Video Game Politics...

[seawasp]

 
It's of course obvious now that the incoming administration's denial of its interest in Project 2025 was just as much a lie as pretty much everything that comes out of Trump's mouth, and I'll be posting a sort of point-by-point checkoff of the plan as we enter the next administration, but today I was abruptly struck by the fact that in their own ways, two video games have been uncomfortably on target with the current era, one in a bit more exaggerated form than the other. 

The latter is, of course, METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE, which ultimately involves a wide and deep conspiracy to use crisis politics and internet memery, along with appropriately-targeted violence, to usher in a sort of Anarcho-Libertarian utopia in which the strong effectively crush the weak, led by the More Manly Than You Senator Armstrong. This is the image of the Strong America of the Musk-type "Freedom" fanboys, their fantasy of somehow emerging the rulers of a purified, reborn world after bringing down the corrupt old order. Armstrong himself literally LECTURES Jack Raiden, the "hero" of the game, on his half-baked philosophy and bellows that he'll "Make America Great Again!". Note that this was in, I think, 2013, well before Trump's rise to the political stage. It's hard NOT to see some of the parallels here, even leaving that eerie call-out from the past. 

Even more accurate, if slightly less bombastic, and far more on-point for the modern younger voter, is Persona 5. In this game, the main characters (starting with the primary viewpoint character's background) are bullied/oppressed/threatened by adults -- always men -- in positions of power. The characters' main power of Persona is, in this game, manifested as the ability to enter the mental constructs, the "Palaces", of these people and, if successful, find their way to their center and break the twisted desires and beliefs that form the heart of each one. This is of course a terrible shock to the target, who generally will then break down and confess their crimes and accept punishment or seek to perform restitution.

But the NATURE of this villainy is one of the things that really drives home the modern parallel. These are all the people, from the small-time to the big-time, who make the world worse simply by being themselves. The big-star coach who uses his reputation to be a little school tyrant and to force high-school girls into intimate situations; the criminal who manipulates others with blackmail; the businessman who exploits both customers and employees for the sake of a few more profits; and at last, the politician who uses all this manipulation -- and his own knowledge of the Persona universe -- to set up the collapse of the ship of state in order to make a little empire of his own, ruling over the rich and powerful survivors as the world burns. 

In both games, the main thing they miss is the pathetically BANAL nature of the front man of the takeover; Trump is too weak and trivial a personality to take seriously as an opponent. It's true that behind Trump there are others, more competent and less mockable, but they're not nearly so visible. 

Yet any player of these, and especially of Persona, must feel an awful and revolting echo in the real world from what was supposed to be a more escapist story, in which you, personally, have the power to make the selfish see themselves for who they are, to confront the darker heart and make it bright. 
 

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>The characters' main power of Persona is, in this game, manifested as the ability to enter the mental constructs, the "Palaces", of these people and, if successful, find their way to their center and break the twisted desires and beliefs that form the heart of each one. This is of course a terrible shock to the target, who generally will then break down <<

That actually does work -- and science has no way to treat reality tunnel injuries.

>> confess their crimes and accept punishment or seek to perform restitution.<<

I haven't seen that happen; usually they just crawl away and avoid the person.

>>Yet any player of these, and especially of Persona, must feel an awful and revolting echo in the real world from what was supposed to be a more escapist story,<<

I used to play Paranoia in high school. It was funny then. It is not funny now. Living in a dystopia, I've largely lost my taste for fictional ones. Though my readers did prompt me for what turned into postapocalyptic hopepunk.

Re: Thoughts

[scott_sanford]

The closest thing that feels semi-plausible is Spider Robinson's story about a drug that makes people want to tell the truth. Many, but by no means all, of the people who get dosed came out better for it (several political careers were ruined, and a gang leader made the news for receiving a remarkable number of bullet holes). On the whole, the experience seemed to do more good than harm for most people.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

That would totally destroy society, though.

I was thinking about individual counterattacks, when someone tries to bully you, and you knock holes in their reality tunnel by telling them things they can't get out of their head and disrupt their worldview.

Re: Thoughts

[seawasp]

If you can REALLY force someone to face the truth about themselves, a lot of people will totally break. The Sword of Shannara is actually one of the most terrifying weapons ever invented from that perspective.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yep. It can be done with words alone, if you tell something they can't stand knowing -- like the record that breaks the record player. If you know what bad tape sounds like, you can use that as a weapon. "You're not as pretty as you think you are" is very effective on mean girls.

Re: Thoughts

[seawasp]

I've found that only works if the person's pretty fragile to begin with. There's plenty such truths that I could tell to a lot of the Trump voters or businessmen, but they simply shrug it off because I'm not An Authority.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's easier with obviously fragile people, but possible for most. Consider we have a shitty society that's bad at meeting human needs and unhealthy to live in: that means a lot of people are faking and skating their way through it.

Another aspect is target sighting -- the ability to look at a person, listen to them, and identify their weak spots. Nobody is invulnerable; anybody can be hit; it's just a question of how many chinks a given individual has and how accessible they are. A well fortified, healthy, resilient individual will rarely if ever do things that mark them as a legitimate target. Conversely, bullies are flimsy as a group because they're pushing down other people to make themselves feel better. Trump voters, for instance, tend to think that gender has to be earned rather than being innate; whenever someone thinks of something as fragile, that's a vulnerability.

I've never bothered using the authority angle because most people in the mainstream don't use facts to assess what I say in the first place. It's about finding a phrase or observation that can hook into their own worries, so it will eat at them even if they don't consider me a credible source. Get them to attack themselves.

One wicked example I've seen was actually graffiti: "You left the oven on." Everyone who has used an oven in the last day or so will think, "Did I?" Most will shrug it off. But someone with a sketchy memory, or anxiety, or OCD, may become trapped a loop.

People have different skills. A socially popular person would fight back differently.

Me, I was in my tweens before I started to get any real ability to filter out the target lock; I would blurt out life-shattering observations without realizing it. And it was several years later before I started putting concerted effort into building a safety cover for the tac nuke that is my mouth. This is a pattern I've observed with some other nerds too.

Re: Thoughts

[seawasp]

Yeah, I find that dark stories don't appeal to me most of the time because I'm seeing it right here.

Another REALLY TOO CLOSE parallel is in Charlie Stross' Laundry Files series, especially the part where it's an evil televangelical apocalyptic "Christian" cult that's really responsible for everything going to crap.

[ninjarat]

I don't see either game, or their franchises, as being escapist.

The Persona series dives deeper into Jungian psychology with each successive game (a thing which distinguishes Megami Ibunroku Persona from Shin Megami Tensei). P5 explores this, along with a big dose of questioning morality, from the dark side perspective of picaresque anti-heroes. Metal Gear games share Hideo Kojima's common thesis: father hates war but loves the idea of being a war hero, takes out his internal conflicts on the son, who kills the father. They make good stories not because they are timely or prescient, but because their themes are timeless.

As for Donald Trump? Don't underestimate the power of controlling a nation-wide personality cult.

[seawasp]

Persona 5 allows you, as individuals, to quite literally FIX THE WORLD. You not only get to confront the individuals in their Palaces and force them to face their true selves, you in the end get to confront the living representative of Humanity's worse side, and BEAT IT. Will a new threat arise from the human subconscious? Yes, but you, for your part, have made a major difference in both your own lives and in the lives of countless others, and you KNOW what you've done. That's pretty positive.

I'll agree that MGS:Revengeance isn't terribly escapist. Nobody in major positions in the plot is a shining light. But in the end, you still do the best you can, and you've even taught a robotic killing machine that it has moral choices to make. Not bad for such a gritty metallic future.

[ninjarat]

Yes, but you, for your part, have made a major difference in both your own lives and in the lives of countless others, and you KNOW what you've done. That's pretty positive.

Their method is a metaphor for lobotomy: removing a piece of a person's psyche which makes them that person. Their motive is revenge: they're out to get those who absued and oppressed them and their close friends. They rationalize it as protecting potential future victims, for the greater good, but are they morally right? Do the ends justify the means and motives? This is the moral question P5 poses.

[seawasp]

Oh, but that's the, um, MID-game. The questionable part of their method isn't like that; it is, as I mentioned above, more akin to the Sword of Shannara. They force you to face the actual TRUTH of your actions and their relevance to who you think you are versus who you really are. The questionable part is that, somewhat like the Sword, it's *involuntary* therapy. Yes, you're forcing bad people to face themselves, but it's still force -- is that good, bad, excusable, not?

In the mid-game they come face to face with that question, and it's a toughie, and to the game's credit, there's actually no easy answer to it. In many ways, they're not left much choice; allow the teacher to keep abusing and exploiting kids, including their friends? That doesn't seem right. Let the big-name artist keep stealing the work of his students? Ignore the criminal who's literally blackmailing high-school students?

They do acknowledge that they're walking on thin ice -- until they realize that there's actually another, MALEVOLENT force using the same power to kill. Then -- once more -- they're kinda stuck. If you want to consider yourself a halfway decent person, you can't ignore a mindwalking murderer, especially when you know that your group may be the ONLY group that can find him or her and stop them.

Ultimately, of course, they find that they're facing a truly supernatural threat, someone suborning the actual proper operation of the Persona universe, and there they REALLY don't have much of a choice, unless "give up choice" is a good option. (the Persona 5 Royal boss really presents this as an actual issue)