Each time you write a story, you're doing politics/morals/philosophy. Each time you describe a world, you describe your own perception and judgement on the world. Whether deliberately or accidentally. Whether discreetely or blatantly. People notice it when it clashes with their views (or else it's rendered invisible by a sense of normality : "it's just how the world is, how else would you describe it"), or when they deliberately investigate it. And revealing the implicit ideological contents to people who "don't see it" is shocking, especially when they want to believe that everything is self-evident, neutral, devoid of ideological content (people usually call "ideology" the ideology of others, and don't see it as such when it's theirs).
So, more or less blatantly, every narrative -and often abstract- game has political contents (is it a game about accumulation, is it a game about competition, are there baddies and what makes them evil, etc). In some games, it's just the unavoidable effect of being made by humans. In some, this content is the purpose. In some, it's as ambiguous as the functions of a fairy tale. And people will of course disagree about these contents, because their visibility is not the same for everybody, and their values neither (again, the more they endorse the values present, the less they notice them).
Like everyone, I'm not against such contents, if they align with my views. I don't mind stories where good guys are good guys and bad guys are bad guys (even when you consciously play the bad guy in the game). Games where good guys are depicted as bad guys are "propaganda" to me, just like the opposite is "propaganda" to creeps. Games which world echo the designer's dumb or creepy worldview are, well, flawed. It's one negative component that may or may not be compensated by the rest. And whether it's deliberate or not, it encourages players to interpret the world that way. You may shrug it off, or not.
"Not tonight" is a kick in the nuts of brexiters (well, I'd say of some brexiters - as a commonplace swiss euroskeptic, I don't care much about the EU and brexit, but I loathe the ethnicist discourses in anti-EU rhetorics, and these seem most specifically targetted by the game). It's a caricature of xenophobes' dream. Suits me. It's political and have sympathy for it. A same gameplay in a game that glorifies ethnic or phenotypic discrimination would be, well, a political game and I'd detest it. And GOG would probably not sell it. Because racism is bad mkay.
But "racism is bad" is a political, moral, philosophical discourse. It's present in many games and stories. Racists will see it everywhere as "political" and "in their face" (omg sjw agenda everywhere), antiracists will see it as just as normal and "neutral" as stealing-is-bad, raping-is-bad, the-baddie-is-bad. Same thing nowadays for homophobia. Same thing, a few decades ago, with nazism (after ww2 it's consensually bad and de-politicized, but in the 20s/30s, criticizing it was a "political bias"). Having a slaver baddie and a slave or slave-liberating hero would not make a story deemed "political" in a society without slavery (or slavery nostalgia). It would be deemed "political" if there was no consensus on slavery. But the message, worldviews and values would be the same. The label comes from outside : A bit, maybe, from the militants that more or less use the story as their flag (not really the case when the theme is a minor component). A lot, surely, from the people who get offended by these views (even when it's a minor component). Those will cry about the story having no business in featuring "political messages".
In short : People are right to point out the political aspects in a game, be them overt or implicit, deliberate or accidental. And they are right to be angry at them, when they are assaults on, or denuciations of, their moral values. But this says nothing on whether they are on the good side or the bad side. Tales, games, myths, are the vehicles of our cultural values, they are our collective mirrors and our main tools of social reproduction. There's a freaky stake, there, and people of all sides of a polemical matter are rightly afraid of which views on it will dominate in cultural products. If Hollywood and videogames normalize "being black", "being homosexual", "being a woman", etc, then racist homophobic chauvinists should rightly panic at those political implications. Same thing for progressives, if Hollywood and videogames glorify discrimination towards homosexuals, women, blacks, muslims, jews, tutsis, etc.
How overtly is a detail. And neutrality an illusion.
Post edited August 20, 2018 by Telika
