The Onion

There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.

Carrying a definite political message is not the same as being a relatively message less environment that has politics as a mechanic.

"Political" games as mentioned by OP carry a message - e.g. who the "good guys" are (the rebels in Star wars are considered the good guys, and authoritarianism is shown as bad). In Civilization games, does it have a storyline that has an equivalent political statement? Or does it serve to let you make whatever statement you want as a sort of sandbox?

I honestly don't know the story of Civ, but hopefully that demonstrates the difference between something that could be "Politics: the game" (a "politics simulator") and something that carries a political statement

Many games have definite traits of political ideas being the themes or undertones. These may be criticisms of major political ideologies or of systems of government, or they may remark on other specific topics.

Anotjer facet, some games are accused or having an "agenda" or something, such as the games that people screech about when they have gay characters. This is usually what dipshits mean when they say a game is being political. To be fair, yes, some games definitely feel like that, which is just poor writing of dialouge and the delivery of themes, imo.

Civilization is a game that features politics as a gameplay mechanic. As mentioned by another user, this game still does have politics, as saying Mt Rushmore was a buildable structure granted by running Facism as your form of government, however it also has Ghandi using nuclear weapons so I don't really read too much into it as a "political statement"

To summarize my point, Civ is a game about simulating politics, you can be a theocracy or a democracy or a fascist state and swap between them all at will pr mix and match, but it's not really the goal of the game to push any specific ideas on political issues. It's a sandbox game, so my point was that it was a poor example compared to story driven games where the protagonists or antagonists have a political tilt that's either presented as good or bad. Not that civ has no political ideas and a tilt, but that its not a super great example when the specific example in the game are mostly jokes anyways.

It's like the recent posts about the Batman game that ended up becoming a lord of the rings game. The game engine and mechanics don't have to be about the theme. Civ could easily have dropped the political part and had more of the trade and development. It would be a different game but not necessarily a different genre. The politics is a mechanic, not to make a point.

In a civ game,.it's a tactics game, that happens to be about politics. Someone who is strong tactically will do well, but someone with vast political knowledge may not do well if their tactical thinking is poor.

When a game has political themes, that doesn't mean it's a game about politics. Take the last of us. It's a zombie survival action adventure game. It has political themes about government overreach, as many zombie media do. It's not a game about politics. It's not even about zombies. It's about survival. If there were no political overtones, the gameplay would be the same but the world and feel would be different.

A political game is trying to make a point, as much art will. Different interpretation of art can lead to different outcomes too. Look at helldivers, inspired by starship troopers which itself is based on a book. Starship troopers is a satire. The book is not and is propaganda, rather than poking fun at propaganda. I haven't played the game but from what I've seen it looks like it's leaning more to the movie than the book.