Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.
I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.
Every game that takes place in a feudal setting has people buying shit with gold coins even though most feudal societies didn’t even have a formalized money economy. Tax-in-kind was a thing for most feudal societies. Peasants weren’t giving their one (1) gold coin to the tax collector.
Plenty of those games have quests to do for gold, I figure just cut out the gold and have quests unlock more of the shop’s gear for you rather than pay for it. You could even just rename gold to influence points or something, that way the devs could still have the players spend an amount of things for an amount of something else.
The Rogue Trader CRPG was a little like this (for different reasons, obviously) - your wealth was immeasurable, but purchasing things involves your reputation with a faction and an abstraction of the degree of your wealth.
The ttrpg it was based on also had this mechanic. Only extreme material investments, like equipping a regiment with plasma guns, put a dent in your profit factor
I liked the way Ys VIII did it, there’s no money to collect since you’re stuck on a desert island, so to buy new stuff and upgrade it you just gather resources. There’s a storyline reason for it, but something like that could be implemented in any other game to have a system that doesn’t directly involve gathering money.
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This really pisses me off about Disney’s Robin Hood lol.
I think we can give the kids movie from the 70s a pass.
the player is never the peasant though, the way most games in these settings are played is from perspectives of the kinds of people that interfaced with the economy through coinage. mercenaries, adventurers, rulers, urban traders, in a ‘real’ premodern economy these are small proportions of the population, but they were also first in line for interacting with a monetary economy.
I’m also annoyed by the fact default* currency even is gold coin in nearly all the games, especially with prices of some trvial commodities going into dozens and hundreds of gold coins. In real world medieval period they weren’t even in open circulation for most of the time and barely any country even released the gold coins in significant numbers. Not even the big scale trade and finance were done in gold even theoretically on paper, the usual unit was certain weight in silver. Even the games that do have silver and copper coins do it bad like WoW or paper Warhammer Fantasy where gold is soon the only used coin and in hundreds and thousands.
*Some games go for specific currency, like Elder Scrolls game having septims (which is big and heavy and prices are high so gold is apparently pretty much worthless in Tamriel) which leads to even funier things like when you loot an ancient ruins where nobody living came in for thousand years only to find a lot of currency which was at first emitted 500 years ago. Though arguably Tiber Septim using Dragon Break to put money with his face everywhere in Tamriel is both in character and canonically at least possible.