I wasn’t sure whether the term heroic would adequately fit both games but if you think about it, you’re still achieving things by pushing your industry in Factorio. The only thing that the tongue-in-cheek commentary adds is some ludo-narrative dissonance. Expansion, technological progress, and conquest are still your main goals as a player.
To be clear, I deliberately did not address my critique to players but the games themselves. If you’re having fun, that’s great. But I still think it’s not for me.
(FWIW these doubts started forming in my mind as I was playing the otherwise excellent Anno 1800, where ever-happy brown-skinned people gladly support you in replacing their lush forests with belching smokestacks.)
they are your goals but you’re quite obviously doing it at the expense of the natural world. the planet slowly corrupts as the factory grows; the trees start growing twisted and ugly and eventually die, the grass turns from green to yellow to red, to bare dirt, and the oceans slowly go from a crystalline blue, to a muddy green, and finally to a dark brown. thats not ludonarrative dissonance, that’s showing you the consequences of your actions.
Not all media has to have the protagonist or player character be a good person.
Of course it depends on how it’s portrayed, if for example American Psycho actually was written the way a lot of idiots seem to think it was, glorifying Patrick Bateman’s actions and showing him as “cool”, that’d be a different story from how it actually exists. In that case the book would be significantly more problematic. Considering your Anno 1800 example, I am unfamiliar with the game, so I can not tell you how things are portrayed there, but overall you definitely need to see the nuance between showing someone doing a bad thing and actually promoting said bad thing.
Also it’s totally fine if that’s not for you and you prefer media with a heroic protagonist, everyone has their own tastes, but
Both celebrate industrialization and the exploitation of the natural world
I wasn’t sure whether the term heroic would adequately fit both games but if you think about it, you’re still achieving things by pushing your industry in Factorio. The only thing that the tongue-in-cheek commentary adds is some ludo-narrative dissonance. Expansion, technological progress, and conquest are still your main goals as a player.
To be clear, I deliberately did not address my critique to players but the games themselves. If you’re having fun, that’s great. But I still think it’s not for me.
(FWIW these doubts started forming in my mind as I was playing the otherwise excellent Anno 1800, where ever-happy brown-skinned people gladly support you in replacing their lush forests with belching smokestacks.)
they are your goals but you’re quite obviously doing it at the expense of the natural world. the planet slowly corrupts as the factory grows; the trees start growing twisted and ugly and eventually die, the grass turns from green to yellow to red, to bare dirt, and the oceans slowly go from a crystalline blue, to a muddy green, and finally to a dark brown. thats not ludonarrative dissonance, that’s showing you the consequences of your actions.
Not all media has to have the protagonist or player character be a good person.
Of course it depends on how it’s portrayed, if for example American Psycho actually was written the way a lot of idiots seem to think it was, glorifying Patrick Bateman’s actions and showing him as “cool”, that’d be a different story from how it actually exists. In that case the book would be significantly more problematic. Considering your Anno 1800 example, I am unfamiliar with the game, so I can not tell you how things are portrayed there, but overall you definitely need to see the nuance between showing someone doing a bad thing and actually promoting said bad thing.
Also it’s totally fine if that’s not for you and you prefer media with a heroic protagonist, everyone has their own tastes, but
is blatantly false