I didn’t mention this before when I brought up WC3 in another thread on the games sublemmy, but the horde are explicitly colonizing new lands, and one of the things you’re told about are the indigenous races you need to wipe out who are conveniently violent and monstrous.
Additionally I’m watching some story about the Zul’amani trolls, and they get into a war with medieval europe themed elves who are there to colonize their lands and lose, and it’s the trolls who are portrayed as the villains who you get to raid to defeat. The elves are also portrayed as being desperate for land to live on as though they’re victims and are forced to do this, and apparently now both see the lands in the area as their ancestral home.
I’ve played other games as well (that I can’t recall off the top of my head) that also seemed to play the whole helping colonizers clear out the local populations, and the local populations are conveniently violent, monstrous, and unwilling to cooperate or coexist.
Being told to kill off indigenous races/populations really leaves a disgusting feeling; this whole cowboys and indians thing really runs deep doesn’t it? Gary Gygax seems to have been of that sort as well, saying of some genocidal general in the past that he ‘observed’ that ‘nits make lice’ in regards to slaughtering every man, woman and child in a nearby native American settlement (again, referring to it as ‘observed’ rather than it being his opinion, as though it was a fact), and apparently his son had made some disgusting comments in regards to native Americans as well.
Read Settlers of Catan
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I didn’t mention this before when I brought up WC3 in another thread on the games sublemmy, but the horde are explicitly colonizing new lands, and one of the things you’re told about are the indigenous races you need to wipe out who are conveniently violent and monstrous.
I guess WC1/WC2 was better in that regard. The orcs were just genocidal invaders from another dimension. Going by WC1/WC2 canon, the orcs invaded and sacked Azeroth and the alliance based in Lordaeron pushed the invaders back to the dark portal. Blizzard didn’t sugarcoat things when you were playing as an orc:
With the decimation of the human forces, the sacking of their castle was a simple matter. They offered little resistance once you ran their weak leader through with your war blade and toppled his body into the moat. The taking of Stormwind has kept your warriors in good spirits, and the offerings of gold and jewels that they bring to you are ample tribute to your leadership. Wine flows like blood, and the smell of freshly cooked meat fills you with satisfaction as you begin your victory feast. The countryside is ablaze with bonfires as groups of battle hardened Orcs celebrate your dominion of this land with songs of war and victory. You have finally assumed your rightful place as ruler of this realm, and as War Chief of the Orcish Clans…
What new conquests will await you in this place? The Shadow Council has begun to bring you information concerning the lands across the great sea that are as yet untouched by Orcish rule. The Warlocks also seek your permission to resume their experiments with the portal, their intent being the subjugation of other worlds. With the power you now possess your choices are limitless - but these are choices for another time…
The victory pyres burn high into the twilight skies covering the ruined capital of Lordaeron. Your success has led Orgrim Doomhammer - War Chief of the Orcish Hordes - to elevate you to the station of Warlord, thus giving you power and the command of your own clan. The Alliance has finally been crushed, with all those surviving being slain and cremated as is dictated by the rituals. At long last Azeroth and all of its lands belong to the thunderous force known to those foolish enough to stand in its way as the Horde!
Warcraft 3 mentioned
https://classic.battle.net/war3/orc/units/grunt.shtml
Grunts are the first and last line of the Horde’s defense. These powerful fighters arm themselves with mighty battle-axes and display all of the savagery and cunning of their race. In past generations, Grunts were characterized by their depravity and brutality. But now, under the visionary leadership of Thrall, the Grunts more closely resemble their savage, yet noble ancestors.
I could’ve swore this site said “savage, yet noble” a dozen times back in the day, idk if they changed it or it’s just on pages I didn’t check. I hadn’t heard of the noble savage myth back then, I just noticed that they used this weird phrasing so many times it felt awkward.
I will also toss in Monster Hunter World where you play essentially big game hunters but if you don’t hunt the big monsters, they will blow up and kill everyone so you have to do it. It’s a silly game about swinging a sword bigger than a human at a lion the size of a dump truck where cats cook magic food that makes you stronger, but nonetheless the colonialism is there.
On the subject of Gygax, D&D’s early settings were designed not to model anything approaching medieval european society, but rather the old west with a fantasy coat of paint. Hence stuff like adventurers wanting to go adventure in the “borderlands” or “wilderness” and to carve out pockets of “civilization” from the monsters currently living there. While the settings have changed (somewhat), the gameplay never did.
When an entire genre of games descends from the core gameplay loop of “go into someone’s home, kill them, and take their stuff”, you will unsurprisingly see colonialist themes come up frequently. Considering that D&D looms so large over western fantasy games, and most people don’t think critically about the media they consume, many creators went on to make games about committing mass murder and stealing stuff from the indigenous for no other reason than because those were the familiar tropes.
As an enjoyer of both megafauna and Monster Hunter the cognitive dissonance is palpable. Something that I noticed is that there’s no possibility of “good” large monster in the game. Anything that is worthy of note must be killed. I know the Stories series exist but I have never played it.
When an entire genre of games descends from the core gameplay loop of “go into someone’s home, kill them, and take their stuff”, you will unsurprisingly see colonialist themes come up frequently. Considering that D&D looms so large over western fantasy games, and most people don’t think critically about the media they consume, many creators went on to make games about committing mass murder and stealing stuff from the indigenous for no other reason than because those were the familiar tropes.
Actually I think as I read about Greyhawk I got some serious vibes of this.
Ive definitely seen this the narratives of colonialism are just so deeply entrenched in culture that I think people don’t even think about the most of the time in the case of your examples I think some of the weirdness comes from like libs trying to do a smart colonialism narrative and failing because their idea of doing it smart is to both sides it as though the indigenous were just as bad as the colonizers see also Disney’s Pocahontas
regrettably though Gary Gygax was a huge chud so he doesn’t apply to that he was just doing it unironically
The talk about gygax reminds me that I was at a sci fi con (swancon, which is an old, fairly small convention in western Australia and has always been way cooler than you might expect) when he died and there was a hastily convened panel. One of the panelists pointed out that the existence of Drow means that, at some point, someone had to have pitched the idea that “we should have a faction of elves that are evil, and you can tell because they’re black”, and like… Yeah, that’s the implication. Yucky!
“Let’s have our underground elves be black instead of translucent white like every other creature that lives in a fucking cave and never sees the sun.”
It’s frustrating, because a faction of deeply evil underground elves worshipping a spider goddess is actually super cool! But they fucking HAD to make it racist.
Making them pale white would’ve made them look really cool without being racist, but thankfully it backfired on them because people fell in love with drow rather than saw them as a faction to hate; everyone wanted to play as their own Drizzt.
In general though evil races have always been ripe for problems; they’re always portrayed as technologically underdeveloped and tribal, and then when they had an evil race technologically equivalent to wealthy human settlements? They’re black.
libs trying to do a smart colonialism narrative and failing
It happens when they try to do a “racism bad” narrative too, it’s always “those people may have done some bad things in the past, but we just need to learn to forgive them even though they are inferior to us!”
Christopher Pike is a novelist I HUGELY loved growing up, but I recall reading some stuff when I was younger that felt…off; I couldn’t put my finger on it because my understanding of the world wasn’t yet developed enough, but eventually I realized the issue: the guy is clearly a hardcore lib.
In one novel he had a white girl who becomes part of a (native American? Can’t remember, but they weren’t white and they lived in a tribe) group that on the one hand he flatters and says everyone is equal and no one is really a leader there, but then also has the shaman/religious figure basically ask her (almost pleadingly) to go somewhere and he reminds you that he has no power over her and she laughs at him to really drive home the message that he has no power over her.
Also in another story where the sun mysteriously gets blocked by something and the world begins to cool, he mentions the Arabs got greedy and refused to share their oil and they all got nuked.
I doubt this guy is a conservative based on the stories, but definitely a lib.
RTS is the colonialism sim genre.
The 4X subgenre of strategy games meaning “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate” still baffles me.
Umm aktually you can just do science and cultural victory… wait a minute why am i slaughtering “barbarians”
I promise you its fans will all turn ultra anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist leftists the moment you make a game about a global South themed country heroically colonizing Western themed savages
Amazon literally had to redesign their big MMO New World because it was just so fuckin racist and colonial
It was still very colonial on release, but now the crazed savage natives were just white settlers who got there first and the land made them go wackadoo
So still pretty bad!
Oof, I remember the cover with the guy who looked like he was dressed like a conquistador; I didn’t think it leaned so heavily into themes of colonialism.
You order a box of Colonialism from the Game Dev Warehouse.
It arrives from the warehouse, and you eagerly open it up excited to discover what’s inside.
It’s full of Colonialism.
“Fuck! Shit! What the hell am I supposed to do with this? I can’t put this on my shelf, it’s just way too much Colonialism!”
You call the warehouse. “Hey man. This is just… This isn’t good! I can’t work with this, can you put less Colonialism in my box of Colonialism?”
“Sir? You just want the box to be emptier?”
“No! There’s supposed to be something here! Some adventure and stuff!”
“You mean the Colonialism, sir? That’s what you ordered. What were you expecting?”
“…Shit!”
The industry has a liberal bias. Which is to say conservative politics and a love of genocide.
Like, there is some discourse I want to follow though. there was that game that came out about fighting vampire democratic centeralism to replace it with a corrupt monarchy and seeing games not get it has been intresting to see gamers not get it
Additionally I’m watching some story about the Zul’amani trolls, and they get into a war with medieval europe themed elves who are there to colonize their lands and lose, and it’s the trolls who are portrayed as the villains who you get to raid to defeat. The elves are also portrayed as being desperate for land to live on as though they’re victims and are forced to do this, and apparently now both see the lands in the area as their ancestral home.
Fun fact. This is actually addressed, somewhat, in the newest WoW expansion. Some remorse is shown by a Blood Elf after a long and in-depth experience with the Amani trolls. Though the Blood Elves in general act like dickhead colonizers for the most part and still treat the Amani with significant amounts of racism. So I suppose it’s not addressed at all except with a very tenuous alliance due to a world ending threat. Just like every WoW expansion since ever.
I kinda think they made a mistake in making the blood elves playable, for this reason. They’re a truly hateful faction, deeply racist and colonialist, but because you can play as a blood elf they knock the corners off them. Not cool. Giving both sides Draenei and making the belves an unaligned or even enemy faction would have let them go way harder. Or they could have just not made belves total dickheads, rather than what we got, which iirc is basically “sure they’re racist imperialists who believe deeply in their own ethnic superiority but hey they’re not all bad ! ! !”
But the horde needed a pretty elf to compete with alliance!
Tangential, but I told my board game group I wasn’t interested in An Infamous Traffic because it felt too much like the tone (seeing as it is based around the real life events of the opium trade in 19th century China where you are competing companies to take advantage of addiction) might be too much for me to just play it like a normal board game on our board game nights.
Of course I got teased for this opinion.🫠[edit] after chatting with my partner about this, my rejection sensitivity might have hit the panic button prematurely with regards to me being teased. Tone is so fucking hard over text.
An Infamous Traffic
Wow, that reads…really badly; if you had the inverse version of this story people would have a fit.
On a scale of Archipelago to John Company, how critical/materialist is its analysis of the colonialism youre doing
I’m honestly not too sure since I’ve always kind of shied away from these kinds of games. I don’t know if I trust western publishers to make it seem like a historical event where tons of people died isn’t just a toy for libs to fantasize about.
In World of Warcraft, after the Horde gets rid of the fel corruption but before the story goes wildly off the rails, the Horde are basically a coalition of refugees (Orcs, Forsaken) and indigenous people (Tauren, Trolls)
Yeah, I remember finding that dynamic really interesting in classic/tbc/wotlk. Always felt like the alliance were, if anything, closer to being the bad guys than the horde. I suspect that’s mostly just because they didn’t want a player faction to be actively evil so they toned them way down, but it made a more interesting dynamic for sure.
Add to that that the Defias Brotherhood is a labor revolt made up of the former members of the Stormwind Mason’s Guild after the king stiffed and bankrupted them.
They’re a coalition of refugees and immigrants in WC3 as well, but they give you quests (in the bonus chapter; it plays like a role-playing game) where they even refer to the races living there as indigenous populations, telling you to wipe them out; conveniently the races living there are all irredeemably evil.
Night elves on the other hand are neighbors to peaceful furbolg, so clearly blizzard knows how to write peaceful indigenous races, but you don’t play a colonizing force when you play the night elves; when you DO play a colonizing force, the indigenous population are monstrous.
Night elves in WoW spend a lot more time killing furbolgs than talking to them. The Orcs don’t talk to the centaurs at all, but nobody on either side talks to the centaurs.
Night elves in WoW spend a lot more time killing furbolgs than talking to them
This was actually pretty jarring when I played WoW; in WC3 (which I’d originally been referring to) they’re a friendly race until they’re corrupted by (Mannoroth’s blood? Fel corruption?), in WoW there’s no reason to believe that they’re literally all corrupted considering they live in very widely separated areas and yet they’re almost all hostile.
Oh, and here’s an odd observation: The least racist faction in the entire game is the Venture Company. They’ll hire anybody.
Honestly if alliance/horde faction pigeonholing wasn’t a core element of the game, I think it would’ve been interesting if they’d allowed players to represent different factions rather than be forced to represent the alliance or horde. If I personally can’t get into the feud between alliance or horde, why would I want to represent them? I remember deeply wishing I could’ve joined and represented the Cenarion circle.
That’s what RP profiles are for
if alliance/horde faction pigeonholing wasn’t a core element of the game, I think it would’ve been interesting if they’d allowed players to represent different factions rather than be forced to represent the alliance or horde
Wait are y’all still talking about video games or nah?
If you actually pay attention to Alliance quest text in Ashenvale, there are a few points where you investigate the corruption of the furbolg but mostly it’s just a lot of killing
I really do need to find the time to read Fanon’s work(s); I remember reading excerpts and being fascinated (it’s just I’m more of a novel kind of guy).
I hear ya. I’ve a hard time maintaining a non-fiction reading habit, myself. Wretched of the Earth was pretty good tho, haven’t read any other Fanon yet, but Black Skin White Masks is calling me a
from my bookshelf. I’ve got a copy of vol 1 of The Prison Notebooks but that was a mistake and I need to find myself one of those Gramsci compilation books. The notebooks are just too scattered and incoherent without enough background.
RuneScape has made some progress in scrubbing out racist content from before, but one thing they still need to get right is the local Karamjan culture.
Doing some OSRS and damn does this need to be addressed, IIRC Legend’s Quest had some colonialist themed but I haven’t gotten to that part yet.
