I would be responsible for the message of the story if I created it. I had to play the game in order to know what the story is to critique it. You are making some really, really bad faith arguments here, dude. If I didn’t play the game, you would then say some crap about “how would you know about the game if you…

I played the game through to completion. What I’m refusing to do is take what the game says at face value. And I find it contemptible that you would take my obvious criticism of the game lore as a “fantasy of making others submit to my control.” In fact, it’s the opposite, I’m criticizing the game’s writers for not…

Yes, let’s just never treat the artistic medium of games with any seriousness or critical thinking. That’s exactly what would be best for everyone. Totally.

The Cleaners are the only ones with altruistic motives? The Looters want to stay alive in a city with no civil services, no agriculture, and no functioning trade economy. Not submitting to the demands of The Division immediately marks them for death though.

Think about the plot of the game. Civil services, regular businesses, etc are all suspended. Many areas of the city are extremely dangerous. In one area of the city, an organized military faction controls the area, killing other armed groups they consider their enemies while feeding and sheltering the civilians they…

It’s just PS. Switch is just the victim of their lockdown, same as Xbox.

I’ve given Bungie hell over the past handful of years for not allowing cross-platform saves, thinking it was them that was stopping cross-platform saves for Destiny (1 and 2). It made no sense, you have a combined account on Bungie.net, the save files reside on their servers, not ones owned by MS or Sony, so it…

Sony’s hubris this generation has aggravated me to no end. They buy up obnoxious exclusive deals that cut out my friends from being able to play the same Strikes in Destiny as I do, the same zombies maps in CoD that I play, and so on.

Here I was, thinking that an online game couldn’t be more of a pain in the butt than Splatoon 2, but at least that game let me have fun when playing it with strangers. I never thought a game would have the stones to slap you with a scarlet letter and leave you with a bland title screen just for having the audacity to…

Reminder: Tom Clancy’s work was ALWAYS political, with a particular pro-CIA/military bent. Tom Clancy was also a pretty crappy person with staunchly pro-war, anti-peace viewpoints who was pro-torture. Every Clancy book or game with a plot comes up with some crazy, convoluted reason why the star of the book/game has to…

I propose the following New Challenger:

The game is still political even if everyone on the game never intended it to be political. Even if you’re right that the people involved in making the game didn’t intend to invoke the loaded symbolism of all those places and things you’ve listed, those places and things do still have that meaning and people’s brains…

Also, watching the Invitational and it seems as though MAYBE stage hazards can be toggled off? Saffron City didn’t have a single Pokémon pop put of the elevator, but Green Greens still had Whispy Woods blowing air, so who knows.

I mean the premise of the game is protecting the last spark of civil government on the cusp of anarchistic collapse.

This is an excellent write-up, and I think speaks to a larger problem in storytelling in big-budget media today. It reminds me of a quote I recently read from Boots Riley in an interview for his upcoming film Sorry To Bother You: “...the truth is, every movie is a message movie. It’s just that most movies have…

In light of all this, it could feel strange to play The Division, a game where you gun down whoever you want without consequence.

I think it’s really more of a reference to the beginning section of the game, where the ‘enemy’ is generic mostly-non-white men in hoodies. Yes, some of the audio logs you find are about criminal gangs, others are about desperate people. Sure, when you come around a corner and there’s a guy beating on someone with a…

Yep. Just look at how Firefly became a hit with Libertarians and also apparently “Lost Causers” when that was most definitely never intended by the creators.

Because it being some fictional agency is:

Maybe this only makes sense in my head, but I don’t like how generic the Divison is. Meaning, the Division itself; the titular agency we play an...agent of.