Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think there's an irony here. You're fine with really blatantly overt politics. But, despite saying that what bugs you about the less-overt political writing is its deception, what you really don't like is its failure to deceive adequately. What you want is writing whose political leanings are sufficiently organically worked into the whole that you are in fact deceived and fail to notice what they are doing.

Heh, you know what this reminds me of?

Of people trying to claim there is a significance in the color of the curtain in one scene of a book with 700+ pages as a side note.
A bunch of overly excitable people high on their own outpouring of words. Not more, not less.

Of course you notice the hints in LoTR once you think about it. The languages, the use of "technology" only by the bad guys, Christianity, etc.
No need to write essays about it.

Despite you apparently believing that since I disagree with you I must have been hit on the head as a child, I do know these things and am not deceived by them - well, tbh I certainly was when I read it the first time, but c'mon I was like 13 or so...

The point is: it's so subdued and so subtle, it doesn't jump in your face.
No character starts blurting concurrent political messages out of context.
The messaging does not take stage, front and center.
Nobody goes out of that story thinking how terrible modernism is and we should all hop back into the caves - there are some themes for those who are looking for them, and you can think about them if you'd like, and that's it. You can engage with it if you want to - but you don't have to (and I certainly don't want to).
And that's fine - to me, anyway.

Quoting: SamsaiThe problem is that your standard is so arbitrary and undefined that you can declare any flaw in any piece of media as having been caused by a political agenda. At the same time you can also reject any counter-examples by claiming that some arbitrary level of political-ness wasn't met by that work or its creator.

Any flaw? Hell, no.
There is more bad writing that was not caused by political agendas than there is bad writing that was caused by it. As always, it makes no sense to suspect malice when incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

When it happens, though, and it does happen often enough, unfortunately with increasing frequency, it is blatantly obvious - and usually doesn't even get denied by the authors, btw. Those who point it out as a flaw in the writing are then decried as some kind of ****ist so the criticism can be conveniently ignored.

I'll gladly accept counter-examples, but nobody has ever provided any where characters blurting out some bluntly preaching-the-authors-opinion lines (for example) have actually made a product's writing better...

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Quoting: SamsaiAnd if your focus is on pushing some agenda, your focus should be on doing good writing because if you have an agenda to push, it is in your interests to sell that agenda well.

You can only have one focus, one thing that is worth more to you than anything else about any given project.
If it is writing, the rest is subjected to it in order to achieve that goal.
If it is agenda pushing, the rest (incl. writing) is subjected in order to achieve that goal.

Any attempt to "balance" things will at best lead to mediocre results and at worst an odd mixture of good writing and blunt preaching alternating within the same product.

Quoting: SamsaiThat isn't even criticism, it's just baseless speculation without substance. It isn't constructive and nothing can be learned from it.

Right, baseless... except being based on probably hundreds (by now) of examples from games, series, movies, entertainment industry itself, etc. from the last two decades proving it right.
With no example (to my knowledge) proving it wrong.

But, sure, go ahead and ignore it if it doesn't fit into your worldview.
I have long stopped caring if someone on the internet acknowledges facts presented to them or not. I doubt that presenting you with more would lead to any useful results.

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Quoting: SamsaiThis is extremely arbitrary and unhelpful. If the issue is "personal opinions", does that mean that you cannot create an game that deals with issues you have opinions on?

Of course you can, but if you let your opinions run rampant with whatever content you produce and don't manage to separate yourself from the product, the result is nothing but propaganda.

Quoting: SamsaiIn this case your problem isn't actually with the politics but poor writing and thus you should really be complaining about poor writing rather than politics.

One of those leads to the other, it is unavoidable.
If your focus is on pushing some agenda, your focus is not on doing good writing/worldbuilding/etc. and that will always show.

I'm glad you brought up Star Trek - the worst episodes of all the seasons are those in which the writers forgot about their actual job of being writers and instead went all-in on the preaching - you could say they went against their Prime Directive (ba-dum tshh).

So yes, my problem is with the personal politics of the authors, because when those take the front seat, the writing - and other parts, too - suffer enormously.
You can not make it a complaint only about bad writing, because that is just a symptom, not the cause.
The cause is bringing your own politics in.

Quoting: SamsaiThe more "insidious and disgusting" possibility I see is that this complaint is raised by people when they encounter something that dissents from their norms. Status quo politics aren't political at all, but if it's something I don't like then it's political and if it's political then it has an agenda and if it has an agenda it is a threat. In this case the "don't put politics in video games" is but an attempt to shut down dissenting viewpoints because they are scary. A modern military shooter which glorifies a US invasion on a foreign country is totally apolitical, but a game having a trans character in it is a vicious attack against society that must be stopped before it leads to total chaos and anarchy.

Cases like that definitely happen, but I'd say only on the ends of the horseshoe. And extremists from those positions can safely be disregarded.

In the vast majority of cases when I've talked to people about exactly that issue, people agree that it's not about agreement or disagreement with the positions themselves.
In fact, I'd say most people bothered by the preaching agree with the basic point behind it (maybe not surprising given that gaming community as a whole is more left-leaning), but the product is still tainted for them.

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Quoting: elistoAlso WTF is burgesses ?

I wondered about that, too, but now I have this urge to fight it :angry::angry:

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Quoting: SamsaiI sure wonder what games the "don't put politics in video games" crowd plays. Pong?

There is no such crowd.
This is an often used misrepresentation of what is being said to build a nice strawman to deconstruct.

What people are talking about when they say "don't put politics in video games" is obviously not "don't have video games that deal with politics as part of their setting/world" - naturally most non-abstract games with a story do that (some game's entire POINT is that, e.g. Disco Elysium) and nobody's got an issue with it.

Instead, the point is that developers should keep their personal opinions and views where they belong (various discussion platforms exist for that purpose) and not taint an entertainment product in order to try and shove their views down the audience's throat via (usually very thinly veiled) pandering, preaching and self-insertions.
Stuff like that is insidious and disgusting.

Now, for games like this one, I would make exceptions.
For one, it is obviously over-the-top satire, there isn't really much of a point made other than "Thatcher bad!" to begin with. It's on the same level as Tonigh We Riot's "Capitalism bad!" - I can't agree with that, but find it cute nonetheless.
Additionaly, nothing here is thinly veiled in the least. You don't get into this game by accident and are then surprised by some anti-Thatcher content. Which is in contrast to a lot of other modern games where you go in expecting nothing vile and suddenly characters become very obvious and annoying mouthpieces for whatever views their creators hold.

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Quoting: seanbutnotheardTo each their own, I suppose, but to me, politics poison everything they touch. For games, this is true whether or not one agrees with the developer's opinions. My favorite games transport me to another reality, rather than reminding me about the things I'd rather avoid in this one.

I definitely agree with that position.

However, that generally applies to games that try to preach underhandedly through characters in their story, etc. - it is usually very obvious, of course, since someone focused on preaching cannot also be focused on doing good writing.

Games that are very open about their intentions from the get-go and just entirely over-the-top in their implementation are IMO totally fine.
There is no deviousness in this, similar to something like Tonight we riot [External Link].
It's all out in the open here.

Quoting: LanzI know it's popular online to be a rabid leftist, but Thatcher was a remarkably talented woman who deserves our respect, not mockery.

I mean, yeah, to leave that kind of enduring legacy of devastation no doubt required great talent. Not many could have pulled that off - though I guess we'll have to see what else good Boris can come up with.

To this day (and certainly for many years to come), UK is busy dealing with the many fallouts of Thatcher's regime - but I'm sure breaking a few unions, delaying inflation a bit and making sure rich people got richer at the cost of the poor was totally worth it :grin: :grin: :grin:

But I guess I'm just a rabid leftist (who usually get's called all kinds of "alt-righter"-like insults by exactly those).

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Zeroedout

Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: jarl.arntzenWhy not just call it "Couch OS".
Much more fun name which is actually perfectly related with the use case :D

That sounds like the OS is running on your couch. Smart couches anyone?

Wait until you hear about CoochOS.

I was making some jokes about CentOS today... like if you swapped the e with another vowel... CantOS is the family friendly version of that. I'll let your imagination go with what else it could be!

I actually went for a look and it seems that Potato OS is a thing :grin:

https://potatoproject.co/ [External Link]

Though it is only for Android phones and the official name is Potato Open Source Project, but it seem enough people just call it Potato OS.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Jewgeni Filippowitsch Iwanowski

Quoting: ShmerlWhat is it using for big screen kind of UX?

Steam Big Picture Mode.

Well, that's disappointing. Would have been nice for someone to work on open source console style UI. The trend of Linux distros starting to use closed source interfaces is a bad one.

I don't have a problem with closed source software per se.
If the documentation is good and the license not too prohibitive, all is fine, albeit not optimal.

Of course, I have no clue how good either is in this case...

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Quoting: dxmnChimera is for sure a better name than GamerOS...

No.

But the logo is a lot better.

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Wow... the reviews for that DLC...

What the hell were they thinking releasing a DLC with that little useful content (there is ZERO reason to actually go underground/on asteroids beyond novelty) and that many bugs, not only breaking the main game but also all mods - you know, the things that kept the game alive for as long as they did?

I am honestly amazed and would love to be a fly on their walls to even get an idea on how this all happened.

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