I haven’t read the article yet but I like the headline. Games should be political. Well, not all have to be, but story based games probably should be. To me, it usually indicates passion and effort from the creator.
D&D/ttrpg personality Matt Coville once said in a stream something like, “no movies are about anything anymore. It’s why everything is about family.”
It was an offhand statement, but it kind of stuck with me since. Especially since I only have the time, money, and inclination for the big movies nowadays where this issue is more prevalent, I see it often. It makes sense. Family is relatable, and not risky. Personal, but not uncomfortable. It’s not “political”, like everything else in life.
If we want to take a bit of an armchair analyst media critique angle, movies can often be viewed through the dual lenses of what society fears and what it desires. (If you want to overextend this a little bit more then “what it desires” could go so far as “what it desires to believe about itself”.)
Horror and, to a lesser extent, thriller movies are really fertile ground for understanding societal and individual fears.
Action and drama movies tend to be the best hunting grounds for what are the desires of society during that time period.
Sometimes it all comes together in one neat little package, like the TV show 24 where a lone prodigy protects freedom and democracy from the evil terrorists who seek to cause havoc and injury to innocent civilians and he does this by going beyond the bounds of what is permissible by morals and laws but he is permitted this exception because what he is doing is ultimately for the good of society, even if he has to resort to doing bad things to protect society. If that isn’t just the perfect snapshot of the US zeitgeist in the post-9/11 world during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan then idk what could do a better job.
If we pull at this thread a little bit more, we have the backdrop being the advent of the nuclear family in the post-war era to replace closely connected extended families and communities that have existed in one place for at least a century if not far longer than that, then came the ushering in of the neoliberal era where communities were crushed and the nuclear family was saddled with so much pressure that most of them crumbled, or otherwise they fell apart but still lived together in the ruins of the nuclear family, (sidebar to mention that housing projects were specifically designed to break up families, with Pruitt and Igoe requiring that black dads were not allowed to stay with their families because the government saw them as a “harmful” and “dangerous” element that would introduce violence and addiction and criminality to that particular project).
Now suddenly movies are all about family instead of being about something deeper. Idk I don’t really watch movies but if we take that as true then just like how Disneyland sells a simulacrum of the experience of a rich, vibrant, and interconnected community to punters then Hollywood is selling product based on our unrequited desire for community which has been culturally and politically hemmed into the model of the nuclear family because we are so far disconnected from the loss of true community that we can only really reach back in history to the 50s-80s where there was at least some degree of long-lasting human connection.
It’s a classic case of capitalism destroying something in order to commodify it and then to sell it back to us.
sidebar to mention that housing projects were specifically designed to break up families, with Pruitt and Igoe requiring that black dads were not allowed to stay with their families because the government saw them as a “harmful” and “dangerous” element that would introduce violence and addiction and criminality to that particular project
Every day I learn something new and more fucked up. Death to america.
I haven’t read the article yet but I like the headline. Games should be political. Well, not all have to be, but story based games probably should be. To me, it usually indicates passion and effort from the creator.
D&D/ttrpg personality Matt Coville once said in a stream something like, “no movies are about anything anymore. It’s why everything is about family.”
It was an offhand statement, but it kind of stuck with me since. Especially since I only have the time, money, and inclination for the big movies nowadays where this issue is more prevalent, I see it often. It makes sense. Family is relatable, and not risky. Personal, but not uncomfortable. It’s not “political”, like everything else in life.
If we want to take a bit of an armchair analyst media critique angle, movies can often be viewed through the dual lenses of what society fears and what it desires. (If you want to overextend this a little bit more then “what it desires” could go so far as “what it desires to believe about itself”.)
Horror and, to a lesser extent, thriller movies are really fertile ground for understanding societal and individual fears.
Action and drama movies tend to be the best hunting grounds for what are the desires of society during that time period.
Sometimes it all comes together in one neat little package, like the TV show 24 where a lone prodigy protects freedom and democracy from the evil terrorists who seek to cause havoc and injury to innocent civilians and he does this by going beyond the bounds of what is permissible by morals and laws but he is permitted this exception because what he is doing is ultimately for the good of society, even if he has to resort to doing bad things to protect society. If that isn’t just the perfect snapshot of the US zeitgeist in the post-9/11 world during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan then idk what could do a better job.
If we pull at this thread a little bit more, we have the backdrop being the advent of the nuclear family in the post-war era to replace closely connected extended families and communities that have existed in one place for at least a century if not far longer than that, then came the ushering in of the neoliberal era where communities were crushed and the nuclear family was saddled with so much pressure that most of them crumbled, or otherwise they fell apart but still lived together in the ruins of the nuclear family, (sidebar to mention that housing projects were specifically designed to break up families, with Pruitt and Igoe requiring that black dads were not allowed to stay with their families because the government saw them as a “harmful” and “dangerous” element that would introduce violence and addiction and criminality to that particular project).
Now suddenly movies are all about family instead of being about something deeper. Idk I don’t really watch movies but if we take that as true then just like how Disneyland sells a simulacrum of the experience of a rich, vibrant, and interconnected community to punters then Hollywood is selling product based on our unrequited desire for community which has been culturally and politically hemmed into the model of the nuclear family because we are so far disconnected from the loss of true community that we can only really reach back in history to the 50s-80s where there was at least some degree of long-lasting human connection.
It’s a classic case of capitalism destroying something in order to commodify it and then to sell it back to us.
Every day I learn something new and more fucked up. Death to america.