Idle Thumbs 153: Blondie, Freckles, and Glasses

[Twig]

Unless it's in The Witcher, that's the only one I can trust.

Haha, I was about to say, there's at least ONE that does it right! Otherwise, completely agreed. Such a boring trope because it's never handled right.

 

That said, there was a time when I was super deep into loving Warcraft lore. Man. I kinda miss those days. I was so innocent. 

[feelthedarkness]

The TV Tropes article mentioned it, I looked up a couple of forum posts on it.  Apparently the Horde were taken over by a new leader for awhile that some viewed as bringing Nazi vibes (racial purity and superiority, along with some other stuff).  Like I said, I'm not a WoW player, so no first hand experience. 

 

Also, a pretty wild reversal from the original vibe, where the horde represented a kind of populist multiculturalism, compared to the shining aristocracy of the alliance. 

[Gormongous]

I couldn't find any of the articles I knew existed on the morality of wargaming as the Nazis, but I did find a Three Moves Ahead episode on the subject that I remember being pretty enlightening.

 

Also, a pretty wild reversal from the original vibe, where the horde represented a kind of populist multiculturalism, compared to the shining aristocracy of the alliance. 

 

Isn't it also a common theme of fantasy (and fiction in general, really) that populism invariably decays into totalitarianism? You can't trust people with power, it makes them genocidal child-killing maniacs overnight.

[tberton]

Didn't we discuss this topic in the thread for the Ananda Gupta episode of 3MA? He had said that he had an idea for a WWII board game like Twilight Struggle, but didn't want to make somebody play as the Nazis.

[Gormongous]

Didn't we discuss this topic in the thread for the Ananda Gupta episode of 3MA? He had said that he had an idea for a WWII board game like Twilight Struggle, but didn't want to make somebody play as the Nazis.

 

We did and I took a depressingly similar position, even to the point of harping on Stalin. Consistency for the win!

 

In all seriousness, I heard a similar thing from the designer of Navajo Wars. It's a singleplayer board game because he didn't want someone's objective to be the eradication of the Navajo, which would undermine the theme of their struggle to survive in addition to being morally repugnant.

[Murdoc]

I was going to snark off about whoever was eating for nearly an hour on the podcast was pretty disrupting to me. Then Jake copped to it and how can anyway be mean to Jake?

 

Well he kept going, which is fine, whatever, he acknowledged it, but then Sean said something like "The patient pack animal that starves to death" and right afterwards was just the most  silent, trying not to make noise crunch as Jake was still chowing down and I had to smile and think to myself that it was all worth it.

 

Then he did one for dramatic effect and the moment was lost.

[CaptainFish]

We did and I took a depressingly similar position, even to the point of harping on Stalin. Consistency for the win!

 

In all seriousness, I heard a similar thing from the designer of Navajo Wars. It's a singleplayer board game because he didn't want someone's objective to be the eradication of the Navajo, which would undermine the theme of their struggle to survive in addition to being morally repugnant.

Looking at Navajo Wars it covers conflict with 3 different enemies over their existence so I can see how that would be really awkward to design around. Had it been about the Navajo and Spain only, for example, I think there's an interesting game to be made there that could depict that conflict in a true palpable way to the players by making it a conflict between people rather than a person and a system. Tangentially, I have a hard time accepting that it's generally okay to make games where all you do is kill and you're the hero, but there are so few that contextualize negative actions in a historical (or at least less fictional) context to show what it really means to be the villain. Papers Please did this extremely well by making it possible for the player to experience large range of motivations for your actions as a guard.

[Urthman]

I'm going to predict that all of this joking about robots taking over and enslaving/murdering all of us will probably be considered highly offensive sometime in the next 2-30 years. Just remember that anytime one of these jokes are made, it's done at the expense of millions of future robot apocalypse victims.

 

It's going to be highly offensive to all those nice, sentient robots who are sick and tired of bigots like Jake stereotyping them as genocidal enemies of humanity.

 

"I'm not robophobic, but wouldn't you feel a little bit scared if you were walking down the sidewalk in one of those Silicon Valley neighborhoods and suddenly notice a couple robots rolling along behind you."

[Urthman]

I was pleased / scared to learn that Jake has an evil twin nicknamed "video games" who is responsible for anything horrible we thought we heard Jake say on a podcast.

[Jake]

You're thinking of "video games," I think.

[Urthman]

That must be the evil Jake, mocking me with his Admin powers to post the word "video games" without a space.

[Gormongous]

It's going to be highly offensive to all those nice, sentient robots who are sick and tired of bigots like Jake stereotyping them as genocidal enemies of humanity.

 

"I'm not robophobic, but wouldn't you feel a little bit scared if you were walking down the sidewalk in one of those Silicon Valley neighborhoods and suddenly notice a couple robots rolling along behind you."

 

Meat chauvinism just like that is a major theme of Iain M. Banks' first sci-fi novel, Consider Phlebas.