14 DAY TRIAL // Tropico 5 is a game about creating a self-sustaining island, keeping a positive cash flow and about competing missions from a variety of characters, in many ways a lighter city builder than the SimCity series from Maxis.
The flavor of the experience is given by the fact that player’s in-game avatar is not a mayor who only looks out for the needs of his people, but El Presidente, a vaguely Caribbean dictator who is mostly interested in the long-term future of his own clan and in stashing away as much cash into a Swiss bank account as possible.
The developers at Haemimont Games and publisher Kalypso choose to play the authoritarian tendencies of the character for laughs most of the time, although it’s certainly rather easy for the player to dispose of rivals and break up demonstrations using the force of the military.
But I realized I had a problem with Tropico 5 and its approach to politics when I read the load and save screens which featured “humorous” details about various tyrannical rulers and their habits and saw one that featured Nicolae Ceausescu.
I come from Romania, a country that’s now part of both the European Union and NATO, but which has a recent history of being dominated by the Communist Party, which ruled with an iron fist and used a powerful internal security service to spy on its own citizens while syphoning a lot of money into outside bank accounts.
Nicolae Ceausescuy stood at the top of the entire apparatus as the leader of the party until he was deposed in a popular uprising in 1989.
When seen fragmentary, as presented by Tropiso 5, his actions might seem laughable and weird, but he was a calculated and capable dictator who knew how to secure his own power by terrorizing the population and eliminating all potential rivals.
The game does itself a disservice by not offering a fuller picture of the rulers who are featured in its loading screens because it creates an image of politics that’s restrictive and falsely comical.
Players who might not be students of history will be unable to see what a figure like El Presidente can do to a country and might believe that a lack of democracy is not great crime.
But the XX century and the many rulers who have oppressed their citizens are an example of the dark side of authoritarian regimes and even a simple video game has a responsibility to show those who play it all sides of the coin and inform them about the comical and the dark side of dictatorships.