard to get dude. For a teen maybe. Please get real. You talk about the indoctrination, that’s what explains some of the wierd reactions. That and teens. It’s a super clear tone you see immediately in the opening cinematic, and not hidden in text lore on the map. It’s humor, joking about very serious things as the backdrop to a coop shooter. Not a wierd place for a game to be in any way.
Starship Troopers also has the joke earlier in the movie about the kid as a soldier, which becomes reality later on as younger and younger kids are drafted into the army. Maybe Helldivers should let you play as a child.
Space Ninjas game spoilers
The player characters in Warframe are children and Warframe players all understand that the government that made them soldiers is evil.
Maybe I missed it, but do they say that anywhere in the course of the gameplay or required interactions for getting into the gameplay? If it’s missable, it’s going to be missed. That’s fine for some stuff, but if your messaging relies on people with the most incurious ideology actively seeking it, you’re going to be disappointed.
We’re talking about it because it is something people misunderstood. You can’t wholly blame the audience without acknowledging the flaws of the media. Not that they bear no responsibility for their reading of it, but it’s not without value to critique the way the message was delivered.
I never played the game but watched some trailers and gameplay videos. I’m 99% certain that Helldivers 2 is following the Starship Troopers formula and purely making fun of patrionism, propaganda, war, the military, military personnel, “freedom”, heroism, politics and military advertisements and turning that into a game. There’s just so many obvious signs, it seems impossible to miss. In other words, it is a political game. Or maybe I just really don’t get either of the two.
You nailed it. It’s 100% inspired by Starship Troopers and is a criticism of US propaganda in the same vein while also being an incredibly fun co-op game.
The only thing you’re missing is just how obtuse some people are. It runs into the same thing as the Warhammer 40k universe, where the humans are obviously just as bad as everybody else, but people praise their fascist military industrial complex society. Either people are so incredibly media illiterate that it makes your head spin, or they’re wilfully ignorant because it supports their worldview. Take your pick, but I go for a little of both.
To be fair, some Warhammer writers also don’t understand that they’re writing satire. The Imperium lights it’s spaceships with candles because they’re too religious for common sense, and yet some claim only a fascist government is efficient enough to save humanity.
The Administratum is such a tangled and immense bureaucracy that entire planets are a rounding error to them. Their propaganda says this is because the Imperium is too big to manage efficiently. But the true reason is, fascists are bad at math
Oof, looks like someone had a deadline looming and decided to take the non-issue of a few dummies lacking media literacy and blow it up into a full article.
Of course there’s a lot of discourse, it’s a popular game, it’s a lot of fun and it’s been a long time since something so high profile was also so over the top in it’s satire.
Now I thought these comments WERE about the article, but if you want thoughts on the topic itself before you’ll be satisfied, sure.
There will always be people who miss the point. There are people who unironically think Starship Troopers is the best thing ever and represents a model society. There are also people who honestly think Fallout doesn’t contain any political commentary. There are people who thought SpecOps: The Line was just an okay modern military shooter. That isn’t a flaw of the media itself, nor is it the problem of people who do understand. Dummies with a complete lack of media literacy or social awareness aren’t a new concept, and the media they fail to understand isn’t responsible for them. It isn’t news that some people didn’t understand a thing, and trying to MAKE it news is just disingenuous and reeks of clickbait and lazy journalism.
There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor
The game does of course have a political message, but I think there is a slightly different take that could have merit.
The “political” part of the game is to make fun of the interventionist foreign policy of the US. This was a major culture war issue from the 80s to the 2000s, but since the 2010s, the culture wars have shifted towards identity politics. The ‘self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers’ are right in pointing out that Helldivers avoids these topics.
I wouldn’t play this game because of my very “woke” anti gun and anti-war sentiments. I think whenever I see a game ad with someone holding a gun, what a sad thing that the video game industry has evolved into - everyone has to use a gun to solve their problems or get “points” in life. Pretty disturbing when you see how young males are groomed to be gun lovers. And really, it’s the worst possible sort of image to be feeding them.
Because people disagree about whether a certain ideology is desirable, you could have an accurate portrayal of it accepted as positive by its supporters and negative by its opponents. The supporters aren’t necessarily missing “satire” - maybe they see the same thing that the opponents do, but they like it.
It’s very dangerous to oversimplify your opponents (in a strategic sense). Generalization is also very risky.
Also, to label them as particularly different from yourself/your social group in some way (especially a way that you consider to be inferior) is the first step on the path to dehumanizing them, as a basis for justifying disdain/anger/hatred/etc. It’s far more likely that they have different life experiences from yours which have lead them to understanding the world differently, but are generally similar otherwise. They “do not comprehend satire” in the same way that you do, that does not mean they are incapable broadly.
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Same thing happens with WH40k and GW has to put out memos telling Nazis to fuck off every few years.
Media literacy is apparently difficult
Some people somehow miss the over the top, in your face satire of the Starship Troopers movie so I’m not surprised.
Professional reviewers missed the satire of the movie. Or pretended to as fake outrage sells papers better and being the loudest to scream offense means you’re the most right.
Honestly, I can’t tell anymore what’s an act, what’s shitposting being misread and what’s genuine. There’s no way to tell what’s a widely held belief and what’s a hand full of idiots in the corner being put on blast. Take Forbidden West and Stellar Blade. How many of the people making hours long rants about either actually play games? How can they? They’re spending all their time just chasing the outrage algorithm.
I personally choose to believe the people complaining about Aloys peach fuzz have never seen a real woman
They put out a notice on the topic more than once?
If they want Nazis to stop liking Warhammer, they should try putting the satire back in it. It’s been fascist sympathy for decades at this point.
Short of the Emperor coming back and correcting his title to “Dictator of the Proletariat” I don’t even know how’d they’d fix it now.
Canonize Chaos just being rebels with no demons? Horus Heresy already canonized them as being even more fashy than the Imperium. Tyranids or Necrons or whoever winning wouldn’t do shit either. The chuds would just whine about people diverting resources from the war by fighting for “rights” and “food”
If anyone says their favorite primarch is Konrad of the night lords… Keep an eye on em
Simple solution tho, ‘american gods’ nailed it.
See, they knew they were gonna have a Nazi problem; having one of the main characters be ‘sleazy grifter ultra american Odin on a quest to restore The Old Ways’ even though he’s transparently a total piece of shit and everyone knows it and hates him. (Especially with an actor that good playing him)
So they added a bunch of really explicit queer Fucking every season. Just gayed it UP. You think the taxi driver doesn’t do anything for the plot? He doesn’t directly. But he does keep the Nazis away for a whole season.
We just need to do this with all media! Just add long explicit queer fucking to everything, with no warning. Yeah it might be boring when the big climactic fight cuts from its beautifully choreographed martial arts set piece to some side character sucking his girlfriend’s dick outside, including foreplay and pillow talk, but I think we can agree; it’s worth it.
TBH what ethics could be gleamed from a game that ships with a rootkit are likely pretty shallow.
See: Does Call Of Duty Believe In Anything?, by Jacob Geller.
Conservatives think they’re the default. They don’t have an ideology, a religion, a sexuality, or an ethnicity. They’re normal. It’s everyone else who’s different.
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I am all about killing fucking bugs in the name of humanity. They are the bugs, after all, not us! Hell yeah.
Paul would be so proud.
I wonder if when extreme satire flies over someones head, outside of not consuming the media critically enough, the difference between heavy satire and pantomime can be subtle. A quick example being One Punch Man, I’d categorize that show as a Pantomime of Anime Cliches rather than satire, as while its playing up the ridiculousness of common anime tropes, its clear it’s doing so with a full love of the medium, and indeed the tropes its making fun of
That just made me think of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. With Edgar Wright simultaneously: satirizing (at times bordering on parody) the genre; paying homage to the genre; and showing their love of the genre by making an actual really good, high quality film.
The third one of that trilogy is fine, but those first two are near perfect films. You could show either of them to someone who’s never watched a cop or zombie movie or whatever, and they would still be able to enjoy them on multiple levels. It’s kind of remarkable actually.
I can’t really think of many, if any, other films that fit the same criteria. Maybe that new-ish Weird Al “biopic”?
I wonder if conservative fans of One Punch Man miss the progressive politics in there, too.
I mean if they’re missing that
Super TroopersHell Divers is satire, then probably xDStarship Troopers?
lmao, you’re right, I got the name mixed up with the cop one
I’m a Leftist who watched One Punch Man, doesn’t that show imply that gays are rapists and that anyone without a job most be lazy? Not very progressive…
It’s Japan, not executing the gay guy might as well be a pride flag
They definitely make fun of the rich though with the guy who’s building has a golden turd on top of it.
I don’t remember any part that implied anything about gays being rapists, what part are you referring to?
Purdy Purdy Prisoner is both gay and a rapist, and the two aspects aren’t presented as orthogonal.
Lol, how could I have forgotten that character.
I never got that impression that the two aspects were inseparable. And he is a very exaggerated representation of a gay man, so maybe it’s that exaggeration that hints at it making fun of those who think gay people are all flamboyant rapists.
Though, I admit it sounds like a stretch.
Given that he’s the only gay character in the show…
This IS Japan we are talking about, anime FREQUENTLY draws black women more muscular than men, and other such shit thats noooooot the greatest
The show’s sole gay character being Putty Putty Prisoner?
So, I think there’s something weird about the nature of the satire in Helldivers 2 that might lead to some problems.
I don’t feel like it’s that controversial to say that the game is pretty obviously ripping off Starship Troopers. Like to a point that goes way beyond mere homage. Now I don’t view this as an inherent problem, because I don’t believe IP should be a thing, but this fact, combined with the way they’ve adapted it into a game leads to some issues.
The game basically has all the aesthetic elements of the satire of Starship Troopers: The over the top patriotism, nationalism, militarism, the devaluing of the individual and life, etc. On it’s own, this is enough for people who have already become disillusioned with the US war machine to get what it’s saying. However, to someone who’s deep in the propaganda that America is a force for good in the world that is simply fighting evil enemies who hate freedom and democracy, there is no cognitive dissonance there. Of course we’re gonna be all patriotic about fighting against some big bad enemy that’s threatening us.
Not that people didn’t also misunderstand Starship Troopers, but a key difference it has in driving it’s point home is that moment at the end of the movie when they capture one of the bugs and learn it feels fear and then they all cheer. We see that no, the bugs aren’t some unthinking monsters bent on destroying us, they’re intelligent creatures and we’re the invaders, but the people are so indoctrinated at this point that this fact doesn’t even phase them.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t really have that anywhere within the main “text” of the game. Sure, you can read some lore and get a bit of that from some conversations with NPCs on the ship, but that’s not really how people interact with games, or at least a game like this. Most people are going to load into a lobby, pick a mission, maybe mess around with their loadout, then go jump into a game where the bugs ARE horrible unthinking monsters who represent an existential threat to humanity. In the ways the game lets you interact with it, there’s no option where you make peace with the bugs or come to understand the horror of what you’re doing. The bugs are just enemies and you have an assortment of guns and bombs to interact with them.
So since the mechanics of the game itself don’t really mesh well with the message of the satire, what it relies on is either a) You already having seen Starship Troopers or b) You already understanding imperialism, fascism, and recognizing those traits in America’s military culture.
It’s kind of a weird place for a piece of media to be when it’s message only makes sense in the context of another similar piece of media or when the player/reader/viewer already agrees with it’s message.
It’s not terribly surprising that it hasn’t had any success breaking through to the people who need their minds changed.
Well said!
There are other games, where you play the bad guys, like Payday. Now I am not knowledgeable enough about the Helldivers or Payday lore, so I cannot compare if similar points can be made there. For all I know Payday could be a group of freedom fighters against a militaristic fascist police state.
Or are there any other games of that genre, where you play the bad guys, and it is made more clear on which side you are on?
There are some others, although I don’t know that they always need to do a “this is bad btw” message. Like Paday or GTA are crime fantasies. The player gets to have fun pretending to act outside the bounds of law and/or morality and get away with it in a safe environment. In the same way you root for the thieves in a heist movie. Although in a movies usually they do more to give you reasons to like the heroes like giving them some sad backstory.
These aren’t really trying to be a political commentary on crime. They might have a component of criticizing the society that forces people into crime, but I don’t know they have anything to say about the act or the people who do it in specific. And they don’t really need to. Not just because they don’t need to send a political message, but also because the game depends on the general understanding that crime is bad and. If it didn’t have that cultural context as a backdrop, the element of the game that makes the player feel like they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t be wouldn’t be effective.
Or to make a more direct thematic comparison: Call of Duty. They’re military fantasy games. The games are pretty much unironic imperialist propaganda. They, like a lot of big budget action movies that include military hardware, get direct support from, and in exchange cede editorial control to, the US military. In these games you are cast as a heroic soldier for either the US or an ally fighting against a bunch of evil, scary foreigners who want to destroy our way of life. When the bad guy turns out to be part of the military, it’s one rogue guy/faction. The one setting that doesn’t twist real life imperialist invasions as being good is WWII. But in the broader context, by placing the fight against the Nazis next to conflicts which have largely been about resource extraction and access to markets, they project the roles of WWII, where America is the good guy and the ones they’re fighting are evil, onto those invasions.
While CoD has to do some work to characterize the enemies to avoid humanizing them, they are heavily leaning on the pre-existing cultural assumption that America is good and brings freedom and democracy to the world. So while I’d criticize CoD for being what it is, I can’t really critique its effectiveness in conveying its message. It might not win over someone who already knows what’s up, and it probably doesn’t make any difference to the complete fascist nutjobs, for most people who don’t like violence and war, but might be convinced it’s necessary for some greater good, it helps reinforce the message that the wars we’re fighting are necessary and are for the greater good.
So yeah. My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message. Sort of responding to some of the other comments: I don’t think you can reasonably expect that the majority of players playing a mission based co-op live service action game are going to stop to read lore or chat with NPCs that aren’t mechanically relevant. So if you want anything to get across, it has to happen in the course of gameplay, maybe even integrated into the mechanics. Granted, that game might not turn out to be fun to play, but that might just be a case for video games in general not being a very effective vehicle for anti-violence messaging.
Going back to those 3 groups:
For anti-imperialists, it doesn’t matter. We know already.
For straight up fascists, it doesn’t really do anything to make them re-evaluate their worldview. Maybe they might get something out of the way the lives of the soldiers is so valueless, but I kind of doubt it. But it certainly wouldn’t change their minds about their enemies being non-human and dangerous/worthy of being killed.
For the average person… they might get the overly patriotic propaganda part of it, but there are so many times when these kinds of people recognize that, but then are like “it’s just like some communist dictatorship! Good thing we’re not like that.” There’s zero self awareness. For the part of it about the nature of the enemy and the necessity of military conflict, the killer bugs and bots that we see in game really only reinforce the idea that this is a necessary conflict.
Idk. It’s fine if the game wants to just be a fun goofy shooting game, and I don’t begrudge it for trying to be something more than that even if it fails, but it’s kind of hard to give it much credit either when it basically just copied someone else’s homework poorly.
I think one of the biggest problems with Helldivers 2 is actually the same one with Star Wars. For a fan that doesn’t really care about thinking through the implications of the lore of a game/movie, and wants to identify themselves with the game/movie franchise what is the coolest looking imagery from that game/movie that they can slap on their car as a bumper sticker and associate themselves with? The fascists.
That is actually a pretty serious problem, and saying “but the text of the art clearly points out the fascists are the baddies” doesn’t matter because fascism is a content devoid political ideology that is obsessed with the superficial aesthetics of power without any desire to examine anything past a surface level.
Great point about the bugs, though I think gamers are really dumb as fuck, and tend to have a hard time examining the political implications of games. Most really can’t understand how saying orcs or bugs are inherently Evil and deserve to die is clearly problematic, even if it is done in a lighthearted way.
The whole concept of space bugs itself is interesting in that they are a creature designed to be so aesthetically repulsive and threatening that we don’t extend empathy to it. Take for example my pet peeve with factorio, the game never examines for even one tiny nano second how fucked up it is to trash an entire planet and slaughter countless wildlife trying to stop you, just so you a single individual can go home. The wildlife are creepy space bugs, ewwww, kill them!!
None of the factory survival genre of games do and it is honestly pretty disturbing in the context of the insane amounts of damage being done in real life to our planet in the name of more and more resource extraction. It is like Helldivers without the layer of self awareness.
I understand where you’re coming from, but you’d have to really go out of your way to ignore a lot of stuff in the game to just get the gameplay without any of the dialogue or text that is absolutely dripping with satire.
It’s not that wierd or hard to get dude. For a teen maybe. Please get real. You talk about the indoctrination, that’s what explains some of the wierd reactions. That and teens. It’s a super clear tone you see immediately in the opening cinematic, and not hidden in text lore on the map. It’s humor, joking about very serious things as the backdrop to a coop shooter. Not a wierd place for a game to be in any way.
Starship Troopers also has the joke earlier in the movie about the kid as a soldier, which becomes reality later on as younger and younger kids are drafted into the army. Maybe Helldivers should let you play as a child.
Space Ninjas game spoilers
The player characters in Warframe are children and Warframe players all understand that the government that made them soldiers is evil.
They kinda threaten to send you off to freedom camp if you disagree with them. The fascisim ain’t subtle.
Maybe I missed it, but do they say that anywhere in the course of the gameplay or required interactions for getting into the gameplay? If it’s missable, it’s going to be missed. That’s fine for some stuff, but if your messaging relies on people with the most incurious ideology actively seeking it, you’re going to be disappointed.
play the tutorial again
Blaming the game devs for making it not obvious enough is really highlighting the lack of media literacy. The game is not subtle at all, man.
We’re talking about it because it is something people misunderstood. You can’t wholly blame the audience without acknowledging the flaws of the media. Not that they bear no responsibility for their reading of it, but it’s not without value to critique the way the message was delivered.
Idiots will always misunderstand shit, however obvious and in front of their faces. It’s like flat earthers etc. nutjobs.
If conservatives had any media literacy, they wouldn’t be conservatives anymore.
This is why the humanities are important
Oh the humanities.
Hue-manatees*
Really? I’m fed up with one humanity. Can’t think I can handle any more. 🫠
I never played the game but watched some trailers and gameplay videos. I’m 99% certain that Helldivers 2 is following the Starship Troopers formula and purely making fun of patrionism, propaganda, war, the military, military personnel, “freedom”, heroism, politics and military advertisements and turning that into a game. There’s just so many obvious signs, it seems impossible to miss. In other words, it is a political game. Or maybe I just really don’t get either of the two.
You nailed it. It’s 100% inspired by Starship Troopers and is a criticism of US propaganda in the same vein while also being an incredibly fun co-op game.
The only thing you’re missing is just how obtuse some people are. It runs into the same thing as the Warhammer 40k universe, where the humans are obviously just as bad as everybody else, but people praise their fascist military industrial complex society. Either people are so incredibly media illiterate that it makes your head spin, or they’re wilfully ignorant because it supports their worldview. Take your pick, but I go for a little of both.
To be fair, some Warhammer writers also don’t understand that they’re writing satire. The Imperium lights it’s spaceships with candles because they’re too religious for common sense, and yet some claim only a fascist government is efficient enough to save humanity.
The Administratum is such a tangled and immense bureaucracy that entire planets are a rounding error to them. Their propaganda says this is because the Imperium is too big to manage efficiently. But the true reason is, fascists are bad at math
It’s an easy worldview. Those people need the world to make sense, and fascism and authoritarianism give easy answers.
Because you don’t have to think about it, big brother does that for you. You just have to cheer the loudest and not ask any questions.
You definitely get it. Pure satire.
Maybe these people are too young to know Starship Troopers. How old is it now?
Even when the movie came out, people didn’t get that it was satire and thought it was 100% serious.
I mean, yeah. That was extremely obvious.
These are the same people that thought the machine RATM was raging against was a refrigerator or something.
Reminds me of this gem
Thats amazing… also Jeez he is old… oh jeez… I’m old…
Also that Homelander was someone to idolize.
Nazies are too stupid to even draw a swastika properly. There is zero hope they are capable of understanding satire.
I don’t think any cultures spell nazis with an added E but I could be wrong. Nazies would be the Plural form of a Nazy.
A nazy sounds like some sort of cute little thing that old ladies make.
Well, now I’m picturing crocheted swastikas :p
Oof, looks like someone had a deadline looming and decided to take the non-issue of a few dummies lacking media literacy and blow it up into a full article.
Bruh the more light we can shed on media literacy in this election year the better…
I’m not sure its just that. There seems to be alot of discourse surrounding this game.
Do you have any thoughts about the topic or did you just want to be critical of the article?
Of course there’s a lot of discourse, it’s a popular game, it’s a lot of fun and it’s been a long time since something so high profile was also so over the top in it’s satire.
Now I thought these comments WERE about the article, but if you want thoughts on the topic itself before you’ll be satisfied, sure.
There will always be people who miss the point. There are people who unironically think Starship Troopers is the best thing ever and represents a model society. There are also people who honestly think Fallout doesn’t contain any political commentary. There are people who thought SpecOps: The Line was just an okay modern military shooter. That isn’t a flaw of the media itself, nor is it the problem of people who do understand. Dummies with a complete lack of media literacy or social awareness aren’t a new concept, and the media they fail to understand isn’t responsible for them. It isn’t news that some people didn’t understand a thing, and trying to MAKE it news is just disingenuous and reeks of clickbait and lazy journalism.
Thanks for clarifying your point.
I agree its not a particularly noteworthy occurrence, I thought your comment seemed kinda gatekeepy.
I don’t know much about the game so I value your insight.
The game does of course have a political message, but I think there is a slightly different take that could have merit. The “political” part of the game is to make fun of the interventionist foreign policy of the US. This was a major culture war issue from the 80s to the 2000s, but since the 2010s, the culture wars have shifted towards identity politics. The ‘self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers’ are right in pointing out that Helldivers avoids these topics.
I wouldn’t play this game because of my very “woke” anti gun and anti-war sentiments. I think whenever I see a game ad with someone holding a gun, what a sad thing that the video game industry has evolved into - everyone has to use a gun to solve their problems or get “points” in life. Pretty disturbing when you see how young males are groomed to be gun lovers. And really, it’s the worst possible sort of image to be feeding them.
Because people disagree about whether a certain ideology is desirable, you could have an accurate portrayal of it accepted as positive by its supporters and negative by its opponents. The supporters aren’t necessarily missing “satire” - maybe they see the same thing that the opponents do, but they like it.
conservatives do not comprehend satire
It’s very dangerous to oversimplify your opponents (in a strategic sense). Generalization is also very risky.
Also, to label them as particularly different from yourself/your social group in some way (especially a way that you consider to be inferior) is the first step on the path to dehumanizing them, as a basis for justifying disdain/anger/hatred/etc. It’s far more likely that they have different life experiences from yours which have lead them to understanding the world differently, but are generally similar otherwise. They “do not comprehend satire” in the same way that you do, that does not mean they are incapable broadly.