> i'm not personally willing to engage in political subjects in my escapist media
When I see this I just think of that old joke that gamers think there are two sexes: male and political. Two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. etc etc you get the idea.
Bad news tho the political subjects are already in your escapist media your only choice is how you engage with them. Regarding any aspect of it as nonpolitical is itself a political act.
this thread started with me basically saying that i'm not willing to engage, and there's a lively downvote brigading going on against the original comment (it goes from -3 to 3 over and over and over again, the grand battle of ideologies!)
i'm not signing under your strawman, because it's not true. but i know the tactics you people use, because you took them straight from the commissar books of my homeland. history books will not treat you kindly.
You can escape from politics in something like FIFA or Madden, I suppose, as long as you're willing to ignore the politics of the team ownership/management and how players are treated. And of course something like Tetris isn't intrinsically political, as long as you ignore the origins of the game itself (which is totally reasonable in a 'separate the art from the artist' fashion).
In practice with many games whether they seem 'political' to you or not depends on whether the game's politics are legible, and depending on our upbringing and education we may or may not be able to recognize a given political theme in a given game. It feels naive to act as if x% of games are Political and y% of games are Not Political and thus coverage should entirely avoid politics. Typically when you see political themes brought up in games coverage, it is usually in regards to games that have political themes beneath the surface, if not directly out in the open in the text of the game itself.
I totally understand the desire to escape from politics, and a good way to do that is to avoid reading coverage that focuses on the politics and to avoid playing games that engage too deeply with political themes. It just feels deeply misguided to me when I see people criticizing games journalists for 'bringing politics into it' when usually the games they're covering are already deeply political. It's fine to want to ignore that as a player but they are rarely bringing something in that isn't there.
A great example of this would be the Yakuza/Judgment series of games. They are filled with social commentary and themes that are most legible to someone who grew up in Japan, and if you read coverage of them from journalists with that context it can seem very political. To me as an American, I lack most of that cultural context so it's very easy to treat them as apolitical fun romps where gangsters fight against corrupt politicians or dirty cops. But even so, corrupt politicians and dirty cops are a problem here in my country too, right? To call these works apolitical from any perspective is perhaps trying a little too hard.
first of all we clearly have different relationship with video games, just by the games you've mentioned, or the fact that you've worked in the industry. i don't play call of duty, because i'm not on board with jock sniffers on political grounds. your other examples are similar, and i agree with you, a lot of video games are political, and i stand by my point. i don't like to engage with them! i find their treatment of political subjects to be juvenile, naive, reductionist, historically illiterate, and yet often moralizing and grandstanding. few games that aspire to deal with tough social subjects ever deliver. this is in my opinion.
there are two dimensions to the question of politics in video games, that make engagement with politics often an unpleasant experience. the question of familiarity that you touched on, and the question of player's choice. with low familiarity and low choice politics are not a problem. yeah i don't know anything about organized crime in japan, why would i care what the game tells me. with high choice politics are also not a problem, this is a very very very rare thing in the games treatment of politics. and i think the faux choice between "i sided with the developer's prefered political position, and got the good ending" and "i sided with developer's disliked political positions, and now i'm literally hitler" is not a real choice.
so the real problem with politics in video games is often high familiarity with low choice. the developer wants you to know that their guys are really the good guys, and they imbue them with all the political views that the developers share. you're "forced" to play out scenarios, where you are not invested in the narrative anymore, you're just doing it for the mechanics of the game. i've played shadowrun: dragonfall recently, you're part of an anarchist commune, and there's a lot of kind of talk that you hear in anarchist communes, and, man, i've been part of anarchist communes before, and all this talk is bullshit, but in the video game universe it works!
which gets me to my original criticism of "activist journalists". these people want more politics in their games not less. by virtue of their activism, and interest of the kind of audience they attract, they are also much more likely to dedicate both time to games with explicit political subjects, or often times explore games from political perspective. they are also much more likely to advocate for high familiarity, low choice games. that's my past experience with their output. there is a lot apolotical games, there's a lot of low familiarity political games, "activist journalists" pretty much gaurantee that politics is front and center of gaming experience.