You should really put your Communism into your Marios, IMHO

animation of a round robot, who is standing on the edge of a pit, shooting nuts that occasionally fall out of a pipe. The nuts burst into coins, most of them falling into the pit, out of the robot's reach.

Yesterday I stumbled over Pol Clarissu’s Blog, and there’s some interesting writing on there, but one piece particularly kicked something in me that I feel I need to talk about.

In their piece “Discourse about Discourse part 2: putting politics in the marios” they make a lot of good observations about the general problems you have when games, try to be outright political and I agree with them to a degree. Where I start to disagree, and frankly feel kind of put on the spot is when I read passages like this:

(...) Organize, educate yourself, wage struggle outside of games! Don't shoehorn politics into your marios!! They're marios!!!!

I mostly make platforming games, but one thing I have been struggling a great deal with is trying to find ways to have the actions you take in them make sense. Not in an overtly real way, they are platformers after all, but the stuff you do, the actions you undertake and the enemies you fight have to be tied into something that explains what’s going on. A lot of my projects came apart, because of this, but I also don’t feel like making games without doing this.

As I was working on what now became G.B.Rober, I was thinking about how to continue on from here, when after all every game starts out from a kind of compromised position and the place I landed up in is to not try to be smart about the message I want to communicate and instead do my best at creating straight up propaganda.

So every boss in this game became a literal boss, the first enemy you kill is a cop who points their gun at you and you can bet that I’ll try to put as much obvious socialist symbolism in this thing as possible. It’s not smart, but I didn’t set out to make something smart. I set out to make something that clearly states who is evil and has to be removed in order for us all to be able to move into a better world

As much as we don’t like it, other people are putting politics in their Marios. Some have you fight Communists for Ronald Reagan, some have you defend a Monarchy. These games aren’t abstract and though their themes are probably replaceable, the framing still matters.

There is a difference between you playing someone who actively puts down a rebellion and reinstates a status quo and playing someone who starts one and ends it with the old order going up in flames.

I often feel like the problem with consciously putting politics in your videogames is that a lot of folks on the left think for some reason they always need to be smart about it. That a political work doesn’t have value, when its message doesn’t reflect the actual complexity of the politics it tries to convey. And that is mostly due to the way discussions around politics in games are framed mostly as something that is being done in podcasts, or maybe longform pieces of writing, usually about whatever big budget game is currently important. The fact is though that most of these debates will never happen around your games, because the reality for most game developers (especially when you’re making games on your own) is that no one will care enough about them to actually engage with them to such a degree.

And this isn’t something I’m accusing Pol of, to be clear, but this all to me feels a lot like people who just are way too much in love with marxism as some kind of abstract thing that is only taught in academia, instead of something that always was intended for everyone. Doesn’t mean that you have to simplify everything, but as much as there's a place for reading Capital, there’s also a place for a big, flashy pamphlet that quickly gives you the rundown on why your boss isn’t your friend. Both can and should exist and ideally one leads to the other, but we need both.

Again this is mostly me trying to justify why I’m doing what I’m doing and frankly, I don’t think I ever had that much fun making something, because I actually care about whether or not I’m just making some random final boss, of if I’m trying to think about who I think would best represent the epitome of capitalism and who I would like for my players to shoot a bunch until they explode.

It matters, maybe only for myself, but it does. And that’s okay.