‘Tonight We Riot’: Why The Rise Of Socialist Video Game Is Important

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Unapologetically anti-capitalist, a new socialist video game that depicts rioting against the system has been made by a worker-owned game development coop.

Why A Socialist Video Game Like “Tonight We Riot” Is Important

As if a global virus pandemic isn’t bad enough, a lot of the country these days are going through absolute unrest, what with capitalists and corporate owners dealing with countless cases of labor crises and inhumane treatment of their workers. Amazon-owner Jeff Bezos, for example, is on his way to becoming a trillionaire, all while his company’s workers deal with worsened conditions and lowered pay.

As such, people are retaliating in kind, leading to protests and riots out on the streets. Because of this, one worker-owned video game company decided to make a game that addresses this, giving players the chance to put themselves in fiction where you can finally make the money-hungry regime pay.

Called “Tonight we riot,” the new video game is an unabashedly anti-capitalist work that puts you in control of a pair of flag-waving workers that grow in number as the game goes on. In true socialist fashion, the game also doesn’t let you control one protagonist, but rather all of them, as you forward the movement instead of an individualistic motivation.

Inspired by video games such as “Bioshock,” “Borderlands” and even “The Outer Worlds,” the socialist offering comes at a time of need, with the developers hoping to inspire people to stand up and ask for change.

“What if we just made an honest-to-goodness leftist game that is unapologetically so, where we show that [leftist] structure, we show that there could be this fight, that it could have an actual culmination, that we could go somewhere with it?” art steward Ted Anderson, the game’s co-creator, said.

“There’s a lot of games that people assume aren’t political just because they see games as being set aside from other media [or] divorced from the reality that we all share. It’s still made by people, and people have lives and biases, and make decisions unconsciously where those biases align,” Anderson said, adding that that much like reality, the game isn’t asking for unreasonable demands, but merely asking to improve the conditions to the point that everyone is getting equal opportunities.

“These aren’t unreasonable demands, these are demands for life,” he said.

Video game Video games combine all forms of media, from music, to visual arts, and of course, programming. Anton Porsche/Pixabay

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