Hidden Role Games and Elections

Hidden role games are great, really. They’ve been with us for a while now, really kicking off in social settings with Mafia all the way back in 1986, and nowadays there are so many different variants. The hot one right now is of course Among Us, and I’d say there’s a good reason for it, as it’s easy to understand, simple to get access to, and does a wonderful job of making player limitations an interesting and enjoyable take on the genre. And yet, at the same time, I’ve been feeling… I don’t know, a little something from these games? A kind of itch, something that feels very relatable, mappable onto real life.. Something… something like real life voting, almost. I’m not about to argue that these games are even remotely close to real life voting, that would be absurd. What I do want to discuss is the similar emotions I feel these games can evoke, and the implications of what it means to be able to map a silly party game genre onto real life systems.

If you live in what’s traditionally considered a “democratic” country, there is one thing prided upon all else in them: voting. We loveeeee voting, oh yes we do. It’s a symbol of democracy, a traditional way for the people to exert influence upon their future! Tell people you didn’t vote and they’ll likely be in disbelief: it’s not just a privilege, it’s a responsibility, they say! It’s your job to vote, to line up every few years, cast a ballot, and then hope the world gets better, I suppose? …I hope you don’t need me to tell you the many criticisms of these systems, never mind the troubled rhetorical tactic of “just vote” and how it’s used to shut down minority worries and systemic changes impossible to enact through traditional voting. Riots? Shouting about injustice? Symbolic gestures? No no no, that’s far too much, please just silently cast a vote and then be quiet if you would please. Voting is the be all end all of what so much of the discourse wants us to to.

You know where else voting is valorized? Hidden role games! This is, uh, obviously a much less serious scenario, but it is true! Most of these games have one of the primary methods of identifying the evil roles as choosing to collectively vote them as being evil, and removing them from the game through whatever context is given. Now, this makes perfect sense in the context of these games, the fun is in the social interactions and the most social interaction possible is probably trying to convince a whole lot of people: and voting is a great mechanism for that!

Persona 3 and An Expression of Modern Living

This article is going to discuss some current events, most of which isn’t good news. If you’re not in the right mindset to think about that, you might want to hold off reading this.

Persona 3. Sometimes I wonder if I talk about this game too much, though I have my reasons. It’s the last hurrah of creative breath the series had, I think, the last time it felt totally engaged and interested in saying something. It’s also when gross elements started to seep their way into the series. It’s a mix of all these things, and also a formative experience for me, having played it as a teenager about to become an adult. Something has been thrown into sharper relief for me lately, however, and it’s why this game has always… Struck a nerve with me. It doesn’t seem to hit on any personal topics to me, not one bit. And yet, I think about it, and it feels deeply real and personal. The world around us has brought a lot of emotions out into focus for me recently. And those emotions sure do feel relevant to why Persona 3 feels so real. Persona 3 is the endless anxiety and malaise we all are forced to take on, living as we do now.

That final month of Persona 3… it doesn’t need any introduction, I don’t think. I’ve written about it before, even. To me, it still stands as one of the all time greatest experiences I’ve ever had in a game. Anxiety driven daily life, as you wile away the time until the end of the world, desperately hoping you’ll be able to do something about it but not being able to know until the moment it arrives. There’s nothing you can do besides just… wait. Pass the time. Go about normal life, pretending things are OK, giving this veneer of normalcy, as the world slowly crumbles around you. It’s always been a bit more, how should I say, relatable than I felt like it should, honestly. I’ve never lived under the spectre of imminent death or ruin, but somehow, this part of the story about numb anxiety, trying to go about your day like everything is OK, that was resonating with me deeply. From the moment I’ve played it until now, it’s always felt like it was articulating something personal to me. But how could it?

Well, that feeling has come into sharper relief for many of us recently, hasn’t it?

Ranking The Mario Games Ideologically

First, there was the dawn of mankind. Then, there was Super Mario. Mario taps into an almost instinctual desire among all of us: have we all not, at some point, simply wished to jump? Yes, yes we all have, and though the bonds of gravity trap us cruelly, we can still imagine our wildest dreams with a happy little red man who jumps really high. But as we jump, have we ever truly considered what this jumping means, what it says? Nobody has ever asked me to do this, so clearly, the masses are secretly yearning for a brave soul to rank the Mario games in order of ideological worth. We can always jump, but what jump will bring us a brighter future? That is the answer we will find today.

#14: Super Mario Bros. 3

We’ve always known Mario has an unfortunate penchant for propping up monarchies, and perpetuating the iron grip of the Peach family over the toads of the Mushroom Kingdom. But apparently that wasn’t enough for him, because in this game he takes time out of his way to rescue seven whole kings along the way! Seven! Seven more unjust concentrations of power intentionally propped up by our monarchist plumber here. One would hope that after the events of the first game, Mario would have learned the error of his ways, that one cannot fix a broken system by simply changing the person at the top. Clearly, he has instead doubled down, believing that the systems as are must be incrementally fixed, that stable corrupt systems are preferable to anything else. Mario Bros 3 is a tale of a jump man who restores a horrifying order in his quest to stop Bowser, a true cautionary tale.

#13: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Mario isn’t fighting for any princesses, monarchies, no, none of that in this entry. So why is this so low? Because Mario is fighting for his obscene showing of private property, an entire castle that he cannot possibly use personally. Sure, Wario probably isn’t a great person either, but in order to buy into Mario’s quest here, you need to believe that he is entitled to such swaths of land, an abhorrent belief. How many toads could that castle house if it was properly utilized? How much land surrounding the castle is usable for farming, or simple utility for the citizens? But no, Mario has the final say on all this, likely charging obscene rent if he even allows anyone into his domain, and certainly wouldn’t allow the poor to have a say on what to do in the land. This is what Mario is fighting for in this game. There can be no happy ending here.

The Troubling Politics of Fallout: New Vegas

Fallout New Vegas is one of those games that I’ve never really stopped thinking about. Normally, I’d consider that a compliment, and in a way, I do appreciate it for giving me a lot to chew on. But as the years have wore on, my thinking has gone from being impressed, to more critical analysis, and eventually to a kind of frustrated dislike of a lot of the conclusions I’ve had to draw. This is a game that’s endlessly praised for the politics it deeply weaves into the world, and that’s true! But New Vegas has a kind of unavoidable issue: what the script says, and more importantly, what the game lets you choose to do, that does ultimately send a message. And the more I think on it, the less I like what this game has to say. New Vegas is complicated, so what I want to do here today is zoom out, look at the game broadly, and to give a basic explanation of what I find so uncomfortable at the end of the day. I won’t be going into any deep theory or analysis, and what I aim to do here is to give you a starting point for these perspectives. Hopefully, you can take it from there if you feel so inclined. There is a deep, underlying discomfort I feel with the politics of New Vegas, and it all comes down to the futures it can imagine.

So: what can a game as open as New Vegas even say? The game lets you choose between 4 options to control the major power center of the Mojave, considered the most overarching and impactful choice. Yes, there’s a lot of smaller choices that will affect many details of the wasteland, but broadly, the future is going to be in the hands of one of these 4 options. The NCR are a militaristic faction with dreams of restoring the typical setup of American government. The Legion is a fascist invading force, with all the woe that brings. Mr. House is an oligarch who has a specific plan for the wasteland. And finally, you can let New Vegas be independent of these external forces, and by extension, the wasteland too will be independent. And frankly, from these descriptions, there’s an obvious best outcome that the game favors: an independent wasteland. It’s extremely clear: fascism and oligarchy are obviously not favoured, and references to the problems of the NCR are numerous. An independent wasteland has the game take a sort of “free to choose their own destiny” tone, telling you that everyone in the wasteland will be answerable to no unjust forces, and implying that this is how everyone will be the most “free”. This is textually what the game says, and certainly it’s the ending that most people agree is the closest to a good one New Vegas has.

My problem with this setup is certainly not that there’s a best ending, nor is it that the game lets you choose objectively evil options. A best ending is an interesting way to send a message, and as long as the script is properly framed (which I think the Legion path is), an exploration of awful ideology and evil can say a lot of interesting things. No, my problem boils down to how New Vegas sees “independence”, and how that troubled definition of independence is seemingly the best world it can imagine. Put simply, New Vegas doesn’t think community solidarity or support is a part of this best world, and instead implies that the best outcome is one where everyone is totally independent from each other. Independence is a big theme of New Vegas, and it does make sense: this is a player driven game, and the entire conceit of the overarching story is how an individual having such an impact on the wasteland can impact the general lives of people. Exploring this idea is one thing, but valorizing independence above all else has New Vegas run into a lot of uncomfortable ideas. Especially in crafting a world where all the other alternatives are clearly shown to be bad ideas, New Vegas skews incredibly closely to a real world political ideology that, well, has some real issues.

Animal Crossing and the Specter of Capitalism

Before we start: I like Animal Crossing. Always have! It’s never been a series that’s had a huge place in my life but it’s always been a comfy and cozy experience whenever I’ve taken time out of my life to relax with it. And yet… something’s been bugging me about the series, specifically, how people have been talking about it. To a lot of people, AC is this sort of pristine experience, where everything is nice and comfortable, unrealistically perfect, and that any sort of analysis of the series in a critical way beyond the gameplay is barking up the wrong tree. Even something as far removed as reality as AC still makes assumptions, and those assumptions made at the base of the series send messages that deserve analysis. So I want to go over what those are, and why they’re deserving of a critical look.

All media makes assumptions. All of it! This is a really basic fact of looking at media: even the most abstract work is making some sort of assumptions that have value and ideological implications. It can be anything from overt politics, like what’s a good form of government, to even more basic stuff like what’s worthwhile to make or assuming what audiences want to see. Pong, the most basic game you will ever see, seemingly the most abstract and assumption free work, that still makes a basic assumption that competition is a fun thing to engage in. That’s an extremely basic and inoffensive assumption, yes, but it is still an assumption with real world implications, however small. Nothing we make ever exists in a vacuum, and this applies to Animal Crossing all the same.

It’s a super nice, lighthearted, escapist game series, but that doesn’t make Animal Crossing immune from this inescapable fact of media. Assumptions have been made about the escapism, assumptions about what’s good or can be good are all over in how they present aspects of the world. Those assumptions inevitably will have real world parallels, value judgements, and in Animal Crossing’s case, undeniably map onto some real world ideology. So… what are some of the relevant aspects of this series? To name a few:

Astral Chain and the Glorification of Police

Astral Chain is the coolest playing game I’ve seen in a while, and that hurts a lot. It looks like this awesome, freeform action brawler where you can capture enemies to aid you and that is awesome. But there is no way I will be able to play this game, and as a fan of Platinum’s work all around, as a fan of the systems they make and the freedom of the stories they tell, it sucks so hard. Astral Chain, and its glorification of police and police aesthetics, is a slap in the face to every minority group that’s loved Platinum’s work.

But let’s rewind a little, because to understand why this is such a big deal, we need to go back and look at what Platinum as a studio have done in the past, and the ways in which they made games. It might seem odd to focus on the studio as a whole, but Platinum have always made a specific kind of game, ones focused on mechanical mastery and freedom, and ones with stories and worlds to back up those values. Across their catalogue, they’ve made many games, with their own properties and existing ones, but consistently what they showed was an aspiration towards making games everyone could enjoy, with wild and crazy worlds that you could ultimately sink your teeth into and master interacting with.

Apolitical Video Games

My favourite apolitical video game is The Division, a game where you play as part of a government sanctioned militia who has full power to kill civilians in a campaign to secure control over an America hit by terrorist attacks. The lack of critique on your efforts and the positive light your side is shown in is actually just how videogames are, and has absolutely no political opinion inherent to it. Why do people keep putting politics into this game, anyway?

You know what else I like to play to get away from all those stressful politics? Assassin’s Creed. Really, it’s just so refreshing to take part in a power fantasy of being an assassin. Sure, most of the time you’re taking out enemies of your group with profound impacts on the historical settings around you, but that’s not politics. The way in which historical people are portrayed in media could never have a political slant, and besides, talking to people like George Washington is just a fun thing, absolutely. I’m so glad Ubisoft recently said that they don’t want to be political, after all, they’re already great at making games with no politics inherent.