There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp) progressive who was then subsequently harassed, but their head-scratching reading of Helldivers 2 as a “non-political” game is worth examining.
The only thing that makes sense is that these players have the shallowest of surface-level readings of the game. You are a patriotic soldier serving Super Earth. You must kill bugs and evil robots trying to hurt your brothers-in-arms and innocent citizens. There are no storylines to insert progressive causes into, everyone wears helmets so no “forced diversity.” Therefore, no politics.
Of course, this is…wildly off the mark, as Helldivers 2 is about the most blatantly obvious satire of militaristic fascism since the film that inspired it, Starship Troopers.
This seems like some made up shit. For all 5 people who don’t seem to get the stinging nature of this game’s satire, I just can’t bring myself to care.
Just have a look at the steam discussions for the game. It’s a cesspool of edgy 14 years olds yelling about politics in their video games.
Yes, I am aware that this describes the steam discussions for most games.
It’s actually refreshingly different for Overwatch Steam reviews, where people mostly just complain about 6v6 being gone and post Widowmaker ASCII porn.
Lemmy is literally the other side of that coin though. A bunch of 14 year olds yelling “fuck capitalism/America” in every thread.
I have zero actual data to back this up but I think the average age on lemmy is much higher than in the steam discussions. A normal discussion between people with opposing viewpoints can somewhat happen on lemmy. On steam it usually immediately devolves into name calling and “edgy” comments