Speaking of conflict (or more accurately conflicting) The Last Night, a cyberpunk game where feminism won, people get universal income, and somehow that makes your male character a second class citizen?
Boy re-reading the interview with the dev is just a lot.
At E3, Tim Soret wanted to set the record straight about equality, labor, and the future.
www.vice.com
Jeez. That interview is the most waffle-y bullshit I've ever seen, all because his real goal is simply to try and not be "pinned down". But not wanting to be pinned down is a belief in and of itself, for some reason Soret just doesn't seem to realize that. Everything is a politic of sorts, to say you want to "avoid politics" is to be disingenuous in the extreme. If you are putting a creative work out there, especially in a very public way, that in itself is a political statement. The creation, the promotion, the product itself... all part of the politic of our current culture.
I hate it when people do this sort of stuff, where they simply aren't willing to say what they think, probably because they know it's toxic and instead want to wrap a context around it that, in their mind, somehow makes whatever bullshit they're spilling okay. You can make a game that explores the flaws of something like UBI or the shortcomings of power struggles, but be honest about it. Perhaps the greatest irony is that, in his attempts to escape dogma, he has created a dogma which he is completely unaware he's following, even to his detriment.
The nature of creative work is political. It cannot exist apolitically.
(I do know however that most anyone who says "keep politics out of games" is either a disingenuous fuckbag or monumentally incompetent - either of which is dangerous, for different reasons)