However not all countries are like this and one would assume that games are made in these countries. There are such games, like the unexpected hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance, developed in the Czech Republic. Please note that it couldn’t have been developed in a liberal country, even if someone had the money to self-fund it, because the developers were arrested, assaulted or boycotted in their everyday life.
But why there are no more such games? Why there is no infamous Polish FPS or Russian MMORPG? Don’t tell me it’s lack of funds, if EVE could be developed in Iceland, I’m sure there is enough money in illiberal countries to fund even an AAA MMO.
I’m absolutely sure that there would be a huge market for such games. Half of the US voters voted for Trump. 1/3 of the French voted for Le Pen. Nobody makes games for them. Hardly anyone makes other kind of entertainment for them. The right-leaning sitcom Roseanne trumped the rating expectations, not because it’s awesome, but because there are no other shows a Trump voter can tune to without being spat on.
How would such game look like?
- Meritocracy: your performance defines your progress
- Hands off: developers will govern with open in-game rules instead of arbitrary GM actions
- Freedom of speech: mute him if you don’t like him, but the GMs won’t ban him for offending you
- Competition is un-consensual: even if there is no direct PvP, you need to compete for resources and spawns
- Unfortunately: pay-to-win. I have to admit one downside of illiberal democracies: systemic corruption. Buying power items is likely unavoidable in such games.
- Fortunately: no lootboxes. Gambling is strongly frowned upon, nationalized, heavily taxed.
- Traditionally gendered. Intersectional feminism has no hold here, most people don’t even know what “mansplaining” means, women dress feminine way while men dress masculine.
Do you know any bigger titles developed in the former Warsaw Pact countries? They are great candidates for my next project.
Well, a different question would be: Where are there games written in other languages?
Answer: Who cares?
The game I’m playing, Screeps, was written by some Russians. But in English. It’s not PC. It’s not easy. It’s also not AAA or “accessible.” There are also only 1500 active players.
There are probably tons of games in other countries, written in their language, that I will never hear of.
You want big money? English speaking market with accessibility? You better play the meta and make that game everything Gevlon hates.
The bad money chases out the good. Oh wait! Let me rephrase that, based on this:
I said: in a comment on the April 21 post:
But here’s the down side, and it’s really bad. There is a principle in economics that essentially stipulates “The bad money will chase out the good.” This has been in full effect for thousands of years, Even the Roman Empire had this problem when it was reducing the silver content of it’s core coin, the “Denarius.” People would recognize the difference and NOT spend the full silver ones, thus removing the “good” coins from circulation.
The parallel here is unethical, but legally operating, companies will out-compete their more ethical counterparts, driving them out of business. So you can “boycott” these guys all you want, but not enough people will do that to make a difference. This is why you can’t design a shooter “properly” by moving the collisions and whatnot to the server, and why item shop and loot box schemes will rule AAA forever.
You replied:
@Smokeman: disagree. Superhero shit and porn didn’t remove good movies from the cinemas and especially not from Netflix. There currently are good indie games, even if their graphics and quality is too bad for them to become success (except Minecraft). It’s only a matter of time before an investor realizes that. I do agree however that anyone coming from big current studios will forever be crap.
Here we go. Without big money, AAA support, how the hell is that tiny, foreign indy game going to get any traction in a AAA world? Sure! It can be screeps, with 1500 players. But it’s “good” money can’t chase out the bad money.
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two quick thoughts. A: you just layed out your game ideal (less the p2w) and you hope that someone has created it, someone is creating it, or that your post will spark someone to create it (even as you have said in the past the graphics are poor). B: just another way to get folks to suggest games to you for your review.
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You could try searching for Chinese games, or east asian games in general, but they all tend to share the same issue: an over reliance on grinding mechanics.
Also, Poland has CD Projekt Red, publishers of the massively popular Witcher series – which while single player, check a lot of the boxes you mentioned.
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As for titles, Skyforge has been around for a while. Not sure how they are doing on english-speaking audience, though.
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((( This might be a duplicate comment. Apologies if so. Reposting it because i don’t see the original comment, even with “awaiting moderation” tag )))
There are a few layers going on here.
1) In most “illiberal countries”, game companies are created by open-minded entrepreneur types that are overwhelmingly liberal leaning.
2) Regardless of the initial political leaning, the entrepreneurs are then served to contend with the western media (and also mostly westernized relevant segments of local media). This includes both the highly liberal game media and also the highly M&S-driven game social media. Among the few non-liberal-minded entrepreneurs that would be willing to do a Kingdom Come, even fewer have the conviction to stand up and keep doing their own thing when they start getting negative pushback.
3) Even if the developer is willing to keep doing his/her own thing, the publisher, whose bread and butter is basically entirely PR, is in most cases not willing to go along with that.
Another problem: there is also a challenge of actually making a good game (something KC:D imo didn’t succeed in, at least to my tastes). And it so happens that most people’s ideas on what makes a good game are very liberal nowadays. There aren’t any books on game-making philosophy and practices that say “create inconveniences for players FOR GREAT JUSTICE”. There are plenty of books that say the opposite, though. All the while citing companies like Blizzard as examples to orient yourself towards (and, to be fair, their work up before Sunwell patch in WoW was stellar).
However, one aspect which you might find interesting is that if you go far enough along the illiberal lines, you end up in China. Game market of China is already in the same order of magnitude as the western game market, seems to feature exactly the kind of approach to game-making that you described, including a ton of massive MMOs.
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@Smokeman: sure, making the game in English (or multilingual) is necessary. However “make the game everything Gevlon hates” is surely wrong idea, because such games are already made and have advantage over yours. You can’t make WoW because it’s already made and whatever clone you make will lose to WoW. If you want financial success, you must make a different game. EVE – for all his failures – is still here, Warhammer Online is not.
How can a tiny indy game get AAA money? From government support due to political reasons. A game that is good can be used for propaganda in its story. It’s a devils bargain that I’d gladly make with Putin.
@Provi Miner: please note that I didn’t even mention genre. The game can be MMO or FPS or RTS and you sure won’t see me playing a game where high APM is key.
@Maxim: WoW before WotLK was illiberal. You were a nobody warrior of an empire. You collected 10 wolf pelts for peasants. You had to work for every piece of gear. Those who succeeded had access to higher dungeons, those who didn’t didn’t. The whole idea behind WotLK was to “make everyone a big hero”.
The “liberals make games in illiberal countries” will probably be countered when the propagandists of the country realize that more young people play games than watch TV. Then government-aligned companies can publish games.
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Look your talking about games published in the west in english right? Where the left won the culture war and now even the centre are being silenced as they push us beyond absurdity, to the realms of being male means you have no right to express an opinion or disapproval about sex crimes (not joking: mat damon). In a commercial age where everything is about the money, even a threat of a boycott of sponsors costs tv journalists/comedians their shows. Publishers in the west CANNOT take risks, theres just too much money at stake.
For the games you want you have to look at the other markets, the non-english speaking markets. If its written in English, its been written with the west in mind as a market! Try korea and japan. You might not like the graphics though I’ll warn you now, given your objection to sexualised female avatars. Or as other commenters have said try China.
You will NEVER find what you want in an english speaking game. Sorry. The wars been lost. Even if you went and made it yourself, You would never get it published (from a main stream publisher) and it wouldn’t sell. You’d end up being another steam indie with 3000 players.
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@Nightgerbil: Roseanne begs to differ. The war isn’t lost, Trump is the living evidence. Finding Western publisher would be hard, but why it couldn’t be published in Poland or Hungary, both are EU countries, lefties couldn’t stop them being distributed in the EU, just like they couldn’t do anything about KC:D. They boycotted. They screamed. They refused to cover in magazines. The game still made a fortune, getting AAA income over very small budget.
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There’s a game in close beta stage of development called Escape From Tarkov, made by Battlestate Games.
It’s an interesting take on Battle Royale and looter-shooter with somewhat realistic mechanics and very detailed gun customization and mechanics.
The gamemode goes like this: you and a few other players spawn on a big map that contains randomly generated loot in form of useful items or stuff you can just sell to vendors, you collect that loot, as much as you can carry, and get to an extraction point to exit the raid. Everybody spawns with the gear they chose to bring in from what they found in early raids or bought, and if they die, all that gear and whatever they find (except for a few small items) can be looted.
There’s no end goal at the moment, just the progression towards access to better gear and more money.
You can trade any items with other players, though there’s no interface for that yet, so you have to meet up in a game to do the exchange.
There is a catch-up mechanism in the form of ability to chose to spawn with some free, but very bad gear late in a raid when most loot is already gone, and get to keep it if you extract, but the money you get from doing that quickly becomes insignificant.
From P2W, as far as I know, there are only a few free items for preorder or getting a better edition of the game, that can be lost like anything else.
Also, every player model is the same bald dude.
I’m not recommending you to play it, with it being a shooter and in a messy state at the moment, but might be something interesting to know about.
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Well, Russia/Belorussia has World of Tanks. It has been somewhat “liberalised” over the years, since they cater to more than just former USSR countries, but they tick probably all of your boxes. Especially in the beginning, all of that was 100% true. Right now, I am unsure, since I don’t play it anymore. There were some games like Etherlords (or something like that) that tried to reproduce WOW experience, however as time progressed they became suffocatingly pay-to-win and lost a sliver of popularity that they had. Historically we loved single player games more, since web was slow to come to Russia. Nowadays this restriction is lifted. Also, while piracy became much less of a concern here, it is still existant. Moreover, Russian game prices are about 1/4 of price in $ or Euro, so most good developers left to pursue their careers in much more profitable western and asian countries.
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Uhm, calling Poland “illiberal” when they are ranked second after the US in freedom of speech is a bit dodgy. Poland is very liberal. In fact, it is so liberal that people have the right to oppose liberalist bullshit.
It’s just that Poland uses the original, true meaning of the word “liberal” instead of the West’s “destroy the patriarchy” liberal.
And they made Witcher, the best game of recent times.
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@Gevlon
I don’t really see how collecting wolf pelts (or doing any physical work at all) is a contradiction to liberalism.
What you are describing can be construed as contradiction to individualism (as in, “the world is not about a single individual”). I don’t think liberalism requires individualism, though.
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CD Project Red is a Polish company and they are considered a AAA studio. Their upcoming RPG, Cyberpunk, will apparently have an online component with no lootboxes, and will have a traditional single player RPG Story attached to the box purchase. The only problem is that it’s still at least a year away, possibly more. They are the model company of how you can publish to a western market, without presence in Silicon Valley: they self published their games, and they got the money by running GOG, which started small and now is starting to nibble at the colossus that is Steam.
To be fair, there are some Russian games out there (Allods being probably the more famous) but they almost never become widespread to the western audiences because they are seen as F2P ripoffs of other games. And if you want to attract an audience in Russia/Eastern Europe, you need F2P because generally no one will be able to pay the equivalent of 40-60$ for a box purchase, or even a sub on top of that.
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Well, one game instantly comes to mind, and you have even played it. It’s World of Tanks. Doesn’t fit your following criteria too well, I guess.
tl;dr: Quality. It is low (WoT is a kind of exception but still).
Speaking of Russia, the game development industry is in somewhat weird state. Quite many good programmers, but lacking amount of good game designers. The industry is still “young”, “not developed”, and I would point out two reasons for that – first, it started evolving later than it did in the West; second – currency rates. You can bake bread in Russia with profit, but making a game for international market is more “relatively expensive”. What feels like an affordable amount for making a video game in the West, feels “too much” in Russia. And not many oil oligarchs are interested in financing video games.
Things might change in some distant future when we indeed start getting games sponsored by the government. But for now, it doesn’t happen and even if that happened, it would better not. The government is stereotypically viewed as a slow, conservative machine which does no good for creativity, and many books, movies etc. which get support from the government end up being plain boring.
Also, most creative people are indeed pro-liberal (including me to some extent, I’m very pro-meritocracy, but for example I can’t stand “traditionally gendered” when it comes in forms of gender-locked MMORPG classes). And those who are conservative/illiberal are often corrupted and pro-gambling guys (think WoT). Not going to speculate on reasons behind that.
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You may ask the authors of index.hu / iddqd.blog.hu (Stöki, Hancu,…) they know the games that were created in hungary (and othes east-block countries).
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You’ve played one already: World of Tanks was developed in Belarus.
Such games do exist, they just don’t normally climb high on quality scale. Also a big game is a big a long-term investment and an investment is a huge risk in unstable country.
If you consider Czech Republic and Poland illiberal (they’re nowhere near Russia and Belarus in that in my opinion) there’s a good number of good games developed in those countries, but they are more often indie than not.
Mount and Blade series from Turkey, Factorio from Czech, Serious Sam series from Croatia and so on. Some of those were huge hits. Speaking of which, did you know that Mafia, an AAA-game was directed by the same Daniel Vavra of Kingdom Come? Studio is now 2K, but it was and is czech.
Also let’s not forget The Witcher, which is polish.
Don’t even start on mobiles (Supercell is chinese for example).
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@Anon: I am thinking about giving WoT another chance, but if what I wrote in my page is still true, I can’t change my opinion. Rewarding bad play is the worst tradition of Blizzard: https://greedygoblinblog.wordpress.com/dont-play-world-of-tanks/
@Maxim: collecting wolf pelts is an in-game allegory of doing work, while giving welfare gear is the allegory of government welfare.
@tithian: this doesn’t make sense. Someone who can’t afford a $60 box won’t afford $60 on lootbox. F2P is a marketing mechanism to lure customers to pay, not an actual cheaper alternative.
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“Liberal” has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of welfare. I think you have your political terminology confused.
Also, it is actually easier to spend $60 in small installments for small immediate benefits than as a lump sum.
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@Maxim: it’s not my terminology, it’s theirs. “Liberal” currently means someone who believes that “oppressed” people deserve “justice”. They don’t believe that being an unemployed useless punk has anything to do with one’s choices, the reason of the sorry state of that person is that he is oppressed by males, whites, heterosexuals, western people, able-bodied people or whatnot and these oppressors must pay him reparations for the injustice.
The “accessible gaming” mantra comes from the same idea: the n00b isn’t a bad player, but has little time, or faces harassment from toxic players or has insufficient reflexes because of age and the game must compensate him for these injustices.
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@Gevlon
Okay. But if you define “liberal” in that way, then you have automatically discarded 90% of all existing political philosophy that doesn’t use that definition. You have definitely discarded all the greats that wrote before 1990s, that’s for sure. But hey, i’m sure you’re a great thinker that is going to have no trouble coming up with another work of the magnitude of, say, “The Open Society and Its Enemies” to fill the void 😀
For reference, given that you have now ascribed to a definition of liberalism which as “freedom from all oppression, including the oppression of responsibility for one’s own life”, what exactly do you call people that believe the opposite of that? I mean the wonky idea that an individual is free to make one’s own choices and take responsibility for one’s own life that used to be called a liberal idea, but apparently isn’t called that anymore, because a bunch of M&S adopted the word?
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Asian devs get commonly flak for stereotyping hispanics/black/… by sjw’s and sell well in the west because most don’t give a crap about this. Outside of that there are not many examples. For the other points it’s not about political believes but $$. Meritocracy makes no sense when it costs you players and thereby income. The main selling point of mmo’s is to give a sucker the chance to be god by simply investing time. Not babysitting the players is the same – it’s onesided tolerance leading to the current state as the crybabies demand developer oversight or leave while the hardened players tolerate the developer oversight without leaving. This makes oversight the best choice to keep a majority of players. Same with Cashshop/Lootboxes. People overall bitch a lot but at the end they stay and continue to pay which means it’s okay to do for the devs.
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Isn’t it simple capitalism? The Invisible Hand of the market?
1) Wider, more varied audience means more potential customers.
2) Making videogames is extremely risky, which leads devs to be risk-adverse.
3) Alt-right gamers will play good games, regardless of their “liberalness.”
4) Alt-right gamers actually enjoy “liberal” features.
You can probably find a few exceptions to the rule – hard games like Dark Souls, etc, exist as a niche – but the answer to your post title is precisely the environment we see today.
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@Maxim: the swastika was an ancient Buddhist symbol. But nobody cares, because after the Nazis started using it, it became theirs. Same way those who say “I’m a liberal” today, are intersectional feminists, BLM activists and migrant smugglers.
@Anon: KC:D didn’t cave to crybabies and it thrives. You forget that crybabies aren’t just annoying veteran players, but also casual conservatives.
@Azuriel: I strongly disagree. WoW was in its peak in BC where it was hard. It wasn’t explicitly illiberal (chat was policed, no P2W), but it was hard and constantly grew. Then Blizz turned it upside down with WotLK and refused to change it back even when player count started to drop. WotLK wasn’t a business decision, it was political.
I agree that illiberal players are playing liberal games if the alternative is not playing. But as soon as you provide an alternative, they will play that.
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If you want to try the World of Something by Wargaming, I suggest you look into Warships this time.
There is less grind and less p2w for starters (none actual p2w in battles, the advantage is bought by faster grind and playing higher tier ships). There are regular ranked seasons and regular Clan Battles seasons, where you can compete in official statistics.
It is also a thoroughly enjoyable game and really f2p for casuals.
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@Stawek: thinking about it, but I’m still worried about the matchmaking which is probably just as rigged/horrible as in WoT
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“KC:D didn’t cave to crybabies and it thrives.You forget that crybabies aren’t just annoying veteran players, but also casual conservatives”
It’s a niche title that got it’s audience exactly by not cathering to the sjw’s. However all mass market titles like WoW,LoL,Fortnite,… fall into the same behaviour as they all try to maximize mass market adoption and that requires getting all sides into their games – in this case that means looking whose more tolerant of getting screwed over. I’m not saying there are less anti-babysitting than pro-babysitting players but that the anti faction is more tolerant of getting screwed over and thus from the dev side it makes sense to screw them over to maximize the player retention from both sides. Partly that might be because it became the norm. Censorship is everywhere present unless you take refugee in the remote edges of the internet. This means people get conditioned to accept it. There’s a psychological term for this mechanic of “If you confront someone with a situation frequently their disagreement will lessen.” .
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Where the left won the culture war and now even the centre are being silenced as they push us beyond absurdity, to the realms of being male means you have no right to express an opinion or disapproval about sex crimes (not joking: mat damon).
future feminism
I doubt they won tho. Sure under the disguise of PC and neo marxist postmodern subversion the west let this go very far. But it isn’t lost. Some wake up and some fight. And even if we lose, we don’t need to really win. rest assured because they are the useful idiots that will be lined up against the wall and shot on regime change. no matter what. every policy and rule they invent and so bitterly want for their safespace preservation will be used against them in a second. This will end in bloodsheed, as their ideology always did.
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@Gevlon
You missed the salient part. Probably dismissed it as a rethorical question or something.
Let me repeat it.
Given that you have now ascribed to a definition of liberalism the notion of “freedom from all oppression, including the oppression of responsibility for one’s own life”, what exactly do you call people that believe the opposite of that?
Or is the classic liberal idea as dead to you as Buddhist swastika?
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@Anon: WoW is 10x bigger than the next game. Ergo, if I make a game that has 15% of WoW’s playerbase, I’m already #2 and make a ton of money. The “illiberal” game doesn’t have to destroy the liberal ones, just like Roseanne didn’t remove Colbert and Bee from TV. It just needs to exist and make money.
@Maxim: the classic liberal idea is dead to THE WORLD as the Buddhist swastika.
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Well Gevlon, quite a few games have been mentioned that have been developped in former socialist and communist countries, some of which have been hugely successful this far.
In Germand “liberal” has a total different meaning than in the US, where the term was abused to call out socialist, egalitarian bullshit.
The true meaning of “liberal” is indeed freedom of statewise intervention, being responsible for one’s own actions and upholding meritocracy.
How this could be turned into those omnitriggered hysterical sluts who infest US colleges is a mystery to me.
And it is a very bold statement to label corrupt east european countries lighttowers of meritocracy… Remember that in these states the expression of free speech got you a rendez-vous with the secret police very soon, so nice try spinning this agenda….
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First of all let me state, that I strongly disagree that the clasical liberalism is dead. To the world or otherwise. I dont want to get into a political debate on a gaming blog though ;).
As for the main point, I think you are misrepresnting it Gevlon. Games you describe are made, also by AAA studios. In all points except the political aspect, which I think you ascribe way too much stock in. In pretty much all games there is no ideology showed down peoples throats. Sure there are more female or black protagonist, but why would I care about that? Im neither racist nor sexist. Let me give you a for instance. Europa Universalis, an AAA title developed in ultra leftist Sweeden. As per usuall they got smacked by the crazy left for not being politically correct, for the regular stuff, like not enough women, or that slaves are a trade good in african provinces. The only change made to the game was that there were added women portraits for advisors, which is compleatly irrelevant to pretty much anybody.
Most games have a hard mode and/or ironman mode. Its not that hard to find good games that require skill to suceed. And if they have an easy mode also? So what? Why would I care about that. I play hard mode.
In conclusion I think Azuriel is spot on. The gaming market is ruled by supply and demand laws. I dont really see a niche for some “illberal” game, as the “liberal” aspects forced by the left are insignificant to an avarage player.
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@Smite: Macron just called that nonsense “liberal world order” in the US congress and I doubt that “freedom of statewise intervention, being responsible for one’s own actions and upholding meritocracy” was in Merkel’s mind when he flooded the country with migrants.
I live in Eastern Europe and nobody is ever taken away for free speech. Not even in Russia. You can should “fuck Orban/Putin/Kazynczky” all day and no one will care. Those who are taken away are oligarchs who want to control politics. That can be problematic, but not more problematic than NOT taking them away (see also: Koch brothers)
@Artham: please name a classical liberal politician who has more than 10% vote.
You are misunderstanding that “politics pushed down on people’s throat” needs Hillary T-shirts or even black female leaders in stories. World of Warcraft WotLK letting everyone become hero just for logging in was a political decision and enforced the culture of “I’m awesome the way I am, without doing anything”. Overwatch banning players just because some crybaby pushed “report” without investigation is left-wing extremist politics, the in-game representation of US college culture. EVE changing from competitive PvP game to “just mine and rat in peace” was a political decision. All rewards being available for all players in PUBG is a political decision. None of these things existed in games 10 years ago and were considered abominations. None of them are good business (like P2W), they are provably bad, but they aren’t changed because the lefty devs believe they are moral. Yes, you can play hard mode, but you don’t get any exclusive rewards, which is exactly what Marx told us: a doctor is no more valuable than a garbage man. Which is bullshit, NOT because the doctor saves lives, but because the doctor could pick garbage while the garbage man couldn’t save the sick.
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Since you mentioned giving WoT another try. What about world of warships? At least it doesn’t have gold ammunition. Does WoT have ranked seasons for ‘competetive’ play?
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@Raziel: I meant I give a try to Warships. But I have pretty low hopes.
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@Gevlon
Finally, a nice straightforward answer 😀
You are, of course, wrong. The liberal idea is definitely not feeling well these days, but it’s certainly far from dead. Just look at the kind of following someone like Jordan B Peterson commands.
But hey, now i understand why you are unwilling to contact anyone outside of your blog 😀
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Have you thought recently about learning about game design/production? I assume that 11 years ago when you were starting the knowledge haven’t been accessible but nowadays you have plethora of books to choose from.
That not discounting numerous youtube channels that range from dry innacessible GDC conferences to shallow oversimplified but still educational cartoons and everything between them.
While there are a lot of books in depth dealing with small part of game industry like hiring, organization of labor, preproduction, crunch etc. I would rather recommend something directed at regular folk namely “Blood sweat and pixels”. The book won’t teach you any technical knowledge, but will show you in what enviroment games are made, what kind of people are making them, they relationship with producers and problems they usually face. The two most valuable characteristics for you are:
1. Audio version is on audible so if you haven’t used up your free trial you can get it legally for free.
2. It’s chapterized, and every chapter is self enclosed story. Therefore you can write a blogpost about every chapter+conclusions etc. Mixing the book posts with your regular ones will probably the best but you’r the judge of that.
Some of them deal with big popular games like Witcher 3 or Dragon Age, but you probably find the chapter about Diablo 3 and it’s troubled puberty the most stimulating.
You can say that a car is broken but without the knowledge what exactly is wrong with, and said knowledge being more and more widespreed you will look less and less like skilled mechanic offering solutions and more and more like an ork bashing poor car with a leaver.
Ps I do not, did not and will not work at game industry, I was curios thought during college.
ahh and my game recommendation is bastard lovechild of Creative assembly and Wargaming with a name of Total War: arena.
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Something like Allods Online? I don’t know if they’re still working outside of Russia. But that’s a hardcore pay2win game without any kind of handholding as far as I remember. Most of Russian game development are on mobile platforms right now. Don’t really know about other ex-USSR countries. Quality is going to be main problem. Every feature is judged only by “can we monetize it?”.
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@Maxim: I agree with Peterson on lots of thing, but he is just a talking head. To quote Stalin: how many battalions does he have?
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Thinkers are not just talking heads. They can be more dangerous than an army. Especially today when information spreads instantly. Yeah, they dont command powerful armies but idea can start a revolution. Stalin is long dead but Marxist ideas are still going strong.
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Look at the current situation. Russia cant conquer USA but the Marxists can unless people like Peterson wont do something about it.
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@Gevlon
If you are talking the amount of batallions liberalism has, then at this point, in an odd and totally unexpected turn of events, the entirety of Russia’s armed forces are basically defending the idea of classic liberalism on an international stage. On the domestic stage, some argue that we are illiberal, but when i go take a look at the allegedly totalitarian government media, i see all points of view represented and decided between on their merits, not on the basis of ideology.
So that’s not just batallions, but also tanks, subs, nukes etc.
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@ Stawek
@ Gevlon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
Sorry stawek, hate to hurt your pro Polish feelings but Poland is not highly ranked in regards of freedom of press/speech…
Gevlon, either stay away from drugs or stop making false claims: No one gets taken away in Russia or other eastern European countries for expressing their opinions?
Pussy Riot! Politskaya come to my mind immediately. And locking away oligarchs because they don’t cooperate while oligarchs who do are free to continue their dirty businesses? That is the exact point! If you oppose the government and have the means to put your money where your mouth is, then you get locked away. A lunatic who yells that Orban can go fuck goats is harmless and can’t be bothered.
http://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/zahlen-und-fakten/europa/70580/nettozahler-und-nettoempfaenger
Oh Gevlon, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czchechia and Slovakia are the four top most beneficiaries of the EU.
Core EU will change and they will implement regulations that European democratic and the rule of law will have to be complied with in order to get EU funds at all.
THis was the core problem with the EU treaties. They were well meant and had in mind that every nation joining was willing to advance Eurioean unity. Therefore these treaties unfortunately lacked severe punishment for non-compliance. This mistake has been identified and will be taken care off.
I wished the EU had sued Germany for breaking all of the Dublin III agreements, jeopardizing the whole EU south east border and letting our member states down.
Still, way to go in regards of freedom of speech, in Poland, where you now no longer tell the truth about polish cooperation in gassin jews, in Russia where criticism of Putin gets you a visit from hitmen or Hungary where opposing Orban and his FIDES party gets you way less seats per vote than a pro Fides vote…
I can hardly wait for the lawsuit of the opposition being presented to Luexmburg…
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@Smite: those indexes are written by liberal journalists. The same kind of people who gladly spread the news about Saddam’s nukes.
Pussy Riot was vandalizing a church and routinely expose their nudity. Go to a park and expose yourself to random strangers and see what happens.
About oligarchs there are only two ways. Either the government owns them or they own the government. I don’t approve what Putin does to “businessmen”, but I still prefer that over what the Koch brothers do in the USA.
The EU funds are not welfare, it’s a compensation for the open market. If the core EU implements “democracy checks” for that money, we’ll simply leave the EU and implement tariffs and lose less than the core EU (everyone will lose, it’s a negative sum transaction, but we’ll lose less)
The “opposing Orban and his FIDES party gets you way less seats per vote than a pro Fides vote” is an absolute misrepresentation how majority election works. You can say “33% of French voted for Le Pen and their vote is worth nothing because the president is 100% Macron despite he only got 66% vote”. The Hungarian election system favors the winner, true. But had the opposition be united and won 52-55% of the popularity vote, they’d have the supermajority.
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Gevlon is ignoring the fact that countries like Russian and China already release hundreds of Pay2Win games which are the pinacle of illiberal game design.
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@Nielas: having P2W alone is not enough. Also, name one that is remotely successful besides WoT?
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@Smite
Pussy Riot trespassed on not-theirs property and vandalized not-theirs stuff. Hence the jail.
I haven’t heard a single valid reason to believe that the government is responsible for Politkovskaya’s death. She was meddling in murky enough affairs to be a viable target for a lot of unsavory individuals.
And don’t get me starting on bleeping oligarchs. Tax avoidance on massive scale is literally the smallest of their sins.
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@Maxim: I have a hunch that Putin is probably not innocent about Politkovskaya. I also have a hunch that Clinton is probably not innocent about Seth Rich.
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@Gevlon
1990-00s were essentially a time of reactionary counter-revolution, rolling back the USSR. We managed to avoid an all-out civil war, but it wasn’t peaceful by any stretch of imagination. The amount of people that lost their lives back then was staggering. Demographic impact of that time is in the same ballpark with demographic impact of WW2. No amount of pink-glasses castle-in-the-sky goodie-two-shoeing innocence could save anyone.
Nobody was innocent back then. Politkovskaya was just one of many casualties of the great and necessary change.
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As a citizen of illiberal country, I believe you lost me when you claimed such a game would be meritocratic.
I mean, why? The only merit I see here is being able to lick your superior’s ass harder. Why should a game be any different, when you have to deal with people who are positioning yourself superior to you, such as censors (and I mean not critics, literal censors who have to greenlight your game before you launch, for example, you aren’t allowed to show bare bones, tough luck making a game with undead mobs) – instead of public pushing their views on how a game should be, censors will, and you gotta deal with those delusional pricks just once to realize it’s easier to add some niggas, than to rewrite half your lore, because it had a revolt in it, and censor doesn’t like that. Or he doesn’t like certain hoodies attributing them to marginals and you have to remove all of those too. I swear, adding a few cunts would’ve been a lot easier.
For the same reason, no freedom of speech. One cunt writes to censors that you allow sedition, you’re balls-deep in trouble, your servers are confiscated, and you’re fined for $10000. It’s cheaper to just remove chat altogether.
Competition? Why? Modern meta is keeping customers. Liberal or not, you either keep them, or you lose them to games that do. Illiberal games will cater to whales even harder than others.
Lootboxes all the way too. Illiberal countries are so behind times and so out of the loop they don’t realize this is gambling. And if you want, you can have a real gambling in there, just share the profit with the right people, and you can even sell drugs through your game, governments in illiberal countries are often hard to discern from a drug cartel, which you, liberal country citizen, seem to not understand at all.
Why open rules too? Just why? We had this gem from World of Airplanes bug tracker where they had to solve an issue of having wrong stripes on japanese airplanes, and ultimately decided it was easier to ban everyone who complained about wrong stripes now, and add them sometime later when they have time to deal with this. And they did. Open rules my arse.
As for traditionally gendered, well, you got a point here. No censor would allow homosexuality, so a game would be traditionally gendered all right.
Speaking of games from illiberal countries that fit the criteria, I would say Panzar. It’s a team arena game mainly, which you shunned, but now you played Overwatch, so maybe you can give it a go. Let’s review it against your points:
Meritocracy: Somewhat. Efficiency is tracked, scoreboard has kill score, damage score, and support score, stats like winrate are visible, and ratings are visible as well. Has a lot of official tournaments (a few per week actually) nobody but small tournament community bother with.
Hands off: I’d say no. GM actions are the law, nobody cares about rules, as expected of illiberal country game.
Freedom of speech: You can (and will) get chat banned for insulting others. Any form of sedition will get you chat banned immediately for a prolonged period. Truth be told, you can’t be banned from game for it, unless you insult a GM, which will get you banned from the game… for 2 hours to 1 week.
Competition is un-consensual: Direct PvP, one team wins. Usually the one with more whales.
pay-to-win: Yes. No way around it.
lootboxes: Also yes. Why won’t they be there? Illiberal countries are medieval. Their rulers can’t use a computer, and simply fail to understand the whole point about gambling in a videogame. If there’s nothing to steal, they won’t see a reason to act.
Traditionally gendered: I have no idea how, but elven matriarchy has acquired the attention of so many female players that when you see any elf played, default expectation would be to find a female voice in built-in voice chat behind it. Of course there are players who make their elven sorceresses look like strippers, but when you see one actually wearing something on top of underwear (contrary to the usual stereotype, it’s low-level armor that is bikini chainmail, with high-level one providing more cover), especially with non-default (read: ugly) character face cosmetic, chance of a female player is 99%. That said, matriarchy or not, they are still heterosexual.
Come have a taste of “illiberal democracy” gaming.
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Fun Panzar facts:
– Your rating change depends on your performance, not the team result. If you do poorly, you lose rating, even if team wins. If you do good, you keep rating even if team loses.
– At certain point, the game had no “participation rewards” – loot chances were directly tied to your performance score. The consequence of that is that players would go rack up their personal performance score instead of going for objectives or playing as a team. Participation reward has been added, and performance score influence on loot nerfed, and that turned out to be a good change which made players actually care about objectives.
– You need to score 40 points to get participation rewards. That is about two full kills, so afk bots are out, and active bots are simply not good enough to do it. Hell, in a landslide match, up to 25% of players won’t get 40 points, and lose participation reward despite being fully active.
– Remember your “spread people to leagues by amount of money they spent” idea? Panzar has it. Your rating is actually a sum of your performance and your gear. Higher $ spending = higher gear = higher rating. That said, matchmaking maximum allowed rating spread is quite high, so you will occasionally get “scrooge mcduck league” matches when you hit level cap.
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