Confirmed: Andromeda is socialist commentary about current world-events

The ''bad guys'' having their own perspective is not freaking politics. There's only an ''agenda'' here if you're actively looking for one.

How on earth does this relate to workers seizing the means of production?


FTFY.

Have you played any story driven game without politics? Cos I haven't. Media always reflects the opinions of the writers or the thought experiments the writers wish to perform. 

Do you not pay attention to stories? 

Good writers can convincingly write about characters who have any opinion. They aren't bound to their own, nor do they, as a rule, engage in heavy-handed political messaging. Only bad writers depend on author filibuster.

This reminds me of an old bsn thread where someone claimed that the mass effect trilogy was a love letter to fascism. We the players will always try to guess what the writers intentions are with the story and a lot of times compare it to real world issues.

Here's the thing. Bioware has already quashed the whole colonialism/imperialism angle. Hell, it's legit part of first contact protocol that you recognize you're a stranger in a strange land.

So there's really no mirror beyond vague inspiration.

This is what I meant by 'thought experiments'. The opinion of a character doesn't have to reflect the authors but in order to fully realise it they must perform a thought experiment. 

And I would argue that some of the best authors & most well-regarded authors in the world had political messaging in their stories, heavy handed or not. They either had a point they wanted to get across (their own opinion or a thought experiment) or they were making a comment on society. 

Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Is a moral message not something to think about though? Take ME:A for example. A.I. could be considered an invading force by any native life and as such, they may be automatically hostile. This could be taken as allegory for immigration or imperialism depending on the state of mind of the player and the actions they are allowed to take within the game. This is a moral message that is allowing the player room to think about these issues or not as they please. Similar to the moral message in Deus Ex.

I honestly tend to find that players don't give video games the same freedom challenge their world view or give them messages to think about.  Star Trek was always much more heavy handed with it's moral messages than Mass Effect (or Bioware in general) has ever been and yet there are Star Trek fans that don't even realise it has political messages in it, while some gamers complete freak out because a game about traveling to another galaxy and colonising planets  (that might already have life on them) might have a political undertones when even the premise of the game would suggest to many people that it would have to have those undertones to make sense. 

Some examples of this:
Gamers said Krem was 'heavy handed' in DA:I, I didn't find him so, you had to ask him a question for him to speak about being trans, otherwise it never came up. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare spent the entire game building up and then hitting you over the head with it's message of private militaries are bad, but gamers didn't seem to notice or care cos it was just an excuse to shoot people. And you were forced to be complicate in this message because it was a linear narrative. Games like COD and Metal Gear Solid carry policial messages about war all the time, but it's only when a game tries to have some social commentary that gamers loudly complain. I think that this reaction is holding games back from the experience that they could be.

That is a very low opinion of fiction. Fiction challenges the readers or audience view on many topics, it is up to the individual on whether or not it they incorporate it into their existing views. 

I could list books that many people cite as contributing to their world view forever, some examples; 1984, Brave New World, Fight Club, To Kill A Mocking Bird, In Cold Blood, Crime and Punishment etc. 


It's not a repetitive if it's the central theme of the work of fiction. The central theme of To Kill A Mocking Bird is racism, it's embedded in the story, interwoven with other themes and character arcs. A writer embeds the central theme throughout the work, they don't count it up and say, 'ok I've mentioned it 5 times now' that is enough. Writing is not math. 



Many difficult topics can be boiled down simply like that. It doesn't mean that the message is not there and isn't completely heavy handed. My point was that people react differently to heavy-handed messages about war than to more subtle or equal heavy-handed messages about social issues. It's like people don't think game devs should even try, people lauded Spec Ops portrayal of the complexities of war but slamed Gone Home or DA:I for the inclusion of both complex and simple portrayals of social issues. 

There is a difference between a theme and a message. A theme is something you can think about, a message asserts its correctness. I don't know what MEA will be. Also, regarding DX:MD, that's a classic example of a forced allegory: the augmented are presented as a persecuted minority down to the point of abusing slogans from the real world to illustrate that. IMO that's completely missing the point of the both augmentations in the DX scenario as well as the real-world problem it aims to illustrate: (1) You're augmented by choice, unlike real-world persecuted minorities, and (2) you're augmented to become better. An augmented person in DX is always superior in some way. DX:HR used a much better fitting theme: control and fear, namely fearing the augmented because they could become a "master race", and control of them through their augmentations, arguably to prevent exactly that, but also just for power. DX:MD forced a theme that didn't fit into its story just to connect to some current social problem, as opposed to DX:HR, which presented a *potential* problem as a theme that arose naturally from the story, and because of that, both felt more natural than its successor and had an aura of timelessness that DX:MD lacked.


As I said, I don't know what MEA will attempt, but again, what I don't like are attempts to forcibly connect to some current real-world problem without sufficient grounding in the story. Themes of colonization and interactions between different cultures arise naturally from MEA's premise, themes of fleeing a hostile environment do not. You can see which current hot topic I do NOT want to see in MEA, right? There's also this: I do like to think about the stuff presented in the stories I read or play, but I read or play them at least in part to get away from the present. So please, present me with something I don't hear about every day in the evening news. IMO the best SF and fantasy stories are timeless in some way, like LOTR and its theme of power that corrupts. You're free to apply it anywhere you want, but you can also reject the message as applying to the real world as fundamentally as it applies to the fictional world of Middle-Earth, without taking anything away from the story.

While I'm at it: I also think some of our social problems in the real world are petty compared to what the characters in your typical SF and fantasy story face. People in RL make much more of them than they deserve, since we're not living in the 1950s any more, or in the 1920s, or in the 19th century, or in medieval or Roman times. Introducing them as a problem into a much more fundamentally dangerous context cheapens that context. That's why a theme of war works more often: it's ultimately about life or death, power to survive or powerlessness to become a slave, or be killed. Compared to that, what do our "disadvantaged minorities" face? Any comparison, as it regards our own culture, can only be fundamentally dishonest, or ideologically deluded.



Krem wasn't heavy-handed, but the connection to the Qun was. When you went to speak with Krem after the scene with Bull, both your lines and Krem's were reasonable and free of ideology. I found that conversation interesting and well-written especially considering the language-related pitfalls of the topic. There was also no moral message in it. The scene with Bull, that's what I found heavy-handed, and the conceit that the notoriously inflexible Qun would make room for trans people and accept their gender allocation as valid, rather jarring.

To sum this up: what I don't like are stories with moral messages that assert their own correctness rather than presenting a problem and leaving me space to think (and yes, that does include Star Trek to some degree), and even more so forcibly introducing ill-fitting themes into a story to connect to some current problem that's invariably less fundamental than the context of the story would require. All stories are, in the end, about aspects of the human condition, and that's fine, that's why we like stories. However, if I'm reminded of what's in the evening news while I read or play a story, rather than leaving me to think about the theme in a more general context by staying in the fictional world, that pulls me out of the fictional world - I'm lost to the story, and so is the story to me. This may be specific to fantastic fiction, but that's why I like fantastic fiction: it lets me view things through a more timeless lens.

Here is the thing though; many of the themes that could remind you of what's on the news at the moment, have plagued humans for centuries. Deus Ex dealt with racism clumsily, I agree but its not like racism is a new phenomenon nor is humans fearing outsiders or people who are different.  Deus Ex used modern language to impart that but it's theme was timeless.


I'm not saying that is always perfectly done, but I think that writers should have the space to try without knee-jerk overreactions 

This is what I always thought. The Tamassrans watch the children has the grow and based on their behaviour (and possibly breeding lines) they decide on their role. A Tamassran would spot that a girl was behaving as they would expect a boy to act, they'd just reassign their gender so their abilities could be used more efficiently.