It has no shape in my mind but I'd love so much to see a fighting back the corruption of society game, capitalists and Fox News foes of the world, society being seduced by lofty promises and ragebait. Trying to maintain the cherished good spirit & can do patriotism.
Brinksmanship, the game, at least when tween me played it. My very anti-war, very pro-computer dad thought it was brilliant in making its point and I tend to agree.
I revisited BOP every few years as I got older and it made more and more sense to me. As an adult I’m pretty sure I’ve learned what there is to learn from it.
I was coming in here to say this too. That game was hard as nails for me, but I don't know how much of that was me being a kid and how much of that was the entire point of the game.
it was on the Mac, and I didn't have a Mac, but there was one in the newspaper office in my journalism class as a junior in high school. so i played it there, and never enough to really *get* it (and it also kind of demanded an adult's understanding of geopolitics, which I sorely lacked).
Remembering how we used to play modded Stellaris by making friends with most species, and then if one of the xenophobic militant ones came trying to fuck shit up we'd shove their home planet in the time out bubble
There was a window between Return of the Jedi and the Zahn novels where the ending of the former was deeply unsettling to me. Even as a kid it felt specious that they just killed the emperor and the whole Empire just changed their hearts. Everything after heavily indicates why they avoid this topic!
It turns out that you can vanquish a man, but not his ideologies, and no matter how universally odious, they live forever in the hearts and minds of the wicked!
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The Fragile Allegiance? There's war, but you struggle to keep it from becoming total...
the manual for it is a work of actual scholarship. and it's *thick*, even for strategy games of the era.
Which worked pretty well until a disgruntled periphery leader figured out they could just manipulate the First Lord into doing lots of stupid things
Total war shogun 2