Seriously. Every form of entertainment has baked-in political assumptions, and that definitely includes #ttrpg . You might choose not to examine them, but this is an active choice on your part, and you don’t get to pretend that your entertainment is “free of politics”.
Do the world and yourself a favor, and use this template instead.
Done. Thanks for the suggestion!
What template was he using before?
Steven Crowder
This douchebag isn’t exactly the most appropriate for this meme.*First draft was the op crowder meme. Good on op for updating it.
He changed it to Calvin, but this comment is hilarious now.
Now it’s like…
Deleted by creator
This template really needs to die.
Edit: this was meant for the Crowder template. Calvin is cool.
Your comment now serms hilariously hostile after the edit.
I came here after the edit and got scared that Watterson did something.
This comment is really funny now that OP is using the new format, please leave it up.
Hah, gotta edit it at least a bit. I’ll leave the original viewable.
“I don’t want to talk about/see politics” is always synonym to “I support the status quo, and I will aggressively reject anything that goes against it”.
Nothing that happens on a public space is free of politics, even when it’s not controversial.
Just MLK’s white moderate doing white moderate things. Funny how shit don’t change.
I don’t like politics in ttrpgs because that means less time SMITING and more time with boring words. Unless the politicians are secretly vampires, then I can keep SMITING.
NO TALK ONLY SMITE.
This post has been brought to you by the palabian gang.
Now with the vampire politicians gone you can help shape the new government of the city
Anything they see in there that goes against their own personally DESIRED to be status quo is an insult. Theyve just got shit views so well rounded culture shocks them and it reminds them all about how their shit stinks and they aren’t really all that smart or morally sound. Cause if they were, they wouldn’t have identified with any that stuff to begin with or realized the perils.
And it makes them know the cringe at how they’re viewed (but they say its just how they’re PORTRAYED to pass the buck on being that way being their own fault and indicative of their lack of stats and general lack of character) 😄😂
You can tell what someone’s politics are by what they consider political.
I was astonished at some of the Steam reviews of Outer Worlds after playing it. People proper pissed off that their experience had been ruined because there’s a female side character with an optional side quest where she wants a date with another woman. Like how thoroughly filled with hate do you have to be as a person, to be fine with all the mass killing but suddenly get a moralistic high horse about a fictional character going on a dinner date you don’t approve of.
Sad that Steam are making a comment of their own by allowing those reviews to stay up.
Steam definitely has a libertarian streak, seemingly. I wish I had started switching over to GOG a lot sooner.
How DARE you make your game try to reflect reality.
While I haven’t read those reviews, I think the implications of Steam removing reviews would be worse, since they would effectively be manipulating the user score of a game. User reviews are just that, user reviews. The score should indicate what users think, whatever their reasons may be for thinking it, no?
I don’t disagree with the rest of what you said though.
EVERYTHING is politics and the shitheads who complain are the ones who made it that way.
Same people who complain about Nazis being the enemy in Wolfenstein
EVERYTHING is politics. It absolutely affects every aspect of life, ESPECIALLY fascism
that’s not politics. That’s just normal people getting offended at things. It’s normal because it’s not possible to please everyone at once so there will always be someone.
People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.
If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.
For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.
You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.
A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)
People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.
It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.
If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.
Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.
All I want is more nice unpolitical games like Bioshock or Wolfenstein
And not the woke nonsense of having female or PoC main characters.
I feel like a lot of people, who complain about politics in gaming are not choosing to examine/not examine the political assumptions, they are simply not realising that they’re there. Often these themes reside deeper in the storytelling so you have to actually engage with it to be aware of them. People who complain about it only choose a handful of topics to be mad about, because they are against it.
Exactly. What they’re really mad about is the fact that there’s a black person, a gay person, or woman with normal sized tits in the game.
I hate normal sized tits!
/s Just in case 😄
normal sized tits are such a rarity
“I don’t want politics in my gaming” = “I stopped growing, emotionally, the first time I saw Jugga in Conker’s Bad Fur Day”
“Politics are genuinely fun and everyone wants to see them all the time, and the people who say they don’t want to see it like it even more, they just wish they were seeing different politics.” -hbomberguy
It means “I don’t believe in anything and my media must reflect the status quo of (my) politics or I will throw a little baby tantrum because you dared to make me think about the cost of the comfort I enjoy”
Feels kind of ironic using Chowder for this meme, but I agree with the message :P
It means “I don’t want politics that I don’t agree with in the game”
I absolutely want politics in gaming. Without it, we’d be stuck in the arcade era. Sure, sometimes I also like to zone out on puzzle games which are largely devout of it. Imagine The Witcher 1 without politics, is there even a game there?
