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Notes -
Who has been following the drama around Disco Elysium? Disco Elysium, of course, is the 2019 CRPG that has received numerous accolades for being the savior of Western computer role-playing gaming, the best game in a long time etc. I've played it through, and it deserves the accolades; many here have played it as well, and it is not surprising that a forum like this would have many aficionados for a game that basically consists of reading vast oodles of texts about one drunken failure cop's personal psychodramas and politics and a well-realized fictional somethingpunk setting, and so on.
The game was been made by ZA/UM, an Estonian developer / art collective, around a world created by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, and is quite obviously Estonian-influenced if one knows anything about Estonia (starting with the fact that Revachol, the city where the game happens, is very visually remiscient of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, once known as Reval).
What's the drama? According to Wikipedia:
How Kurvitz and Rostov explain it:
I've also seen suggestions that Kurvitz et al believe that Tütreke, Kender etc. are planning to compromise their vision specifically for upcoming Amazon Disco Elysium series, presumably so that the political (anti-capitalist - Kurvitz is a self-described communist, very much a rarity in Estonia) aspect of their work would be compromised.
What ZA/UM says:
More context from an Estonian Redditor
Perhaps it's not necessary to specifically mention all the ironic aspects involved in this, and if we indeed see Disco Elysium as an art project, it feels like a fitting capstone to the project, in a way.
The whole thing reminds me of Kanye West. Both West and Kurvitz are talented individuals and such talent is always very close to mental illness. I am sure Kanye's agents and producers would love to be able to exploit the brand of Kanye West without West himself getting in the way, but alas, you can't yet plug his albums into an AI and get it to make another one.
A more nebulous brand like "the world of Disco Elysium" is much more exploitable (see what the Mouse can do with the brands it owns). You can easily get rid of Kurvitz, Rostov and Luiga and just milk the existing lore. Who cares if the new game or TV series fails to capture the tone and the themes of the original work? We're going to visit the Pale (pointing_soyjaks.png)! Look, you can buy Disco Elysium merch! You won't believe the cameo we've set up for your viewing pleasure! We won't say it's Kim, but you know it's Kim, right, right?
And Kurvitz? Der Mohr hat seine Arbeit getan, der Mohr kann gehen. Unstable creative individuals are hard to work with, it's not a secret. When they start to get in the way they can always be labelled problematic or even toxic, and the label won't even be completely wrong.
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I didn't know about any of this, and it saddens me. By the in-game political alignment system, I'm a filthy Moralist which makes me the current bad guy (seeing as how they're the ones running/ruining Revachol right now) and while they do criticise Communism, you can tell which system is closest to their hearts. But the game is great, and who does not love Kim Kitsuragi?
I guess this shows that the love of money is the root of all evil. A whiff of success, and they started eating each other's faces for the spoils.
But God Almighty, not an Amazon streaming video/TV adaptation of the game. Seeing the shitty mess they made of Rings of Power, I can't even begin to imagine what they'd do with Disco Elysium. Sure, the union would definitely be the Bad Guys there (we all know what Amazon thinks of unions) but how do you flatten down Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harrier Du Bois Detective Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau Tequila Sunset into one 2D character to be played by (possibly, God help us) Ryan Reynolds?
Yeah, one of the things many know about the game is that you can select from one of four political alignments and the game will chew you out for it, but one of the most fascinating things was how they make Moralism bad. There's the metacommentary on how Moralism is exactly what you get if you play a typical "RPG centrist", one who always selects the moderate option from the good and evil one, or a mix of choices... but also that Moralism is the ideology that is specifically screwing up Revanchol at the moment, something you can see in various ways all around you while playing the game. At least the fascists and communists (and some ultraliberals, if Joyce is to be believed) are working to make Moralintern go away and stop oppressing and exploiting Revanchol, but being a Moralist ingame is basically just being like "Yep, I'm a willing tool of a system that keeps everyone here poor, takes away the city's sovereignty, sends cruel mercenaries on the streets etc etc... and I'm fine with it! Go team"
The Sunday Friend is absolutely some Brussels bureaucrat who is something to do with the European Commission, maybe one of the civil servants directly under a Director-General of something or other.
It's also fascinating how they make Joyce likeable, and I don't know if that's a level of meta-irony or if they mean it relatively straight. She's not just an errand-runner, she's one of the higher-ups in Wild Palms, but it looks like she can't get the mercs to stand down because whatever faction of the board hired them on has run around her on that. So she's out to make money out of Revachol like the rest of them, but there is a level of overt violence she won't or can't support. At least, if she's not in control holding the leash.
I did laugh about "oh yeah, Fascism is because that pretty girl wouldn't sleep with you". I mean, come on guys, this is your level of mockery? All the things you could say about ultra-nationalism and the rest of it, and you have to go for "pfft, buncha incels"?
I strongly suspect that in itself is mockery of people who'd take it straight, same as Gary the Cryptofascist is a character mocking the idiots who think fascists are worthless scum without any merit whatsoever.
I suspect that because the rest of the game is nuanced and thoughtful, so this kind of idiocy has no place in it.
I'm generally disappointed when I give media that much benefit of the doubt. They don't seem to play games with that many layers.
I think in this case it's either warranted or they had more people do characters and some moron did Gary.
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It's a pretty suitable one for Harry, isn't it? After all, he has been going through some lady troubles, to put it mildly...
Harry has his problems, including an inability to let go or move on from his failed romance, but he can Jamrock Shuffle like nobody's business!
I would have thought they wouldn't go for "Fascists are just failures at getting girls" as being much too trivial. I mean, nobody in Revachol is getting any kind of happy ending; the working-class woman ends up with a dead husband, look at the entire tangle of desire and sex around Klaasje; all the broken marriages and relationships and not even started in the first place - Garte is the only one with any kind of a chance at a start, and that depends how you handle the phone call with Sylvie.
I guess the idea is mockery by not taking it seriously and reducing it to a clownish reason for anyone finding the philosophy attractive, but it's not like any of the other political quadrants are all happy happy joy joy at interpersonal relationships either.
I kept thinking about this yesterday, and one way of thinking about political alignments is that they also sort of align with, and are commentary, on traditional RPG alignments. You've got the "good" alignment, the "bad" alignment and two different interpretations of the "neutral" alignment. However, all also get commented on and subverted as concepts.
The "good" alignment is communist. Is communism good? YMMV, but that's what we know the developers think, from their interviews, and communist alignment is also what you get if you take all the romantic revolutionary options about defending the poor and so. And yet, the game will chew you out for all the crimes of the fictional communists and the unworkability of it all in practice, and most communists you encounter are compete messes, murderous wrecks and idiots, culminating with The Deserter, who is not really at all different from the fascists he claims to loathe.
The "bad" alignment is fascist. And fascism, as seen through the game, is indeed, bad, and the game makes no bones about it! However, it's not the "cool" sort of bad where you do epic shit, like become a conquering Dark Lord (KOTOR) or punch out annoying reporters (Mass Effect) or whatever. Rather, it's just being a dick towards other people, generally in a very banal way, including towards Kim. It's not fun, and deliberately so. Very few people end up stomaching a genuine fascist run in DE.
Moralism is the "neutral" alignment, interpreted as what you get when, in a normal RPG, you deliberately mix and match choices to keep the karma meter running too far to either side. That's often a smart way to play a RPG and keep your conversation options open, but DE reminds you that if you just avoid taking a side and play it safe, that's a choice in itself, and the choice in this particular game is just keeping up an oppressive and brutal system and being a part of it's machine.
Ultraliberalism is also a "neutral" alignment, but another way. I've seen jokes about how RPG alignment is like having game's choices be "There's a kitten in a tree, what do you do? a. Climb a tree to rescue the kitten b. Shoot the kitten c. "I can rescue this kitten... for a price!", and ultraliberalism is, of course, the c. option, playing a RPG in a way where you just maximize your resources and, typically, get better gear to make the boss fight a simple matter. And yet... here, there's no real reason to do that; money is necessary at places, sure, but you can run a perfectly fine character without buying anything, and collecting oodles of cash eventually just becomes a question of hoarding money without really having much use for it. Why? Because you're a greedy hustler, obviously! Or rather, you aren't, but you're pretending to be one in a game, for... why, exactly? And game ultraliberalism is just an ideological cover for that.
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Nothing to say except this is a fairly strong case in favor of generative AI. The smaller a studio needs to be for viability, the lesser is the probability of such shitshows with extra hires, HR, publishers, complex ownership structures, and Gervais-style dynamics.
I'm a fan of games made by artists and writers, even extreme barely playable examples. Mor.Utopia and Turgor are great! Planescape:Torment is rightfully considered a masterpiece, Disco is fantastic. And in general, daring genre experiments with a focus on worldbuilding and narrative, even to some detriment of gameplay, are to be encouraged. I liked Hellblade a lot, Morrowind is of course a work of genius, Perimeter and Vangers are gems of my youth (btw their creator has died a few days ago in Kaliningrad, RIP). We need more of that, and therefore we need artisan studios.
But artists are barely able to function in a friendly collective. People who optimize for business process can run circles around them.
Unfortunately, this sort of problem seems present even for incredibly small projects, even separated from conventional ideological frustrations. The NeosVR Saga had a lot of 'developers', but they overwhelming majority were only not volunteers because they were paid in monopoly money; the real crux was a battle between the two guys at the heart of the project. And I've seen non-game business battles with a half-dozen employees, generally split between the Growth Uber Allies and the internal designers.
It's not even necessarily the business guys running circles around them -- even when they take really simple approaches, or have the right position (after all, 'artist goes so far up their ass you don't have a sellable product before you run out of burn' is a failure mode that happens often!) -- so much that there's a lot of tools each side has for a really phyrric victory, really easily.
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KranK and his "drugs are shit-stained glasses" metaphor have been the biggest shaper of my attitude towards mind-altering substances. Can't say the same about books, though.
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Damn. I'll have to play Vangers one day. I saw the MandaloreGaming video and it intrigued me.
Yeah, he got hit by a car, really dumb way to go (when you can get gutted on Sri Lanka after escaping the conscription, or get shelled in Ukraine, I mean).
I know that Perimeter translation is absurdly bad and has butchered the impression for at least one Mottizen. Not sure about Vangers.
I think Perimeter is available on GOG or Zoom, I was interested, but I may have to see if there'll be a fan-translation to fix it. Is it E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy-levels of bad? Vangers looked like it was translated decently.
Legs are ok, you gain brozouf
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Damn, Perimeter looks nice!
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This seems like a conflict between 1 and 3 other chief creatives, with some additional possibility of fraud being instigated by another person..
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For Amazon? No. Why would they need to do that? The average Amazon staff member is probably far, far more favourable to communism than the average Estonian. I'd imagine being an Estonian Communist in Estonia in 2022 makes you about as popular as being a Jewish Nazi in Germany in 2022. If not worse due to the way Russia is, once again, engaged in imperialist expansion in Eastern Europe.
i haven't had Amazon Prime for a while, but have they commissioned any explicitly pro-communist (or anti-capitalist) TV series? Referring specifically to economic, not cultural, aspects? A show like The Expanse might have been woke, but even that series at least implicitly ended up both-sidesing the whole Belter conflict.
I'd imagine being an Estonian anything that does something that brings a vast truckload of money and international positive attention to Estonia (population: bit over a million) is going to make you very popular indeed in Estonia.
The Boys is an interesting example because the primary antagonistic force is literally an international megacorp which aggressively manipulates the media narrative to hide its misdeeds and knowingly tolerates the excessive degenerate behavior of the celebrity superheroes it employs. All for power and profit.
And the protags are mostly "normal" people whose lives were fucked over by the Corp or the superheroes and are looking to strike back however they can.
And this is one of Amazon's most popular shows and hundreds of thousands watch it and while they act like they're in on the joke (haha Vought is just like Amazon, ironic isn't it?) they miss that THEY are the easily manipulable populace who consumes frivolous media rather than having any positive impact on the world.
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It's ironic and sad, I thought the DE creators would get purged by the woke but they apparently fell out between each other over money.
Kender supposedly played an important role in the project, as did the the 3 other guys.
If it is as they say, I hope they get somewhere. Also, it doesn't really strike me as possible Kurvitz & co are actual communists; the game is way too nuanaced to be a product of true believer cogitation.
They strike me more as pranksters who used the retarded western fascination with superficial communism to get promoted. Also, intelligent Balts being unironically communist.. what?
Does being a true believer mean you have to be a mindless follower of the existing dogma? I think the game makes it quite clear that ZA/UM consider communism a valid reaction to the injustices of existing socioeconomic systems. They don't blame people for wanting social justice and economic equality, but they don't know how to do this without spilling rivers of blood or ending up ruled by corrupt bureaucrats or oppressive dictators or remaining a useless discussion club. A heart vs mind conflict.
At this point, you cannot possibly be in favor of communism, that is, state ownership of means of production unless you're an idiot, which the writeres aren't, so..
Why planned economy cannot possibly work efficiently or without being tyrannical has been explained sufficiently by Hayek around the end of WW2, and subsequent developments have only supported his ideas.
EDIT:
although reading the wiki, if it's accurately describing details from the history mentioned in the game, they might actually be commies. In-game communism is portrayed as less dire than actual real-world communism, in broad strokes.
I guess it makes sense if we consider intelligence to be often used to rationalise away innate drives. The communist revolutionaries were typically not very successful children of middle classes, who, having not succeeded in the existing order riled up the lower classes in order to usurp power, and inevitably created regimes way more nightmarish than the ones they had rebelled against.
I hope this caused you to update away from believing "people who disagree with me are all idiots, because they're obviously wrong" is a good heuristic.
I generally did not believe that, though..
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The impression I got from playing Disco Elysium was that they are some kind of post-Marxists, or disillusioned Marxists. They are still support the Marxist project, but they see Marxism more like the lesser evil than a grand utopian vision. It's a begrudging kind of support for Marxism.
I always felt that that Disco Elysium was went easiest on its criticism of Marxism of all the ideologies the game critiques and satirises - I thought this even before I knew the background of the developers. Much of the criticism of Marxism within the game itself isn't actually levelled at the philosophy of Marxism, but rather how Marxism is (in)effectively implemented. The union boss is less a critique of Marxist or socialist organising, but more about how self-serving people will abuse the idea of Marxism/socialism to enrich or empower themselves. It occasionally veers dangerously close to 'Marxism doesn't fail people, people fail Marxism' territory. Not to say it the game doesn't have any substantial critique of Marxism, but I definitely felt it was less substantive than some of the other critiques.
It's just hard to figure out. The union boss is disgusting and corrupt but also possibly quite efficient and ruthless in bring about the violence which is all that matters to true bolsheviks, no?
They corporate negotiator there is portrayed somewhat positively - she's not snobbish or out of touch or arrogant but dignified and sympathetic and fairly brave operating mostly solo in a restive neighborhood, eventually you figure out she's a billionaire who owns part of the company involved. IIRC, she doesn't want to use violence and is alarmed that the security contractors they hired have gone rogue.
Weird game. I feel like this all might end up with them being RPG players with a rather more nuanced view of people's characters than basic ideologues may have.
I'm also perplexed by the three racists.
The first is a typical stock character, the basic garden variety racist prole that exists in the real world in great numbers.
The second is an amusing hulk of a black supremacists spinning cute racist theories about the various races of the fictional world, with three adorable groupies.
But he's also an important asset to the local revolutionary wannabes, personally brave and quite intelligent and can help the protagonist get over his alcoholism.
The third one is some sort of lower middle class twit so pathetic and contemptible and one dimensional in a game full of nuanced characters that he feels out of place, like they're making fun out of anyone who'd take him seriously. What gives here ?
Interestingly I'd say that personwise the ultraliberal characters are portrayed the best. Most communists tend to be violent dicks, but Joyce Messier is one of the objectively most positively portrayed characters in the game, and the guy who is so rich light bends around him is more comical than anything else.
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I struggle to remember a third racist, maybe I didn't take note of him. Is the truck driver who says something like "welcome to Revachol" (and your partner takes offence to it) the first or the third in your list?
No, that's the first racist. The third racist is Gary the cryptofascist.
What about the fascist petanque player?
Oh, you mean the monarchist veteran guy? I think he isn't described as especially racist. Or fascist, just an old guy who is nostalgic for the monarchy he defended in his youth.
My read of Revacholian fascism is that it's not strictly similar to our world's fascism, more like nostalgia for late-stage dictatorial Revacholian monarchy combined with atavistic racism and sexism. Agreeing with René's points moves you along with the fascism path quite considerably.
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He's a monarchist, isn't he?
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"Communist" probably means anarchist here, mostly. The game makes it fairly obvious they aren't really that sympathetic towards old Soviet-style communism, figures as much.
They also aren't sympathetic to revolutionaries eitgher. One thing that cemented it was mention of a staff of a small cutting edge computing company getting lined up and shot during the revolution..for unclear reasons.
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They have a portrait of Stalin hanging in their office and gave thanks to Marx and Engels during their VGA award acceptance speech. Maybe some part of it is ironic and/or they're like the portion of /pol/ who like to use Hitler and the swastika as edgy symbols despite not being neo-nazis themselves, but it's not as straightforward as just being anti-Soviet anarchists.
I feel that has to be a psy-op on their part, getting the clueless idiots in gaming journalism on their side.
In-game communist are portrayed as bloody handed idealists who leave corpses in their wake, slaughter a small computing company for no good reason and manage to build a nuclear reactor but fuck it up and get their very own meltdown. They replace a corrupt monarchy with something that doesn't work and it all ends in a bloody failure.
Moralintern is deeply weird. Eh. Dammit, I hoped for a second game.
Moralintern is basically EU. Crossed with NATO, but mostly EU. The conversation with the Moralintern bureaucrat who has a thing going on with the guy smoking in the balcony makes this very clear to anyone with even a passing familiarity with EU rhetoric. Moralism is basically equivalent to EU's functional guiding ideology, stripped of the federalist impulse: ever-present, continuous progress at a snail's pace, so slowly one might not even notice it at all times... but above all economic stability ("constant 2 % inflation rate" and so on).
That part (the EU bureaucrat being a homo sex tourist) made me chuckle.
It's too bad people who make up the EU bureaucracy are working from false premises. I could imagine being in favor of a Moralintern. It works, sort of.
EU doesn't. But EU is absolutely wrong on energy policy, immigration, education and also defense. It's not actively working to kick yanks out, it's wrong on education and the energy debacle is absolutely a catastrophe. Mind you, yanks are now talking about how to drag EU into their China war because they have 'saved us' from the Russian menace in Ukraine.
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