I’m glad to see Breitbart’s new blog Big Hollywood has lots of comic book coverage. I got into comics a few years ago. Always making fun of Aquaman, I got curious of what exactly did he do in his comics. And then I’d thought I’d check out comics from all the superheroes I knew from movies or watching cartoons when I was growing up. And it snowballed from there. I’m just glad they have online sites to get comics so I don’t have to walk into a comic book shop each week.
Anyway, it does seem that comics have about as much as a knee jerk leftism as Hollywood does, so it’s nice to know there are a few writers out there who would have Batman punch bin Laden in the face same as Captain America once punched Hitler. I read comics for the same reasons I watch movies and TV: to be entertained. I don’t do it because I’m desperate for lectures on politics from screenwriters and comic book writers.
I wonder if the Big Hollywood blog is going to cover video games? For the most part, video game have been a politics safe zone, but as plots get increasing complex you can see politics in them more often (I just finished playing Bioshock which sort of explored Objectivist themes). I would argue that video games have sort of a conservative gravity, though. Many games have an easily identified bad guys and the only option given to you to deal with them is shooting them all — hard to make that liberal. And while a game like Wii Sports may seem apolitical, it has winners and losers and rewards skill — so its conservative. Also, someone wanting to make a video game can’t be a pure artists; he has to be somewhat practical as a processor doesn’t appreciate art in its machine code and game play sucks if it doesn’t follow certain rules. Practicality always pushes towards conservatism.
Well, I hope video games remain mainly politically neutral. If I paid fifty dollars for a game and then got beaten over the head with knee jerk leftism, I’d be really pissed.
Video game content is a free speech issue, so of course the conservative evil will have to be purged.
But that $50 tag looks high. I think after we can be sure their content is appropriate, we may need to look at some way for the poor and disadvantaged to get these new forms of expression.
I think Burnout Paradise had an Obama ad in it at some point but other than that video games for the most part have been neutral.
I pay $60 per 360 game… It is worth it for the online community though.
Videogames have to be conservative because they inherently involve personal reward.
Video games are totally by nature. I will say, though, that in a Star Wars game (that’s right, I’m a nerd) once they were making a point that was very similar to the wars in the middle east. They kept asking about your past and if you still think it was right when you charged into war without the council’s blessing. They made both points seem rational, because one was the “yeah we should have waited for the UN’s go-ahead” but the other side of the argument was a really good, “I’m proud of going to fight a war against people who killed innocent people and would have spread that violence to us if we didn’t stop them.” Most of the time they were trying to get you to admit fault, but you were still given good points for defending your position.
I would be so totally pissed off by a Super Hero that didn’t destroy the bad guy and stand-up for the good guy…but how can I feel this way? This calls for a determination of bad and good…and who am I to make such a call? Since this is no longer allowed I guess the best we can “hope” for is that everyone “feels” good about themselves…so this would call for Super Heroes to…well…act like Homos I guess…
I just watched Hulk VS Wolverine. It was pretty cool.
And don’t be fooled. There are a LOT of liberal game developers. On the plus side, most are moderate enough to realize people like shooting and explosions more than they like politics. It is also an unwritten game development rule that players don’t want to go unrewarded. Imagine going through an entire game without getting a reward(item, cutscene, points, etc), or worse(more liberal) yet, getting rewarded for NOT playing.
Add politics loose my money. If a person or group lets their political views be known, then they should expect to loose half of their customers . I will not shop at buisinesses that I know support liberal agendas. I will not purchase or rent any movie staring liberal ducsh bags like Danny Glover , Alic Baldwin , and the like. If all conservatives would do the same we could get rid of this liberal politicaly correct bulls%^* we call our president, house ,and senate.
“Comics, Video Games, Politics”
* Movies, TV, Politics
* Doctors, Laywers, Politics
* Banking, Mortgages, Politics
* 1st Amendment, Talk Radio, Politics
* Learning, Public Schools, Politics
* Savings, Retirement, Politics
* Industry, Small Business, Politics
* Everthing, Now, Is Politics.
This society can kiss my ass. Dang, I’m cranky,
I agree with your premise to a point. But so many games have the Blackwater/Big Evil Corporation type enemy as the ‘real’ bad guy in the game. And even in modern games that are good v evil (Call of Duty 4), the bad guys are commies (even the ones in keffiyahs). Since 9/11, how many games have been US v Taliban or Iraqi Army? We have seen a million WW II games (NAZI’s were white guys, so they were okay to kill), and I have enjoyed many of those games, but it would br nice to be able to play a Navy SEAL in Operation Red Wing or a 3ID tank commander in the Thunder Run on Baghdad. I remember playing Combat: Desert Storm 2 for the X Box. Not a great game, but good enough, but in the reviews, nearly every one that I read anyhow, the reviewer had to mention how it was not cool to kill arabs. So, video games still have a long way to go, in my view, to be “conservative.”
One of the original CD-ROM games was The Journeyman Project, and it spawned two sequels. The games were excellent for the time, but there was a definite leftist slant in that they flat out say that “the democrats” took over the world, ushering in an age of peace and high tech and communication with aliens. Your job in the first game is to stop a radical conservative from assassinating an alien arriving for the first time. In the third game, you find out the crazy was actually the sane one, and that the alien is the problem. Your helpful AI in your helmet from the second game comes out of the closet in the third game. I wish I was kidding. 99 percent of the game is apolitical and beautifully rendered, though.
Some other games hide the liberalism in the backstory, or in the manual. Homeworld is one example of a military game that contains some of that in the manual.
Video games are pretty self-selecting. I don’t see a lot of pacifists playing first person shooters. Most FPS-haters are either women or women trapped in mens bodies.
I will give CoD4 credit for having Arab and Chechen (implied) Islamist bad guys. Unfortunately, there have been some attempts to politicize video games, usually leftist. Some games out there like Haze and Blacksite: Area 51 (I haven’t played either, both apparently blew dog- ha!) were basically left-wing bash fests on capitalism, the US military and US foreign policy, and though older titles had equally lampooned the left and right, GTA4 went out of its way to smear right-wingers- every Republican character was a violent, racist, dim-witted, xenophobic closet homosexual and the game implied that terrorism was a joke.
Speaking of comics, how will Frank The Artist draw stick figures of a stick figure (Obama)? Oooohh, and how much would a signed print of one fetch?
Best comic book cover ever…
http://superdickery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=35&Itemid=49
I still laugh every time I see it.
He’d probably have to work in a halo someplace and it would fetch a lot more then it was actually worth.
It’s hard to beat me over the head with politics in a video game because I’m just going to pick whichever side is more liberal and start shooting at them.
I don’t care if I have to shoot a conservative to win the game, the liberals are going to die and then I’ll determine if my target is a RINO or not. If I have to die and lose so that the Empire can crush the rebels, so be it.
I just finished Bioshock too… Like 2 years after its release.
I don’t pay much attention to story lines in games, I just go from A to B to C, killing everything inbetween.
Right on… Video games better not become politicized! I like them the way they are and if I have to listen to liberals there too, that will just tick me off!
What about the Mario Party series, Frank? It’s 99% luck, the game actively rewards you for losing with bonuses that put you back up into competition (Hey, it’s a corporate bailout!) and there’s next to no violence in it and definitely no bad guys.
I’ve played World of Warcraft for a couple of years now, and I can definitely say that it has a strong liberal bias in the quests that are offered. You’re always trying to “heal the land” and it usually involves killing mobs that are capitalists or destroying their property/disrupting their operations.
Also, while I believe it is meant to be tongue in cheek, the new expansion includes a faction that will attempt to kill you if you’ve killed an animal in the area in the last three minutes. Their quests include killing people to protect the animals.
“Practicality always pushes towards conservatism.”
True.
I’m a producer for a video game developer. Most of the games I have worked on are not political at all. The management and programmers here have a definite conservative outlook, while quite a few of the artists lean toward the liberal.
I’m going to have to disagree with you here, Frank. Pretty much every role-playing game with a Good/Evil tracker has the morality skewed to the absurdly liberal. Fable 2 and Fallout 3 are the ones that I’ve been playing most recently, and they are some of the worst. In Fallout 3, there is an evil capitalist who has committed the dastardly sin of fortifying an old hotel in the post-apocalytic wastes and charging people market rates to live there in safety. As part of his services, he won’t rent to Ghouls, the games oppressed minority”, because they sometimes degenerate into mindless flesh eating zombies. So of course you are presented with a band of Ghouls who want to move in there, and the “Good” course of action is to convince the evil capitalist to let them in. Which he quickly agrees to do if his other tennants are OK with it. When the Ghould move in, they murder the capitalist and everyone else in the hotel, and if you kill any of the Ghouls in retribution, you get evil points. Fable is even worse: hunting, eating meat, and being a landlord make you evil, while being a vegetarian and a bigamist makes you good. It’s ridiculous.
The best games are apolitical, but I’d like to see a truly conservative game – one where the big bad guys are all democrats and you get to shoot them in the end. Or heck, I’d be happy with just inserting some of the current douchebags into Mortal Kombat or something (they wouldn’t have any good moves, and most of them would probably just cry instead of fighting back). Imagine Sub-zero or somebody beating down That ONE and then ripping his spine out. Or see Harry Reid standing there swaying back and forth and hear FINISH HIM!!!
I would totally pay money for that game. Heck, maybe I should write it myself. I’d look into that, but I’m currently busy writing assembly games for my calculator (I’m working on Yahtzee at the moment).
James C. Bennett:
Ah, but there is another way. You can complete the quest by assassinating the Ghoul leader without losing Karma points: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Tenpenny_Tower_(quest)
How has nobody mentioned Socks The Cat Rocks the Hill? A planned SNES game where you played as Clinton’s cat and fought Rush and Nixon. I kid you not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socks_the_Cat_Rocks_the_Hill
Never released, though, since at the time, Nintendo wouldn’t allow games with overt political messages.
Mortal Kombat vs. DNC!
I can’t express sufficiently how absolutely sick and tired I am of Leftist crapology getting into every facet of the media. It really reached a crescendo for me during the 1990s, when Leftism and environmentalism were introduced to AD&D, and a 4HD wolf with a 1d8 attack was transformed into a “magnificent, multifaceted creature with an elaborate social life and an intrinsic part of the circle of life” or similar craptastic crapola.
It’s one of the reasons why I was turned off comic books – generally decent comic guys like Alan Moore were touted as geniuses, because their ideology was sufficiently Leftist and fanatical, while stuff like Savage Sword of Conan was panned as “fascist”. I’ve still got a bad taste in my mouth from Moore’s work on the Swamp Thing, where an otherwise decent comic was suddenly and without warning turned into a didactic diatribe about the negative effects of capitalism on the environment, etc.
I wouldn’t put it past these ideological weasels to try forays into game design. The problem for them is that code writing takes actual math skills and logic-based intelligence, something in short supply amongst Leftists, who tend to depend more on social machinations and thievery to get ahead. But yes, I have noted that Leftist ideas have starting to leak into gaming storylines.