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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I think it's worth considering that one of the most well-written games, by a considerable margin by my estimation, is the nigh-literary Disco Elysium. It's a game that doesn't shy away from ideological conflict, hell, ideological conflict is the game; it's the mechanics, it's the setting, it's the engine under the internal and external dialogue trees and conflicts. Hell, the pale functions less well as a climate change allegory than it functions as a manifestation of nation utterly drowning in ideology, until it all becomes static, noise, meaningless.

The characters are 'diverse' to be sure, but they're too real/inhabited to read as cynical box-ticking, so maybe the answer is just to create good art. If create good art and the characters are in honest service of that art, the internal narrative for their inclusion will be so compelling and self-evident that shoehorning them into culture war narratives will seem silly and reductive. It's when you don't have any reason for your cast choices that you invite a bit more scrutiny.

To sum up the options you've given here it seems pretty obvious based on what kind of game you want to make:

  • If you want to make a game that is directly or allegorically about race, then race (or characteristic X) is necessarily salient and needs to be in there
  • If you want to make a game that has deep world-building then characters arise naturally out of the world
  • If the setting is shallow/incidental and there's no allegory then your character choices aren't grounded by in-world or thematic/allegorical considerations and your choice is arbitrary, in which case why not give yourself more character design space and give players a wider range of roles to inhabit (whether assonant/dissonant with their actual identities)

There are ways to develop sub-themes out of larger themes without making them full-blown allegories, too, e.g. there's room to explore transgender issues within transhumanist Deus Ex settings, that just add some colour/complexity/dimensionality to it with out going all the way.

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