Seriously. Every form of entertainment has baked-in political assumptions, and that definitely includes #ttrpg . You might choose not to examine them, but this is an active choice on your part, and you don’t get to pretend that your entertainment is “free of politics”.
RPGs, much like SF, have always been a mechanism to explore social issues in philosophy, governance, and thought. In Human society I don’t personally believe that “politics” can be avoided in any group anywhere. —of course that’s just one man’s opinion.
You can tell what someone’s politics are by what they consider political.
I was astonished at some of the Steam reviews of Outer Worlds after playing it. People proper pissed off that their experience had been ruined because there’s a female side character with an optional side quest where she wants a date with another woman. Like how thoroughly filled with hate do you have to be as a person, to be fine with all the mass killing but suddenly get a moralistic high horse about a fictional character going on a dinner date you don’t approve of.
Sad that Steam are making a comment of their own by allowing those reviews to stay up.
While I haven’t read those reviews, I think the implications of Steam removing reviews would be worse, since they would effectively be manipulating the user score of a game. User reviews are just that, user reviews. The score should indicate what users think, whatever their reasons may be for thinking it, no?
I don’t disagree with the rest of what you said though.
Steam definitely has a libertarian streak, seemingly. I wish I had started switching over to GOG a lot sooner.
How DARE you make your game try to reflect reality.
Do the world and yourself a favor, and use this template instead.
Done. Thanks for the suggestion!
What template was he using before?
Steven Crowder
This douchebag isn’t exactly the most appropriate for this meme.*First draft was the op crowder meme. Good on op for updating it.
He changed it to Calvin, but this comment is hilarious now.
Now it’s like…
Deleted by creator
This template really needs to die.
Edit: this was meant for the Crowder template. Calvin is cool.
Your comment now serms hilariously hostile after the edit.
I came here after the edit and got scared that Watterson did something.
This comment is really funny now that OP is using the new format, please leave it up.
Hah, gotta edit it at least a bit. I’ll leave the original viewable.
“I don’t want to talk about/see politics” is always synonym to “I support the status quo, and I will aggressively reject anything that goes against it”.
Nothing that happens on a public space is free of politics, even when it’s not controversial.
Just MLK’s white moderate doing white moderate things. Funny how shit don’t change.
I don’t like politics in ttrpgs because that means less time SMITING and more time with boring words. Unless the politicians are secretly vampires, then I can keep SMITING.
NO TALK ONLY SMITE.
This post has been brought to you by the palabian gang.
Now with the vampire politicians gone you can help shape the new government of the city
Anything they see in there that goes against their own personally DESIRED to be status quo is an insult. Theyve just got shit views so well rounded culture shocks them and it reminds them all about how their shit stinks and they aren’t really all that smart or morally sound. Cause if they were, they wouldn’t have identified with any that stuff to begin with or realized the perils.
And it makes them know the cringe at how they’re viewed (but they say its just how they’re PORTRAYED to pass the buck on being that way being their own fault and indicative of their lack of stats and general lack of character) 😄😂
I disagree, because typically it means someone is racist or sexist and just doesn’t want to see people of color or queer characters. Such people may still be willing to engage with the political aspects of their gaming insofar as they may join initiatives like Stop Killing Games or argue that game devs should be treated better, but they’re just bigoted assholes who can’t handle people of color or queer characters.
Also don’t mistake this as a defense of them. They’re deplorable. I’m just saying I don’t agree with the statement as written.
People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.
If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.
For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.
You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.
A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)
People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.
It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.
If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.
Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.
EVERYTHING is politics and the shitheads who complain are the ones who made it that way.
Same people who complain about Nazis being the enemy in Wolfenstein
EVERYTHING is politics. It absolutely affects every aspect of life, ESPECIALLY fascism
that’s not politics. That’s just normal people getting offended at things. It’s normal because it’s not possible to please everyone at once so there will always be someone.
All I want is more nice unpolitical games like Bioshock or Wolfenstein
And not the woke nonsense of having female or PoC main characters.
What’s the political assumption of pong?
I mean I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the moment something has world building or a story or goals that relate to real life non-abstractly, there’s at least a political assumption, potentially an intentional statement. And people just don’t notice when it conforms to their world view. But politics free entertainment can exist, even if being able to engage in that entertainment necessarily requires some sort of engagement with real politic systems.
Though the most memorable games tend to be the ones very intentionally making statements anyway.
Glancing at Wikipedia for any Pong discourse. Found a likely example. Turns out Pong had a bug (read: feature) that contributed to its place as the first commercial success in video games. Quote,
the in-game paddles were unable to reach the top of the screen. This was caused by a simple circuit that had an inherent defect. Instead of dedicating time to fixing the defect, Alcorn decided it gave the game more difficulty and helped limit the time the game could be played [per payment]
So, Pong established the concept of video games systematically favouring the rich. Are we there yet, is that political enough?
There is still no political assumption in the game itself. Of course the moment you consider the means of acquiring it, everything touches on politics, even going to the forest and throwing a random stick, because forests existing is politics, them being accessible is politics, and you being allowed (or not) to throw a random stick is politics. That doesn’t make the concept of “throw stick at target for fun” political.
Alright yes, if you deliberately draw a circle around a portion of your entertainment and say “this is the part I like because it’s not political!” that’s still a political choice, which is the entire point OP is making, ICYMI.
Everything is political, even the choice to isolate one thing as non-political. The fact is that politics are only escapable if you’re privileged to be the kind of person who gets to say “shut up about politics, I’m trying to play Pong!”
Yeah generally when talking about a thing you draw a circle around the thing, that’s how that works. My glass from ikea isn’t making any political statement or assumption in its design as a finished product (unless you consider presumed size requirement for a beverage container to be political, though inherently nothing about it even states its purpose, so even that is doubtful) the process behind its design, manufacturing, and sale very much is political as fuck though.
You slightly moved the goalposts there. The assertion is not “Everything is making a political statement” it’s “Everything is political.” Your ikea glass reflects your social class, the international relations between where you are and where it was made. It may have been made by an oppressed person in some third world shithole (or even sweden!) It may even be a political statement, like a designer somewhere made it curvy because he thinks people are more likely to buy something with a “feminine” silhouette.
Okay, well I’m drawing a circle around how much more interesting it is to talk about politics than whatever this was.
Closest I’ve got, which I’m surprised nobody has mentioned, is the very concept that entertainment is a worthwhile pursuit, and that we aren’t made solely to work. Pong serves no functional utility, which is a statement unto itself.
That said, it feels a bit like a cop out to me, from what that quote is supposed to mean. I’d be content to rephrase it to “any sufficiently complex entertainment has politics in it”. For example, I feel like this could almost certainly be said about stories in general, but I’d struggle to find the politics in many simple children’s books, besides “children should be read to”. Although the more I think about it, teaching all children to read was once quite political.
Children’s stories have tons of politics. They’re almost always intentionally pushing a message of some kind, like “Be nice to ugly people because they might turn out to be really hot and/or magical later.”
We are trying to indoctrinate children though
Pong represents the slow but inevitable march towards socialism
Pong is competitive rather than cooperative, and I find that very meaningful.
That’s a false argument your are making here.
First : it’s a TTRPG group. You can’t have TTRPG without world building, story goals, etc.
Second : Pong is not a TTRPG. AFAIK.
Third : In case you don’t know, people who tend to say “no politics in my gaming” (like gamergaters) actually do a very political statement as for them “being black” or “being gay” or “being a woman” etc. is often seen as “politics in [their] gaming”.Sure, you can try to argue with the words, but it’s not just words, they exists in a context and the context is that it’s a fascist dog whistle.
The statement was “every form of entertainment”. Tbh tho yea i didnt really notice it being rpgmemes so it wasnt super relevant, that statement was surely not just meant for ttrpgs tho.
I fully agree you can’t have a ttrpg without political assumptions
I absolutely want politics in gaming. Without it, we’d be stuck in the arcade era. Sure, sometimes I also like to zone out on puzzle games which are largely devout of it. Imagine The Witcher 1 without politics, is there even a game there?
I love politics in gaming, I loved Fallout 3, NV,4 (I still enjoyed it but to a lesser extent), Cyberpunk, and Outer Worlds 1/2. I love it when a game has multiple factions, I love when you get to really understand the politics of a fictional world, and I love stories involving politics.
Yes agree, scheming and politicking can make the game mechanics really work.
I feel like a lot of people, who complain about politics in gaming are not choosing to examine/not examine the political assumptions, they are simply not realising that they’re there. Often these themes reside deeper in the storytelling so you have to actually engage with it to be aware of them. People who complain about it only choose a handful of topics to be mad about, because they are against it.
No. Their politics is being default to the point they can completely avoid self awareness.
Exactly. What they’re really mad about is the fact that there’s a black person, a gay person, or woman with normal sized tits in the game.
I hate normal sized tits!
/s Just in case 😄
normal sized tits are such a rarity
That may be the case for some people, but a lot of people just want some good lighthearted fun without any of the real world implications attached to it. This obviously doesn’t excuse bigoted mindsets. I’m talking about campaigns where me and my players just want to do some good old goblin slaying without the need for anyone to chime in with a “UM actshually those goblins have families too”.
Aren’t goblins ontologically evil in most DND settings? That should take care of that specific issue anyway.
Nah, they’ve long fallen to the usual cycle of “here is a species of interesting antagonistic creatures” -> “Oh wow, that sounds interesting. I want to play them” -> “Yeah sure, here’s a playbale variant of that species. We’ve removed all traces of evilness and uniqueness because god forbid players playing evil characters”. Same as Drow, Orcs, Fairies and Goliath.
It’s not just their inherent evil nature BTW. It’s also stuff like daylight sensitivity.
I mean I can understand having occasional exceptions to the rule so the players can get an interesting non standard experience, but straight evil aligned critters should always be present in fantasy settings especially ttrpg and DND specifically.
I’m not sure about always. That’s just lazy world building to have orcs naturally evil instead of predominantly mind controlled or ruled by evil leaders or some sort of blood fued. It’s the same with good aligned races. Unless you want to focus on the definition of good and evil.
Easy moral patch: These specific goblins have all made unambiguously evil choices that warrant a good slaying. Like kicking dogs. You’re not slaying goblins because they’re goblins, you’re slaying dog-kickers that happen to be goblins. There are plenty of goblins who do not kick dogs, but they’re not a part of this fight.
This is still a political statement that dog kickers are evil. I doubt anyone would mind that, and those that do are better off leaving my table anyway.
Or, you know. We could just ignore those pseudo-moral excuses and do some good old goblin slaying because they’re in the dungeon, laying traps and we want the loot. Not everything needs 12 layers of logical depth. Sure, it’s fun to explore moral implications from time to time, but more often than not, no one cares.
But you’re making the statement that it’s okay to kill people if you want their stuff. The politics are there even if you don’t choose to examine them.
No, I’m not. Because my mental development moved past three years old and I’m able to differentiate reality from fiction. Do you also believe that Super Mario players advocate for animal cruelty towards turtles?
Have you taken any literature or maybe other media classes at the 200 level?
Sometimes people say really weird things and I wonder if they just don’t know any better. Maybe they’re a teenager.
But like “fact from fiction” is irrelevant here. No one’s saying Dracula is non-fiction, but you can still read it and take meaning from the text. Furthermore, it’s not just a story about a guy who bites people. The read on how women are expected to behave is pretty obvious, for example.
You don’t have to care about the subtext of “kill all the goblins and take their stuff”, but saying there is no subtext or “no one cares” is absurd and self-centered.
That’s an interesting point you make and I partly agree. There are certain undertones and sometimes you can create a better story by engaging these undertones and creating a monster in noble clothing and a metaphor for the societal corset women are forced ro wear.
But other times I just want to enjoy a trash movie or 15$ airport library book. And the undertones there are purely accidental and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Both forms of entertainment serve their purpose and you can insist on pointing out the political statements and societal undertones in a cheap slasher movie. but that doesn’t make you smart or enlightened. It just makes you an ass who enjoys shitting on other people’s lighthearted entertainment.
And one last note: “‘fact from fiction’ is irrelevant here”. No, it’s not. If someone accuses me of encouraging mindless slaughter of people based on some mindless dungeon crawling, then it does matter. Because that’s exactly the idiotic killer games argument of the early 2000s that has been disproved 100s of times! Killing goblins in a ttrpg has absolutely nothing to do with any moral standpoints I hold outside of the game and only an idiot would believe otherwise!
I mean the statement is being made within the universe. Super Mario does advocate for violence against koopas. You don’t have to examine it, but that doesn’t make it apolitical.
“I don’t want politics in my gaming” = “I stopped growing, emotionally, the first time I saw Jugga in Conker’s Bad Fur Day”
