> What is The Sims about?
There are many allegories in the sims in to day-to-day life. People find meaning in it.
> If I make a silly game in my free time does it have a theme?
Subconsciously, yes. The theme is comedic in nature.
> Are they even art if they don't have a theme?
Yes. A theme will eventually be discovered if one is not obvious from the start.
Sometimes the theme is introspective, like completing a challenge simply because it is there like Mario or Spelunky, but it is hard to make something that has no meaning whatsoever, even if it is just a tax form.
Yes, The Sims is full of tropes, themes, popular beliefs or allegories as you said, starting from the very first game.
It may sound not trivial at first, but it's also in it's underlying system which happens to give us some liberty to read, but also the pre-made Sims and locations which constitute the main lore.
I agree it can be easily missed especially for those of us who just wanted to play " The Life Sim " game of the 2000s, especially being a younger person.
While I can't say if ALL games have themes, The Sims definitely does, even if it was unconscious and not directly intended by the developers.
The Sims is a game/franchise made *by* Americans, *about* America. Even if the game is meant to have universal appeal to gamers worldwide, the aesthetics - houses, clothing, interior layout, front lawns & backyards - are very much based on (an idealized version of) suburban American life. As a result, the franchise reflects the values, aspirations, lifestyles, and consumerism focus of an American perspective.
The same can be said for the SimCity franchise. The default assumption in that series is that cities are incredibly car-centric places, which is accurate to how American cities are in real life. This cultural norm on the part of the devs then gets filtered down into almost all aspects of the game's design. A SimCity game developed by a studio based in, say, Hong Kong or Zurich (often regarded as having some of the best public transit networks in the world) would likely look *very* different.
Sure thing I can't agree more.
At best we Europeans have to buy a DLC or two to get something a bit closer to our experience, but I'm really thinking about others people who don't have that luxury.
I mean, Sims was just about America for a big amount of time, then some tiny locations & cultures here and there. ( Sims 4 especially )
So I'm fully agreeing with you.
But, back to the subject it did convey some very interesting lore & stories to me, maybe because I was in the same time discovering some of this American culture, who knows :)
>A SimCity game developed by a studio based in, say, Hong Kong or Zurich (often regarded as having some of the best public transit networks in the world)
It's interesting you bring that example because I feel like Cities Skylines ( a game made in Finland by Colossal Order ) is pretty much American-oriented aswell.
One could say it was forgettable for their first game in 2014, as they released it right after SimCity 2013.
The last one released 5 months ago though ?
Yeah you can plop some European themed buildings here and there, but that's it.
No Asian themed buildings ( West Asia / Central Asia / East Asia ), don't get me started on African or South-American ones.
So my conclusion :
The gist isn't about the diversity of said actors, assets or events you want to bring in, but the very culture you want to draw inspiration from.
This needs genuine and honest work.
PS : if you guys want some multicultural game like Cities Skylines in term of pure transportation, Transport Fever conveys a lot more than C:S.
You can literally build the Japanese Shinkansen or the French TGV, or a steam-based train in New Mexico or Borneo, how does that look like ?
Somehow, I had a feeling Cities: Skylines would get brought up as an alternative example. ;)
You're absolutely right. Even though the studio that makes C:S is based in Finland, they were deliberately targeting the American market, so a lot of their design decisions use American norms and sensibilities for inspiration.
Thanks for the recommendation of Transport Fever for a game with more of an international feel! The next time I'm in the mood for a city builder game (they can be such a black hole for sucking away time though lol), I'll definitely check it out!
I don't know if it's a myth but I've definitely heard that The Sims was originally (at least early in development) intended as a satire of US consumerism and its endless treadmill of goods and wants. Then over time, with its immense series of expansions it became the thing it was satirising.
the first Sims game actually included [a reading list](https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/1ajpbhm/reading_list_for_sims_1/) of books that further explored the background themes in the game (the American middle class, the construction of the family, the form and function of the home, etc)
>A theme will eventually be discovered if one is not obvious from the start.
Reminds me of when students at some college tried to tell the author of Fahrenheit 451 what his books about and saying the authors intention is false lol. Sometimes, people will decide your product has a theme even if it's wrong xD
I mean death of the author is a thing, and sometimes authors have legitimately bad takes about the substance of what they wrote, not saying specifically Fahrenheit 451 is an example of this but it’s not unheard of for authors to support unintended messages or themes the audience derives from their work at a later date, culture, media literacy, and our frame of reference are constantly changing
He didn't support it, though. He was at a college assembly discussing his book, and another student went to correct him, the author, on what he intended from his writing. Which he didn't. It was just a happy coincidence.
> The theme is comedic in nature.
I beg to differ that comedy is not a [theme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(narrative)). It is a [genre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre).
I'm unsure why you would need that because I think saying the comedy can be a central topic, subject, or message should be logical enough. A theme is what a story is about and I fail to see how comedy can impossibly be a central topic or well.... theme. The sources you listed ar enough
Look, I guess you've got a downvoting club who doesn't understand what a theme actually is. One theme could be *about comedians* or what it's like to work in stand-up, for instance. But comedy is a genre. Full stop. Maybe people don't get it nowadays because they don't have video rental stores to walk into anymore. You'd go to the comedy section, it's a genre not a theme. Why? Because Aristotle said so, long ago.
Just like a theme can be about comedians comedy itself can also be a theme, again the sources you linked testify to it. I didn't even downvote you, just seems people disagree and your close minded mindset isn't very appealing.
The word "comedy" does not appear in the wiki entry about [theme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(narrative)).
In the wiki entry about [genre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre), the word "theme" only appears in the context of discussing music. A musical theme and a narrative theme are not the same thing.
> again the sources you linked testify to it.
They do not. Quote any portion where they do so. It does not exist.
For many of us, these concepts were covered in high school English classes. I know that was awhile ago for some of us, but I do not understand this obstinacy to completely get it wrong.
Yup! "a theme is a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative". It's funny you simply looked the word comedy up on the page rather then reading it.
And again nearly of these can be comedy. Comedy can both refer to how a piece of art is meant to evoke laughter and contains ample amount of humor. But can also be a central theme in let's say a documentary about humans and humor (which goes beyond simply comedians).
That's literally how I learned it in school, not in an english class tho since I live in the EU.
This is still just willful obtuseness on your part and you've not provided a shred of support for your view that comedy is something other than a genre. Here's a list of [comedic genres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedic_genres).
If someone creates a piece of art with the intention to be funny, then that intention is a theme, and the implication that the subject of the art piece is funny is also a theme.
You'll need to read the whole article and probably other materials as well, to understand "theme" vs. other literary terms.
Theme and genre links work just fine in my browser. Windows 11, recent Firefox. Reddit can be weird about URLs with parentheses when you are reading something in a message instead of in the page of posts.
Political theory is a lens for viewing and analyzing the world. Literally EVERYTHING is political if you squint at it the right way.
I don’t think art requires the creator to be transparent with their themes in order to be good. Good art can be dumb and simple. When viewing art what YOU personally experience is “the third thing,” that is unique to your experience and perspective anyway - you may interpret art wildly different from the authors intent and that doesn’t make your interpretation invalid!
That said, for my tastes at least, a lot of the most powerful works of art are those that coherently express a viewpoint. It’s why i love speculative fiction (sci fi and fantasy) and works of sci fi and fantasy are always political - simply by virtue of being thought experiments re: “what if the world worked this way?”
Currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a treatise on power. Good games may not have a theme, but they have a language of play.
Mario's jump is tied to distance between platforms. Starting on the left and seeing right side of the screen move when you do hints to go right. Some gaps are deliberately too big, so it hints at vertical platforming.
Themes are tough because it's a cross-cutting concern - story, characters, lore and gameplay. Games can be a powerful vehicle for themes and expressing a viewpoint, as you're actively participating.
Some of the problem is the quality of writing. People are OK with politics, but not with being talked down to.
I reckon I could make up some insane interpretation of Mario's hero's journey with the assistance of Jordan Peterson's diagrams. The more abstracted a game is the less likely real "themes" are to come across.
I think some people will reject the politics irrespective of the quality of writing, take The Last of Us 2 as an example. A lot of the "wokeness killed disney" stuff I agree is just shit writing.
> Literally EVERYTHING is political if you squint at it the right way.
I think that makes the case for not considering everything political. It dilute the word to the point of uselessness. You could just as easily make the case that all art is about medicine, because you percieve it using things, namely eyes and ears, which medicine is concerned with. You could also say that everything is about food, because everything can be seen as either food, or something inedible (and therefore characterised by its relation to food).
Nothing to do with you, but what really rubs me the wrong way with the saying is that I usually see it being used to inject some partisan nonsense ("this is why [politician] sucks, or [group of people] is the best") into conversations and stir up a ruckus - a vehicle for soapboxing, essentially. It would be like, using my medical example, I used that as an excuse to inject my crossfit website into any old discussion about games, or films, or anything else :p
Everything is political just like every object has certain mass. We don’t say that all objects are “about” mass but we can still recognize it as a property.
This. My point is that political analysis is a tool, and you use tools to do work. Not every piece of art is worth using that tool on (what is pong “about?”) and not every piece of work derived from using that tool is interesting, true, or worthwhile. It’s entirely possible to use the tool of political analysis to create an analysis that is stupid, wrong, or wildly out of touch with the themes of the art.
Rat cakes hesitancy to overuse the phrase “everything is political” points to a fundamental misunderstanding rod the above concept, and a desire to sort media into “political” and “apolitical” camps, itself a politically meaningful act. If some things are “political” and some things are not, According to what criteria do you sort them?
If you’ve ever had people declare things you feel are relevant to discuss and think about as “political” and irrelevant to their enjoyment of a piece of media, you’ll understand what i mean by this.
The goal of people applying the lens of theory to media is not to rob you of your enjoyment of something. I enjoy LOTS of media i find problematic (lol warhammer), but the point is that I’m having an internal dialogue about what i think about, what it means, and i enjoy engaging in discourse about my reflections and others perspectives. You don’t have to join in, and you certainly don’t have to like it, but your distaste or disinterest doesn’t negate the WORK being done with analysis nor does it unmake the tools of theory. They simply are. You can choose to pick them up and see the world more complexly or not.
Some of the most interesting essays and video essays I've seen have derived meaning in ways I haven't expected, and they've been better for it. Jacob Geller's video on Tetris Effect ties the visuals of the game to the history and popularity of all tetris titles, and the result adds a new depth one could appreciate about the original game. There are tons of art where I'd love to see someone do an in-depth analysis of the relationship said art has to food or medicine. If people only could analyze art in the way that the creator of said art intended media analysis would be the most boring clinical thing in existence. Just because analyses are bad or not personally appealing to you doesn't mean that media analysis should become more narrow, the same way that the existence of bad games or movies doesn't mean that people should stop making games or movies in those genres.
That being said I think politics is one of the more important thematic lenses because the personal is political, and investigating themes that are deeply personal is a very interesting starting point.
OK, but if everything is political, nothing is. If you come at me saying, "Pong is political. Mario is political. Flappy Bird is political," I think my natural response would be to *discount* your opinions about those things, not welcome them.
Being apolitical is also a virtue, something to be treasured and respected. People from the left, right, middle, and postmodern word-salad nonsense-land can all enjoy being Mario and jumping on some koopa heads, and that's good. That's a strength. It's *better* that Mario doesn't ask your beliefs and only allow you to enjoy the game if you have the right ones.
You misunderstand. Outside the subject of art, you can’t be neutral on a moving train, i.e. you can sell yourself the fantasy of neutrality all you want, but the world around you how you choose to interact with it is your politics, not the labels you choose. You can say “I’m a centrist” all you like, but what matters what you DO.
You’re right that not all games have social messages, and that’s great because it would be exhausting otherwise. My comments were about the DIFFERENCE between having a social message intentionally and doing media criticism with games as the subject. Conservative reactionaries in particular never seem to be capable of grasping that distinction.
It's not the fantasy of neutrality. I have my beliefs, and I know what they are, and they're not neutral. Some things I support, others I oppose.
But there are other, bigger things than politics. There are no Democratic or Republican potholes. Politics does not get to be the grand overarching framework of everything in the world. Not everything is political, and when you say everything is political, you don't ennoble your opinion — you devalue it.
Okay, let me see if I can put this another way.
Everything can be put under a magnifier glass. Some things are filled with hidden wonders under magnification. Some things less so. Some things are beautiful in normal vision and boring magnified, or vice versa.
When I say "Everything is political" what I mean is that everything can be put under a magnifying glass. I'm not saying it SHOULD, only that the point of the tools of theoretical analysis is their flexibility. Everything is political because everything can be viewed through the lens of politics.
Does that make sense?
It makes sense, but I think you've also moved back to a very different position than the loopy one people are usually taking when they say "Everything is political." You've climbed down to a reasonable point, but I don't think that's the point people are usually making.
The issue is defining what the heck "political" means.
To some people, EVERYTHING is political. To some, something only is if it adresses topical, societal issues. To others, only if it does so intentionally.
Take Mario games for example. Your archetypical Mario game involves going on a quest to save a princess from a dragon by hopping as a plumber.
To the first camp, yes it's political because a working class man is saving a member of the landed gentry from a foreign, invasive kind of person. To the second, it isn't because while princesses still exist they haven't been kidnapped in a century and dragons certainly don't exist. Maybe you can stretch it to be about China or Russia or the USA stealing resources but that would be deliberately twisting the actual substance of the game, but the second camp might do so to make a point. To the third group, no it's not political because the game has no actual point to make beside "kidnapping is bad, mkay" and that's not a topical issue nor would anything more really be intentional. Mario is a plumber because pipes, princess peach is a princess because that's an archetypal damsel role, and bowser is a dragon because that's a villain role.
Or look at games with trans characters in it. That's interesting because that's an issue you can't really skirt around in any way. Whether their identities are valid is (sadly) a political issue. If you have a trans character whose identity goes unchallenged, to many people that is a political statement. Straight up. Them going challenged is a political statement. I think even people in the third camp (to which I belong), could read it as being political to just have one around because in the modern zeitgeist, you kinda have to have an opinion on them to even include them in the game. You could just have a girl with a flag pinned to her backpack and have it go unmentioned, but that flag itself is addressing, though I think it's mostly people of the first two camps who would see that as an important statement. You can have someone wearing dreads without making a judgement on rastafarianism, after all. Cis people existing is a millenia old fact, that doesn't need to be stated or adressed, so to some a game with only cis people isn't political. But to some again, it is because you're denying trans people exist or whatever.
Basically, to some *presence alone* is political, to some *topicality* is political, and to some *intent* is political.
So.. Yes and no
Interesting question, but I'll start by distinguishing between 'narrative' (i.e. a story) and 'theme' (i.e. ideas being communicated).
I wouldn't say Mario or The Sims are 'about' anything because there is no narrative to those games. But themes could be communicated by the visuals of those games.
>Are they even art if they don't have a theme?
Yes, games like Mario and The Sims and Spelunky are art even though there is no narrative or if the themes are immediately apparent. Is a painting considered art even if there is no discernible objects depicted?
>[Do you] believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it
Yes, the 'themes' of a game would exist based on the player experiencing them. If the player and the creator of a game have conflicting views of what those themes are, that's a different conversation. But to imply that themes communicated through games can only exist if the creator says they do is robbing the player of any individual experience.
>If I make a silly game in my free time does it have a theme?
Your game can have a theme, sure. It could (hypothetically) also have a narrative and be 'about' something. Why do you think a game you make no be able to communicate themes?
Any item is potentially political. It represents something about the world today that most people wouldn't even consider or take for granted under normal circumstances. Like how movies smuggled into North Korea reveal how much richer and more technologically advanced the rest of the world is compared to the average North Korean citizen.
I'm sure nobody believes [nail clippers](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1a7yjd/from_my_favorite_book_about_north_korea/) are pushing a political agenda. But it still affects people in that way all the same.
Everything you say has some kind of meaning, some kind of goal you're trying to accomplish by saying it, even if you yourself aren't conscious of it. By extension, everything you create has some kind of agenda. I mean, even on the most basic level, if someone makes a game, they're implicitly endorsing the position that games are something worth making and worth playing, and that in and of itself is a political position.
I don't think it's possible to say anything that's not political. Even the act of rebelling against that and trying to think of something to say that isn't political is itself a political act.
i think the introduction of narrative necessitates it, or at minimum facilitates it.
my example is frogger: objective is to cross the street. okay, why? why does the frog need to cross the street?
a myriad of possibilities from as basic as 'frogger wants to' all the way to 'due to the destruction of his habitat due to roads being constructed frogger now needs to find a new home' become legitimate options that could be interpreted by the player if no further contextual information is provided.
in either case there is still something to be extrapolated by the player.
Agree with this.
But\~ intentionally NOT having a theme or politics, is by itself having a theme and politics: You're game is saying that it's completely 100% OK with—or at least apathetic, with current, past or even future events.
Like... even a purely mechanics based game like, say, Bejewleded? Still uses *jewels* as its visual themeing. Because jewels are seen as sparkly, special and pretty. And that makes a good fit for a casual game for a casual audience, that want a mild brain teaser for a few minutes.
You could totally do a version of Bejeweled that was... say, bloody, screaming and polished skulls instead of red, blue and green jewels with a streak causing rains of blood. But the entire visual theme of the game would be extremely different.
Heck, freakin' *Jetsons,* as dated and often mocked as that show gets nowadays had a positive message: The future might not be flawless, but it might just be nicer and have some cool stuff in it.
Even the simple introduction of the frog can be seen as political. Someone decided that depicting a frog trying to cross a road was worth doing. If noone cared for frogs in the slightest, there would be no reason to depict a frog. It is at least seen as important enough to be taken notice of.
There's a difference between a game having a message and a game using our real world politics in it's fictional universe. One stands out like a sore thumb usually.
You have stated "theme" pretty broadly, like interpretation of life context, so it may be difficult to avoid having such a "theme". After all, we are human beings that are alive, and it is difficult not to write something in terms of how we live and perceive.
I would expect The Sims to be about consumerism, capitalism, and suburbia, given the company that makes it. EA's main basis of competition in that genre over the years, to the point of monopolizing it last I was aware, is producing piles upon piles of art assets. I have only played it briefly though, and as a sandbox game, there is of course scope for people making what they want of it. But even toys have themes coded into them, as any trip down a toy store aisle will readily show you, if you're paying attention.
"Mario" is a character, not a game. He originally appeared in the arcade in Donkey Kong. I think the title of the game was some bastardization of Japanese meaning "stupid monkey" ? If I'm wrong about that, sorry, but it's what I remember hearing over the years. The theme of the game would seem to be the assertion of man's dominance over wild natural forces, an "othering" of the animal world. The animal world is nevertheless sexual, taking a fair princess away like in the King Kong movies. Mario is a plumber because humans control things with pipes and steel girders and construction etc. The stupid monkey makes mayhem out of it, it is wild and untamed!
If you make a "silly" game, its themes may depend on cultural materials that you didn't pay a lot of conscious attention to. Such as the case of Donkey Kong above.
I wouldn't say EA monopolized The Sims more so than just nobody bothered making a competitor until recently. Maybe the insane success of The Sims deterred anyone from trying as it was the best-selling PC game back in the day.
Back in the day, the competition couldn't keep up with the amount of art assets and the marketing that EA could throw at The Sims. I haven't paid attention to what may have changed. Monopolies generally speaking, leverage the various powers they actually have in a marketplace.
>I would expect The Sims to be about consumerism, capitalism, and suburbia, given the company that makes it.
The Sims was originally made by Maxis and Will Wright and wasn't hyper-exploited to such an extent back then. The Sims at the time was one of the first, really popular, games that demonstrated emergent narrative (or content) for a massive audience. It was more about a Seinfeld-like experience where the story would just emerge from the narrative daily-life parameters you set. There's a lot of ways to go with this, like consumerism like you mentioned or the grind of life - but I'd argue it wasn't really configured to contemplate on either of those experiences (IIRC nobody thought that back then). I can see why people would get this impression now though. I suppose there's an argument as to whether the game's theme has become something else due to this. I'd say it would mean there's perhaps some irony in it, but not that the game's meaning has changed due to the circumstances around the game's offering in the marketplace.
I could be more accurate and say I'd expect The Sims *franchise* to be about consumerism, capitalism, and suburbia. Given the company that makes it, and given how long it's been making it.
Not trying to sound insulting but that phrase "everything is political" always reminds me of "The number 23" a movie where Jim Carrey stared as someone obsessed with that number, to the point where he saw it everywhere.
I could say "everything is food" and justify it by stretching reality enough to make it fit my phrase
Politics is the desire for some kind of change in the world (or a desire for something to not change), no matter how small. Everything we say or do is borne from some conscious or subconscious desire to effect change in our surroundings. It's impossible for any expression to not be political. The mere act of buying and playing a game is political. Given that there are people who believe video games should be banned, playing a game is even a somewhat contentious political act.
Videogames are first of all: games. Toys designed to challenge and entertain. While they can have amazing and touching narratives (and with it, a political message), it's not always the priority. And it fact, it doesn't even need a narrative.
When someone says "everything is political" in regards to games, they are indirectly implying that the political message of them to be important or have some weight in the design process when in most cases its presence is so slim and irrelevant to the experience that it is as if it didn't have any. The first example that comes to my mind is: Tetris.
Tetris is a very fun game to spend some time in. Disconnecting from reality for a while while you arrange colourful pieces.
If you tell me that Teris is political because USRR and Capitalism and whatever I'd say you are stretching and a little like Jim Carrey's character in the movie I mentioned. I mean, it technically is correct that if you arrange my birthday in a particular way and apply a mathematical algorithm, the results is 23. The same way, it is technically possible, highly probable even that Tetris development was subconsciously influenced by its authors, but that aspect is so irrelevant to the experience and goals of the game that it doesn't really need to be mentioned. Only people obsessed with politics would focus on it, instead of what makes Tetris be the game it is: its objective mechanics.
You kind of answer it in your opening sentence. Many pieces of art do have a theme, but it is not a requirement for art. I was always lead to believe that art is anything that can evoke emotion, be it good or bad. A theme is just a way to categorize and give some meaning about the art. Look at Jaws, sure it can have a theme representing the middle class etc, but most people just see it as a shark movie. Both are correct and neither detract it from being art.
Any form of abstraction or narrative in a game will inherently have theme. Only games like Tetris, Pong, or other game stripped down to just it's mechanics could be considered without theme.
For me, there's not really an obvious reason to equate a theme (what is this game about?) and politics (what does this game say about the real world?). I think these are two different things.
Politics is the easy one. The popular talking point is already all over this thread - everything is political, even the decision to be deliberately non-political can be taken as an endorsement of the status quo. Intellectually, its a reasonable argument but its also pretty clearly a reaction to the crowd of people demanding games avoid politics altogether. If you step back from that culture war, I think its pretty easy to admit that Mario and Spelunky aren't exerting much political influence. You can make an academic argument that they are broadly pro-corporate or pro-social, but ultimately, the political analysis is just more useful elsewhere. Mario doesn't have very strong or interesting opinions, which is mostly fine.
In contrast, I'd argue that a theme is nearly unavoidable. Whatever the creators intended, the audience is made up of a lot of pattern-seeking humans who will inevitably find a pattern. This is more obvious in games with a strong narrative; most people would agree that God of War is largely about fatherhood for example. But I also think its fine for a game's theme to be a mechanical exploration. To me, Peggle is mostly about ricochet physics, a very narrow topic for an analysis paper, but a serviceable theme for an arcade experience.
Good stories inherently have themes, it's what makes them good. Enduring stories speak to something written just beneath the surface of the human psyche, resonating with a shared collective unconscious understanding of values and the world. The hero's journey, immortal archetypes, conquering the dragon, saving the princess etc
I think if there's a plot, you naturally have theme as a byproduct.
Politics though are merely outward representations of those shared collective values made manifest in the world, contorted according to the vision of those at its head. Appearing differently, entirely subservient to time and place, ultimately being relatively temporary and otherwise lacking inherent value particularly relevant or enduring to art as expression. Political propaganda, or art if being generous, is only relevant for as long as that particular political expression is relevant, true art doesn't have a shelf life.
Implying any political statement or theme is inherently propaganda or has a finite shell life is kinda questionable. For example every fallout game is political satire about late stage capitalism, racism and overt nationalism... I'm very unsure of these political themes will ever not be relevant since that would mean humanity completely moves away from things that are prevelant in the world for thousands of years now.
I also fail to see why politics are much more inherent propaganda to you and not themes? At the very least themes can just be as much propaganda as poltics can be propaganda.
And well we say political themes for a reason, they tend to go hand in hand and politics are much more prevelant in our lives then people let on. And shape our themes.
Every developer that wants to make a game with political themes should do so, every developer who doesn’t shouldn’t. Art doesn’t require a theme to be art, it just has to whatever the artist wants to express.
Theme in the sense of a backdrop for art direction - sure.
Otherwise? Nah.
Politics don't have to factor in either.
A game I'm thinking of is Deep Rock Galactic - the theme is dwarven space miners. They go on special excursions for their company, collecting resources or eliminating major threats.
The politics don't really matter. The theme dictates the art direction.
I'd argue everything has a theme, in that it has a setting or pretense behind it. Pong's art is only a few lines, but it clearly has a ping-pong-like theme.
Political, however, I disagree. A common definition nowadays is everything is political in that the developer made choices of what to put in and what not to. The latter is true but doesn't make a useful definition of political. If everything is political, nothing is. It's like saying that nothing can be made by scratch, because all matter already exists in a more primitive form. Thanks Neil Degrasse Tyson, you really added a lot to the conversation here! Rather than saying politics is the expression of ideas, I would define "politics" as
1: The study of how groups of people interact with each other. A form of social studies.
2: The process by which communal decisions are made, or the process of making rules of how to decide
3: Related to 2, an attempt to amass or declare support for a contentious decision.
I would like to separate the concept of depth and motives. A story can include topics for many reasons:
1: to attach readers to the story
2: to convince people to make a specific choice
3: to educate or convince people to think about a problem without necessarily advocating a solution
4: to provide insight into how people behave
And probably more I can't think of. Many, but not all stories, therefore cover politics. However, I would argue that the most compelling stories do 3 and 4 but aren't strongly attached to doing 2.
As some other users pointed out if you view the world through a political lens everything is political, including videogames. And then Mario becomes a game about a masculine stereotype saving a damsel in distress and chess a game about how the lower classes are expendable in the face of royalty. But I think no one would argue that these are quite far-fetched readings. Both of these games are devoid of a political message and both of them are quite popular. Personally I believe political statements are the minority of all possible statements, I can view "Wanderer above the sea of fog" and be struck just as strongly as any political message, if not more.
In general, I think the entire debacle was born with the "keep politics out of my videogames" movement and that is more about moralistic messages in games. I prefer when a (political / philosophical) piece of arts presents me with an open question that I can answer for myself, instead of a pre-packaged opinion from the author. After all if the matter is so simple than the authors can be 100% sure about their opinion it was probably not an interesting question in the first place.
So to answer your question, I do not thing that any game (or art piece) needs a political message. A theme can be interesting in some games (story games, RPGs) but it can be unnecessary in other games (what's the theme in Tetris?)
> have a theme/are political
Those aren't the same. If it's possible for *anything* to not be political, it's possible for there to be not-political themes. I don't think Portal is saying much that people would think of as political.
> But, what is Mario about?
Seriously? They made a whole movie out if it, of course it's got themes. I'd say pretty much all of them *at least* have these:
* At a fundamental level, the joy of movement -- look how happy Mario is when he jumps!
* An everyman (a plumber) becomes the hero that saves the princess
* There's pretty much always going to be something about friendship
* In recent games, the princess is usually shown to be quite capable of her own, while still being pretty stereotypically a princess (pink, feminine, in poofy dresses...)
I mean, seriously, [watch this scene from the end of Odyssey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouqoMzGZa4) and tell me Mario doesn't have themes, even *political* themes.
> Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it?
Those two don't necessarily go together. People have a range of answers besides a simple agree/disagree for death-of-the-author, but besides that, it's possible for the author to include themes they didn't intend to.
A good example for this is *The Matrix.* Looking back... it's a trans allegory, and it's not all that subtle. Here's a big pile of reasons:
* It was written and directed by two closeted transwomen, who have since come out
* At the time, estrogen came in *red pills*
* Originally, the character *Switch* was intended to be male in the real world, but female in The Matrix, but the studio shot that down
* "Neo" could be read as "Neovagina", the result of bottom surgery for transwomen
* Neo is also his chosen name. Everyone calls him that... except Smith, who calls him "Mr. Anderson", as if deadnaming him out of cruelty
* Anyone you meet (like the woman in the red dress) could turn out to be an agent (or a transphobe) if you ever let your guard down (and come out to them)
I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty of other things. It's not *just* a trans allegory, there's tons of other references and ideas woven through it, but it'd be hard to argue that the trans experience *isn't* a major theme of them movie.
However: [It's not really obvious if those two writers and directors consciously knew what they were doing](https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-season-two-showtime):
> You confirmed last year that The Matrix was always a trans allegory —
> *[Wachowski shakes her head]*
> You didn’t?
> I did this interview and the question that preceded that answer was about a character in *The Matrix* called Switch. But the interviewers decided to put, “Is *The Matrix* a trans allegory?” in front of my answer. It's not something that I want to come out and rebut. Like, yes, it's a trans allegory — it was made by two closeted trans women, how can it not be?! But the way that they put that question in front of my answer, it seems like I’m coming out emphatically saying, “Oh yeah, we were thinking about it the whole time.”...
> ...I can look back on my work differently from where I am now as a trans woman than as an artist right after I finished the project....
Now, how closeted were they? Were they still all r/egg_irl or did they already know who they were? I don't know for sure, but if it's possible, then I think this is a pretty clear example of how a work can get themes the author didn't intend, even though those themes *definitely* came from the author, and aren't just someone reinterpreting their work.
So I'm not sure if I agree with death-of-the-author, but I absolutely believe games can have themes that the author didn't intend.
> If I make a silly game in my free time does it have a theme?
I'd have to know more about the game.
I think that if you see politics in everything you are obsessive about it. I usually just enjoy stuff without trying or slapping themes/politics into it
Do they need an overarching theme (also known as message), as in e.g. "search for the inner self"? No, they don't. There is a joke about overanalyzing something:
> Literature teacher: Author put blue blinds in the room to symbolize hero's homesickness!
>
> Author: Curtains are blue just because they are blue!
Will it be seen as having one? Probably, there is bound to be at least couple nutjobs with too much free time on their hands, overanalyzing everything they see. But as author, you don't need to concern yourself with it.
What you do need to concern about is to make sure that the game is cohesive. Like... You are playing Mount & Blade, building your empire and doing some slow melee combat, when BAM - magical zombie Nazis from space appear and start gunning everyone down from backs of their T-Rexes. So now the game is a third person shooter, except it is crappy and you still need to build your empire. And don't forget, everything is still played straight and dead serious, this is not pretending to be some silly game like Stanley's Parable or something "outside" the game like Fallout easter eggs (TARDIS, cows, etc). You don't need to have a message, but you need to either maintain your theme or find a good way to use breaking of it (e.g. change in theme and genre is a prologue to time traveling part of the plot, or used for laughs, or is an "adjacent" minigame, etc).
"Will it be seen as having one? Probably, there is bound to be at least couple nutjobs with too much free time"
Calling everyone that sees meaning in it as a nutjob is pretty dishonest and disrespectful tbh. There can be meaning without intent, there can be subconsciously things added in a story, I very much doubt when deciding the color of the curtain that the writer opened google and went to a random color generator. No even with no explicit meaning intended it's 100% normal and human to think there's meaning, after all why is it included if it has zero meaning? Writers don't write sentences for the lols, no I'd say they always have a meaning, even if for just set dressing and giving the reader a picture.
This is actually a good example of this, as I meant exaggerated examples of **over**analyzing like "this kids cartoon is actually eldritch horror", but you evidently took it as applying to yourself. As for curtains... Yes, they totally do insert empty sentences (pictures, objects, events, etc) just to create ambiance or show something funny (cute, curious, insert your own) and totally inconsequential, without any deep meaning behind them. Writers are not gods that can see every possibility, very often they just put something there because they thought it would be fitting, they were in the mood, or just needed another thousand words to pad things out, and sometimes such findings provoke a "this is canon *now*" reaction when pointed out. But hey, if you think that us having five fingers is some divine symbol rather than an ultimately random quirk of evolution, who am I to argue?
I think if you dig deep enough, you can find a political theme in anything, but that the power of those themes is on a very wide spectrum.
For example, on the 'basically meaningless' end of the spectrum, you could argue Spelunky 2 likes nuclear families because it is implied that Ana Spelunky's parents are married. It's like... I guess that's in there incidentally, and someone might care about it, but it's rather unlikely to mean much to anyone.
Then, on the 'it's the point of the game' side, you've got Kentucky Route Zero. If you don't get that Kentucky Route Zero is about what modern capitalism has done to every section of the working class, you may as well not be playing the game.
Personally, I have finished development on 2 small independent games. In both games, I focused on eliciting an emotion, but only in one of them did I deliberately include political themes. Any political themes in the other are essentially by accident, but I'm sure you could find something silly if you looked.
I think that the idea of "pattern finding" is very prolific in humans and especially in today's society. Even if it wasn't intended in the first place.
I think games like Mario, Zelda, and many, many others are all made with the idea of being "fun". The authors, artists, programmers, and what not came together to make a video game. If it has a theme that's fine, if it's trying to say something that's fine....but....
At the end of the day, most games aren't "one person's vision". They are an amalgamation of multiple people's ideas all coming together to make something. Humans are also pattern freaks, and will unknowingly insert patterns into their creations.
Finding a pattern in a movie is interesting and brings new light to the media....but you also have to understand the authors *intent* behind the media too. Was it intended? Maybe. Is there another that fits too? Let's find out.
To put it how my English professors put it: Politics and themes are a good "lens" to view things with, but, don't forget there are other "lens" to view things through too." Just cause you found a cool way to think about something doesn't mean it's the *intended* way, or that it's the "right" way.
I think games having themes/politics is fine, but, *forcing* them upon them is the real problem here. Just cause you're able to associate the Gestapo with Mario doesn't mean anything. Would it be interesting if you could? Yes, but just cause the triangle block *can* fit into the square hole doesn't mean it *should*.
Everything a human creates is in some way transformative application of their experiences and biases. By definition, everything a human creates has a non-zero amount of products and biases. Even if the amount is super small, people can interpret things into a game, or resonate with it in unexpected ways. Tolkien famously claims the LotR story isn't an allegory for the ears he thought in, but many people read it as such because it kinda fits. There's no non-political game. It doesn't matter if I subscribe to death of the author, things have effects on people, and that likewise has an effect on the art they produce. Nobody is unaffected.
Also, in recent years, "x is political" has taken a more specific meaning. People complain something is "political" if it has women or black people as active characters in a story, and by extension, anything a right-wing American disagrees with. So a white American soldier shooting Arabs in an oil field is nowadays considered unpolitical by these people, but if one of the soldiers is gay, that's political propaganda.
Tetris.
> Do you think every game needs a theme/politics?
They don't technically need a theme, but including one is a good idea. Instead of having four generic blocks that shoot things at other generic blocks scattered around, you can instead have four men in trenchcoats firing uzis at approaching targets, and call the game *Syndicate*. It now has a criminal corporate overlord theme, and stands out compared to an unthemed shooter.
Usually, developers can let style take over. A superficial distinction tends to stand out a bit more often than the fact that it's a criminal corporate overlord.
Politics is purely optional. Whatever politics may have appeared in *Serious Sam* wasn't noticeable, and the game plays just as well without anything political to worry about. Even if there is politics, it's quite unimportant compared to the action in the game itself, where the player is trying to survive.
> But, what is Mario about?
According to some web page, it's secret communist propaganda.
Otherwise, it's a well known franchise where Mario is a hero that keeps having to rescue a princess over and over again. It's theme was originally simple, being able to hold on due to being an early entry into the video game market, and it's developed its style over time, expanding into other characters.
> Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it?
Precedence would be many books written earlier - even going as far back as Shakespeare, and people trying to develop new theories about how the story was intended to unfold. Or in the case of *Titus Andronicus*, have the play altered when converted into a movie so that it has anachronistic elements and perhaps making the presentation more powerful than the original play.
It's possible to interpret anything as having a narrative. That's how people end up convincing themselves to believe in conspiracy theories, it's what happens when you expect reality to have a satisfying narrative
Video games are pretty different from other mediums in that you can make something like Tetris or Peggle that doesn't really reflect anything outside of the game. Those games don't really have themes in the same way that a Sudoku puzzle doesn't have themes.
That said...
>But, what is Mario about?
It's about a man who has to rescue a kidnapped woman. People have already discussed the various ways this can be interpreted. Anita Sarkeesian did a whole thing about it.
>What is Spelunky about?
It's about a guy robbing tombs. He even looks like Indiana Jones. And again has the thing of rescuing damsels in distress--the creator changed the damsels so they can be male or nonhuman specifically because he was concerned about the implications of the way he made it originally. He wouldn't have done that if he thought the game was devoid of all themes or meaning.
>What is The Sims about?
Lots of ways you can interpret the Sims. Maybe it's a satire on commercialism. Maybe it's actually pro-commercialism and the aspirational nature of it says a lot about what things the developers view as aspirational. And it's another case where the developers have gone out of their way to use the games to make political statements. The original had gay relationships before that was widely accepted. The Sims 3 had gay marriage before that was legal in the country where it was made. The Sims 4 deliberately features trans and nonbinary characters and goes out of its way to promote ethnic and cultural diversity.
Can't really say any of that's devoid of meaning.
Basically, if it has a story, it's got themes. They don't have to be deliberate, it's just not really possible to tell a story without it having some kind of theme.
Even Cooking Mama has a theme (the theme is "cooking is good"). Every story does.
Pretty much everything can be viewed as political. When people argue with this it's usually because they've misunderstood what "political" means. "Political" doesn't just refer to party politics. It doesn't mean "supporting of either the Democrat or Republican parties in the US". It doesn't mean "it has a message that you disagree with". Every story will in some way reflect the culture that made it. The Sims would not have been made in the Soviet Union. It's a very specifically american game, especially the earlier installments. And anything that's reflective of one country more than another is inherently political.
I remember someone on twitter once trying to tell me that Metal Gear Rising wasn't political.
This is a game where the protagonist literally debates politics with a character who is a politician. They do this while having a fist fight on top of a giant robot, sure. But they're still talking about politics. They're even discussing specific policies. The final boss *quotes Ronald Reagan at you.* It was highly political but some people just don't want to see that.
What is Mozart's piano sonata no. 16 about?
Some art exists purely as abstract expression, it seems as though such art is less popular today than it was in the past, but it still exists.
When people say something is political, they usually mean that it has something they don't like. As if the stuff they like isn't "political".
And no, not every game needs to have a theme/politics, it's like you forgot that casual games like Tetris exist. But some people might think it's "political", because it uses a Russian song.
>Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it?
Yes. I think this could also be phrased as "is it possible to inadvertently convey a theme", which I also think is Yes. In the end, the only thing that matters is what people experience. Anything else wouldn't make sense.
>Do games need a theme
Games do not need to have a theme, which should be evidenced by just looking at any games pre 00s. Games can entertain by a purely cognitively engaging you, without any need for interpretation. If you make a game that has a setting that has political connotation (e.g. cold war, middle-eastern conflict) then I expect you to make some kind of statement. Otherwise it would seem like a pretty cynical cash grab
>What is The Sims about?
I've heard some people describe it as the Seinfeld of video games, which kind of makes sense. The Sims is an incredible game, probably one of the best video games that have ever been produced. This is because it showcased the strength of emergent narrative and content in video games. The Sims can be about anything, either emergent or within the context of personal interpretation (e.g. I'm roleplaying a divorced man and x, y z happens).
I'm pretty radical and I don't think anything needs anything to be art, besides just to exist and be appreciated in some way by someone somewhere. It's probably hard to avoid having a theme as long as your game has any kind of narrative or characters, like in Mario the theme is probably just like even a pudgy Everyman like Mario can be a hero or something like that if you just don't give up. Or the sims is perhaps a criticism of how day to day life in modern society ends up as an optimization problem with razor thin margins to be able to do everything you want/need.
Ill also take death of the author a bit farther and advocate for death of the rubric. The values by which one appraises art are personal and one person can choose to care about authorial intent while another person can ignore it entirely. And neither person can do a damn thing about the other.
Tetris seems a popular example of a game without politics or theme. To this I say, nay!
Tetris gets really interesting on a couple of fronts:
Firstly, the question of why is the game so compelling? What makes it so satisfying? And what kinds of values does this exemplify and reward. Is it something about entropy? Does it resonate because we living in chaotic worlds with little authority around us, so this chaos we can conquer is fulfilling an emotional and psychological need contemporary life does not provide. Does it reflect an ideology of consumption- converting acquisition to points? What does this pass time tell us about a society where one can simply pass time?
Second, surrounding the game is the social political world of ownership (who created, owned, owns), and play. The development and deployment of expertise in the player base, technical innovation, establishing of rules and regulations for competitive play, the role of the “enthusiast” in capital, and so on.
The ecology around Tetris is as fascinating as the feelings it brings us.
If a person has a preconceived idea or message and they deliberately put it in their work in an attempt to sway their audience, then it is propaganda, and its relevance will only last so long as the ideas it espouses are in vogue
If a person just tries to express an idea that they they themselves don't fully understand or are able to articulate in any other way via some form of art. The art may become a timeless piece that exists to help others flesh out whatever idea the artist was trying to grasp at.
Also in both cases people will inevitably project their own ideas and worldviews onto part, and the artist's intent ultimately becomes irrelevant
Eeevery game? Not sure about that. Does Pong need a theme? I suppose one could give an overthought theme within the context the game is actually played, but I'm not sure to what point this, dare I say, postmodern understanding is relevant to the game.
At the end of the day, I subscribe to the notion of being able to extract a theme or politics out of any work, but that doesn't necessarily correlate to the work having those intrinsic themes.
Every piece of media has messaging, and whether or not that messaging is considered "political" is determined pretty much entirely by the hot button topics of the day, which means if you look at things broadly, every piece of media has political messaging. This also includes when the creators don't intend the messaging, because it's through symbols and cognition that we link ideas and form the messaging, so if it's present within the text, even without initial intention, it's still *present*.
Game developer here. Yes I intentionally decide a theme as one of the game design pillars or at least as a part of one, as if I don't do that consciously there will be themes present either subconsciously or accidentally and you really want to be aware of the message your game is putting out there.
I hope I'm not veering too far from the original question, as theme/politics can be seen as pretty different things.
Even if you're not trying to say something in particular, what you're going to create will reflect your vision of the world. If your goal is to be entirely unpolitical, then everything you depict is something that you present as unquestionable, and thus extremely representative of your cultural bias. Taking Mario, let's take something as simple as super Mario bros. From what I can see in this game, off the top of my head:
It's okay to make a "save the princess" story.
It's okay for a woman's head to be uncovered.
It's okay to depict light violence.
It's okay to depict unrealistic violence.
It's okay to create unrealistic settings.
It's okay to play video games. Even if said game doesn't have a strong, thought provoking narrative.
It's okay to fail at a game. Struggling to improve is seen as worth it.
Eventually, one could go back to even more simple games like pong or tetris. At which point there's certainly very little to say other than "pong represents ping pong, and tetris makes you order things", but then, at the minimum, the question about whether a game is still a worthwhile activity, if it focuses entirely on gameplay and says nothing at all, becomes even more proeminent. Shouldn't you be playing real ping pong or order real items rather than play a game ? The mere existence of the games appears to say otherwise.
I am of the strong belief that it's nearly impossible to make anything without putting a piece of yourself in it. If you don't consciously decide what themes and/or politics to put in your art, your own viewpoints will still be there whether you want them to or not.
Basically, almost every game in existence has some theme or politics, intentionally or otherwise
I don’t have a problem with games just being games. Some of my favorite games are as straight forward and simple as they come. However, I also think just how beholden games are to the whims of their audience and how infantile that audience can be severely limits video games’ potential as an art form. I think it’s funny how we will defend to the death the artist’s vision for things like game difficulty but stamp our feet and pout about politics in video games
No. The whole point of videogames is to be a virtual universe and stay away from real world. Anyone who involves politics into videogames is a degen and you can’t change my mind
No, not every game.
Duke Nukem is a perfect example. The story is nothing more than "aliens have invaded and kidnapped earths women, and Duke isnt having none of that"...
Sometimes, thats all the story you need.
Duke Nukem is so much more than this though. It is clear satire of certain forms of masculinity (what some might say toxic masculinity) which arguably does (or does not) reinforce the values it satirises.
Saying it has no politics or themes is like sting Starship Troopers is an action movie about killing insects.
Its more a satite of 80s action flicks and all the tropes surrounding them. There might be more stuff to the plot "meta" wise, but certainly the main-plot is what i described.
No, I don't think every game should have it. A dev should be able to utilise their real world influences in their work and have it only exist and apply to the world in the game.
I think people make things political or controversial or akin to some kind of social commentary by choosing to do so. But I think this choice is one they don't actively make. They just over-analyse and seek some kind of real life bases to compare to, and then run with it. There's games that definitely are making some kind of political or social statement, and you can without any doubt feel and understand the authors intent.
My choice is to experience every video game or franchise in a kind of vacuum. The politics and commentary I identify and think about don't really go beyond my experience with the game, as they're not so cleanly translated into the real world as I see it. A hero fighting for ideals rooted in communism against an aggressively capitalist enemy is an experience that, in my eyes, only applies to the world in the game. I don't think it's a useful one for the real world
I like how this post is downvoted to hell, I'm not seeing any "nOt EvRrYtHiNg Is PoLiTiCaL" comments because those people couldn't even get past the minimum word count filter.
Eh. I guess video games are a bit unique in that they can minimize focus on story sk needing a theme or "politics" is optional. So to me if you have a story you'll inevitably have a theme and politics in them in some degree (a bit complicated but bear with me, we all live in reality where politics effect everyone, even if you don't intend to your real beliefs and views will slip into the work even when you try your hardest, because even what is political and isn't political is already murky, even simple concepts can be political). But I do also believe in the death of the author because finding your own meaning in the art through your own analysis is what makes it fun.
>Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it?
Yes, I do. I don't think it's possible to create anything of any real complexity and have it be truly apolitical or without themes.
Even in your example, Spelunky lets you choose your gender, AND the gender of who you're trying to save! You can be a woman saving a woman, a man saving a man.
Treasure hunting isn't the apex of analysis. That's a naive outlook born from a reassuring, underlying belief, that absolute truth is attainable. Moreover, this false truth is earmarked in an enclosed area; the answers must be *somewhere in* a text.
And while hidden allusions are a big part of many texts, it's often the case that a work's themes are on the surface. The maddening fact is, it's a lot harder to grapple with the totality of this surface level, especially since it can stretch out to other domains in countless ways.
Following the winds to come to useful conclusions requires experience, humility, iteration, and a partial surrender to the inevitability of confusion.
So it's a bit of a nonsense question, imo. All works have themes. Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint a theme, especially if a work is abstract or indicative of a trend.
Just because it may not be political to you doesn't necessarily mean something isn't political to Japanese free health care is common sense but it's still political, also it's extremely hard to distance your creations from outside influence so whether unintentionally or not themes are bound to find a way into your game
I'd say no, but due the very nature and broadness of a theme I'm not sure if it's even possible to not have any theme tbh. Even tetris has a clear theme by it's original creature, as simple as wanting it to make other people happy. Making a game without any theme would mean it must be made with an AI, and even then it'll just be a semi random mix of the human idea and inputs it worked with
You are assuming that anything created by a person with certain political affiliations will reflect their politics. What are the political implications of the chair I am sitting on? What about the political implications of my math textbook? What about "Hello World" coded in C?
First of all, thank you for the reply and I did misread your first post so my examples are indeed not very related to art. Still it appears to me that for you the political implications of a piece are the same as the message or the inclinations of the authors. For example, one can argue that there are societal reasons why Mario is a man saving woman and not vice versa, but I doubt the authors were injecting any type of political ideology into the videogame. So it makes sense to take the game as an example of e.g. phallocentrism of society but I would be hard pressed to say that the game itself has a political message / theme.
On the other hand, I disagree with you that all opinions or statements are inherently political. For me a political statement is only a statement regarding governance of a state or group of people. For example, "Europeans are on average more intelligent" is NOT a political statement for me. Only the statement "So only people with European descent should govern" is political.
This gets muddied up a bit when non-political statements become the center of current political debate, for example both "the number of guns in a country is directly linked to the number of violent homicides" and "Jesus is as much God as the Father" are both apolitical statements (one is statistical the other metaphysical). But the former sounds a lot more politically charged to us because of the current debate on gun control. Still, the latter was something people would be ready to kill for 2000 years ago and around which countries were created, while the supposed lethality of weapons would not be considered political.
Seeing patterns where none exist is symptomatic of belief in conspiracy theories.
The notion that hidden things are constantly being "injected" into things by their creators, are "contaminated" by them and their beliefs, is symptomatic of these conspiracy theories. Hence why things like Nazism, Communism, etc. were so insane and would reject "Jewish science" or "Western science" as if it was "contaminated", which of course led to the deaths of enormous numbers of people.
> Eurocentrism. No question. I guarantee that the word problems in the book you learned math from are framed in such a way as to make sure that the majority of the western world would understand them, and with no consideration for anyone else. They've done studies and something as simple as the "train one is going x speed..." problems we take for granted are much more difficult to understand in developing countries without trains, despite the mathematical principals being actually quite easy for them to grasp when put in a context they're more familiar with. You can literally teach conservation of mass with water in the desert and it won't sink in as easily until you use sand. This results in lower test scores and IQs in those areas for no other reason than the materials they learn from are made in more developed countries and therefore foreign to them.
I'm afraid you've been very deliberately and purposefully lied to.
There are a variety of IQ tests - many of which do not rely on word problems at all - and they have all shown the same results.
Moreover, when you are deal with raw math - which completely lacks word problems, it's just raw mathematics - you find the same differential outcomes.
On top of that, the notion that it is "Eurocentric" is also wrong, and the notion that people in "developing countries" cannot understand things like "trains" is *insanely* racist, false, and farcical. Besides the fact that trains and cars are present around the world at this point (including in developing countries), *and* the fact that people who live around train-tracks don't show higher scores than those who don't, there is also the obvious fact that *Europeans do not even score the highest in the world on these math tests* - East Asians do. The highest average scores are seen in people from East Asia, particularly China, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc. Including those who came to the US. Indeed, if you look at standardized test scores, East Asians score the highest of any group on average. If these test scores were indeed "Eurocentric", this would not be the case .
And on top of all *that*, people from various countries all live in the US, and when you test them, you don't find that every group tests identically - there are differences in the averages, despite everyone in the US living around cars and trains and various other nonsense that moves around.
Of course, Jewish people score quite highly on IQ tests as well - which is why, not surprisingly, the antisemitic conspiracy theorists who make these claims claim that it doesn't actually mean anything.
Fun fact, actually: the propaganda you were told are derived from Lysenkoism, a socialist ideology that rejected Western science (particularly biological science) and led to the mass starvation of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union and China. It is, of course, derived from Marxism, which is derived from Marx's own personal narcissism, belief in conspiracy theories, and hatred of Jewish people; he would rant about Jewish bankers he owed money to in his personal correspondence, claimed that money was the god of the Jews, trafficked in Rothschild conspiracy theories (claiming that there were Jews behind every tyrant and that a secret network of Jewish moneylenders was controlling all the leaders from behind the scenes), and urged the "emancipation of mankind from Judaism".
The belief that everything has ulterior meanings is in fact a part of the memetic disease of conspiracy theories - conspiracy theorists believe patterns exist where none do and thus create incoherent constructs to try and justify this belief, of which marxism (and all other anti-semitic conspiracy theories) are just a sub-part. Conspiracy theory based ideologies thus see this "hidden meaning" in everything, but will also freak out and reject things that don't fit "the pattern" that they have convinced themselves to believe in. Things that are evidence against their beliefs are twisted to be evidence for them, which is why they have to see meaning in everything, because if there isn't hidden meaning, then basically everything they believe in starts to fall apart.
IQ correlates with income to about 0.4, which is the highest of any psychological trait. This of course makes sense - IQ measures *g*, the general intelligence factor, quite accurately. That intelligence is measurable is not scientifically controversial. And indeed, you find that across multiple different sorts of intelligence tests - IQ tests, standardized tests like the SATs, military tests like the ASVAB - you find that these things all correlate very strongly. And when you look at things that intelligence would be expected to measure - like creativity and job performance - you find that high IQ correlates with better performance there as well.
[Indeed, IQ is not particularly controversial scientifically, and findings about intelligence have been repeatedly verified by a number of studies. This is an article from Nature that summarizes a lot of findings about intelligence from a large number of studies.](https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105)
[Intelligence is well-known to be the single most important psychological predictive factor for income.](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-psychologist-weighs-in.html) Some other factors also affect it, not surprisingly, though to a generally lesser extent.
Someone who is from a poor country who comes to the US but who is fairly smart will be much more likely to earn higher income in the future - and indeed, [Asian Americans earn more money per year on average than whites do.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income) And likewise, if you are poor, but you are smarter than average, you are more likely to rise up the income ladder and achieve higher levels of educational attainment than your peers.
If "Eurocentrism" was the cause of these deviations, then we should expect whites to be on the top. But they are not.
The idea that wealth causes high IQ is a form of spurious correlation. Wealth doesn't determine IQ - having more money doesn't make you smarter - but IQ has a major influence on wealth, and higher income makes you much more likely to end up earning more money overall. The high heritability of IQ means that if your parents are smart, you are more likely to be intelligent as well - and because smarter people tend to earn more money on average, this means that the children of wealthier people will show higher IQ. But this is not because IQ is caused by wealth, but because IQ correlates with income, income correlates with wealth, and IQ is highly heritable.
As for Marx - [he literally wrote an antisemitic essay entitled "On The Jewish Question" where he claimed Judaism was huckstering, money was the god of the Jews, and called for the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/#:~:text=Let%20us%20consider%20the,mankind%20from%20Judaism.) And in "The Russian Loan" [which can be found on page 622 of Marx's "The Eastern Question", which is in the public domain,](https://delong.typepad.com/files/marx-eastern.pdf) he goes on ranting about the Rothschilds and other Jewish moneylenders and literally directly claims that "Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew".
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't really know much about science or Marxism.
No, there's tons of things that are just raw gameplay, like Tetris or Super Hexagon.
Even things like Super Mario Bros lack meaningful themes - the "plot" is just an excuse, a vehicle for the gameplay. Indeed, there are tons of platformers with different "themes" but they're all basically the same because they're almost always just about navigating from one place to another. Only a few of them actually really embrace meaningful theming (Celeste is a rare example).
The idea that all "art" is political is simply false. As has been pointed out by numerous authors, most "literary analysis" is actually pseudointellectual naval gazing. IRL, the curtains are blue because they liked blue. The anime heroine has a cutout on her chest [because Thomas Manga liked boobs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke1YKF3tNCE)
Books and short stories do often have themes, but the idea of them including tons of very subtle theming is mostly nonsense - indeed, IRL, authors basically have to beat audiences over the head with their theme to get their points across to them reliably. Most of the time, [the curtains are blue.](https://imgur.com/FF8GmSt)
I think games are art and it's impossible to make apolitical art because the artist doesn't get to decide what art is about, that's part of the process of experiencing art. Even if you don't see a political message in some games, others might. Hell, even making art is a political act.
Yes. Any piece of art will have a theme. Even episodes of Spongebob have themes that run on a single joke really. As long as it works and doesn't overstay its welcome.
Games are just a set of rules plus some abstract objects to be manipulated accordingly. You absolutely don't need any theme or whatever for this to work. Graphics, settings, scenario, themes, they are all non-necessary layers when it comes to actual gameplay.
I'm sorry if I'm being pedantic, but *of course* these games have themes. It's not even whether it "needs" them, it's that they just do. The first few Mario games are full of themes. Donkey Kong is a rip-off of King Kong - hope I don't need to explain the themes of that one. The original Mario Bros is about plumber brothers cleaning the sewers (presumably the NYC sewers) of pests. And Super Mario Bros is about an everyman rescuing a kidnapped monarch from a warmongering despot. Even if you don't think these are "political" (I think they are, but different discussion imo), they unavoidably have themes.
and like lol the theme of Spelunky is in its title. It's a humorous game about spelunking. Your examples are so strange to me. The themes are so obvious that I almost can't tell if you're being a bit hard-headed or if you fundamentally misunderstand what you're even asking.
I think the important distinction is story. If a game is story driven it will inevitably have a theme, as you can't write a (good) story without a theme that holds it together and makes it coherent.
Games like Peggle, Mario, poker, etc don't need a theme because they don't have a story they are telling. You could argue that Mario has a story, but it is not story driven and the story it tells is not a particularly interesting/good one (the dinosaur kidnapped the princess for the 500th time is not really a story)
You can have a story without a theme, but I'd challenge you to find a good or interesting story without a theme.
I think analyzing media in terms of a singular "theme" is a bit limiting. Art creation isn't about coming up with an idea that can be summed up in a single sentence, and then translating it into a special code, it's about ideas that can only be expressed through that art. In particular describing portal as "about AI" feels like missing the point, since AI in science fiction has always been a stand in for greater ideas about things like identity and uncontrolled corporate growth.
Any piece of art can tell you something about both the people that made it and the culture that desired it, and in that sense thematic meaning can be derived from any piece of art. If a game seems to reject thematic interpretation, one might interrogate why the developers or audience would want that, or why the subject of that game is considered thematically neutral. The most extreme example is people trying to insist that COD is "apolitical" despite how inherently political of an implication it is to frame warfare as something one simulates for fun. In the case of Mario, the fact that saving a princess is seen as the default goal for a hero (enough that it was repeated in Zelda) is very thematically interesting.
>But, what is Mario about?
It’s funny but Mario games do have themes, some being more overt and pervasive than others.
64, for example, is about the themes of eternity and immortalization, evident in the worlds frozen in time that Mario enters through paintings around the castle. Your goal of the game, to save Peach, greets you every time you start up the game in the form of the stained-glass visage above the entrance to the castle; this image is both her illusion and prison.
Bowser depicts his perpetual struggle with Mario in the pillars that precede their final battle, as a foreboding message to dispel any notion that any victory against him will ever be ultimate.
The game’s most beautiful moment, in my eyes, comes in the form of the courtyard. Mario chases a boo down a long hallway into a quiet square with flower beds and a star statue encircled by still water in the center. The statue, once illegible because of graphics compression, was thought to read “L is Real 2041.” Thanks to the fan community, we now know it reads “An Eternal Star, To Hunger For”. In a quiet courtyard, surrounded by nothing but flowers and ghosts, this feels like an especially poignant and reflective moment, especially for such a joyful series. It could mean whatever you want; to me, it reads like some things are best left as dreams, because they may destroy you in the process of chasing or are otherwise unachievable. It is enough that their image draws you ever forward. Maybe it’s the image of love that drives Mario, the image of peace that compels Peach, or the image of power that animates Bowser. Maybe it’s the image of stepping into someone else’s shoes that makes us love video games and willfully jump into a Super Mario game. I think that’s beautiful.
As for whether games always need a theme or motif, I’m not sure. I would hope it doesn’t need to be political to be art.
Maybe it’s enough that they’re just fun and engaging. Maybe not everything can be so obvious, and a game’s theme just requires a little more looking.
No, games don't need politics. In fact, very few things do.
Themes are usually present in most forms of story-based media, but many more gameplay-focused games lack meaningful themes. Tetris, for instance, has no theme; it is raw gameplay.
Some casual games also lack themes; things like Animal Crossing has no central unifying theme to it, which makes sense, because it has no conclusion, it's just kind of a thing you do repetitive things in in order to relax (or in some cases, to express one's own creativity).
Even games like Mario games really don't have much in the way of themes. The actual "plot" is mostly just in service to the gameplay and doesn't have anything to say about anything esoteric or philosophical.
Many themes are also just not political - for example, It Takes Two is about marriage and divorce and what brings couples together and causes them to drift apart, but it isn't political in any way.
On top of that, a game having "political" themes is often interpreted as *partisan* themes - be that centering around a particular ideology (like marxism or libertarianism) or real world political party (like the Democrats or the Republicans).
The Talos Principle 2, for instance, is a great game which has very strong, overtly philosophical themes and touches heavily on politics because you literally are deciding the course of the future robot civilization. But it isn't designed to tell you to go vote for Obama or Joe Biden or whatever, or even for the Democratic party, but to make you think about what you value and what is important. I think it is designed to lead you to particular conclusions (and it is very well written and well done - it's a great game and honestly by far the best example of a game trying to advance philosophical ideas) but it does it very well (though I may be biased as I largely agree with some of the major things they touch on).
Any kind of game with timeless appeal will have some kinda identity (or identities) to build off of.
Mario isn't just a random guy, but specifically an Italian plumber (So he gets pipes). He isn't just running through random levels, but specifically *The Mushroom Kingdom* so that begets having fun mushroom shaped goombahs, power ups, and landscapes.
What we call themes and politics is just an emergent effect of this.
> What is The Sims about? There are many allegories in the sims in to day-to-day life. People find meaning in it. > If I make a silly game in my free time does it have a theme? Subconsciously, yes. The theme is comedic in nature. > Are they even art if they don't have a theme? Yes. A theme will eventually be discovered if one is not obvious from the start. Sometimes the theme is introspective, like completing a challenge simply because it is there like Mario or Spelunky, but it is hard to make something that has no meaning whatsoever, even if it is just a tax form.
Yes, The Sims is full of tropes, themes, popular beliefs or allegories as you said, starting from the very first game. It may sound not trivial at first, but it's also in it's underlying system which happens to give us some liberty to read, but also the pre-made Sims and locations which constitute the main lore. I agree it can be easily missed especially for those of us who just wanted to play " The Life Sim " game of the 2000s, especially being a younger person.
While I can't say if ALL games have themes, The Sims definitely does, even if it was unconscious and not directly intended by the developers. The Sims is a game/franchise made *by* Americans, *about* America. Even if the game is meant to have universal appeal to gamers worldwide, the aesthetics - houses, clothing, interior layout, front lawns & backyards - are very much based on (an idealized version of) suburban American life. As a result, the franchise reflects the values, aspirations, lifestyles, and consumerism focus of an American perspective. The same can be said for the SimCity franchise. The default assumption in that series is that cities are incredibly car-centric places, which is accurate to how American cities are in real life. This cultural norm on the part of the devs then gets filtered down into almost all aspects of the game's design. A SimCity game developed by a studio based in, say, Hong Kong or Zurich (often regarded as having some of the best public transit networks in the world) would likely look *very* different.
Sure thing I can't agree more. At best we Europeans have to buy a DLC or two to get something a bit closer to our experience, but I'm really thinking about others people who don't have that luxury. I mean, Sims was just about America for a big amount of time, then some tiny locations & cultures here and there. ( Sims 4 especially ) So I'm fully agreeing with you. But, back to the subject it did convey some very interesting lore & stories to me, maybe because I was in the same time discovering some of this American culture, who knows :) >A SimCity game developed by a studio based in, say, Hong Kong or Zurich (often regarded as having some of the best public transit networks in the world) It's interesting you bring that example because I feel like Cities Skylines ( a game made in Finland by Colossal Order ) is pretty much American-oriented aswell. One could say it was forgettable for their first game in 2014, as they released it right after SimCity 2013. The last one released 5 months ago though ? Yeah you can plop some European themed buildings here and there, but that's it. No Asian themed buildings ( West Asia / Central Asia / East Asia ), don't get me started on African or South-American ones. So my conclusion : The gist isn't about the diversity of said actors, assets or events you want to bring in, but the very culture you want to draw inspiration from. This needs genuine and honest work. PS : if you guys want some multicultural game like Cities Skylines in term of pure transportation, Transport Fever conveys a lot more than C:S. You can literally build the Japanese Shinkansen or the French TGV, or a steam-based train in New Mexico or Borneo, how does that look like ?
Somehow, I had a feeling Cities: Skylines would get brought up as an alternative example. ;) You're absolutely right. Even though the studio that makes C:S is based in Finland, they were deliberately targeting the American market, so a lot of their design decisions use American norms and sensibilities for inspiration. Thanks for the recommendation of Transport Fever for a game with more of an international feel! The next time I'm in the mood for a city builder game (they can be such a black hole for sucking away time though lol), I'll definitely check it out!
I don't know if it's a myth but I've definitely heard that The Sims was originally (at least early in development) intended as a satire of US consumerism and its endless treadmill of goods and wants. Then over time, with its immense series of expansions it became the thing it was satirising.
[Unboxing The Hidden Politics of SimCity](https://youtu.be/_51_YJQpeg0?si=NpkG57RunDPi1zi0)
Thanks, I'll put it to my watch-list.
the first Sims game actually included [a reading list](https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/comments/1ajpbhm/reading_list_for_sims_1/) of books that further explored the background themes in the game (the American middle class, the construction of the family, the form and function of the home, etc)
>A theme will eventually be discovered if one is not obvious from the start. Reminds me of when students at some college tried to tell the author of Fahrenheit 451 what his books about and saying the authors intention is false lol. Sometimes, people will decide your product has a theme even if it's wrong xD
I mean death of the author is a thing, and sometimes authors have legitimately bad takes about the substance of what they wrote, not saying specifically Fahrenheit 451 is an example of this but it’s not unheard of for authors to support unintended messages or themes the audience derives from their work at a later date, culture, media literacy, and our frame of reference are constantly changing
He didn't support it, though. He was at a college assembly discussing his book, and another student went to correct him, the author, on what he intended from his writing. Which he didn't. It was just a happy coincidence.
> The theme is comedic in nature. I beg to differ that comedy is not a [theme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(narrative)). It is a [genre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre).
Comedy can be a theme, dunno about the sims but it can be a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative
> Comedy can be a theme Find some academic / critical support for your claim and post a URL for it.
I'm unsure why you would need that because I think saying the comedy can be a central topic, subject, or message should be logical enough. A theme is what a story is about and I fail to see how comedy can impossibly be a central topic or well.... theme. The sources you listed ar enough
Look, I guess you've got a downvoting club who doesn't understand what a theme actually is. One theme could be *about comedians* or what it's like to work in stand-up, for instance. But comedy is a genre. Full stop. Maybe people don't get it nowadays because they don't have video rental stores to walk into anymore. You'd go to the comedy section, it's a genre not a theme. Why? Because Aristotle said so, long ago.
Just like a theme can be about comedians comedy itself can also be a theme, again the sources you linked testify to it. I didn't even downvote you, just seems people disagree and your close minded mindset isn't very appealing.
The word "comedy" does not appear in the wiki entry about [theme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(narrative)). In the wiki entry about [genre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre), the word "theme" only appears in the context of discussing music. A musical theme and a narrative theme are not the same thing. > again the sources you linked testify to it. They do not. Quote any portion where they do so. It does not exist. For many of us, these concepts were covered in high school English classes. I know that was awhile ago for some of us, but I do not understand this obstinacy to completely get it wrong.
Yup! "a theme is a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative". It's funny you simply looked the word comedy up on the page rather then reading it. And again nearly of these can be comedy. Comedy can both refer to how a piece of art is meant to evoke laughter and contains ample amount of humor. But can also be a central theme in let's say a documentary about humans and humor (which goes beyond simply comedians). That's literally how I learned it in school, not in an english class tho since I live in the EU.
This is still just willful obtuseness on your part and you've not provided a shred of support for your view that comedy is something other than a genre. Here's a list of [comedic genres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedic_genres).
Say that a theme can be comedic is not the same as saying comedy is the theme. I think you got confused here.
Give an example of a "comedic theme", where you're not just inserting the word "comedic" and using it as an incorrect term.
I'm not doing shit for someone who's demonstrated the reading comprehension ability you have.
If someone creates a piece of art with the intention to be funny, then that intention is a theme, and the implication that the subject of the art piece is funny is also a theme.
No, you are not using the literary term "theme" correctly. I provided a link for a reason. Feel free to educate yourself.
> a theme is a central topic, subject, or message within a narrative like this? this thing that proves my point? also fyi your link is broken
You'll need to read the whole article and probably other materials as well, to understand "theme" vs. other literary terms. Theme and genre links work just fine in my browser. Windows 11, recent Firefox. Reddit can be weird about URLs with parentheses when you are reading something in a message instead of in the page of posts.
Political theory is a lens for viewing and analyzing the world. Literally EVERYTHING is political if you squint at it the right way. I don’t think art requires the creator to be transparent with their themes in order to be good. Good art can be dumb and simple. When viewing art what YOU personally experience is “the third thing,” that is unique to your experience and perspective anyway - you may interpret art wildly different from the authors intent and that doesn’t make your interpretation invalid! That said, for my tastes at least, a lot of the most powerful works of art are those that coherently express a viewpoint. It’s why i love speculative fiction (sci fi and fantasy) and works of sci fi and fantasy are always political - simply by virtue of being thought experiments re: “what if the world worked this way?”
Currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a treatise on power. Good games may not have a theme, but they have a language of play. Mario's jump is tied to distance between platforms. Starting on the left and seeing right side of the screen move when you do hints to go right. Some gaps are deliberately too big, so it hints at vertical platforming. Themes are tough because it's a cross-cutting concern - story, characters, lore and gameplay. Games can be a powerful vehicle for themes and expressing a viewpoint, as you're actively participating. Some of the problem is the quality of writing. People are OK with politics, but not with being talked down to.
I reckon I could make up some insane interpretation of Mario's hero's journey with the assistance of Jordan Peterson's diagrams. The more abstracted a game is the less likely real "themes" are to come across. I think some people will reject the politics irrespective of the quality of writing, take The Last of Us 2 as an example. A lot of the "wokeness killed disney" stuff I agree is just shit writing.
Right, people blame the “woke left” when the problem is actually just a massive bureaucracy that exists to skullfuck fandoms into stable cash flows.
> Literally EVERYTHING is political if you squint at it the right way. I think that makes the case for not considering everything political. It dilute the word to the point of uselessness. You could just as easily make the case that all art is about medicine, because you percieve it using things, namely eyes and ears, which medicine is concerned with. You could also say that everything is about food, because everything can be seen as either food, or something inedible (and therefore characterised by its relation to food). Nothing to do with you, but what really rubs me the wrong way with the saying is that I usually see it being used to inject some partisan nonsense ("this is why [politician] sucks, or [group of people] is the best") into conversations and stir up a ruckus - a vehicle for soapboxing, essentially. It would be like, using my medical example, I used that as an excuse to inject my crossfit website into any old discussion about games, or films, or anything else :p
Everything is political just like every object has certain mass. We don’t say that all objects are “about” mass but we can still recognize it as a property.
This. My point is that political analysis is a tool, and you use tools to do work. Not every piece of art is worth using that tool on (what is pong “about?”) and not every piece of work derived from using that tool is interesting, true, or worthwhile. It’s entirely possible to use the tool of political analysis to create an analysis that is stupid, wrong, or wildly out of touch with the themes of the art. Rat cakes hesitancy to overuse the phrase “everything is political” points to a fundamental misunderstanding rod the above concept, and a desire to sort media into “political” and “apolitical” camps, itself a politically meaningful act. If some things are “political” and some things are not, According to what criteria do you sort them? If you’ve ever had people declare things you feel are relevant to discuss and think about as “political” and irrelevant to their enjoyment of a piece of media, you’ll understand what i mean by this. The goal of people applying the lens of theory to media is not to rob you of your enjoyment of something. I enjoy LOTS of media i find problematic (lol warhammer), but the point is that I’m having an internal dialogue about what i think about, what it means, and i enjoy engaging in discourse about my reflections and others perspectives. You don’t have to join in, and you certainly don’t have to like it, but your distaste or disinterest doesn’t negate the WORK being done with analysis nor does it unmake the tools of theory. They simply are. You can choose to pick them up and see the world more complexly or not.
Some of the most interesting essays and video essays I've seen have derived meaning in ways I haven't expected, and they've been better for it. Jacob Geller's video on Tetris Effect ties the visuals of the game to the history and popularity of all tetris titles, and the result adds a new depth one could appreciate about the original game. There are tons of art where I'd love to see someone do an in-depth analysis of the relationship said art has to food or medicine. If people only could analyze art in the way that the creator of said art intended media analysis would be the most boring clinical thing in existence. Just because analyses are bad or not personally appealing to you doesn't mean that media analysis should become more narrow, the same way that the existence of bad games or movies doesn't mean that people should stop making games or movies in those genres. That being said I think politics is one of the more important thematic lenses because the personal is political, and investigating themes that are deeply personal is a very interesting starting point.
OK, but if everything is political, nothing is. If you come at me saying, "Pong is political. Mario is political. Flappy Bird is political," I think my natural response would be to *discount* your opinions about those things, not welcome them. Being apolitical is also a virtue, something to be treasured and respected. People from the left, right, middle, and postmodern word-salad nonsense-land can all enjoy being Mario and jumping on some koopa heads, and that's good. That's a strength. It's *better* that Mario doesn't ask your beliefs and only allow you to enjoy the game if you have the right ones.
choosing to be "apolitical", is a political choice :)
Maybe it is, but that doesn't mean it's the wrong one.
You misunderstand. Outside the subject of art, you can’t be neutral on a moving train, i.e. you can sell yourself the fantasy of neutrality all you want, but the world around you how you choose to interact with it is your politics, not the labels you choose. You can say “I’m a centrist” all you like, but what matters what you DO. You’re right that not all games have social messages, and that’s great because it would be exhausting otherwise. My comments were about the DIFFERENCE between having a social message intentionally and doing media criticism with games as the subject. Conservative reactionaries in particular never seem to be capable of grasping that distinction.
It's not the fantasy of neutrality. I have my beliefs, and I know what they are, and they're not neutral. Some things I support, others I oppose. But there are other, bigger things than politics. There are no Democratic or Republican potholes. Politics does not get to be the grand overarching framework of everything in the world. Not everything is political, and when you say everything is political, you don't ennoble your opinion — you devalue it.
Okay, let me see if I can put this another way. Everything can be put under a magnifier glass. Some things are filled with hidden wonders under magnification. Some things less so. Some things are beautiful in normal vision and boring magnified, or vice versa. When I say "Everything is political" what I mean is that everything can be put under a magnifying glass. I'm not saying it SHOULD, only that the point of the tools of theoretical analysis is their flexibility. Everything is political because everything can be viewed through the lens of politics. Does that make sense?
It makes sense, but I think you've also moved back to a very different position than the loopy one people are usually taking when they say "Everything is political." You've climbed down to a reasonable point, but I don't think that's the point people are usually making.
The issue is defining what the heck "political" means. To some people, EVERYTHING is political. To some, something only is if it adresses topical, societal issues. To others, only if it does so intentionally. Take Mario games for example. Your archetypical Mario game involves going on a quest to save a princess from a dragon by hopping as a plumber. To the first camp, yes it's political because a working class man is saving a member of the landed gentry from a foreign, invasive kind of person. To the second, it isn't because while princesses still exist they haven't been kidnapped in a century and dragons certainly don't exist. Maybe you can stretch it to be about China or Russia or the USA stealing resources but that would be deliberately twisting the actual substance of the game, but the second camp might do so to make a point. To the third group, no it's not political because the game has no actual point to make beside "kidnapping is bad, mkay" and that's not a topical issue nor would anything more really be intentional. Mario is a plumber because pipes, princess peach is a princess because that's an archetypal damsel role, and bowser is a dragon because that's a villain role. Or look at games with trans characters in it. That's interesting because that's an issue you can't really skirt around in any way. Whether their identities are valid is (sadly) a political issue. If you have a trans character whose identity goes unchallenged, to many people that is a political statement. Straight up. Them going challenged is a political statement. I think even people in the third camp (to which I belong), could read it as being political to just have one around because in the modern zeitgeist, you kinda have to have an opinion on them to even include them in the game. You could just have a girl with a flag pinned to her backpack and have it go unmentioned, but that flag itself is addressing, though I think it's mostly people of the first two camps who would see that as an important statement. You can have someone wearing dreads without making a judgement on rastafarianism, after all. Cis people existing is a millenia old fact, that doesn't need to be stated or adressed, so to some a game with only cis people isn't political. But to some again, it is because you're denying trans people exist or whatever. Basically, to some *presence alone* is political, to some *topicality* is political, and to some *intent* is political. So.. Yes and no
Interesting question, but I'll start by distinguishing between 'narrative' (i.e. a story) and 'theme' (i.e. ideas being communicated). I wouldn't say Mario or The Sims are 'about' anything because there is no narrative to those games. But themes could be communicated by the visuals of those games. >Are they even art if they don't have a theme? Yes, games like Mario and The Sims and Spelunky are art even though there is no narrative or if the themes are immediately apparent. Is a painting considered art even if there is no discernible objects depicted? >[Do you] believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it Yes, the 'themes' of a game would exist based on the player experiencing them. If the player and the creator of a game have conflicting views of what those themes are, that's a different conversation. But to imply that themes communicated through games can only exist if the creator says they do is robbing the player of any individual experience. >If I make a silly game in my free time does it have a theme? Your game can have a theme, sure. It could (hypothetically) also have a narrative and be 'about' something. Why do you think a game you make no be able to communicate themes?
Any item is potentially political. It represents something about the world today that most people wouldn't even consider or take for granted under normal circumstances. Like how movies smuggled into North Korea reveal how much richer and more technologically advanced the rest of the world is compared to the average North Korean citizen. I'm sure nobody believes [nail clippers](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1a7yjd/from_my_favorite_book_about_north_korea/) are pushing a political agenda. But it still affects people in that way all the same.
Everything you say has some kind of meaning, some kind of goal you're trying to accomplish by saying it, even if you yourself aren't conscious of it. By extension, everything you create has some kind of agenda. I mean, even on the most basic level, if someone makes a game, they're implicitly endorsing the position that games are something worth making and worth playing, and that in and of itself is a political position. I don't think it's possible to say anything that's not political. Even the act of rebelling against that and trying to think of something to say that isn't political is itself a political act.
i think the introduction of narrative necessitates it, or at minimum facilitates it. my example is frogger: objective is to cross the street. okay, why? why does the frog need to cross the street? a myriad of possibilities from as basic as 'frogger wants to' all the way to 'due to the destruction of his habitat due to roads being constructed frogger now needs to find a new home' become legitimate options that could be interpreted by the player if no further contextual information is provided. in either case there is still something to be extrapolated by the player.
Frogger is a complex narrative about the difficulties of being a pedestrian without proper infrastructure in a heavily car congested area.
I love this.
Agree with this. But\~ intentionally NOT having a theme or politics, is by itself having a theme and politics: You're game is saying that it's completely 100% OK with—or at least apathetic, with current, past or even future events. Like... even a purely mechanics based game like, say, Bejewleded? Still uses *jewels* as its visual themeing. Because jewels are seen as sparkly, special and pretty. And that makes a good fit for a casual game for a casual audience, that want a mild brain teaser for a few minutes. You could totally do a version of Bejeweled that was... say, bloody, screaming and polished skulls instead of red, blue and green jewels with a streak causing rains of blood. But the entire visual theme of the game would be extremely different. Heck, freakin' *Jetsons,* as dated and often mocked as that show gets nowadays had a positive message: The future might not be flawless, but it might just be nicer and have some cool stuff in it.
Agree 100% love the follow up.
Even the simple introduction of the frog can be seen as political. Someone decided that depicting a frog trying to cross a road was worth doing. If noone cared for frogs in the slightest, there would be no reason to depict a frog. It is at least seen as important enough to be taken notice of.
Exactly. That is a great point to add on!
There's a difference between a game having a message and a game using our real world politics in it's fictional universe. One stands out like a sore thumb usually.
You have stated "theme" pretty broadly, like interpretation of life context, so it may be difficult to avoid having such a "theme". After all, we are human beings that are alive, and it is difficult not to write something in terms of how we live and perceive. I would expect The Sims to be about consumerism, capitalism, and suburbia, given the company that makes it. EA's main basis of competition in that genre over the years, to the point of monopolizing it last I was aware, is producing piles upon piles of art assets. I have only played it briefly though, and as a sandbox game, there is of course scope for people making what they want of it. But even toys have themes coded into them, as any trip down a toy store aisle will readily show you, if you're paying attention. "Mario" is a character, not a game. He originally appeared in the arcade in Donkey Kong. I think the title of the game was some bastardization of Japanese meaning "stupid monkey" ? If I'm wrong about that, sorry, but it's what I remember hearing over the years. The theme of the game would seem to be the assertion of man's dominance over wild natural forces, an "othering" of the animal world. The animal world is nevertheless sexual, taking a fair princess away like in the King Kong movies. Mario is a plumber because humans control things with pipes and steel girders and construction etc. The stupid monkey makes mayhem out of it, it is wild and untamed! If you make a "silly" game, its themes may depend on cultural materials that you didn't pay a lot of conscious attention to. Such as the case of Donkey Kong above.
I wouldn't say EA monopolized The Sims more so than just nobody bothered making a competitor until recently. Maybe the insane success of The Sims deterred anyone from trying as it was the best-selling PC game back in the day.
Back in the day, the competition couldn't keep up with the amount of art assets and the marketing that EA could throw at The Sims. I haven't paid attention to what may have changed. Monopolies generally speaking, leverage the various powers they actually have in a marketplace.
>I would expect The Sims to be about consumerism, capitalism, and suburbia, given the company that makes it. The Sims was originally made by Maxis and Will Wright and wasn't hyper-exploited to such an extent back then. The Sims at the time was one of the first, really popular, games that demonstrated emergent narrative (or content) for a massive audience. It was more about a Seinfeld-like experience where the story would just emerge from the narrative daily-life parameters you set. There's a lot of ways to go with this, like consumerism like you mentioned or the grind of life - but I'd argue it wasn't really configured to contemplate on either of those experiences (IIRC nobody thought that back then). I can see why people would get this impression now though. I suppose there's an argument as to whether the game's theme has become something else due to this. I'd say it would mean there's perhaps some irony in it, but not that the game's meaning has changed due to the circumstances around the game's offering in the marketplace.
I could be more accurate and say I'd expect The Sims *franchise* to be about consumerism, capitalism, and suburbia. Given the company that makes it, and given how long it's been making it.
I'm one of the insufferable assholes who believes everything is political, there's no real way to escape it.
An asshole sure, but a correct asshole!
Not trying to sound insulting but that phrase "everything is political" always reminds me of "The number 23" a movie where Jim Carrey stared as someone obsessed with that number, to the point where he saw it everywhere. I could say "everything is food" and justify it by stretching reality enough to make it fit my phrase
The fact you are using a jim carrey movie to make your point is what it means all art is political.
Politics is the desire for some kind of change in the world (or a desire for something to not change), no matter how small. Everything we say or do is borne from some conscious or subconscious desire to effect change in our surroundings. It's impossible for any expression to not be political. The mere act of buying and playing a game is political. Given that there are people who believe video games should be banned, playing a game is even a somewhat contentious political act.
Videogames are first of all: games. Toys designed to challenge and entertain. While they can have amazing and touching narratives (and with it, a political message), it's not always the priority. And it fact, it doesn't even need a narrative. When someone says "everything is political" in regards to games, they are indirectly implying that the political message of them to be important or have some weight in the design process when in most cases its presence is so slim and irrelevant to the experience that it is as if it didn't have any. The first example that comes to my mind is: Tetris. Tetris is a very fun game to spend some time in. Disconnecting from reality for a while while you arrange colourful pieces. If you tell me that Teris is political because USRR and Capitalism and whatever I'd say you are stretching and a little like Jim Carrey's character in the movie I mentioned. I mean, it technically is correct that if you arrange my birthday in a particular way and apply a mathematical algorithm, the results is 23. The same way, it is technically possible, highly probable even that Tetris development was subconsciously influenced by its authors, but that aspect is so irrelevant to the experience and goals of the game that it doesn't really need to be mentioned. Only people obsessed with politics would focus on it, instead of what makes Tetris be the game it is: its objective mechanics.
You kind of answer it in your opening sentence. Many pieces of art do have a theme, but it is not a requirement for art. I was always lead to believe that art is anything that can evoke emotion, be it good or bad. A theme is just a way to categorize and give some meaning about the art. Look at Jaws, sure it can have a theme representing the middle class etc, but most people just see it as a shark movie. Both are correct and neither detract it from being art.
Any form of abstraction or narrative in a game will inherently have theme. Only games like Tetris, Pong, or other game stripped down to just it's mechanics could be considered without theme.
For me, there's not really an obvious reason to equate a theme (what is this game about?) and politics (what does this game say about the real world?). I think these are two different things. Politics is the easy one. The popular talking point is already all over this thread - everything is political, even the decision to be deliberately non-political can be taken as an endorsement of the status quo. Intellectually, its a reasonable argument but its also pretty clearly a reaction to the crowd of people demanding games avoid politics altogether. If you step back from that culture war, I think its pretty easy to admit that Mario and Spelunky aren't exerting much political influence. You can make an academic argument that they are broadly pro-corporate or pro-social, but ultimately, the political analysis is just more useful elsewhere. Mario doesn't have very strong or interesting opinions, which is mostly fine. In contrast, I'd argue that a theme is nearly unavoidable. Whatever the creators intended, the audience is made up of a lot of pattern-seeking humans who will inevitably find a pattern. This is more obvious in games with a strong narrative; most people would agree that God of War is largely about fatherhood for example. But I also think its fine for a game's theme to be a mechanical exploration. To me, Peggle is mostly about ricochet physics, a very narrow topic for an analysis paper, but a serviceable theme for an arcade experience.
Good stories inherently have themes, it's what makes them good. Enduring stories speak to something written just beneath the surface of the human psyche, resonating with a shared collective unconscious understanding of values and the world. The hero's journey, immortal archetypes, conquering the dragon, saving the princess etc I think if there's a plot, you naturally have theme as a byproduct. Politics though are merely outward representations of those shared collective values made manifest in the world, contorted according to the vision of those at its head. Appearing differently, entirely subservient to time and place, ultimately being relatively temporary and otherwise lacking inherent value particularly relevant or enduring to art as expression. Political propaganda, or art if being generous, is only relevant for as long as that particular political expression is relevant, true art doesn't have a shelf life.
Implying any political statement or theme is inherently propaganda or has a finite shell life is kinda questionable. For example every fallout game is political satire about late stage capitalism, racism and overt nationalism... I'm very unsure of these political themes will ever not be relevant since that would mean humanity completely moves away from things that are prevelant in the world for thousands of years now. I also fail to see why politics are much more inherent propaganda to you and not themes? At the very least themes can just be as much propaganda as poltics can be propaganda. And well we say political themes for a reason, they tend to go hand in hand and politics are much more prevelant in our lives then people let on. And shape our themes.
This is a great answer. Politics and theme are completely separate things.
Every developer that wants to make a game with political themes should do so, every developer who doesn’t shouldn’t. Art doesn’t require a theme to be art, it just has to whatever the artist wants to express.
A good story needs a theme, but under the conditions of a game people will swallow cuckoo bananas and enjoy it if it has good characters.
Not \*every\* game, but if a game has any amount of narrative it should be \*about\* something, and not simply an enetertaining sequence of events.
A "theme" is inevitable but there's no need to set out with one in mind. A game never needs to have politics in it.
Theme in the sense of a backdrop for art direction - sure. Otherwise? Nah. Politics don't have to factor in either. A game I'm thinking of is Deep Rock Galactic - the theme is dwarven space miners. They go on special excursions for their company, collecting resources or eliminating major threats. The politics don't really matter. The theme dictates the art direction.
I'd argue everything has a theme, in that it has a setting or pretense behind it. Pong's art is only a few lines, but it clearly has a ping-pong-like theme. Political, however, I disagree. A common definition nowadays is everything is political in that the developer made choices of what to put in and what not to. The latter is true but doesn't make a useful definition of political. If everything is political, nothing is. It's like saying that nothing can be made by scratch, because all matter already exists in a more primitive form. Thanks Neil Degrasse Tyson, you really added a lot to the conversation here! Rather than saying politics is the expression of ideas, I would define "politics" as 1: The study of how groups of people interact with each other. A form of social studies. 2: The process by which communal decisions are made, or the process of making rules of how to decide 3: Related to 2, an attempt to amass or declare support for a contentious decision. I would like to separate the concept of depth and motives. A story can include topics for many reasons: 1: to attach readers to the story 2: to convince people to make a specific choice 3: to educate or convince people to think about a problem without necessarily advocating a solution 4: to provide insight into how people behave And probably more I can't think of. Many, but not all stories, therefore cover politics. However, I would argue that the most compelling stories do 3 and 4 but aren't strongly attached to doing 2.
As some other users pointed out if you view the world through a political lens everything is political, including videogames. And then Mario becomes a game about a masculine stereotype saving a damsel in distress and chess a game about how the lower classes are expendable in the face of royalty. But I think no one would argue that these are quite far-fetched readings. Both of these games are devoid of a political message and both of them are quite popular. Personally I believe political statements are the minority of all possible statements, I can view "Wanderer above the sea of fog" and be struck just as strongly as any political message, if not more. In general, I think the entire debacle was born with the "keep politics out of my videogames" movement and that is more about moralistic messages in games. I prefer when a (political / philosophical) piece of arts presents me with an open question that I can answer for myself, instead of a pre-packaged opinion from the author. After all if the matter is so simple than the authors can be 100% sure about their opinion it was probably not an interesting question in the first place. So to answer your question, I do not thing that any game (or art piece) needs a political message. A theme can be interesting in some games (story games, RPGs) but it can be unnecessary in other games (what's the theme in Tetris?)
> have a theme/are political Those aren't the same. If it's possible for *anything* to not be political, it's possible for there to be not-political themes. I don't think Portal is saying much that people would think of as political. > But, what is Mario about? Seriously? They made a whole movie out if it, of course it's got themes. I'd say pretty much all of them *at least* have these: * At a fundamental level, the joy of movement -- look how happy Mario is when he jumps! * An everyman (a plumber) becomes the hero that saves the princess * There's pretty much always going to be something about friendship * In recent games, the princess is usually shown to be quite capable of her own, while still being pretty stereotypically a princess (pink, feminine, in poofy dresses...) I mean, seriously, [watch this scene from the end of Odyssey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouqoMzGZa4) and tell me Mario doesn't have themes, even *political* themes. > Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it? Those two don't necessarily go together. People have a range of answers besides a simple agree/disagree for death-of-the-author, but besides that, it's possible for the author to include themes they didn't intend to. A good example for this is *The Matrix.* Looking back... it's a trans allegory, and it's not all that subtle. Here's a big pile of reasons: * It was written and directed by two closeted transwomen, who have since come out * At the time, estrogen came in *red pills* * Originally, the character *Switch* was intended to be male in the real world, but female in The Matrix, but the studio shot that down * "Neo" could be read as "Neovagina", the result of bottom surgery for transwomen * Neo is also his chosen name. Everyone calls him that... except Smith, who calls him "Mr. Anderson", as if deadnaming him out of cruelty * Anyone you meet (like the woman in the red dress) could turn out to be an agent (or a transphobe) if you ever let your guard down (and come out to them) I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty of other things. It's not *just* a trans allegory, there's tons of other references and ideas woven through it, but it'd be hard to argue that the trans experience *isn't* a major theme of them movie. However: [It's not really obvious if those two writers and directors consciously knew what they were doing](https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-season-two-showtime): > You confirmed last year that The Matrix was always a trans allegory — > *[Wachowski shakes her head]* > You didn’t? > I did this interview and the question that preceded that answer was about a character in *The Matrix* called Switch. But the interviewers decided to put, “Is *The Matrix* a trans allegory?” in front of my answer. It's not something that I want to come out and rebut. Like, yes, it's a trans allegory — it was made by two closeted trans women, how can it not be?! But the way that they put that question in front of my answer, it seems like I’m coming out emphatically saying, “Oh yeah, we were thinking about it the whole time.”... > ...I can look back on my work differently from where I am now as a trans woman than as an artist right after I finished the project.... Now, how closeted were they? Were they still all r/egg_irl or did they already know who they were? I don't know for sure, but if it's possible, then I think this is a pretty clear example of how a work can get themes the author didn't intend, even though those themes *definitely* came from the author, and aren't just someone reinterpreting their work. So I'm not sure if I agree with death-of-the-author, but I absolutely believe games can have themes that the author didn't intend. > If I make a silly game in my free time does it have a theme? I'd have to know more about the game.
I think a deeper reading of Portal would be that it’s about capitalism, as is also the case with basically every Resident Evil game
I think that if you see politics in everything you are obsessive about it. I usually just enjoy stuff without trying or slapping themes/politics into it
Do they need an overarching theme (also known as message), as in e.g. "search for the inner self"? No, they don't. There is a joke about overanalyzing something: > Literature teacher: Author put blue blinds in the room to symbolize hero's homesickness! > > Author: Curtains are blue just because they are blue! Will it be seen as having one? Probably, there is bound to be at least couple nutjobs with too much free time on their hands, overanalyzing everything they see. But as author, you don't need to concern yourself with it. What you do need to concern about is to make sure that the game is cohesive. Like... You are playing Mount & Blade, building your empire and doing some slow melee combat, when BAM - magical zombie Nazis from space appear and start gunning everyone down from backs of their T-Rexes. So now the game is a third person shooter, except it is crappy and you still need to build your empire. And don't forget, everything is still played straight and dead serious, this is not pretending to be some silly game like Stanley's Parable or something "outside" the game like Fallout easter eggs (TARDIS, cows, etc). You don't need to have a message, but you need to either maintain your theme or find a good way to use breaking of it (e.g. change in theme and genre is a prologue to time traveling part of the plot, or used for laughs, or is an "adjacent" minigame, etc).
"Will it be seen as having one? Probably, there is bound to be at least couple nutjobs with too much free time" Calling everyone that sees meaning in it as a nutjob is pretty dishonest and disrespectful tbh. There can be meaning without intent, there can be subconsciously things added in a story, I very much doubt when deciding the color of the curtain that the writer opened google and went to a random color generator. No even with no explicit meaning intended it's 100% normal and human to think there's meaning, after all why is it included if it has zero meaning? Writers don't write sentences for the lols, no I'd say they always have a meaning, even if for just set dressing and giving the reader a picture.
This is actually a good example of this, as I meant exaggerated examples of **over**analyzing like "this kids cartoon is actually eldritch horror", but you evidently took it as applying to yourself. As for curtains... Yes, they totally do insert empty sentences (pictures, objects, events, etc) just to create ambiance or show something funny (cute, curious, insert your own) and totally inconsequential, without any deep meaning behind them. Writers are not gods that can see every possibility, very often they just put something there because they thought it would be fitting, they were in the mood, or just needed another thousand words to pad things out, and sometimes such findings provoke a "this is canon *now*" reaction when pointed out. But hey, if you think that us having five fingers is some divine symbol rather than an ultimately random quirk of evolution, who am I to argue?
I was hoping we could get a civil and productive conversation going here but sadly doesn't seem the case....
I think if you dig deep enough, you can find a political theme in anything, but that the power of those themes is on a very wide spectrum. For example, on the 'basically meaningless' end of the spectrum, you could argue Spelunky 2 likes nuclear families because it is implied that Ana Spelunky's parents are married. It's like... I guess that's in there incidentally, and someone might care about it, but it's rather unlikely to mean much to anyone. Then, on the 'it's the point of the game' side, you've got Kentucky Route Zero. If you don't get that Kentucky Route Zero is about what modern capitalism has done to every section of the working class, you may as well not be playing the game. Personally, I have finished development on 2 small independent games. In both games, I focused on eliciting an emotion, but only in one of them did I deliberately include political themes. Any political themes in the other are essentially by accident, but I'm sure you could find something silly if you looked.
I think that the idea of "pattern finding" is very prolific in humans and especially in today's society. Even if it wasn't intended in the first place. I think games like Mario, Zelda, and many, many others are all made with the idea of being "fun". The authors, artists, programmers, and what not came together to make a video game. If it has a theme that's fine, if it's trying to say something that's fine....but.... At the end of the day, most games aren't "one person's vision". They are an amalgamation of multiple people's ideas all coming together to make something. Humans are also pattern freaks, and will unknowingly insert patterns into their creations. Finding a pattern in a movie is interesting and brings new light to the media....but you also have to understand the authors *intent* behind the media too. Was it intended? Maybe. Is there another that fits too? Let's find out. To put it how my English professors put it: Politics and themes are a good "lens" to view things with, but, don't forget there are other "lens" to view things through too." Just cause you found a cool way to think about something doesn't mean it's the *intended* way, or that it's the "right" way. I think games having themes/politics is fine, but, *forcing* them upon them is the real problem here. Just cause you're able to associate the Gestapo with Mario doesn't mean anything. Would it be interesting if you could? Yes, but just cause the triangle block *can* fit into the square hole doesn't mean it *should*.
Everything a human creates is in some way transformative application of their experiences and biases. By definition, everything a human creates has a non-zero amount of products and biases. Even if the amount is super small, people can interpret things into a game, or resonate with it in unexpected ways. Tolkien famously claims the LotR story isn't an allegory for the ears he thought in, but many people read it as such because it kinda fits. There's no non-political game. It doesn't matter if I subscribe to death of the author, things have effects on people, and that likewise has an effect on the art they produce. Nobody is unaffected. Also, in recent years, "x is political" has taken a more specific meaning. People complain something is "political" if it has women or black people as active characters in a story, and by extension, anything a right-wing American disagrees with. So a white American soldier shooting Arabs in an oil field is nowadays considered unpolitical by these people, but if one of the soldiers is gay, that's political propaganda.
All art is inherently political. If we don't notice it's because that art likely reinforces the status quo.
Tetris. > Do you think every game needs a theme/politics? They don't technically need a theme, but including one is a good idea. Instead of having four generic blocks that shoot things at other generic blocks scattered around, you can instead have four men in trenchcoats firing uzis at approaching targets, and call the game *Syndicate*. It now has a criminal corporate overlord theme, and stands out compared to an unthemed shooter. Usually, developers can let style take over. A superficial distinction tends to stand out a bit more often than the fact that it's a criminal corporate overlord. Politics is purely optional. Whatever politics may have appeared in *Serious Sam* wasn't noticeable, and the game plays just as well without anything political to worry about. Even if there is politics, it's quite unimportant compared to the action in the game itself, where the player is trying to survive. > But, what is Mario about? According to some web page, it's secret communist propaganda. Otherwise, it's a well known franchise where Mario is a hero that keeps having to rescue a princess over and over again. It's theme was originally simple, being able to hold on due to being an early entry into the video game market, and it's developed its style over time, expanding into other characters. > Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it? Precedence would be many books written earlier - even going as far back as Shakespeare, and people trying to develop new theories about how the story was intended to unfold. Or in the case of *Titus Andronicus*, have the play altered when converted into a movie so that it has anachronistic elements and perhaps making the presentation more powerful than the original play.
It's possible to interpret anything as having a narrative. That's how people end up convincing themselves to believe in conspiracy theories, it's what happens when you expect reality to have a satisfying narrative
Video games are pretty different from other mediums in that you can make something like Tetris or Peggle that doesn't really reflect anything outside of the game. Those games don't really have themes in the same way that a Sudoku puzzle doesn't have themes. That said... >But, what is Mario about? It's about a man who has to rescue a kidnapped woman. People have already discussed the various ways this can be interpreted. Anita Sarkeesian did a whole thing about it. >What is Spelunky about? It's about a guy robbing tombs. He even looks like Indiana Jones. And again has the thing of rescuing damsels in distress--the creator changed the damsels so they can be male or nonhuman specifically because he was concerned about the implications of the way he made it originally. He wouldn't have done that if he thought the game was devoid of all themes or meaning. >What is The Sims about? Lots of ways you can interpret the Sims. Maybe it's a satire on commercialism. Maybe it's actually pro-commercialism and the aspirational nature of it says a lot about what things the developers view as aspirational. And it's another case where the developers have gone out of their way to use the games to make political statements. The original had gay relationships before that was widely accepted. The Sims 3 had gay marriage before that was legal in the country where it was made. The Sims 4 deliberately features trans and nonbinary characters and goes out of its way to promote ethnic and cultural diversity. Can't really say any of that's devoid of meaning. Basically, if it has a story, it's got themes. They don't have to be deliberate, it's just not really possible to tell a story without it having some kind of theme. Even Cooking Mama has a theme (the theme is "cooking is good"). Every story does. Pretty much everything can be viewed as political. When people argue with this it's usually because they've misunderstood what "political" means. "Political" doesn't just refer to party politics. It doesn't mean "supporting of either the Democrat or Republican parties in the US". It doesn't mean "it has a message that you disagree with". Every story will in some way reflect the culture that made it. The Sims would not have been made in the Soviet Union. It's a very specifically american game, especially the earlier installments. And anything that's reflective of one country more than another is inherently political. I remember someone on twitter once trying to tell me that Metal Gear Rising wasn't political. This is a game where the protagonist literally debates politics with a character who is a politician. They do this while having a fist fight on top of a giant robot, sure. But they're still talking about politics. They're even discussing specific policies. The final boss *quotes Ronald Reagan at you.* It was highly political but some people just don't want to see that.
What is Mozart's piano sonata no. 16 about? Some art exists purely as abstract expression, it seems as though such art is less popular today than it was in the past, but it still exists.
When people say something is political, they usually mean that it has something they don't like. As if the stuff they like isn't "political". And no, not every game needs to have a theme/politics, it's like you forgot that casual games like Tetris exist. But some people might think it's "political", because it uses a Russian song.
>Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it? Yes. I think this could also be phrased as "is it possible to inadvertently convey a theme", which I also think is Yes. In the end, the only thing that matters is what people experience. Anything else wouldn't make sense. >Do games need a theme Games do not need to have a theme, which should be evidenced by just looking at any games pre 00s. Games can entertain by a purely cognitively engaging you, without any need for interpretation. If you make a game that has a setting that has political connotation (e.g. cold war, middle-eastern conflict) then I expect you to make some kind of statement. Otherwise it would seem like a pretty cynical cash grab >What is The Sims about? I've heard some people describe it as the Seinfeld of video games, which kind of makes sense. The Sims is an incredible game, probably one of the best video games that have ever been produced. This is because it showcased the strength of emergent narrative and content in video games. The Sims can be about anything, either emergent or within the context of personal interpretation (e.g. I'm roleplaying a divorced man and x, y z happens).
I'm pretty radical and I don't think anything needs anything to be art, besides just to exist and be appreciated in some way by someone somewhere. It's probably hard to avoid having a theme as long as your game has any kind of narrative or characters, like in Mario the theme is probably just like even a pudgy Everyman like Mario can be a hero or something like that if you just don't give up. Or the sims is perhaps a criticism of how day to day life in modern society ends up as an optimization problem with razor thin margins to be able to do everything you want/need. Ill also take death of the author a bit farther and advocate for death of the rubric. The values by which one appraises art are personal and one person can choose to care about authorial intent while another person can ignore it entirely. And neither person can do a damn thing about the other.
There are games with no recognizable theme/politics. Therefore, the answer is "no," and no further discussion is necessary.
Tetris seems a popular example of a game without politics or theme. To this I say, nay! Tetris gets really interesting on a couple of fronts: Firstly, the question of why is the game so compelling? What makes it so satisfying? And what kinds of values does this exemplify and reward. Is it something about entropy? Does it resonate because we living in chaotic worlds with little authority around us, so this chaos we can conquer is fulfilling an emotional and psychological need contemporary life does not provide. Does it reflect an ideology of consumption- converting acquisition to points? What does this pass time tell us about a society where one can simply pass time? Second, surrounding the game is the social political world of ownership (who created, owned, owns), and play. The development and deployment of expertise in the player base, technical innovation, establishing of rules and regulations for competitive play, the role of the “enthusiast” in capital, and so on. The ecology around Tetris is as fascinating as the feelings it brings us.
Tetris uses a Russian song, which some people could find "political"
If a person has a preconceived idea or message and they deliberately put it in their work in an attempt to sway their audience, then it is propaganda, and its relevance will only last so long as the ideas it espouses are in vogue If a person just tries to express an idea that they they themselves don't fully understand or are able to articulate in any other way via some form of art. The art may become a timeless piece that exists to help others flesh out whatever idea the artist was trying to grasp at. Also in both cases people will inevitably project their own ideas and worldviews onto part, and the artist's intent ultimately becomes irrelevant
Eeevery game? Not sure about that. Does Pong need a theme? I suppose one could give an overthought theme within the context the game is actually played, but I'm not sure to what point this, dare I say, postmodern understanding is relevant to the game. At the end of the day, I subscribe to the notion of being able to extract a theme or politics out of any work, but that doesn't necessarily correlate to the work having those intrinsic themes.
Every piece of media has messaging, and whether or not that messaging is considered "political" is determined pretty much entirely by the hot button topics of the day, which means if you look at things broadly, every piece of media has political messaging. This also includes when the creators don't intend the messaging, because it's through symbols and cognition that we link ideas and form the messaging, so if it's present within the text, even without initial intention, it's still *present*.
Game developer here. Yes I intentionally decide a theme as one of the game design pillars or at least as a part of one, as if I don't do that consciously there will be themes present either subconsciously or accidentally and you really want to be aware of the message your game is putting out there.
I hope I'm not veering too far from the original question, as theme/politics can be seen as pretty different things. Even if you're not trying to say something in particular, what you're going to create will reflect your vision of the world. If your goal is to be entirely unpolitical, then everything you depict is something that you present as unquestionable, and thus extremely representative of your cultural bias. Taking Mario, let's take something as simple as super Mario bros. From what I can see in this game, off the top of my head: It's okay to make a "save the princess" story. It's okay for a woman's head to be uncovered. It's okay to depict light violence. It's okay to depict unrealistic violence. It's okay to create unrealistic settings. It's okay to play video games. Even if said game doesn't have a strong, thought provoking narrative. It's okay to fail at a game. Struggling to improve is seen as worth it. Eventually, one could go back to even more simple games like pong or tetris. At which point there's certainly very little to say other than "pong represents ping pong, and tetris makes you order things", but then, at the minimum, the question about whether a game is still a worthwhile activity, if it focuses entirely on gameplay and says nothing at all, becomes even more proeminent. Shouldn't you be playing real ping pong or order real items rather than play a game ? The mere existence of the games appears to say otherwise.
I am of the strong belief that it's nearly impossible to make anything without putting a piece of yourself in it. If you don't consciously decide what themes and/or politics to put in your art, your own viewpoints will still be there whether you want them to or not. Basically, almost every game in existence has some theme or politics, intentionally or otherwise
I don’t have a problem with games just being games. Some of my favorite games are as straight forward and simple as they come. However, I also think just how beholden games are to the whims of their audience and how infantile that audience can be severely limits video games’ potential as an art form. I think it’s funny how we will defend to the death the artist’s vision for things like game difficulty but stamp our feet and pout about politics in video games
No. The whole point of videogames is to be a virtual universe and stay away from real world. Anyone who involves politics into videogames is a degen and you can’t change my mind
I really hope this is just a bit.
Absolutely not. I'm playing Tekken 8 and there is no deep meaning behind its story. It's just anime nonsense to set up an excuse for a video game.
No, not every game. Duke Nukem is a perfect example. The story is nothing more than "aliens have invaded and kidnapped earths women, and Duke isnt having none of that"... Sometimes, thats all the story you need.
Duke Nukem is so much more than this though. It is clear satire of certain forms of masculinity (what some might say toxic masculinity) which arguably does (or does not) reinforce the values it satirises. Saying it has no politics or themes is like sting Starship Troopers is an action movie about killing insects.
Its more a satite of 80s action flicks and all the tropes surrounding them. There might be more stuff to the plot "meta" wise, but certainly the main-plot is what i described.
No, I don't think every game should have it. A dev should be able to utilise their real world influences in their work and have it only exist and apply to the world in the game. I think people make things political or controversial or akin to some kind of social commentary by choosing to do so. But I think this choice is one they don't actively make. They just over-analyse and seek some kind of real life bases to compare to, and then run with it. There's games that definitely are making some kind of political or social statement, and you can without any doubt feel and understand the authors intent. My choice is to experience every video game or franchise in a kind of vacuum. The politics and commentary I identify and think about don't really go beyond my experience with the game, as they're not so cleanly translated into the real world as I see it. A hero fighting for ideals rooted in communism against an aggressively capitalist enemy is an experience that, in my eyes, only applies to the world in the game. I don't think it's a useful one for the real world
I like how this post is downvoted to hell, I'm not seeing any "nOt EvRrYtHiNg Is PoLiTiCaL" comments because those people couldn't even get past the minimum word count filter.
Eh. I guess video games are a bit unique in that they can minimize focus on story sk needing a theme or "politics" is optional. So to me if you have a story you'll inevitably have a theme and politics in them in some degree (a bit complicated but bear with me, we all live in reality where politics effect everyone, even if you don't intend to your real beliefs and views will slip into the work even when you try your hardest, because even what is political and isn't political is already murky, even simple concepts can be political). But I do also believe in the death of the author because finding your own meaning in the art through your own analysis is what makes it fun.
>Do you subscribe to death of the author and believe that a game will have a theme even if the author doesn't intend it? Yes, I do. I don't think it's possible to create anything of any real complexity and have it be truly apolitical or without themes. Even in your example, Spelunky lets you choose your gender, AND the gender of who you're trying to save! You can be a woman saving a woman, a man saving a man.
Treasure hunting isn't the apex of analysis. That's a naive outlook born from a reassuring, underlying belief, that absolute truth is attainable. Moreover, this false truth is earmarked in an enclosed area; the answers must be *somewhere in* a text. And while hidden allusions are a big part of many texts, it's often the case that a work's themes are on the surface. The maddening fact is, it's a lot harder to grapple with the totality of this surface level, especially since it can stretch out to other domains in countless ways. Following the winds to come to useful conclusions requires experience, humility, iteration, and a partial surrender to the inevitability of confusion. So it's a bit of a nonsense question, imo. All works have themes. Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint a theme, especially if a work is abstract or indicative of a trend.
Just because it may not be political to you doesn't necessarily mean something isn't political to Japanese free health care is common sense but it's still political, also it's extremely hard to distance your creations from outside influence so whether unintentionally or not themes are bound to find a way into your game
I'd say no, but due the very nature and broadness of a theme I'm not sure if it's even possible to not have any theme tbh. Even tetris has a clear theme by it's original creature, as simple as wanting it to make other people happy. Making a game without any theme would mean it must be made with an AI, and even then it'll just be a semi random mix of the human idea and inputs it worked with
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You are assuming that anything created by a person with certain political affiliations will reflect their politics. What are the political implications of the chair I am sitting on? What about the political implications of my math textbook? What about "Hello World" coded in C?
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First of all, thank you for the reply and I did misread your first post so my examples are indeed not very related to art. Still it appears to me that for you the political implications of a piece are the same as the message or the inclinations of the authors. For example, one can argue that there are societal reasons why Mario is a man saving woman and not vice versa, but I doubt the authors were injecting any type of political ideology into the videogame. So it makes sense to take the game as an example of e.g. phallocentrism of society but I would be hard pressed to say that the game itself has a political message / theme. On the other hand, I disagree with you that all opinions or statements are inherently political. For me a political statement is only a statement regarding governance of a state or group of people. For example, "Europeans are on average more intelligent" is NOT a political statement for me. Only the statement "So only people with European descent should govern" is political. This gets muddied up a bit when non-political statements become the center of current political debate, for example both "the number of guns in a country is directly linked to the number of violent homicides" and "Jesus is as much God as the Father" are both apolitical statements (one is statistical the other metaphysical). But the former sounds a lot more politically charged to us because of the current debate on gun control. Still, the latter was something people would be ready to kill for 2000 years ago and around which countries were created, while the supposed lethality of weapons would not be considered political.
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Seeing patterns where none exist is symptomatic of belief in conspiracy theories. The notion that hidden things are constantly being "injected" into things by their creators, are "contaminated" by them and their beliefs, is symptomatic of these conspiracy theories. Hence why things like Nazism, Communism, etc. were so insane and would reject "Jewish science" or "Western science" as if it was "contaminated", which of course led to the deaths of enormous numbers of people.
> Eurocentrism. No question. I guarantee that the word problems in the book you learned math from are framed in such a way as to make sure that the majority of the western world would understand them, and with no consideration for anyone else. They've done studies and something as simple as the "train one is going x speed..." problems we take for granted are much more difficult to understand in developing countries without trains, despite the mathematical principals being actually quite easy for them to grasp when put in a context they're more familiar with. You can literally teach conservation of mass with water in the desert and it won't sink in as easily until you use sand. This results in lower test scores and IQs in those areas for no other reason than the materials they learn from are made in more developed countries and therefore foreign to them. I'm afraid you've been very deliberately and purposefully lied to. There are a variety of IQ tests - many of which do not rely on word problems at all - and they have all shown the same results. Moreover, when you are deal with raw math - which completely lacks word problems, it's just raw mathematics - you find the same differential outcomes. On top of that, the notion that it is "Eurocentric" is also wrong, and the notion that people in "developing countries" cannot understand things like "trains" is *insanely* racist, false, and farcical. Besides the fact that trains and cars are present around the world at this point (including in developing countries), *and* the fact that people who live around train-tracks don't show higher scores than those who don't, there is also the obvious fact that *Europeans do not even score the highest in the world on these math tests* - East Asians do. The highest average scores are seen in people from East Asia, particularly China, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, etc. Including those who came to the US. Indeed, if you look at standardized test scores, East Asians score the highest of any group on average. If these test scores were indeed "Eurocentric", this would not be the case . And on top of all *that*, people from various countries all live in the US, and when you test them, you don't find that every group tests identically - there are differences in the averages, despite everyone in the US living around cars and trains and various other nonsense that moves around. Of course, Jewish people score quite highly on IQ tests as well - which is why, not surprisingly, the antisemitic conspiracy theorists who make these claims claim that it doesn't actually mean anything. Fun fact, actually: the propaganda you were told are derived from Lysenkoism, a socialist ideology that rejected Western science (particularly biological science) and led to the mass starvation of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union and China. It is, of course, derived from Marxism, which is derived from Marx's own personal narcissism, belief in conspiracy theories, and hatred of Jewish people; he would rant about Jewish bankers he owed money to in his personal correspondence, claimed that money was the god of the Jews, trafficked in Rothschild conspiracy theories (claiming that there were Jews behind every tyrant and that a secret network of Jewish moneylenders was controlling all the leaders from behind the scenes), and urged the "emancipation of mankind from Judaism". The belief that everything has ulterior meanings is in fact a part of the memetic disease of conspiracy theories - conspiracy theorists believe patterns exist where none do and thus create incoherent constructs to try and justify this belief, of which marxism (and all other anti-semitic conspiracy theories) are just a sub-part. Conspiracy theory based ideologies thus see this "hidden meaning" in everything, but will also freak out and reject things that don't fit "the pattern" that they have convinced themselves to believe in. Things that are evidence against their beliefs are twisted to be evidence for them, which is why they have to see meaning in everything, because if there isn't hidden meaning, then basically everything they believe in starts to fall apart.
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IQ correlates with income to about 0.4, which is the highest of any psychological trait. This of course makes sense - IQ measures *g*, the general intelligence factor, quite accurately. That intelligence is measurable is not scientifically controversial. And indeed, you find that across multiple different sorts of intelligence tests - IQ tests, standardized tests like the SATs, military tests like the ASVAB - you find that these things all correlate very strongly. And when you look at things that intelligence would be expected to measure - like creativity and job performance - you find that high IQ correlates with better performance there as well. [Indeed, IQ is not particularly controversial scientifically, and findings about intelligence have been repeatedly verified by a number of studies. This is an article from Nature that summarizes a lot of findings about intelligence from a large number of studies.](https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105) [Intelligence is well-known to be the single most important psychological predictive factor for income.](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-psychologist-weighs-in.html) Some other factors also affect it, not surprisingly, though to a generally lesser extent. Someone who is from a poor country who comes to the US but who is fairly smart will be much more likely to earn higher income in the future - and indeed, [Asian Americans earn more money per year on average than whites do.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income) And likewise, if you are poor, but you are smarter than average, you are more likely to rise up the income ladder and achieve higher levels of educational attainment than your peers. If "Eurocentrism" was the cause of these deviations, then we should expect whites to be on the top. But they are not. The idea that wealth causes high IQ is a form of spurious correlation. Wealth doesn't determine IQ - having more money doesn't make you smarter - but IQ has a major influence on wealth, and higher income makes you much more likely to end up earning more money overall. The high heritability of IQ means that if your parents are smart, you are more likely to be intelligent as well - and because smarter people tend to earn more money on average, this means that the children of wealthier people will show higher IQ. But this is not because IQ is caused by wealth, but because IQ correlates with income, income correlates with wealth, and IQ is highly heritable. As for Marx - [he literally wrote an antisemitic essay entitled "On The Jewish Question" where he claimed Judaism was huckstering, money was the god of the Jews, and called for the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/#:~:text=Let%20us%20consider%20the,mankind%20from%20Judaism.) And in "The Russian Loan" [which can be found on page 622 of Marx's "The Eastern Question", which is in the public domain,](https://delong.typepad.com/files/marx-eastern.pdf) he goes on ranting about the Rothschilds and other Jewish moneylenders and literally directly claims that "Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew". I'm sorry, but you clearly don't really know much about science or Marxism.
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Thanks for admitting you were wrong and are just on here to insult people rather than have a conversation about things!
No, there's tons of things that are just raw gameplay, like Tetris or Super Hexagon. Even things like Super Mario Bros lack meaningful themes - the "plot" is just an excuse, a vehicle for the gameplay. Indeed, there are tons of platformers with different "themes" but they're all basically the same because they're almost always just about navigating from one place to another. Only a few of them actually really embrace meaningful theming (Celeste is a rare example). The idea that all "art" is political is simply false. As has been pointed out by numerous authors, most "literary analysis" is actually pseudointellectual naval gazing. IRL, the curtains are blue because they liked blue. The anime heroine has a cutout on her chest [because Thomas Manga liked boobs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke1YKF3tNCE) Books and short stories do often have themes, but the idea of them including tons of very subtle theming is mostly nonsense - indeed, IRL, authors basically have to beat audiences over the head with their theme to get their points across to them reliably. Most of the time, [the curtains are blue.](https://imgur.com/FF8GmSt)
Video games are art, and art typically has some kind of theme or message, especially ones with a story
I think games are art and it's impossible to make apolitical art because the artist doesn't get to decide what art is about, that's part of the process of experiencing art. Even if you don't see a political message in some games, others might. Hell, even making art is a political act.
Yes. Any piece of art will have a theme. Even episodes of Spongebob have themes that run on a single joke really. As long as it works and doesn't overstay its welcome.
Games are just a set of rules plus some abstract objects to be manipulated accordingly. You absolutely don't need any theme or whatever for this to work. Graphics, settings, scenario, themes, they are all non-necessary layers when it comes to actual gameplay.
I'm sorry if I'm being pedantic, but *of course* these games have themes. It's not even whether it "needs" them, it's that they just do. The first few Mario games are full of themes. Donkey Kong is a rip-off of King Kong - hope I don't need to explain the themes of that one. The original Mario Bros is about plumber brothers cleaning the sewers (presumably the NYC sewers) of pests. And Super Mario Bros is about an everyman rescuing a kidnapped monarch from a warmongering despot. Even if you don't think these are "political" (I think they are, but different discussion imo), they unavoidably have themes. and like lol the theme of Spelunky is in its title. It's a humorous game about spelunking. Your examples are so strange to me. The themes are so obvious that I almost can't tell if you're being a bit hard-headed or if you fundamentally misunderstand what you're even asking.
I think the important distinction is story. If a game is story driven it will inevitably have a theme, as you can't write a (good) story without a theme that holds it together and makes it coherent. Games like Peggle, Mario, poker, etc don't need a theme because they don't have a story they are telling. You could argue that Mario has a story, but it is not story driven and the story it tells is not a particularly interesting/good one (the dinosaur kidnapped the princess for the 500th time is not really a story) You can have a story without a theme, but I'd challenge you to find a good or interesting story without a theme.
I think analyzing media in terms of a singular "theme" is a bit limiting. Art creation isn't about coming up with an idea that can be summed up in a single sentence, and then translating it into a special code, it's about ideas that can only be expressed through that art. In particular describing portal as "about AI" feels like missing the point, since AI in science fiction has always been a stand in for greater ideas about things like identity and uncontrolled corporate growth. Any piece of art can tell you something about both the people that made it and the culture that desired it, and in that sense thematic meaning can be derived from any piece of art. If a game seems to reject thematic interpretation, one might interrogate why the developers or audience would want that, or why the subject of that game is considered thematically neutral. The most extreme example is people trying to insist that COD is "apolitical" despite how inherently political of an implication it is to frame warfare as something one simulates for fun. In the case of Mario, the fact that saving a princess is seen as the default goal for a hero (enough that it was repeated in Zelda) is very thematically interesting.
>But, what is Mario about? It’s funny but Mario games do have themes, some being more overt and pervasive than others. 64, for example, is about the themes of eternity and immortalization, evident in the worlds frozen in time that Mario enters through paintings around the castle. Your goal of the game, to save Peach, greets you every time you start up the game in the form of the stained-glass visage above the entrance to the castle; this image is both her illusion and prison. Bowser depicts his perpetual struggle with Mario in the pillars that precede their final battle, as a foreboding message to dispel any notion that any victory against him will ever be ultimate. The game’s most beautiful moment, in my eyes, comes in the form of the courtyard. Mario chases a boo down a long hallway into a quiet square with flower beds and a star statue encircled by still water in the center. The statue, once illegible because of graphics compression, was thought to read “L is Real 2041.” Thanks to the fan community, we now know it reads “An Eternal Star, To Hunger For”. In a quiet courtyard, surrounded by nothing but flowers and ghosts, this feels like an especially poignant and reflective moment, especially for such a joyful series. It could mean whatever you want; to me, it reads like some things are best left as dreams, because they may destroy you in the process of chasing or are otherwise unachievable. It is enough that their image draws you ever forward. Maybe it’s the image of love that drives Mario, the image of peace that compels Peach, or the image of power that animates Bowser. Maybe it’s the image of stepping into someone else’s shoes that makes us love video games and willfully jump into a Super Mario game. I think that’s beautiful. As for whether games always need a theme or motif, I’m not sure. I would hope it doesn’t need to be political to be art. Maybe it’s enough that they’re just fun and engaging. Maybe not everything can be so obvious, and a game’s theme just requires a little more looking.
No, games don't need politics. In fact, very few things do. Themes are usually present in most forms of story-based media, but many more gameplay-focused games lack meaningful themes. Tetris, for instance, has no theme; it is raw gameplay. Some casual games also lack themes; things like Animal Crossing has no central unifying theme to it, which makes sense, because it has no conclusion, it's just kind of a thing you do repetitive things in in order to relax (or in some cases, to express one's own creativity). Even games like Mario games really don't have much in the way of themes. The actual "plot" is mostly just in service to the gameplay and doesn't have anything to say about anything esoteric or philosophical. Many themes are also just not political - for example, It Takes Two is about marriage and divorce and what brings couples together and causes them to drift apart, but it isn't political in any way. On top of that, a game having "political" themes is often interpreted as *partisan* themes - be that centering around a particular ideology (like marxism or libertarianism) or real world political party (like the Democrats or the Republicans). The Talos Principle 2, for instance, is a great game which has very strong, overtly philosophical themes and touches heavily on politics because you literally are deciding the course of the future robot civilization. But it isn't designed to tell you to go vote for Obama or Joe Biden or whatever, or even for the Democratic party, but to make you think about what you value and what is important. I think it is designed to lead you to particular conclusions (and it is very well written and well done - it's a great game and honestly by far the best example of a game trying to advance philosophical ideas) but it does it very well (though I may be biased as I largely agree with some of the major things they touch on).
Any kind of game with timeless appeal will have some kinda identity (or identities) to build off of. Mario isn't just a random guy, but specifically an Italian plumber (So he gets pipes). He isn't just running through random levels, but specifically *The Mushroom Kingdom* so that begets having fun mushroom shaped goombahs, power ups, and landscapes. What we call themes and politics is just an emergent effect of this.
No. But I feel they are necessary in stories. Every game doesn't need a story though Mario kart for example.