[DinoTriz2]

lol

There's a lot of implicit storytelling, narrative assumptions, and philosophical expositions on good and evil that I barely registered as a teenager 15 years ago, but today I find myself raising an eyebrow and seeing as evidence that the game has not aged well from a social and political perspective.

The heavy military checkpoints, the treatment of youth gangs as irredeemable evildoers deserving mass incarceration, the treatment of addiction as a moral failing rather than a disease, the fact that King's Row is explicitly a hellish slum occupied by the working class and yet the player is expected to work tirelessly as a protector of the status quo, the alienation (double entendre here) of the homeless as sewer dwelling monsters and not victims of failed social policy, etc. There's even a part of the new Skulls story arc where a character heavily implies to a pair of demure female recruits that they have to sleep with him in order to move up in the organization, and then in the next mission he's proudly bragging to a friend about doing it. Was that subplot really necessary to help me feel repulsed by a gang of death worshipping drug pushers?

I'm sophisticated enough a consumer of culture nowadays to be able to reject the facile "it's a story about gangs / villains / evil so of course it's going to have these things in it!" As a replacement for critically thinking about why a designer or writer chose to very uncritically include all these themes into their work of fiction. I definitely was not sophisticated enough when I was 18 in 2004 and thrilled to be designing the spiny Bramble hero that became my internet pseudonym afterwards.

I still love the game and play it every spare moment I have, don't get me wrong. But it is interesting to see how our perspectives, and the "facts" we are willing to accept with question, can shift over time like this, isn't it?