'Helldivers 2' Developer Claims He Brainwashed "An Entire Community To Fight For A Fascist State" With The Game
Johan Pilestedt, the former CEO of Arrowhead Games and the current Chief Creative Officer, claims he brainwashed “an entire community to fight for a fascist state” with Helldivers 2.
As reported by PC Gamer, Pilestedt conducted presentation at the Game Developers Conference titled “Helldivers 2: Capturing Lightning in a Bottle.” In the presentation. Pilestedt described what he views Helldivers 2 to fundamentally be, “What is Helldivers 2, fundamentally? It would probably be fun to play a co-op action shooter where you’re put in the shoes of the evil side grunts of pop culture … how many seconds would you be able to survive?"
From there, he said, “We asked ourselves, could we brainwash an entire community to fight for a fascist state? Would they? Would we be okay with that? And turns out, yeah, actually.”
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After claiming he was engaging in brainwashing players with the game, he seemingly tried to downplay it saying, “We do it all in fun and good spirits, and we actually try to get people to recognize the science of what is a totalitarian state. If you start wearing the same uniform as everybody else and do salutes constantly, you might be in a totalitarian regime.”
Pilestedt went on to highlight that totalitarian regimes create pleasing aesthetics, “There’s something totalitarian regimes are really good at: pleasing aesthetics.”
Furthermore, he admitted that following the game’s release he and his company were approached by the United Nations to give a “talk, in some form, about psychological defense against manipulation.”
Pilestedt’s comments come a little less than a year after the game’s Community Manager Katherine Baskin declared the game as “pretty woke.”
She also indicated that the game was a “big satire of jingoism” and how she thought it was amusing that some players “don’t know that super earth is bad!”
Ironically, as novelist Isaac Young has repeatedly pointed out while discussing Starship Troopers, which Helldivers 2 takes inspiration from, Pilestedt and Baskin are identifying with bugs and aliens hellbent on wiping out all of humanity. While they attempt to wax poetic about how superior they are, they unwittingly expose their own moral degradation by rooting against life and humanity itself whether it be Super Earth or the Terran Federation.
As Young noted in February 2024, “Tens of thousands of Leftists aggravated into openly siding for the bugs. The memes were far more effective than the actual arguments over the movie because they exposed where the Left’s priorities were. It was never about Starship Troopers. It was about their hatred for healthy modes of human existence.”
This then begs the question, how much brainwashing did Pilestedt and Arrowhead even do if any at all? And if the so-called brainwashing even work could it have worked contrary to what he thought?”
What do you make of Pilestedt’s comments?
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If you start wearing the same uniform as everybody else and do salutes constantly, you might be in a totalitarian regime.”
That sounds like every military in every country. It's why it's called a uniform. Everyone dresses the same and salutes those with more authority than them.
Quite the delusion bubble there, ay Lads? If it doesn't make sense to them, they must create a justification after-the-fact. Absolutely nothing is allowed to shatter their collective paradigm.