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[Servant Corps]

I will stress that I won't implement any changes to the Liberal Agenda (because I believe in consensus and respect Jonathan S. Fox), but I do want to say something that at least outline my game design philosophy.

You want to be heroes.

I play games for fun; I don't play them with the belief that what I'm doing is somehow good or heroic or nice. That my characters are sane or worthy of being loved. There is a separation between me and the character that I control, and I am a observer watching the character does what he wants to do.

There is a reason why I considered most FPS protagonists to be evil genocidal people. They may speak nicely, wear fine suits, never betray their friends, fight for their family or even for deeply-held values. But it does not matter for all the people they mow down (who are unable to defend themselves due to poor AI) and all the crimes they committed in pursuit of their goals. The LCS is even worse: at least a mercenary/soldier has the excuse of putting money on the table. The LCS has voluntarily became psychos to pursue a limited set of ideals that many people may not even care too much about (for example, in previous versions of LCS, Elite Liberals didn't care much about the military: as long as you're environmentally friendly and don't use nukes, go invade Iraq! Today's LCS don't care about universal health care either, though tomorrow's LCS may).

And the reason I don't see this as satire is because...

There is little to no satire of the Liberal Agenda because the Liberal Agenda isn't being satirized. It's not that it's too subtle and hard to notice; it simply isn't there. This game is a Liberal fever dream. It's about frustrated Liberals getting to go out there, throw away their principles, and FORCE people to see their ways. If you change the goals, if you "corrupt the world" so that the win condition isn't likable, you undermine that. It would be about... what? People pursuing made-up goals with ridiculous methods? That's not wish fulfillment for frustrated Dennis Kucinich Liberals anymore, and it's not wish fulfillment for Conservatives either.

...because the idea of using violence in order to get people to see things their way is far too common in this world already and is generally accepted and paraded around as acceptable and tolerable. Wars waged on ideological grounds are seen as automatically justified in the US press, meaning that it's alright to, say, blow up a couple of cities and wage a counter-insurgency campaign to turn a dictatorship into a liberal democracy. The United States also suffers from the (declining) threat of domestic terrorism, both left-wing and right-wing. And I'm sure the right-wing terrorists and left-wing terrorists have really sympathetic goals motivating why they decided to do what they do, but they are also seen as extremist and it is this extremism that may be responsible for them resorting to terrorism rather than, say, participating in the legal political process and expecting a real chance of electoral success. And even then, a satire against violence doesn't quite work: in the LCS game, torture is justified by saying "The terrorists would do worse to us" (which seems to imply kidnapping and brutal interrogation tactics)...so torture is being used to prevent torture. So a satire based on criticizing violence really doesn't work, at least for me, because our society generally accepts and rewards violence, so long as it is being done for "correct" purposes.

So if an LCS satire couldn't work satirizing violence...then what could it satirize?

To me, L+ and C+ are meant to be extremist. It's not meant to be a horrible place (well alright, it's horrible for a C+ world because we're viewing the game through the eyes of the LCS), but it is meant to be one we're slightly unsettled to be living in. Not used to yet, like we're just arrived to a foreign country with strange habits and funny hats. We're supposed to feel a sense of "culture shock" for the L, M, and C players who view this game. For example, the LCS supports police elections. I haven't even heard of police elections before playing LCS, though I have later learned that the Black Panthers also supported these sort of elections. Police elections aren't bad, and it's possibly likable maybe, but it's certainly weird for someone who just started off playing this game without any knowledge of the Black Panthers. "Animals are people too" also once caused you to talk to animals...and I know of no extremist group that actually does believe this sort of thing.

The LCS' proposed changes may be ideal certainly, but they are certainly worth noting for non-L+ players, and are not simply treated as "L, but better" as some of the current Liberal Agenda topics seem to be. It is there that I see the most plausible way for LCS to engage in satire, by engaging in slippery slope fallacies, logical conclusions, and complete overreactions. Of course, this also implies that the LCS does not represent Dennis Kucinich Liberals...which could help to explain why I have a different view from Fox.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

So a satire based on criticizing violence really doesn't work, at least for me, because our society generally accepts and rewards violence, so long as it is being done for "correct" purposes.

I agree with your premise, including your criticism of video game violence as unrealistic and unheroic in general. But in my view, the fact that our society accepts political violence so readily is precisely why LCS works as a criticism of political violence. Satire takes something real and exposes it to ridicule. If people didn't actually believe in political violence, it would be like mocking unicorns and fairy dust. It wouldn't mean anything.

We're constantly surrounded by news of political violence, especially in the middle east, but elsewhere as well. You see young people smash windows and throw rocks and start fires during angry protests, and it accomplishes nothing but wanton destruction. Liberal Crime Squad turns you into the perpetrators of that violence against society, and invites you to extend it to a ridiculous level and trudge through the obvious hypocrisy, then rewards you and says it actually works. You shoot people for gun control, kidnap for civil liberties, steal for economic justice. And it works. When the game supports you and reacts positively to your violence, if you experience a sense of dissonance and notice how oddly the game world works, then bingo. You win the prize for seeing through the nonsense.

Most people in Western society think they already know this, and say they reject terrorism. But I don't think they really get it. In World War II, western powers believed that strategic bombing to raze cities and burn down homes would break enemy morale and end the war early. That theory only actually worked once, when it was elevated to the point of dropping nuclear bombs. We regularly impose economic sanctions that cause hardship and arrest economic development for common people in the name of pressuring their government. Even today in Israel, retaliatory destruction of homes and draconian crackdowns on civil liberties are carried out in an attempt to punish terrorism. We regularly demonize violence carried out by enemies, then idealize it in the name of freedom.

LCS isn't preachy. It's just a game. The point of the game is to have fun, not to change minds, and fun is paramount. But I do believe that most people who play the game will walk away feeling a sense that such radicalism represents a disconnect from reality.

[Little]

For the L+ Army Issue, I always thought it should make a Black Army reference.

[Kay12]

By the way, is conscription Liberal or Conservative? In Finland, it's definitely the latter, but these things differ from country to country. It can be presented in a very Left-Wing sense - having everyone do their share of the national defence cuts expenses and allows more public funding for schools etc.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Conscription is universally unpopular. There are so many people in the US that we're able to maintain a fully professional military with minimal difficulty. For LCS purposes, it would be a Conservative policy. As with free speech, this issue would be reversed if the game were about playing as the CCS (the CCS would fight to oppose conscription and support free speech).