People, including right-leaning people, seem captivated by this game and dialogues like this from Deus Ex:
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My question is: what makes them so effective? I can see myself making similar points and getting eye rolls. Is it just because it's in a videogame, or is there a rhetorical trick to it?
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Idk, maybe we misjudge how much we need to justify our opinions. I mean if we all just went out and constantly talked about stuff like this we'd probably have a big effect.
Deus Ex makes me nostalgic for the period before Alex Jones completely ruined conspiracy theories
Well Deus Ex has you playing as a secret agent with what are essentially superpowers. You have the power to stop the electronic old men running the world .
In real life we don't so the response you get is often "What are you/we gonna do about it?"
I think it's a combination of right-wing conspiracy theorists, 9/11 conspiracy theorists (which at least back then had tons of leftists among them) and moon landing truthers that discouraged people from even thinking of politics in terms of hidden government activities.
A good point of reference for me is Hitchens. Watch him back in the 90's and he was openly talking about Gladios, about JFK and the mafia, things like that. 10 years later it seemed like anything but the official narrative was purely fiction for him and completely out of the table. Weird shit.
It's the "crying wolf" effect combined with the association of conspiracy theory with fringe, reactionary politics.
Because the early 2000’s were fucking amazingly comfy. Don’t lie.
The mainstream media doesn't mind reactionary politics
I guess you have a point there. I suppose that extreme militant right wing views are kept off the table until all other options are exaggerated.
The whole point of Deus Ex was to use conspiracy theories that were popular in the late '90s as the basis for a "what if" scenario, so it's no surprise it speaks to right-wing paranoiacs.
The Ancap is right for once.
Yeah, it was essentially cramming every single conspiracy theory they could find into a single game. It also helps that the game is really good with some amazing level design.
Deus Ex was the perfect implementation of politics in video games. Wasn't so heavy handed with political aspects that it became an overly wordy polisci borefest that the layman couldn't enjoy, and is a breath of fresh air to play today because of the stranglehold neolibs have on video gaming today and their heavy handed as fuck implementations of liberal progressivism in every fucking game.
What's makes the geopolitical aspect of the game so memorable is that the world it builds is such a fucking hellhole created by such apolitical and ignoble material conditions that all sides of the spectrum can work to repair, thus including members of all aisles:
I don't disagree, but why would dialogues like that be more effective in comfier times and not in problematic ones?
mate are you joking
the basis of deus ex is that fema camps are real
In comfy times real politics are boring so you need something more spicy.
I think it's because the atmosphere of the game entices people so when this red pilling shows up, people genuinely want to listen. It's fairly different from standing up on a soap box.
desu x was a popular video game. I imagine people who grew up during that time period are shitposting on the intern now.
You can tell a persons old when they make threads like this. Or like asking why people like anime so much.
Another popular video game was metal gear solid
What’s Gladios?
you don't get convinced and your opinions swayed by random people, but by people you care about. Games involves you a lot in their world, and you usually have empathy for friendly characters. Meaning their discourse prolly have a more effective effect on you. also people don't hold the bar too high for vidya.
secret cia funded far right extremist militia set up across europe to retaliate in case of communist success in elections / invasions
Operation Gladio was a clandestine NATO operation built upon a network of paramilitary operatives across Europe following WWII. Supposedly they were just sleeper agents prepared to respond to a potential Soviet invasion or socialist revolution, but they went out of their way to "combat communism" by pursuing a strategy of tension and getting involved with right-wing terrorism — most notably in but not limited to Italy.
