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Azarkon: Fantasy is inherently conservative therefore RPGs don't need overt conservative messaging

octavius

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Isn't he a neanderthal / primitive German tribal?
Description from The Return of the King is probably closer to the Aboriginals.


Or the original Druids. Druedain, which was the people Ghan-Buri-Ghan belonged to, looks suspiciously like Druid.
 
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Iznaliu

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* Maybe I'm failing muh 'kwan history roll here, but wasn't the Republicans the one's who freed the negros? And the ones that supported the Civil Rights bill more than the Democrats?

Southern strategy my ass; and once LBJ, a Democrat, supported civil rights, all of the descendants of the slaveocrats jumped shit ship

I never would have believed people like Sarah Silverman would be calling for armed revolt against a president, but these days anything is possible, I guess.

From the moment Trump passed 270, the United States have became a dead man walking

Problem today is that liberal retards can't make the distinction between writing a mary sue cunt and a stronk woman. They do it with nigger characters to a lesser degree as well. The frequency with which these type of characters appear also give away the agenda. When you can't skit in the plaza without hitting a stronk woman but white men are completely absent save for the main villain...well... let's just say the writer's from cucknifornia.

Confirmation bias 101

With respect to feminism, third wave feminism has tainted the whole debate, such that today you have people saying the Witcher is sexist because there's naked women in it. It's like fundamentalist prudes took over the feminist movement and it no longer resembles anything that could be considered a positive, progressive force.
3rd wave feminism is more sex-positive than 2nd-wave feminism. I believe the issue is that how the women are portrayed, not the existence of nudity in the first place. BTW; the portrayal of women in TW3 is shit

Without going into that, all I'm going to say is that the women characters in the Witcher remind me of what used to be the model for feminism in the old days of the movement: strong, independent characters who are ultimately just as flawed as men. Equality, not superiority or eternal victims.
True, but feminism has not 'declined'. The truth is that feminists are humans; some are selfish pricks and some genuinely want to make the world better. In today's constant media blitz, the former type attracts more attention because they do more stupid shit.

Wrong. In spirit, they're still the same they've always been, only the form has changed. Personal freedom and responsibility for the individual - Republicans. Big government and institutionalized systems of exploitation - Democrats. Whether Democrats outright enslave blacks via collars and chains or get them hooked on welfare and thus enslave them to an existence of permanent dependence on government programs, the essence is still the same.

Wrong. In spirit, they're still the same they've always been, only the form has changed. Personal freedom and responsibility for the individual - Republicans. Big government and institutionalized systems of exploitation - Democrats..

How does that fit with major Democrat figures jumping ship when the Dems passed the Civil Rights bill? By the way, the Republicans get awfully shaky about passing bills loosening gun restrictions etc in minority areas, they give handouts to corporations 'to fund innovation'; they institute a police state and make Voter IDs required; DMVs conveniently close down in only Democratic-voting areas to ensure Republican supremacy; they mandate expensive wars, and once these are over, use inefficient methods such as waterboarding to try and squeeze info out of them. Overall, spending increases under republican governments, while taxes for the rich go down. Big government is just a buzzword that the Republicans' corporate donors use in order to secure rights for corporations so they can oppress people

Whether Democrats outright enslave blacks via collars and chains or get them hooked on welfare and thus enslave them to an existence of permanent dependence on government programs, the essence is still the same.

These quotes are spurious and do not fit well with the fact that it was JFK, not LBJ, who was the real author of the civil rights programmes. Many whites also take welfare, which is often insufficient, forcing people to have 2-3 jobs to support the children they are stuck with due the lack of easily accessible state-subsidised contraception
 
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SausageInYourFace

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My post was specifically about the fantasy literature that influenced the creation of RPGs (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons), not fantasy literature generally, although it isn't too far off from fantasy literature generally ending circa 1980. (..) You might as well justify the intrusion of progressive politics

Fair enough, must've been lost in translation between threads, since Azarkon is arguing that. However, your response was a reaction to me 'citiation needed'-ing your post:

RPGs in general inherently contain a conservative subtext, derived from the fantasy literature that inspired them, even when they aren't explicitly political.

Which is just as untrue as to say fantasy inherently contains conservative subtext. And I am not justifying anything, I am saying that, to say the genre is inherently anything is nonsense, be it fantasy or RPGs.

Though out of the three counterexamples you listed, two of them are quite recent, and are therefore meaningless in terms of having influenced D&D.

Of having influenced D&D perhaps; not meaningless however in illustrating my main point, that simply tracing the roots of a genre does not make inherently anything, it merely traces its origin. But as my examples show and you admit, genres are quite versatile and open to interpretation and change.

The same that is true for fantasy literature is true for RPGs as well, their message is far from being dictated by their fantasy setting. I guess there is no need to post a bunch of modern RPGs here that illustrate this point. But even for older RPGs that is not the case. You (and I guess Azarkon) seem to argue that traditional fantasy is inherently conservative, therefore D&D is, therefore RPGs are.

A lot of old RPGs do not even have a story and I have trouble accepting that the mere fact that you are a knight and have to go into a dungeon to kill an evil wizard already is a subtext sufficient enough to constitute a meaningful message. RPG stories became only more sophisticated roughly around the mid 90s when there are already many influences beyond just D&D.

One of the earliest RPG series directly inspired by D&D that was hailed for its sophisticated story and themes is Ultima and that is far from conservative in its explicit message. If you wanted to give that a deep reading (though thats already a bit of a stretch) Ultima 4 begins at the dawn of a new age of enlightenment and social progress for which the player ought to become a role model. It checks on almost none of the points you have listed in a meaningful way except the most basic ones owing to the setting. There is no good vs. evil, no threat to empire and no particularism, it is very subversive towards religious institutions - your main task is basically to establish a new humanist philosophy. As later games will show, this new philosophy is distinctly undogmatic as well as open to (re)interpretation by other people with different set of believes one ought to be tolerant of.

I could go on with Ultima as an example but my point is clear, there is nothing in fantasy literature, nor the pen & paper games derived thereof, nor the video games derived from these, that gives it an inherent political stance. It is what you make of it, it is how people use it, irrespective of its roots. A genre offers a number of tools, conventions of setting, emplotment and so on, that hand itself to the authors (or devs, or players) and they are at liberty to use these tools to their hearts content and tell whatever story they desire and transport whatever message they desire.

And I maintain that the explicit message is far more relevant in this than traces of conservative subtext mainly derived from the setting. In other words, just because Ultima has Lord British it doesn't make it pro aristocracy and inherently conservative. That would be to overemphasize a fairly irrelevant and superficial element of a setting and ignore the actual explicit message it transports.
 
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Azarkon

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But that's the whole point. SJWs do that. That's what we're pissed about.

"Fucking liberals are trying to change my conservative fantasies into... into... LIBERAL fantasies!"

Does that describe it pretty well? There's no reason to interpret the opposition as anything but the reverse of liberal activism. When grognards tell Beamdog developers to fuck off with their liberal agenda pushing, that's conservative activism speaking. Just because conservatives had - and indeed, has always had - the advantage of 'defending the status quo' doesn't, in and of itself, make them less forceful in pushing their agenda. The Codex is, in fact, an example of a place where conservative activism is powerful, and perhaps even influential.

Are we going to play connect the dots now? Because Howard was accussed of being a conservative and game devs put musclemen in their video games, muscle men in video games are a conservative value now? smh

The worship of traditional masculine values is conservative regardless of whether Howard was politically a liberal or a conservative; but it helps my argument that he was a conservative because it's yet another example of fantasy's conservative beginning.

anti-gun control messaging

Uh, you do realize the worship of violence as THE solution in video games accomplishes the same effect? Just because conservatives don't get called out for it - actually, they do, but the Codex tends to dismiss the people doing it as social justice warriors - doesn't make it any less obvious. Games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc. DO have a message and that message usually IS "guns are cool; violence is necessary; support the military."

I just wanted to pull this out specifically. Do you think modern American conservatives want to go back to when kings and queens ruled? Are these their ideals and they are already built into the fantasy setting? I mean, these are the forms of government often present in fantasy settings, so it's "implicit", right?

They - and like I said, people who share conservative values aren't necessarily 'conservatives' because it's not a binary divide - want to go back to a time when government was less ubiquitous, exactly as I said. Whether kings, wizards, or tentacle squids rule, it doesn't much matter. What draws many people to fantasy is the fact that fantasy's government structures are much more primitive, which lends itself to the practice of adventuring, as well as the values of heroic violence, vigilantism, binary morality, etc.

Frankly, although I agree that they need more nuance, it's not just that for me. It's motive. I don't want to pay for propaganda. I don't want people altering a setting I am paying to enjoy just because they had a fat catlady feminism teacher who help drill these ideals into them in college.

No one wants to be party to an agenda they don't agree with. But it helps to know what our own agendas are, because it keeps us honest. Understanding that games typically push conservative agendas - not necessarily the crazy, alternate right sort, but the more status quo, traditionalist, or even nostalgic sort - makes it easier to identify what exactly it is that we enjoy, as opposed to trying to defend an internalized experience that one can't even describe.

Yeah, because as you just said, they hearken back to a medieval setting with different values etc and it strains verisimilitude the further away you get from that because people know history and have a concept for how that time was based on what they know of history and reality.

Slavery and rape aren't modern conservative values, but your setting becomes less and less true to form without them. Similarly, if you set a fantasy game in 14th century Poland or whatever and then fill it with a multicultural population, it's going to be noticed.

This doesn't make fantasy conservative any more than it makes history conservative though.

Pretend I'm a developer. Pretend that I only released games about Nazi Germany. Pretend that in these games, you could only play as a Nazi soldier, and that the game doesn't judge you in any way but offers you a glorious death fighting the Allies. Sooner or later, you'd accuse me of being a Nazi sympathizer, and you would have cause to do so, because even though it's completely right by history, the subject matter & setting I keep choosing reflect an obvious agenda.

It's the same with fantasy. You can argue that it all makes sense in the context of the setting; but the choice of the setting, the choice of the subject matter, that is what makes it a generally conservative genre.

...

Because it's a modern political issue that is newer than the setting (D&D, just not fantasy in general) itself.

In DA: Inquisition or even Origins there is tons of gay stuff etc, but that's their setting. I didn't buy Inquisition because I saw that it would be far more central than in Origins and I don't like it, but I wasn't as pissed at them because it's their own IP and they've put that sort of thing in from the beginning of the series and been public about it.

They weren't co-opting another IP marketed to fans of a game series that predated this SJW nightmare and packaging their "gender fluidity" propaganda into it.

As I said, liberal activism in video games is often badly done; but you know why liberals target fantasy video games so often? It's because it offends their sensibilities, and the only way it can do that is because it is a conservative genre. Liberals don't go around trying to make Steven Universe more liberal, because it's already liberal enough.

A genre convention isn't inherently conservative. Again, we're going back to your overbroad use of the words "traditional" and "conservative".

Fantasy genre conventions tend to be conservative. Not all of them are, but they tend to be. Of course, there are always works attempting to break out of these conventions, and there's a movement, especially in literature, that could be considered a liberal shift. Yet such a shift has consequences for people who have long been used to fantasy's conservative conventions. The sooner you admit to this, the sooner you understand why you simply can't stand liberal fantasy games like Dragon Age Inquisition, regardless of whether the values of the game are consistent with the setting. And no, I'm not saying the only problem with Dragon Age Inquisition is that it's liberal. I'm saying that it's one of the few fantasy games that attempt to push liberal values, as opposed to conservative ones.
 
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a cut of domestic sheep prime

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"Fucking liberals are trying to change my conservative fantasies into... into... LIBERAL fantasies!"
No. Again, what I am talking about is hamfistedly inserting modern political topics into a game.
There's no reason to interpret the opposition as anything but the reverse of liberal activism. When grognards tell Beamdog developers to fuck off with their liberal agenda pushing, that's conservative activism speaking.
No, most of what we've been discussing is changes made from within the studio. And even in the second case, no, advocating the exclusion of a liberal agenda does not equal advocating a conservative agenda being inserted in its place.

Again, show me the pro-Trump plotlines. Or show me the video game character who is a Pepe-posting 8chaner inserted by one of /ourguys/ and trying to redpill the audience on the holocaust.
The worship of traditional masculine values is conservative
Nah. It is liberal - or rather feminist - to hate them, but no, not conservative to "worship" (really? Including hyper masculine characters is worship? k. :roll: I guess Bull in DA:I was conservative worship of masculine values.) them.
Uh, you do realize the worship of violence as THE solution in video games accomplishes the same effect?
Have you said your Hail Bloodsheds today? :M
Just because conservatives don't get called out for it - actually, they do, but the Codex tends to dismiss the people doing it as social justice warriors - doesn't make it any less obvious. Games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc. DO have a message and that message usually IS "guns are cool; violence is necessary; support the military."
Yeah, I knew you were gonna try this. No, having violence be a possible solution is not tantamount to making a statement on the modern gun control debate. And it certainly isn't a pro-military message either. If they inserted an entire plotline where there was a vote and all the heroes in the city had their swords confiscated due to that popular political vote and then someone attacked and no one could defend themselves, that'd be closer.

The way you put it, any movie that has heroes that use gun violence is conservative, pro-military and making a statement about gun control specifically.
They - and like I said, people who share conservative values aren't necessarily 'conservatives' because it's not a binary divide - want to go back to a time when government was less ubiquitous
Which is more libertarian than strictly conservative btw. But continue and I'll show you why that's still wrong.
Whether kings, wizards, or tentacle squids rule, it doesn't much matter.
No, it really does. Monarchy is a form of government that can be very authoritarian and very much ubiquitous. A king can have agents within his country policing everything from free speech to - in the squid monsters case - thought.

And on the subject of squid monsters, you really think that being ruled by monsters who control your thoughts, use you for slave labor and eventually eat your brains is both a less ubiquitous form of government and part of conservative ideology? :hahano:
What draws many people to fantasy is the fact that fantasy's government structures are much more primitive, which lends itself to the practice of adventuring, as well as the values of heroic violence, vigilantism, binary morality, etc.
Longing for simplicity, more freedom and adventure are not exclusively conservative values. And morality need not be binary in fantasy.
No one wants to be party to an agenda they don't agree with.
No, that's not my point. I don't want to buy propaganda. I want to buy a video game made to entertain me, not one clearly designed to sway my politics.

My point is, when you make a game, your purpose is to entertain. Creative license exists, yes, but you should also place your audience's desires above your own and not use it as an opportunity to put your pet ideas or values into it - especially if it pisses off a large segment of your customers. They paid you money for a certain type of game and that should be the type of product you deliver.

You don't put Barbie minigames or a Barbie-loving NPC into GTA 6 - even if you REALLY, REALLY like Barbie Dolls and want everyone to understand just how great they are and how important Ken is to the franchise.
Understanding that games typically push conservative agendas - not necessarily the crazy, alternate right sort, but the more status quo, traditionalist, or even nostalgic sort
Nice goalpost shifting. We started out this discussion with me quoting your post about how Trump supporters would be doing the same sorts of things to shoehorn their agenda into videogames, but then you deflected and said that they don't have to do that because their agenda is innate to fantasy.

Now you are saying that only traditionalism/nostalgia is innate to fantasy. So I'd again put to you that your point about Trump supporters specifically not doing the same things SJWs do to insert their agendas is invalid because they aren't doing it, even though their agendas are not present in fantasy.

Also, nostalgia is not inherently politically conservative. Anyone who grew up in the 60s-70s can be nostalgic about free love and liberal drug use. The status quo is also not exclusively politically conservative. Obama was a black, liberal president for 8 years. I didn't see any conservatives trying to preserve that status quo.
Pretend I'm a developer. Pretend that I only released games about Nazi Germany. Pretend that in these games, you could only play as a Nazi soldier, and that the game doesn't judge you in any way but offers you a glorious death fighting the Allies. Sooner or later, you'd accuse me of being a Nazi sympathizer, and you would have cause to do so, because even though it's completely right by history, the subject matter & setting I keep choosing reflect an obvious agenda.
No, I wouldn't. If it was supposed to be a historical simulation, I would take your word for it. If, however, it also featured scenes with evil Jews plotting to rape german women or showed concentration camps as resorts with swimming pools, I might get a bit suspicious. :M

If you want to make Das Boot, the game though, go right ahead.
It's the same with fantasy.
For the Nth time, we aren't talking about selective historical allegory. We are talking about deliberate inserts of far-left talking points and agendas into video games. Again, show me the conservative inserts. Put up or shut up.
Fantasy genre conventions tend to be conservative.
'K. Still playing that fantasy race-mixing simulator Baldur's Gate btw. Any tips on beating Drizzt - the iconic fantasy hero who has been appearing in games and books for over 20 years and who is also black? The one who is constantly used by his author to represent issues about race relations?

Magic Missile doesn't seem to werk fsr. :shittydog:
Of course, there are always works attempting to break out of these conventions, and there's a movement, especially in literature, that could be considered a liberal shift.
How recent is this movement? 'cuz 20 years seems like a long time ago.

If you keep having to time travel back into history to find an era where this totes conservative version of fantasy supposedly exists, maybe fantasy isn't really that conservative and your point about that being the reason conservatives don't try to change/insert characters and lore in order to foster their own ideals the way SJWs do is total bollocks?
:M
 
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The Codex is, in fact, an example of a place where conservative activism is powerful, and perhaps even influential.

The existence of the Codex is a good argument in favor of the fantasy genre being inherently conservative. The stereotype of the right-wing grognard? It exists for a reason.

(counterpoint: rpg.net)
 

a cut of domestic sheep prime

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The existence of the Codex is a good argument in favor of the fantasy genre being inherently conservative. The stereotype of the right-wing grognard? It exists for a reason.
The RPGCodex is also filled with 4chaners. Does that mean the fantasy genre is inherently pro-Nazi?
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:M

And you actually agree with this guy? Wtf? :lol:
 
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Ranarama

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The existence of the Codex is a good argument in favor of the fantasy genre being inherently conservative. The stereotype of the right-wing grognard? It exists for a reason.

(counterpoint: rpg.net)

Since the_donald exists on reddit, reddit must be inherently... well not conservative exactly. Retarded? Retarded.

Hmm... I guess this might be a valid line of reasoning.
 
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The existence of the Codex is a good argument in favor of the fantasy genre being inherently conservative. The stereotype of the right-wing grognard? It exists for a reason.

(counterpoint: rpg.net)

Since the_donald exists on reddit, reddit must be inherently... well not conservative exactly. Retarded? Retarded.

Hmm... I guess this might be a valid line of reasoning.

You should post more in Politics.
 

sser

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The Codex is, in fact, an example of a place where conservative activism is powerful, and perhaps even influential.

The existence of the Codex is a good argument in favor of the fantasy genre being inherently conservative. The stereotype of the right-wing grognard? It exists for a reason.

(counterpoint: rpg.net)

Grognards are older. Older people skew conservative. The Codex's existence doesn't actually track with the RPG community at large, I imagine, seeing as how the biggest movers and shakers are centered around the BioWare forums (romance-obsessed), NeoGAF (SJ-obsessed), Reddit (pay2play aggregation), and Bethesda (rape mods-obsessed).



Anyway: calling a medium politically leaning one way or another seems like putting the cart before the horse to me. That's the sort of tribalistic thought that has people associating colors with gangs (be they street-level or running for President).

Not to mention Azarkon's argument is a tautology: our past is inherently by definition conservative, so utilizing fantasy versions of it as a setting is therefore conservative. I think the far more obvious argument is that fantasy is inherently liberal, because it usually utilizes these settings while hurriedly divesting any sense of connection to the far darker historical reality -- that's kind of why it's called "fantasy", and why historical fiction novels about suspiciously stronk womyn warriors don't sell especially well.

IMO, there shouldn't be any kind of 'messaging' in a game to begin with -- and by messaging I mean an obvious effort by an author to insert their views. A game is not all that different from a movie. There's a suspension of disbelief and players like to forget that what they're playing/reading was made by some idiot with a keyboard. If the player gets a sense of political projection, it's like the boom mic dropping into a shot of the movie. You go aw fuck, right, this is a game and this isn't a character I'm invested in, but the spewings of some moron. And if it's some political bullshit falling into the scene, you go aw shit come on! I play games to get away from this shit! That's why people reacted badly to the trans person in the Baldur's Gate, while simultaneously virtually no one gave a fuck about the crossdresser in the Witcher. Because the crossdresser kept character, while the trans person was that goddam boom mic coming down from the top of the screen.
 

Azarkon

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"Fucking liberals are trying to change my conservative fantasies into... into... LIBERAL fantasies!"
No. Again, what I am talking about is hamfistedly inserting modern political topics into a game.

No, most of what we've been discussing is changes made from within the studio. And even in the second case, no, advocating the exclusion of a liberal agenda does not equal advocating a conservative agenda being inserted in its place.

Again, show me the pro-Trump plotlines. Or show me the video game character who is a Pepe-posting 8chaner inserted by one of /ourguys/ and trying to redpill the audience on the holocaust.

I thought you were arguing against the fantasy genre being conservative, because I've never made the argument that inserting modern political topics into a game is desirable.

Nah. It is liberal - or rather feminist - to hate them, but no, not conservative to "worship" (really? Including hyper masculine characters is worship? k. :roll: I guess Bull in DA:I was conservative worship of masculine values.) them.

That depends on how it's included. Provided we interpret the prevalence of nu-males among the player's companions to be an example of liberal agenda pushing, then logically, the prominence of muscle head companions would be the opposite. I don't have much of an issue with saying that a game like Gears of War promotes hyper masculine values. Do you? On the other hand, a subversion of the archetype can easily work in the other direction.

Yeah, I knew you were gonna try this. No, having violence be a possible solution is not tantamount to making a statement on the modern gun control debate. And it certainly isn't a pro-military message either. If they inserted an entire plotline where there was a vote and all the heroes in the city had their swords confiscated due to that popular political vote and then someone attacked and no one could defend themselves, that'd be closer.

Apples and oranges. I'm talking about the promotion of conservative values in video games and fantasy; you're talking about making modern political allegories.

The way you put it, any movie that has heroes that use gun violence is conservative, pro-military and making a statement about gun control specifically.

I didn't say that. I said that Call of Duty, Battlefield - and I'll add Tom Clancy's X games - are conservative, pro-military, and pro-guns. Whether they have anything to say about a particular modern political controversy is a different question.

No, it really does. Monarchy is a form of government that can be very authoritarian and very much ubiquitous. A king can have agents within his country policing everything from free speech to - in the squid monsters case - thought.

You're not getting it. I'm not talking about a specific form of government & its possible capability. I'm talking about a general feature of governments portrayed in fantasy settings, regardless of what form they take. That feature being, they're not ubiquitous, because had they been, then the adventurer's freedom of action & role would be diminished. Governments in fantasy games are rarely portrayed as anything other than just another quest-giving organization, when they're not the enemy; and in such cases, they're usually perpetually being undermined by actors beyond their control.

No, that's not my point. I don't want to buy propaganda. I want to buy a video game made to entertain me, not one clearly designed to sway my politics.

My point is, when you make a game, your purpose is to entertain. Creative license exists, yes, but you should also place your audience's desires above your own and not use it as an opportunity to put your pet ideas or values into it - especially if it pisses off a large segment of your customers. They paid you money for a certain type of game and that should be the type of product you deliver.

Having an agenda and entertaining the audience are not mutually exclusive.

Nice goalpost shifting. We started out this discussion with me quoting your post about how Trump supporters would be doing the same sorts of things to shoehorn their agenda into videogames, but then you deflected and said that they don't have to do that because their agenda is innate to fantasy.

My argument hasn't changed. Your original response was to "Social justice activism is just a symptom of the loss of passion, not the cause. They could substitute it with any ideology and the problem would still remain. As another dude put it, they could be spending their time praising Trump, and while the immediate effects of that on the games would change, the end result would be the same." In this case, I was saying that it's not what ideology they push that matters, it's the fact that they no longer feel passionate about games. Your argument was that conservatives would never push their ideology the way liberals do in fantasy CRPGs, to which my response was that conservatives don't need to, because the fantasy CRPG genre is already conservative enough. The argument then became about whether fantasy is, in fact, conservative.

You still seem to think you're arguing about whether conservatives would push political ideologies in games. I'll go ahead and say - of course they would, and they do, for example in Tom Clancy's X games, which reference contemporary political events & then generally depict the US military as the saviors of the free world. But it's not what most of this debate has been about.

I'll further observe that most of the liberal ideology pushing in fantasy CRPGs also doesn't take the form of direct references to contemporary political events, but are more about values and representation. For example, by making homosexuality a normative state in fantasy settings, which doesn't reference any controversy in particular but is an expression of liberal 'inclusiveness.' Of course, there are exceptions, for example the despised GamerGate reference from Beamdog that they later deleted. But those are rare.

Also, nostalgia is not inherently politically conservative. Anyone who grew up in the 60s-70s can be nostalgic about free love and liberal drug use. The status quo is also not exclusively politically conservative. Obama was a black, liberal president for 8 years. I didn't see any conservatives trying to preserve that status quo.

Nostalgia by itself, no, but traditionalism IS conservative; in fact close to its very definition.

No, I wouldn't. If it was supposed to be a historical simulation, I would take your word for it. If, however, it also featured scenes with evil Jews plotting to rape german women or showed concentration camps as resorts with swimming pools, I might get a bit suspicious. :M

Then you have a rather high tolerance for conservative ideology pushing; in which case, it's no wonder you don't recognize it when you see it in games.

For the Nth time, we aren't talking about selective historical allegory. We are talking about deliberate inserts of far-left talking points and agendas into video games. Again, show me the conservative inserts. Put up or shut up.

You're missing the argument.

'K. Still playing that fantasy race-mixing simulator Baldur's Gate btw. Any tips on beating Drizzt - the iconic fantasy hero who has been appearing in games and books for over 20 years and who is also black? The one who is constantly used by his author to represent issues about race relations?

Salvatore pushing his liberal values in a novel series makes fantasy genre conventions not conservative? What?

How recent is this movement? 'cuz 20 years seems like a long time ago.

If you keep having to time travel back into history to find an era where this totes conservative version of fantasy supposedly exists, maybe fantasy isn't really that conservative and your point about that being the reason conservatives don't try to change/insert characters and lore in order to foster their own ideals the way SJWs do is total bollocks?

The movement is within the last two decades and it's NOT the mainstream in fantasy video games.
 

Azarkon

Arcane
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,989
The Codex is, in fact, an example of a place where conservative activism is powerful, and perhaps even influential.

The existence of the Codex is a good argument in favor of the fantasy genre being inherently conservative. The stereotype of the right-wing grognard? It exists for a reason.

(counterpoint: rpg.net)

Grognards are older. Older people skew conservative. The Codex's existence doesn't actually track with the RPG community at large, I imagine, seeing as how the biggest movers and shakers are centered around the BioWare forums (romance-obsessed), NeoGAF (SJ-obsessed), Reddit (pay2play aggregation), and Bethesda (rape mods-obsessed).

Anyway: calling a medium politically leaning one way or another seems like putting the cart before the horse to me. That's the sort of tribalistic thought that has people associating colors with gangs (be they street-level or running for President).

Not to mention Azarkon's argument is a tautology: our past is inherently by definition conservative, so utilizing fantasy versions of it as a setting is therefore conservative.

You say it's obvious, then turn around and argue:

I think the far more obvious argument is that fantasy is inherently liberal, because it usually utilizes these settings while hurriedly divesting any sense of connection to the far darker historical reality -- that's kind of why it's called "fantasy", and why historical fiction novels about suspiciously stronk womyn warriors don't sell especially well.

:killit:

It's the exact opposite - romantic views of the past are much more associated with conservatism than with liberalism.

Liberals don't ignore what's negative about the past. Liberals equate feudalism, monarchism, and most Western religions with oppression & ignorance. Liberals exaggerate the darkness of the past for the sake of justifying moving away from it. By contrast, conservatives view the past more positively, think of it as a fundamental aspect of our identity, which we would do well to learn from and imitate in certain cases. Thus, what you think makes fantasy liberal, is in fact what makes it conservative.

IMO, there shouldn't be any kind of 'messaging' in a game to begin with -- and by messaging I mean an obvious effort by an author to insert their views. A game is not all that different from a movie. There's a suspension of disbelief and players like to forget that what they're playing/reading was made by some idiot with a keyboard. If the player gets a sense of political projection, it's like the boom mic dropping into a shot of the movie. You go aw fuck, right, this is a game and this isn't a character I'm invested in, but the spewings of some moron. And if it's some political bullshit falling into the scene, you go aw shit come on! I play games to get away from this shit! That's why people reacted badly to the trans person in the Baldur's Gate, while simultaneously virtually no one gave a fuck about the crossdresser in the Witcher. Because the crossdresser kept character, while the trans person was that goddam boom mic coming down from the top of the screen.

All fiction authors push their values through their works, one way or another. What you described is what happens when they fail to do it competently.
 

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