games

Oh I mean easily what springs right to mind is Call Of Duty. I mean the games are literally made in cooperation with the department of defense and are drunk off the american exceptionalism with real might makes right fashy undertones. I find almost directly responsible for the hero worship we have for special forces in the USA, as most of these games have you working as a spec ops goon.

chess

The entire battlefield 4 campaign is you helping the guy who tried to do a colour revolution in China lmao. Like that's the plot, trying to free the guy. Which results in war with China ofc. Also you take in a boat of refugees from Shanghai of all places onto your aircraft carrier, those poor people probably had a much better standard of living over there than they'll ever have in the USA.

Bonus points for Call of Duty black ops II, where you help the Taliban to fight against Russia, and help the apartheid supported UNITA forces to fight the MPLA. You literally fight for the Taliban and apartheid South Africa proxy forces.

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Assassin's Creed yet. All conflict in history stems from two competing ideological sects of callous murderers who wanton manipulate populations into doing their bidding and for some reason one side in this conflict is supposed to be the moral superior of the other. Also some of the supplemental material is batshit and basically just a way for the devs to denote certain historical figures as good or bad depending on what organization they belonged to. All other conflicts are secondary to the overarching philosophical differences of two sects competing for magical thingies.

At the same time those games have probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Marx in a western piece of fiction, so there's that.

I'll add one more for now. I will never forget that back in Civilization II, the corruption mechanic that most civilizations had to deal with in the modern era could be bypassed simply by choosing "democracy" as the game describes it over its competitors. We never have corruption in US-style "democracy" do we? :amerikkka-clap: Also, inventing capitalism has absolutely no downsides and is only a boon, though to be fair all capitalism does on its own is allow you to convert your people's labor into additional money which checks out. :marx-hi:

bioshock 2 communism is when you do the borg and no one matters, also the collectivist is portrayed way less sympathetically than the libertarian nutjob

Bioshock Infinite.

The city of Columbia was built as a haven for the ruling class of 1800s America. Complete with a white underclass and, of course, slaves. It was built by a scientist who discovered a new technology and was to serve as a floating World's Fair showing the world how great and advanced America is. Pretty okay premise if done right. Many opportunities to talk about real history and draw comparisons to today. The city is politically divided among several factions, which isn't a fleshed out mechanic in the game due to development issues. But you have a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and hates Lincoln for ending slavery. You have people who are hyper religious and treat the Founders as religious prophets. You have normal upper middle-class people who are tuned out to the politics. You also have the revolutionary group Vox Populi who are trying to overthrow Columbia's government and install actual democracy. Again, some great ideas in there for good stories based in real history. But then somewhere towards the end of the game it makes the Vox Populi just as bad as the imperialist, racists, sexists, zealots. When you start the game there is a couple being physically abused for miscegenation, in front of a cheering crowd. Yet the black lady trying to stop it is bad because her and other workers killed some cops and are pushing the middle class white people out of the city. It's total "both extremes are really the same" kind of thing. And to make the revolutionary leader bad they write her to kill a baby or something? It's been a while I can't remember if she tries to kill Elizabeth or just Comstock. She was also going to use Columbia's weapons and invade NYC to liberate people on land too. But that's bad because NYC in the late 1800s/early 1900s was good.

Some people might bring up the development troubles as a reason the story got so simplified into horseshoe theory. But there are early gameplay videos from before the troubles started that show Vox Populi implying they want to sexually assault Elizabeth. So they meant for them to be bad from the beginning. The only real thing that was different was that Comstock was supposed to me more nuanced. So the people's revolution of communists were pretty much always a political cartoon and they had to jam the right wing factions into one guy. Instead of getting the subtleties of "cleanse all the immigrants" from many different factions, we get it from one guy. Thanks 2k/Irrational.

Ken Levine is a fucking hack and always has been. Keep him away from games.

I recently played C&C Generals, thought the ideology there isn't "subtle but insidious", but rather just hilariously blatant.

Hearts of Iron: Nazi whitewashing. Nazi fantasy simulator. Goddamn fucking Nazi fanbase.

Europa Universalis: Colonial Nazi simulator with religious persecution button, Pogrom button, slave trading button, honestly more offensive than HOI because all the atrocity is extremely normalised and in fact optimal play

Minecraft's villager and pillager colonial mechanics is weird.

I love the Wargame series, and its sister series Steel Division manages to avoid a lot of the most common myths about the Soviet Union circa World War II, but god damn does Eugen Systems have serious brain worms.

Here are the campaigns in Wargame: Red Dragon:

• The South Korean dictatorship opens fire on a student protest, sparking a massive wave of unrest. This prompts North Korea to invade, and you play as the Americans who push back the Northerners and defend the dictatorship that was literally just massacring college students.
• The Soviet Union invades China in response to China attacking Vietnam. You play as China, and lead a counterattack that captures Vladivostok, successfully defending the Khmer Rouge.
• The time has come for Hong Kong to be handed over to China, but after Den Xiaoping makes a somewhat flippant remark to Margeret Thatcher, she decides that she doesn't want to give up Hong Kong after all. You play as the Br*ts and fight to maintain control of your colonial holdings.
• The Soviet Union of 1984 grows paranoid about an impending American/Japanese attack to take some disputed islands, and launches a preemptive invasion of mainland Japan.
• The CPSU successfully coups Gorbachev right before he dissolves the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union barely hanging on after the defection of several Eastern European republics, North Korea decides that this is the perfect chance for reunification, and kicks off the Second Korean War.

Earlier games in the series posited a Soviet invasion of Germany across the Fulda Gap. It's like someone made a list of every single thing that the Cold Warriors were wrong about and made fanfiction of them actually being right.

The Civ series is basically Whig History: The Game.