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[Egan_BW]

Just play them as space buddhists or something.

[Radsoc]

You know those times when you read or listen to people who just don't know what they are talking about? Paradox have had real good and serious depictions of historical events in the past, but for me I experience that they let someone who has no clue write box and event descriptions in many Paradox games of late. Their depiction of materialism in Stellaris is somewhat caricature-like, just like how they depict the USSR and socialism in HoI4 (while unwittingly glorifying Trotsky). I don't think it's an agenda, it's just that they do it to the best of their ability, when they should've asked consultants for fact checks (i.e. real proponents of materialism or communism) instead of writing (by default liberal "common knowledge" preconception) statements no materialist or communist would sign on to. The game universe seems to support 'spirituality'/idealism at its core, which in essence falsifies materialism, while letting both exist simultaneously with real effects, when they in reality exclude each other.

By including "materialism" in a by design religious game/universe, all materialist civs and players turn out to be silly - because they are wrong. The game should've been designed the other way around, i.e. with religion in a materialist universe, but where, figuratively speaking, prayers are left unheard.

Sure, they take a lot of other liberties, so why not, the game works. But they simultaneously want you to immerse yourself in their stories. This gets hard when the inner logic of the stories are in contradiction. It's a bit like magic intense games like Skyrim. The feudal economy of that game does not reflect the state of "technology". Why do menial manual labor when you could just do some magic to skip it. The level of magic in that game would correspond to a super high tech economy, beyond our modern one, in terms of automation and transport, yet it's all surrealistically in a medieval setting. A good story should have no paradoxes or contradictions, even if it's just made up, to be plausible. So, yeah, paradox interactive.

[Hanzoku]

I'm curious, beyond the Warp, what exactly is 'religious' in the game? There's plenty of rational materialist civilizations in the game that make sense and produce great material works of wonder. Where I think the game falls flat is that it has a weird preconception that if you are materialist, you automatically go cybernetic/synthetic, and if you're spiritualist, you automatically go psychic/transcendent. I think both philosophies can and are fully capable of being independent of the whole physical ascendance/mental ascendance paradigm. A fanatic spiritualist empire that worships machines and technology (Hello, Cult Mechanicum!) and sees becoming cybernetic/synthetic as becoming closer to the Machine God should be just as reasonable as a logical materialist empire that approaches unlocking psychic potential and transcending the physical form as a logical and scientific method to bootstrapping evolution through science.

[ZeroGravitas]

I'm curious, beyond the Warp, what exactly is 'religious' in the game? There's plenty of rational materialist civilizations in the game that make sense and produce great material works of wonder. Where I think the game falls flat is that it has a weird preconception that if you are materialist, you automatically go cybernetic/synthetic, and if you're spiritualist, you automatically go psychic/transcendent. I think both philosophies can and are fully capable of being independent of the whole physical ascendance/mental ascendance paradigm. A fanatic spiritualist empire that worships machines and technology (Hello, Cult Mechanicum!) and sees becoming cybernetic/synthetic as becoming closer to the Machine God should be just as reasonable as a logical materialist empire that approaches unlocking psychic potential and transcending the physical form as a logical and scientific method to bootstrapping evolution through science.

i mean, that kind of is the exact problem he's pointing at. If psionics were "real" then a real materialism would try to account for them. placing psionics solely in the realm of "spirituality" just means stellaris materialism is wrong on its own terms.

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

[Persus13]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

[ZeroGravitas]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

they probably didn't think about it in those terms, no, but that was the driving force behind the need to have religion at all

[Teneb]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

they probably didn't think about it in those terms, no, but that was the driving force behind the need to have religion at all

Remember that Paradox are swedes, and thus they lean more towards atheist neoliberalism with social welfare on the side.

But I think the reason they decided spiritualism = psionics was to give that something to the spiritualists. The materialists had AI and such, and it seems Paradox is going with the Star Trek style of thought that dictates that logic is the opposite of emotion, with some elements of Dune too.

[ZeroGravitas]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

they probably didn't think about it in those terms, no, but that was the driving force behind the need to have religion at all

Remember that Paradox are swedes, and thus they lean more towards atheist neoliberalism with social welfare on the side.

Of course that's the mainstream of Swedish politics. But that's not who their games are for. There is a significant chunk of their players who are ultranationalist / ultraright-wing, with basically every strain of insane alt-right thought you can imagine (Breivik defenders, neomonarchists/pro-fuedalism, pro-ethnic cleansing, etc etc).

But I think the reason they decided spiritualism = psionics was to give that something to the spiritualists. The materialists had AI and such, and it seems Paradox is going with the Star Trek style of thought that dictates that logic is the opposite of emotion, with some elements of Dune too.

The better comparison is Warhammer 40k (hence someone calling it "the Warp" earlier). Which, of course, is xenophobic space catholicism.

So given that, how can stellaris materialism exist in the same universe?

[umiman]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

they probably didn't think about it in those terms, no, but that was the driving force behind the need to have religion at all

Hahahahahahahaha.....

HAHAHAHAHAHHAA.....

Do you know what you're talking about here?

Do you even realize what company you're referring to?

You think they included a nonexistent religion framework ripe for exploitation to appease the fans? You think they even give a shit about that? Like, it even crossed their minds for a microsecond that they better "appease their hardcore deus vult fanbase"?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[ZeroGravitas]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

they probably didn't think about it in those terms, no, but that was the driving force behind the need to have religion at all

Hahahahahahahaha.....

HAHAHAHAHAHHAA.....

Do you know what you're talking about here?

Do you even realize what company you're referring to?

You think they included a nonexistent religion framework ripe for exploitation to appease the fans? You think they even give a shit about that? Like, it even crossed their minds for a microsecond that they better "appease their hardcore deus vult fanbase"?

i totally credit this explanation as likely and will admit you are right when they release a "build-a-religion" expansion like CiV:G&K / various EU4 religions.

[Paul]

I can't help but laugh. How does the spiritualism in this game appeal to a "rabidly right-wing deus vult fan-base"?

The spiritualism in this game doesn't even come close to any real world religion, and certainly not any of the Abrahamic religions.

The closest it comes to is some forms of paganism or mysticism. The Abrahamic religions all have one thing in common (well, more than one thing, but this is the biggie): They believe in a single God who exists as the only God and who created everything in the universe, as it is, in 6 days. Some of the more liberal members of all 3 faiths don't hold to this, but the conservatives of all 3 faiths do hold to this.

This game's spirituality flies in the face of that. There is a higher plane where multiple gods or higher beings live, the whole setting is based on evolution and billions of years being true, and the ultimate form of evolution is to transform and ascend to that higher plane.

As what you would probably describe as a "rabidly right wing Christian" it doesn't bother me at all to play a game that represents things that way. It's a game, meant for entertainment purposes. It's not supposed to be educational or political. Even CK2, which could easily be very political and has a lot of history, still injects a healthy dose of silliness and fun gameplay. I also play Crusader Kings 2 as the *gasp* PAGANS and MUSLIMS sometimes! Oh, the horror - I'm conquering make believe Christians in a make believe simulation of alternate history! What would my rabid foaming at the mouth ring wing deus vult Christian friends think?

[Baffler]

By including "materialism" in a by design religious game/universe, all materialist civs and players turn out to be silly - because they are wrong. The game should've been designed the other way around, i.e. with religion in a materialist universe, but where, figuratively speaking, prayers are left unheard.

This comes off as pretty petty to be quite honest. Your complaint toward spiritual/materialist is literally "this game doesn't cater to MY philisophical position! Those dumb fundies should be left out in the cold!" I frankly think it's good on them for making spiritualism an actually viable philosophy instead of just dangerous assholes you have to work around, fight off, or keep appeased as is much more typical, while still making the opposite a good choice. I do agree though that limiting the Shroud and robots/upload behind one or another is a little silly, but I guess I can see why they did it that way.

[EnigmaticHat]

conflating spiritualism and psionics was a terrible design choice, but it's also the only way they can accommodate their rabidly right-wing "deus vult" fan-base that would never buy an atheistic space game.

I'm betting that's not why they made that design choice.

they probably didn't think about it in those terms, no, but that was the driving force behind the need to have religion at all

Remember that Paradox are swedes, and thus they lean more towards atheist neoliberalism with social welfare on the side.

Of course that's the mainstream of Swedish politics. But that's not who their games are for. There is a significant chunk of their players who are ultranationalist / ultraright-wing, with basically every strain of insane alt-right thought you can imagine (Breivik defenders, neomonarchists/pro-fuedalism, pro-ethnic cleansing, etc etc).

I'm pretty sure that the whole fanatic spiritualist = psychics thing isn't a moral statement its more of an extremely stock sci-fi trope.  But I do agree that, how did that one person put it, the Paradox forums have some tendencies.  I would not say that's what Paradox games are for per se.  I would say that Paradox games attract a lot of people, like for example they have the historical revenge fantasy crowd with Aztec invasions and pagans/natives being able to survive and theoretically conquer the world.  Compare the Total War saga which usually makes factions like that unplayable (and had I think... 2 unit models in Rome 2 Total War that were dark skinned?  Out of like a bajillion.  Even the Romans and Iberians are very pale despite locals to those regions typically having more olive skin even in modern times, the Romans should be darker skinned than the Germanic barbarians).  Ah, anyway, I would say that what Paradox games attract is history buffs.  A very common fallacy of people who study history (which thankfully seems to be in the process of being pushed out of schools and history books) is taking primary sources at face value.  An example of this would be the Conan the Barbarian stereotype, a lot of casual history buffs are all over that shit for a million reasons but its just straight wrong.  Or for example Dominions which takes a wide but surface level interpretation of history (for example featuring the Aztec and African kingdom factions interacting with other factions over the course of countless years yet never adopting their weapons, when in reality those peoples straight up had guns for most of the Colonial period albiet not ones they made themselves).

Back to Stellaris, I'd also add that science fiction has always had a strong authoritarian (often fascist) strain to it.  Not, mind you, necessarily agreeing with that authoritarianism, but it exists as a subtext very often.  As does genocide which is extremely unusually highly present in sci-fi, usually going hand in hand with the authoritarian subtext.  I'd say that purely in terms of how they handle authoritarianism there are 3 strains of sci fi: dystopian (authoritarianism is the future and its bad), military sci-fi (authoritarianism is the future and that's OK), and space opera/post-apocalypse (authoritarianism exists but this is a story about people, not about governments).  Some of them are a mix for example cyberpunk skirts the edge between accepting authoritarianism (Ghost in the Shell) versus ignoring it in favor of a personal story (Neuromancer).

Spoiler: This is my writing an essay about a digression for no reason except I want to (click to show/hide)

Sci fi often features casual references to things like genocide and Earth being unified under a fascist government.  They were stock plots long before I was born, for example with Halo featuring Earth as a ultramilitarist unified government prior to the Covenant coming which gives weird moments like a Spartan kicking down a door to kill human rebels at the start of Reach.  Fantasy has similar plotlines but with a different narrative in that fantasy tends to adopt the mindsets of the time.  So for example Codex Alera did feature a casual reference to the human faction committing genocide in the past but its copying the Roman mindset, Tolkien and his literary descendents are very pro-Monarchy and pro-agriculture but they're copying a romanticized version of history.  And fantasy has been stripping itself of those tendencies for a while; you can see this for example with the stock video game fantasy setting incorporating steampunk which is basically abandoning the Tolkien mindset wholesale.  Or A Game of Thrones which goes even further in the direction of adopting a time-appropriate mindset but portrays it as a strongly negative thing, again breaking from Tolkien.

The authoritarian streak in sci-fi is mostly because of when it developed.  Putting aside Mary Shelley as ahead of her time, science fiction began a bit before WW1 and started booming after WW2.  All across the world people used military sci fi and dystopian fiction to deal with what they had experienced and learned in WW2.  You can see this really heavily in Japan with works like Space Battleship Yamato and the original Godzilla which are basically a giant group therapy session for the events of WW2 especially Hiroshima.  A whole generation in the US experienced that horrible moment where the American on the street broke open the concentration camps and saw what was inside; you still see cultural echoes of this moment in anime now where creators indirectly reference the Third Reich or take a stance on whether the alliance was OK.  With for example Full Metal Alchemist, Axis Powers Hetalia, and even more indirect possibly accidental references like what you see in Bleach or Attack on Titan.

Meanwhile American sci-fi went in a pretty wildly different direction, dealing more with themes of an uncertain future colored by the rapid technological and social change of the 40-70s.  Most of American sci fi from that period is just asking "what will the future be?" and having a truly bizarre answer like "we'll find dinosaurs on the moon" or "in the age of the atom, we'll have flying cars" or "overpopulation will become rampant and we'll all have live-in sex slaves because human life is meaningless."  Stuff that seems like nonsense now but people of the time believed that anything could happen and sci-fi was their rudder and their way of dealing with the hope and fear.  Popular sci fi in the US was either anti-authoritarian or simply off doing its own things with last minute plot twists and dehydrated dinners.  The authoritarian aspects of US sci-fi were mostly regulated to military sci-fi such as Starship Troopers and Ender's Game.  However this was always a relatively small niche in the grand scheme of US culture (compounded by the fact that even in the 50s book readership was dying).  You can see this with the Starship Troopers movie being turned into an anti-war parody.  A lot of people were mad about that but pro-authoritarian sci-fi has never struck a strong cord with the American mainstream.  Things like Warhammer 40K never rise above cult status for this reason; you couldn't put 40K in theaters and have the modern American sympathize with it.  When they do get introduced they get altered, you can see this with for example the Aliens movie which was inspired by Starship Troopers and has similar themes of interacting with a larger power structure but takes a completely opposite view of the matter.  Or with the Independence Day which turned the narrative of "we need to have a One Earth Government so we can fight the Alien Menace" on its head by having the countries of Earth fight off the aliens as a coalition while retaining their identity and ideals.  IIRC the only time "authoritarianism is OK" sci fi ever really connected with mainstream audiences was with a certain era of video games; Doom, Halo, Starcraft, Battlefield 2142 ect.  But that no longer really flies anymore.  You can see those style of games getting pushed out by games where you fight authoritarianism or you're a "normal" kind of person.  Games about being part of the genocidal space empire remain niche such as 4x games and indie shooters.  You can see that even as game series that were once positive or neutral towards authoritarianism get rebooted or sequeled what you see is they get made far less militaristic.  Starcraft 2 for example takes the very strange and complicated narrative the Terrans had in the first game (the Terran Confederacy literally uses the real life Confederate flag for reasons that are never explained) and replaces it with a much more conventional story about revolution and teaming up against common enemies.

Mass Effect is a perfect example of what happened.  It deals with very stock sci-fi and space opera themes but turns them around to be relatable to Americans.  The fear of the Reapers is used not as an excuse for glorious war but rather this hanging dread that forces the good guys to balance their own ideals with evil necessity.  No one is happy about unifying against the reapers, no one expects to be stronger after the war than beforehand.  The "wiping out planets is just part of war" stock sci-fi theme remains strong in Mass Effect but is examined constantly throughout the game.  The Salarians have a good-guy sci-fi genocide plot but they spend the entire game answering for it, as all the characters ask whether it was justified and if there was a lesser way of doing it, and yet even then the Genophage is pretty tame by sci-fi standards.  Meanwhile the Quarians and Geth deal with the tension between understanding your enemies versus defeating them, and the Quarians in particular are an examination of how much a people can be held responsible for their actions in the past as well as a refugee plotline about a people who don't have the resources to survive on their own and how the galaxy reacts to that.  You also personally deal with the theme of whether you want to represent the entire galactic community or just humans.  Of course the player can choose to be a hawk instead of a dove here but the game is very aware of what that decision means.  And even a Renegade Shepard is hardly a fascist thug, more like one of those guys that the CIA recruits from the special forces.

Anyway, sci-fi has always been a vehicle for people to discuss things they can't deal with directly.  Even "silly" sci-fi usually has some kind of powerful sentiment behind it even if people have forgotten what that sentiment is.  Kind of like comedy in that way.

[Radsoc]

Materialism and idealism make, mutually exclusive, claims about the universe we live in. It's not just a matter of materialist or spiritualist civs following their own ideas. The problem is that the game actually answers the question in the scope of that universe in favor of idealism/spirituality, by having actually existing e.g. psionic perks and the things associated with that like "mind over matter", explicitly outside the realm of "reality". That's just one issue, but puts the materialists to shame, and in some ways ruins the immersion there, because materialists turn out to be wrong by the very premises of the game. It would've been better if they just left the question unanswered (and made the player decide if those prayers are unheard or not  ), while maybe adding different bonuses including the reasons as to why a specific civ has a specific ethos. Ideas don't appear in a vacuum. Found a very old, but good, more detailed discussion over at physics forums https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/philosophy-materialism-versus-idealism.2677/ on the subject, for people who are interested.

Ironically a similar problem exists in HoI IV with the soviet focus tree, where guys who are supposed to be materialists are forced to adopt (tooltip self-described or not) idealistic nodes. It's an immersion killer. I would more be a proponent of a game mechanics where a change to material circumstances affect the ideas of a population, i.e. second order variable, than allowing players direct (tooltip) access to ideas.

I think the stated DF approach to magic is a correct approach, where you generate a basis (the laws of nature or what not) and then (try to) build a consistent universe out of that.

[Teneb]

Ironically a similar problem exists in HoI IV with the soviet focus tree, where guys who are supposed to be materialists are forced to adopt (tooltip self-described or not) idealistic nodes. It's an immersion killer. I would more be a proponent of a game mechanics where a change to material circumstances affect the ideas of a population, i.e. second order variable, than allowing players direct (tooltip) access to ideas.

Soviets were only atheists on propaganda, both their own and others'. The Orthodox Church was a massive power in Soviet Russia, especially since it's not exactly easy to get everyone to just drop their belief system in a heartbeat. The Russian Revolution happened in response to the authoritarianism and militarism of the czarist monarchy, the consequences of industrialization and a wish to return to the old Mir rural system, not in response to religion.

EDIT: Reading the forum post you linked to, it seems you are confusing spiritualism (religion) with (philosophical) idealism. Stellaris spiritualism is not about Hegelian thought. Stellaris spiritualism is a vague belief system tied to the idea that there is a higher plane of existence tied to psionic energies, which turns out to be true. It does not reject that the material world exists outside our perceptions. Stellaris materialism, meanwhile, argues that there is no sort of higher power, instead everything can be explained through the scientific method. If something can't be explained by the laws of physics, then it's not because there is some mystic property to it, but that researchers got the laws wrong.