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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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My favorite was when a person claimed civ was non-political. It's literally "Politics: the Game"
I'd definitely argue there's a huge difference in a politics simulation game, and a game "being political"
Please, elaborate.
Many games have definite traits of political ideas being the themes or undertones. These may be criticisms of major political ideologies or of systems of government, or they may remark on other specific topics.
Anotjer facet, some games are accused or having an "agenda" or something, such as the games that people screech about when they have gay characters. This is usually what dipshits mean when they say a game is being political. To be fair, yes, some games definitely feel like that, which is just poor writing of dialouge and the delivery of themes, imo.
Civilization is a game that features politics as a gameplay mechanic. As mentioned by another user, this game still does have politics, as saying Mt Rushmore was a buildable structure granted by running Facism as your form of government, however it also has Ghandi using nuclear weapons so I don't really read too much into it as a "political statement"
To summarize my point, Civ is a game about simulating politics, you can be a theocracy or a democracy or a fascist state and swap between them all at will pr mix and match, but it's not really the goal of the game to push any specific ideas on political issues. It's a sandbox game, so my point was that it was a poor example compared to story driven games where the protagonists or antagonists have a political tilt that's either presented as good or bad. Not that civ has no political ideas and a tilt, but that its not a super great example when the specific example in the game are mostly jokes anyways.
I will try to come back later and do a fuller reply, as I didn't expect so many lengthy replies to my request for elaboration.
One of the things I don't think people really touched on here is that there's political like big and in the foreground text, and there's political in other ways.
For an example, what are the win conditions in civilization? Using military forces to annihilate everyone else is a win condition. That is a political statement.
The game could also say you lose if civilian deaths cross a certain threshold. I don't think it even models that. What the game choses to model and reward are part of the "text", and when doing a critical read should be considered.
The stuff about "oh you can be a democracy or autocracy" is political in its own way, but that's only one dimension of the subject. There's more to it.