Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

National News Service, a Russian media agency, will hold a press conference on Vampire 5 tomorrow at 10.00 GMT. Among the participants are Dzhambulat Umarov, a minister of national policy, external relations, press and information of Chechnya and representatives of Studio 101, a company that publishes V20 in Russia.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnsn.fm%2Fpress-center%2Fkto-poselil-v-chechne-vampirov.html&edit-text=&act=url

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 18th 2018 at 1:57:50 AM

You know that moment when you realise that your cute plotline idea has real world implications you could have taken a little more seriously?

I suspect WW have now reached this moment.

And, given how Russia loves its distractions and scapegoats, they should, perhaps, be panicking a bit. :|

Eh, it wasn't a cute plotline.

The author made it to critique the government for torturing his friend.

He moved to Georgia during the Georgia-Russia civil war.

So, this puts lie to a lot of our assumptions about how people react to RL evils being depicted metaphorically.

It just got butchered by editing.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 18th 2018 at 3:07:31 AM

That was my point: the author was putting a serious message out, as well as pouring rage and pain onto the paper.

Yet, the editors saw something edgy they could use with just a few tweaks here and there. And, failed to anticipate just what they were messing with. Badly.

In short, the editors saw a cute (if edgy) toy to play with. But...

Edited by Euodiachloris on Nov 18th 2018 at 1:15:16 PM

This is true.

I suspect that the people at White Wolf responsible for this got a very angry phone call from Paradox once it all blew up, an instant leadership swap out isn’t done lightly, Paradox have enough trouble walking the fine line of not offensively portraying real world tragedies as is.

Hey, remember when Paradox used white supremacist rhetoric to promote their new DLC?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

Is this about Deus Vault and Holy Fury? I think it actually originated the other way round, Paradox have used the phrase for years in their games and racists picked it up from them (as a number of racist gamers are fans of their games), Paradox have refused to drop it but it originated with them not the white supremacists.

They’ve done similar with EU 4, when they announced that the next DLC will be Europe based they used the “putting the Europe back in Europa Universalis” line that racists have been using to demand such DLC on their forums.

Paradox seem to try and improve, but they’ve made it very clear that their commitment is to making games that their fans enjoy and will buy, that means not coming down hard on their alt-right fans and generally avoiding big topics (in EU 4 there is no real slave trade and the HOI there is no holocaust).

I mean, I'm extremely grateful they're not touching the Holocaust in Ho I 4 because of the fanbase of toxic shitbirds they've managed to lovingly cultivate.

And the whole 'Deus Vult' thing is way older than Paradox, it goes all the way back to the boner the modern-day far right have for denigrating the Middle East.

From RPG.net, they said:

For a bit Paradox was attracting Neo-Nazis; and I don't mean the alt-right kind, I mean the viking rune wearing kind; and went out of their way to purge the hell out of them on their forums and have the games judge the hell out of you.

They did once use "Make space great again" in Stellaris, which was probably an unwise move.

Complete with red ball caps, though they more or less dropped it once Trump got elected.

Yes, because - as they put it - the joke stopped being funny.

@Math.

Let me disagree. Ignoring the Holocaust (and the Genocides of Imperial Japan and Italy) in a game about WW.2 is just denying that they happened. You can't make a game about WW 2 without at least acknowledging that they happened.

I've definitely heard criticism that games set in WWII, in general, have a rather bad tendency to completely ignore the holocaust. This is actually part of why Extra Credits gave praise to the modern Wolfenstein games for talking about it.

I can get it from games dealing in fronts like the Pacific Front...but then you should acknowledge the Japanese War Crimes.

Not necessarily go for the protagonist finding a concentration camp. But at least something (everything in the Eastern European and Asian fronts count. Sadly). Nazis or Imperials deliverately shooting civilians or abusing non-white POW.

Also. HOI do have the Sino Japanese war? I find that conflict being fascinating. When you end up with Nationalists and Communists doing a Enemy Mine against a literal The Empire, you know that is serious.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 18th 2018 at 1:27:50 PM

Wolfenstein doesn't let you control the Germans. War games like Hearts of Iron let you.

Nobody wants to deal with the inevitable backlash of letting players re-enact the Holocaust, especially since these kind sadly do attract a lot of neo-fascists itching to "correct history".

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Nov 18th 2018 at 7:28:19 PM

I've always wanted do something as making the Holocaust being a drain of resources. You don't control it, it is already happening and your own resources are being wasted for something that don't help you at all. Basically. The holocaust happens, but is bad even for a wehraboo.

To answer your earlier question, yes HOI does represent the Sino-Japanese war. HOI 4 had a DLC/major patch that focused on it.

Which strangely enough included bicycle divisions, for god knows what reason.

Yeah, my problem is specifically with giving people the agency to possibly 'perfect' the Holocaust.

I wish more World War 2 games would have the conversation, but not ones where the option is to have any agency or metrics by which to compare yourself to the monsters who perpetrated the crime in the first place.

I suppose you're damned either way because the ignorant nobheads will use the game to whitewash the war more broadly, but that's its own kettle of fish.

And yet no motorized/mechanized artillery to represent a historical US Army infantry division, feelsbadman.

Edited by math792d on Nov 18th 2018 at 8:13:05 PM

Isn't that... literally the entire point of the mechanised infantry/later artillery upgrades?

Because Japan made heavy use of bicycle infantry in World War 2, if I recall correctly.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Nov 18th 2018 at 8:25:08 PM

Yeah, but the current tree is half SPG's, half close support AFV's, and either way there's no option to just...have artillery batteries you tow behind a Jeep, like the US historically did.

the NYPD gang squad has come under fire for using the Punisher’s logo.

It isn’t the first time the police have used the Punisher logo and faced criticism for it either. Last year the Kentucky police removed his symbol from their squad cars after facing criticism. Though it’s hard to tell just how much the cops actually know about the Punisher and whether or not they’re just using his symbol because it looks cool.