Lately I have been watching a friend play BioShock Infinite, something to which I paid little attention at the time of its release. At first the setting and the story were attracting me, as they pertain to my field of interest… but later in the story, after acquainting us with an archetypal capitalist, I noticed that the story was getting a little ‘darker’—in a familiar way—and it soon devolved into what I feared: another subplot about how much revolution sucks.
I’ve seen it already in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Metro 2033, so I know how it goes: first the writers lure you in with a display of the prerevolutionary situation, and at first they portray the revolutionaries positively, but as the climax approaches the revolutionaries go around suddenly committing atrocities without any clear rhyme or reason, nothing can be done to prevent it, ordinary people hate it (so the revolutionaries abuse them too), and the lesson is that revolution is no better than the prerevolutionary situation.
Why do revolutionaries go through the trouble of making revolution? Not because the material conditions (whatever those are) made revolution inevitable, no. It’s because revolutionaries are stupid and unreasonable. Simple as that. That’s probably also why they commit atrocities, and also why they can’t figure out how to keep their supporters without resorting to coercion or violence.
The message, it seems, is an advertisement for conservatism: ‘Yes, we’ll admit that things may be awful now, but no matter how awful they may be, anything else would be worse, so just shut up and do nothing.’ They don’t state it outright—possibly because of how embarrassing it would look—but that is the only conclusion that I can draw. (Otherwise, the only alternatives are either that the writers wanted to subject innocent people to their angsty, immature whining, or they simply wanted to waste their time, both of which would be bafflingly unwise of them.)
Is there anything inaccurate about my observation? Because otherwise, I don’t know why these presumed professionals would suddenly subject us to this lazy and shallow writing.
you probably don’t want to read it if the already present ‘‘gommunisn BAD’’ of the games was too much.
the book is full of genuinely enraging, anti-communist, george orwell-stan type of fanfiction about the cartoonishly evil, baby-eating totalitarian Red Line. It’s so damn out of left field that by consequence the whole thing ends up feeling more sympathetic to the nazis the author is trying to both-sides them with because it spends more time antagonizing the communist faction than anything else. hell, the sequel game to 2033, Metro Redux, baits you into thinking that the antagonists are going to be the literal skull-measuring fascists of the Fourth Reich but then has you massacring endless waves of the heinous communist horde for three quarters of the whole campaign. Ugh, no fucking wonder why ukrops and other reactionaries love this franchise.
Thanks for reminding of this. I remember really liking the Metro games when I was younger, and I completely forgot about the incredible amount of anti-communism. I remember liking that there were communists in it but wishing I could side with them, then understanding they weren’t reaaal communists since they were doing a genocide or whatever and it was ok to kill them, totally buying into the world building of the game uncritically, as if communists like the Red Line could ever actually exist and weren’t just an amalgamation of more than a few shitty tropes stitched together by some anti-communist hack.