I’ve played Ingressfor several months now. It is interesting to note that it happens to reflect the binary nature of American politics so clearly: There are the Englightened, who are welcoming to change, and see it as a possibility. There are even undertones of migration with the alien entities clearly trying to gain a foothold in our reality. These values happen to coincide with the progressive side of the political spectrum. ...
To a great surprise to everyone, this post is not going to be about the fuss surrounding the killing of civilians in Modern Warfare 2. Instead, I’ll write about a few older games. ...
Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, but that they had in them political situations reflected from history. Basically, I took historical situations and placed them in a hypothetical future realized in a dystopian cyberpunk-setting. The first two games were about Vietnam 2.0. In these games Vietnam was devastated by war and still collecting itself after Chinese occupation. The UN was trying to keep peace in a situation where part of the country was in Chinese and part in Vietnamese rebel control. We watched parts of Full Metal Jacket and Rambo to get to mood for a sweaty journey through a hostile jungle. The characters in the first game were independent contractors trying to rescue American construction workers that had been in Vietnam to aid in its reconstruction. The construction workers had been captured for ransom by Vietnamese rebels, led - ironically - by an ex-Chinese general. The company they worked for decided that the ransom was not worth it, so workers’ families collected enough money to hire some mercenaries. The game ended with a lot of dead rebels, a wounded general and rescued construction workers. ...