I find it interesting how a lot of socdems think the ‘fuck the factory’ conclusion of the Emerald Vale plot is a ‘socialist’ answer. I didn’t get that impression at all.
To me, it comes off incredibly libertarian instead of socialist. A group breaks off from the production line to live off the land and form a society around Adelaide’s greenhouse. It is set up clearly that this society isn’t an egalitarian one, seeing as how Adelaide is hiding the true nature behind her fertilizer and how she’s basically doing this for spite instead of the good of the people. Wouldn’t the more ‘socialist’ answer be to take over the factory and give control to the workers? Of course, Obsidian doesn’t give us that choice cause ‘MORALLY GREY.’ It kind of bothers me how people give Fallout 3 shit for it’s very admittedly blatant ‘good vs. evil’ moral choices, but the close mindedness of the ‘super grey’ choices in Outer Worlds doesn’t bother them. I know the workers are deep in the koolaid, but let me do some skill checks to get them on my side. Let me convince them, in their warped brain, that they can still be Spacer’s Choice people, but just remove Tobson since it matters so much to them. You start to realize how limited your choices actually are once your brain starts thinking of the many ways you could shake this quest up.
I mean, I get it. I made the ‘fuck the factory’ choice as well, because I didn’t believe Tobson’s claim that he would make things better for his people. To me, the choice came more as a North Korea analogue than a worker vs. boss one. When you have workers so deep in the koolaid that they look like they’re about to topple over without saying the Spacer’s Choice slogan, and a society so broken that getting fired is basically a death sentence, destroying that framework the best solution in my eyes. Plus it plays into my ‘fuck the corps’ meta I’m gonna set throughout the play through.
But socdems taking this quest line as an example of class consciousness is pretty out there, to me…
Yeah, to me, socialism—and anarchist socialism—requires workers control of the means of production. When they don’t let you give control of a literal factory to the workers, but only let you give it to another corrupt leader figure they’ve fucked up from the jump. I was really frustrated by the available choices in Edgewater, but I also got equally if not more frustrated with how the Iconoclasts are portrayed. The Iconoclasts are talked about by others outside their group as anarchists, so I thought “oh cool. My people.” But when you meet them they are portrayed as some kind of new age, kool-aid-drinking cult, with a well meaning but way too zealous leader. This isn’t a non-hierarchical community.
Between the writing in edgewater and how the game portrays it’s supposed anarchist faction it seems to me that no one at Obsidian/Private Division has ever read any theory of any kind. Yes, this game satirizes both workers and bosses, but frequently mischaracterizes workers movements and ideology to the point where it looks to me like it was written through the lens of neoliberal propaganda (this tried to autocorrect to “propagandalf”—I have no explanation). It doesn’t understand socialism in any flavor and ends up being way too sympathetic to corporate structures. If you want to go in thinking you can play this while applying Kropotkin or Malatesta or Marx you’re going to be kind of disappointed.
Despite that… I’ve been loving my time with this game. It really is a comfortable space to hang out in. My crew rules and playing the game feels great.
I agree that it feels like none of the writers really understood any leftist theory, I also think it’s simultaneously a limitation of resources. (Heads up I tried to edit this as best I could but it feels pretty rambley)
Large scale video games don’t lend themselves to non-hierarchical communities. If Outer Worlds wanted to be accurately reflect what a worker led business or an anarchist commune might be like, suddenly they are going to need a lot more voiced NPCs, a lot more writing and voiced lines from the voiced NPCs they do have, and the complexity of that writing would increase.
The deserters couldn’t just be represented as a workers commune through just Thomas, Adelaide, and Cowboy Gal. They seem to be a community of at least 10-15 people, so we’d want more than 3 people to talk to to represent a non-hierarchical community. Additionally, you’d want what they say to be in conversation, it shouldn’t just be exhausting someone’s dialogue tree and you’re done with them. Ideally they should be a community in a dialogue with each other, and that should be reflected in their conversations with you. This is a kind of thing that could actually benefit from something like the Radiant AI.
Making a community like that would be pretty resource consuming, and that’s for what seems to be the smallest community of it’s kind. I don’t think that Obsidian could make a good representation of non-hierarchical communities without scaling back parts of the game.
I see where you’re coming from with this, but I dont agree with this actually. For a couple reasons. First, “large scale video games don’t lend themselves to non-hierarchical communities.” This was probably unintentional on your part but this sentence is nearly exactly a sentence used to argue that anarcho-syndicalism doesn’t work at scale.
Second, to your point about needing more voices and named NPCs… not really? You aren’t a part of that community. It could be framed as you giving advice to those characters who then go and discuss and vote with their comrades off screen. This could be done in a series of sentences, not drawn out conversations tbh.
I am genuinely frustrated at how you CANNOT help Martin in anyway. (The guy stuck in the Spacer’s Choice mask.) He has a TON of lore in the Groundbreaker computers, and he also gets a ton of dialogue detailing how awful his life is.
Like, he’s one of the most detailed NPCs on that space station, even more then Junlei, and she’s the fucking captain.
He’s a character that plays for laughs, but when you’re reading him message his mother about all the great savings she can get at Spacer’s Choice, and her only response is, “Martin, are you ok?” All that comedy becomes really fucking tragic.
I am ACTUALLY MAD there is no quest to free him from corporate servitude.
I’ve got a question, I may not understand enough about the concept of non-hierarchical, but I don’t see how the game gives us enough information on the deserter community to know how it really operates? I think I understand wrt the Iconoclasts, but what do we know about the deserters’ day-to-day? Adelaide started the community… what else?
the asshole option is leaving edgewater with power, and not convincing Adelaide to go back. just let them toil the rest of their lives until they all die of scurvy
RE: Martin,
his situation is super heartbreaking, but you effectively can’t really save him - his problem is not personal, it’s systemic. the only solution to the problems facing the colony is to fully dismantle the board and any company trying to muscle in on their territory. You can take the moon mask off the martin, but they’ll just stick a new one on Martin’s replacement.
the (star) system needs to be changed. saving a single person isn’t enough
RE: the deserters
after you reroute all the power their way Adelaide states that she has full control over who is and isn’t welcome there
This I do agree with. We’re absolutely not given enough information about the deserters. We learn some stuff about individual members and we know that the factory life was bad enough for people to want to leave and join this community, but it’s an instance of both not enough information and what I mentioned above with regard to the game painting in mischaracterization of labor movements.
I had to create my own headcanon tbh.
I dethroned Reed and, after learning how Adelaide was fertilizing her plants, killed her and left the community to sort itself out. In my headcanon this meant they took direct democratic control of the factory town.
Your other option is to screw over the deserters after you talk to Adelaide. This is not a black and white choice, however! If you do so, you can still return to Adelaide’s faction to talk. The leader of the deserters will still agree to return to Edgewater with her people — assuming Reed steps down as leader.
At this point, you can return to Reed again, and inform him that the Edgewater food is making people sick. With high enough speech skills, you can convince him to walk way peacefully, and Adelaide will become the new boss. She will also replace the town’s food processes with a garden — just like the one in the wilderness — and save everyone from the plague.
I am so fucking mad.
Mind you, this still isn’t a real ‘socialist’ answer, but it seems like it benefits the most people.
I love that the player character seems to steal signs and put them in their ship. I’d prefer if they didn’t have that kind of flavor text though. It’s… a slap in the face.
What I meant when I said “large scale video games don’t lend themselves to non-hierarchical communities” is that mechanically, making human settlements with enough NPCs and dialogue to recreate a non-hierarchical community is probably going to eat up more of the developer’s resources than a hierarchical one.
I agree that it could be could be framed as you giving advice to those characters who then go and discuss and vote with their comrades off screen, but personally I’d find that pretty lack luster. In the fiction the game might present the community as non-hierarchical but I personally would need that to be reflected mechanically. I feel a non-hierarchical community should have more voiced NPCs and meaningful dialogue, instead of just being filled with nobodies named “worker”.
To be clear on a couple things, I don’t think that is a bad thing. Nor is that an argument that anarchism bad because it uses more resources. That’s just a statement that developers have a set amount of resources for a game, and they have to pick and choose what it gets used on. Outer Worlds is the kind of game where players often want them have a bunch of quests, and to fill maps with camps and lil nooks and crannies full of enemies and stuff (useless bullshit). I’m saying that there would have to be less of something to create an approximation of a non-hierarchical community that I personally would find satisfying.
Which, again. I think would be a good thing. I think a lot of the non-character dialogue driven stuff in this game is worthless cruft that I could do without. Getting more meaningful character dialogue would to me, be so much more of a valuable investment than literally any other part of this game.
Yeah, I think we have less a political disagreement here than a mechanical/framing device disagreement and that’s okay!
For me personally, this stuff could be fixed with a mod that adds a name randomizer (I can’t stand seeing people just named “Resident”) and a few lines of dialogue to recontextualize things.
Btw! The non-named characters thing is even more baffling to me because I’ve walked by NPCs talking to each other who refer to each other by name, but when I look above them it still has a default signifier like “Sublight Thug” or “Resident.” Come on! Let them have names!!
