There's a tipping point between the two aspects RP vs what's actually going on. For me it's important not to just "make stuff up" This is a project that has involved CMDRs from a dozen Alliance groups. The video was in progress for a fortnight and even had a script development stage. Each of the group logos at the back is a real Alliance Group. The video has been released in stages. First among AEDC Militia and our closest allies, then to the wider Alliance community, and finally to the public.
The video is dense with encoded information. Even the font choices have meaning.
One criticism I was given was that the music sounds like a reggae party, and I should use something more epic and dramatic. The problem there is that type of music applies to both sides: the fascists and the oppressed. The track I have used is from Linton Kwesi Johnson a Jamaican Englishman and an angry voice of the black working classes in London in the seventies and eighties. The lyrics are:"fascists on the attack, we gonna fight dem back" about the rise of the racist skinheads.
There's a graph you can see at one point - that really is the historical data of the influence levels of Leesti since the beginning. AEDC has a database with more than three thousand systems, and important ones like Leesti have data that goes all the way back. Data gets entered by hand in case you are wondering - my sig says: "Data Entry Clerk Second Class" and that's why.
The film footage really has "come out of George Lucas" - it's from the film "THX1138" that Lucas made in 1971.
When the word "torture" is spoken, there is a brief flash of a boy hooded in a chair. His name is Dyllan Voller and the photo is from the juvenile detention centre in my IRL home town. That photo pretty much brought down the conservative state government here two weeks ago. There is another brief visual where it says "Nerve staple the citizens of George Lucas? (atrocity)" This is from Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri. Years ago I was halfway through a conquest and my support base started to crumble and I committed this atrocity several times. And then I watched a film on the war in Sarajevo and came to understand more deeply what it is like to live through a war in contemporary times. The disappearances of family and friends. Rumours of torture. The mass graves. And since then it has changed the way I command my minions, where I have them - and who I side with and fight for where I am not a leader. I always consider objectively what it would be like to live under my rule.
Most games won't let you build a utopia and that sounds boring anyway - but I think it's important to make strong moral / ethical choices in games.
Likewise with slavery, our cleaner is Phillipina and she talks about friends who went to the Emirates on "fly now pay it off" schemes and ended up being endentured slaves over there for years. Similarly in my drug-pig days, I knew a lot of uh "working girls" and there were several brothels in town that had Thai and Phillipina girls who were basically slaves. Not as in BDSM fun and games, but as in not able to access their passports, not having a bank account, all the money they were making held by their bosses, and their bosses keeping track of their "debt". There's a documentary called "The Jammed" that details their plight.
So when I view slavery and the Empire it is through these glasses. Slavery is real, and happening around us.
