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The Politics of the Video Game
illuminata writes "Can the video game industry keep its mittens out of the political slugfest? According to Kevin Parker's article Free Play, they sure can't. In it, he cites Dreamcatcher's Gore and Sega's Legacy Online and Jet Set Radio Future as main offenders. He even goes on to point out how some people want video games to convey their favorite political message in the future. Are there any particular titles or game companies that you think lay on the politics too thick, or is it all just a bunch of foof?"
...America's Army: Operations is little more than a thinly veiled recruiting tool for the U.S. Army.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
most of the slant seems to be definitely doomsday, environmental, and decidely anti-government..
agan, this is just from reading the article. I haven't played any of the games mentioned.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
What about the myriad of war-themed games released in the recent years: Medal of Honor, Soldier of Fortune, BF1942, Call of Duty, etc?
O.k Let's see an anti-gun FPS. You an (FBI agent) with a Tazer and sleeping gas are supposed to single handedly elminate a Wacoish compound of gun loving fanatics that are prepared to shoot you to preserve their rights.
There are of course very few game plots that approach the beauty of a well-written novel, or even a mediocre one.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Jet Set Radio? You mean the games about street gangs on rollerblades, each one based on a ridiculous* theme like sharks, love droids, and 3-year-out-of-date raver culture stereotypes, sticking it to the man via rail grinds, graffiti and pirate radio?
The one that ends (depending on the game in the series) in either a skyscraper rooftop battle on a giant spinning record against an evil dj booth, or a battle with a three story disco mind-control robot?
Is Kevin Parker seriously trying to say that game has an overtly political message? This just goes to show; some people have a vivid imagination, but little common sense.
*holy fucking shit, Slashdot posters, what's with all the high mod posts with the mis-spelling of this word as 'rediculous' lately? Buy a damn dictionary.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Sometimes games, great games even, are taken from politically charged source material. The evil Haitians of Vice City invoke political considerations, as do all the recent spate of Iraq War spin-offs. Its inevitable. Also, common gaming themes like violence, sex, and the rest of the usual suspects invoke politics. My question is, so what? Politics happens.
The commercial has a bunch of children reciting the pledge of allegiance, interspersed with bits of violence from the game, and then ends with the phrase (in red) "Freedom isn't free."
Maybe I'm just a liberal hippie communist, but I always thought the basis of free government was a willingness to follow the rule of law, not brainwashing children into military service.
unbiased is impossible. the notion of unbiased (reporting, movies, games, whatever) is dangerous because it offers a disguise for people who are trying to gain momentum behind their political stance. if everybody read (listened, watched, played, etc.) thinking about the source of the content and what they might be trying to push, then the world would be a better place. instead most people seem to be stuck trying to determine if a message is the norm, or the "main stream view". that leads to being easily duped by politicians and salespeople (experts at delivering a message regardless of the content). No message is unbiased. An the notion of an unbiased message is proliferated by those who want to pull one over on the masses.
--Brian
It always bothered me that the SimCity manual editorializes that Reaganomics doesn't work. (Somewhere toward the back, in the section on economic srategies I think -- it's been a while.) I think the game is even set up to demonstrate that 'fact' for you under one of the pre-configured scenarios.
Now, that said, SimCity does a pretty decent job of teaching you firsthand that taxes are necessary and that overtaxation hurts as much or worse than undertaxation, so the political commentary isn't fatal, just annoying.
BTW, to all the Reagan-haters out there (and there are a lot of you) that are getting ready to click the "moderate" button: please consider that disagreeing is not same as flamebaiting or trolling. This is a discussion, not a war.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Witness "The Passion", which was an enormous success largely because it got people out to movies that normally can't stomach them. I think videogames tap into some of that.
As an example, I find SNL and the Daily Show irritating because lately they try to make lame political statements. So I just don't watch them anymore ... instead I stick to Chapelle Show, South Park, and adult swim.
I've kind of moved away from most movies, tv and music and towards videogames for similar reasons. They don't have a sophomoric political message to irritate me. I hope that doesn't change.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Unless you have played a game similar to planetarion, or similar game, you have no idea how much on-line games can have huge political conflicts.
The entire game was a "strategy" game but it really involved simple uot and out politics. There were two kinds of successfull players.
1. Players that were good at the game, and good at the politics (the top tier)
2. Players that were bad at the game, but good at the politics.
Being Good at the game, that involves management of resources, being on till 3 am and getting up every 2 hours via an alarm clock.
Being good at politics was to find a lot of friends to help you.
When I started in round 3 of the game, you simply did not have to be good. All that you required was that you had friends that would CRUSH ANYONE THAT FOUGHT YOU.
I was a "good" player, which means I stayed up way to late, and got up way to early to monitor my fleet. I got crushed several times because I was picking on players who were not as good players but had better political connections.
The next round I actually got a couple friends together and we constantly were sending messages/e-mails/sitting in chat to constantly improve our political situation. My goal for that round was to get my galaxy (which i controlled a group of 25 people) to get into the top 800, instead we got into the top 400, mostly because of strong strategic alliances.
The game was pure rampant capatilism, except all companies had the same product and a few got a relative monopoly (the top 400 galaxies controled well over 90% of all resources)...
The game always reminds me as the best argument for government controls on large companies.
Planetarion sucked later on, but it really was exciting during that time.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
What Ronnie did wrong was increase spending greater than the increase in revenue (thus the increase in the debt).
Whether we like it or not, there are underlying messages within the games, and players are there to push the limits, since the risks are basically none. Anyone whose been following TSO (designed to be Perfect-land) knows about the Alphaville elections' being rigged, which can only be described as humorous. There was a big discussion about what we are teaching our teenagers, as the losing non-rigged candidate is in RL a 14-year-old girl. To which I can only respond -- we are teaching them that elections are rigged, that's why in English we have the phrase gerrymandering. And just wait until we get electronic voting...
In any case, the question becomes, as game developers and designers, what is our responsibility in creating the framework and rules of these alternate realities? Can we do better? Or at least, can we create a few games where antisocial behavior isn't the most fun behavior available?
One of the striking passages from "The Utopian Entrepreneur" was about doing a focus group, discussing the Purple Moon games. One of the fathers was a bit distressed that the game had ethical content, but when asked later in the interview about his opinion on the ethical content of Mortal Kombat, for example, he answered that it was not a game about ethics -- but Purple Moon was.
With the amount of time our kids are spending playing games, we owe it to ourselves to offer some alternative to games where the basic goal is to smash stuff up, overthrow a government or make lots of Simoleans. Takers, anyone?
Like movies, novels, and plays before them, computer games have discovered politics. Even the pure, plot-driven action that remains often comes attached to heavily politicized back-stories.
Personally, I don't remember the time when stories existed in some magical land of pristine unaffected factual recounts of events.
There are no stories without perspective and no stories without bias of any sort. Even Asteroids has an anti-mineral bias (who's gonna think about the space rocks!?!?!). But to argue that perspective doens't belong in stories is to deny one of the reasons why we read, watch, listen, and play along with them - we want to hear other peoples' ideas about the stuff going on around us.
Games don't exist in a vacuum. Games are stories. Stories don't discover pplotics and other forms of "bias." People do (like writers.)
Anyone who wants factual data should stick to Excel spreadsheets.
I think the author of the article has conflated "politics" with "economics" in the first few paragraphs. While I appreciate that Parker is critical that recreational pastimes like gaming may be taking themselves too seriously, I'm not sure what the hell his point is.
Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trvialized depiction of pre-tax-reform US industry and culture? Are fat little men in top hats really in charge of all public utilities, and able to charge whatever they want for rental of their slums? Shocking!
Singling out the so-called massively multiplayer games like Asheron's Call for being too "real" because the players are demanding a certain level of reality in their game play is a pretty weak argument that games, in general, are getting too political. Microsoft is in the business of selling software and subscriptions. Whether or not they are "scrambling" to offer what their subscribers want is hardly relevant.
People who design software and systems know that how the software is used in the wild is often very different than the your own idea of how it should be used. It's not surprising that people who pay good money to play Asheron's Call and Star Wars Galaxies want to create simulated economies, culture and history. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a more sophisticated versions of old BBS culture.
People grow culture. It's what we do.
I'm not convinced that any of this has anything to do with his other contention, that the software manufacturers themselves are getting over-political. Which is it? Are the customers demanding more immersive worlds, or the designers injecting overwrought politics into gaming? Are these really the same thing?
The other games he mentions seem to fall easily into the post-apocalyptic near-future scenarios that share dystopic fictions with a whole range of popular culture. Comics, anime and (of course) science fiction stories have mined this vein for decades. Placing your otherwise undemanding first-person shooter in some kind of science fiction setting to explain why you happen to be a hyper-muscled uber-soldier tearing holes in the "bad guys" seems perfectly reasonable to me.
How is this different from, say, Escape from New York or even "Buffy"?
While the author brings up some interesting points, he seems to miss the mark on every target he aims at. Maybe he needs to just relax and play some Unreal Tournament.
-- clvrmnky
Just like in Hollywood, a lot of protagonists revolved around the "perceived" threat of the times.
Soldier of Fortune for instance has gone thru the "Middle Eastern" country and South American Drug Barons.
China is now perceived as a viable threat as evinced in Command & Conquer: Generals
Picking the enemy is making a statement.
You couldn't just pick the Vatican, or Albania (as happened in the movies Hudson Hawk, or Wag the Dog) without some kind of premise.
Is it preparing the hearts and minds of the public for a future conflict or just reflecting what's already there. With today's media war coverage, keeping public support is important and I don't think a game with the Palestinians being oppressed by the Israeli Army would market in the US of A at all.
Funnily enough, such a game does exist! IIRC Slashdot quickly "labeled" it as propaganda.
Battlefield 1942 had a mod where the Middle Eastern country had special forces troop type could suicide bomb and they were great for taking out tanks. That "feature" didn't survive long. And if it was non PC, how come we can still use flamethrowers?
So the next time you decimate the opposing forces, think about the real world equivilant. Is it just a reflection or is it projecting it's image into your head.
Oriental Hero "I want to live in a city where the Police don't shoot you" Jean Charles de Menezes
Games are (generally speaking) a work of fiction that involve humans, and being fiction you need a story. I would argue that it's almost impossible to tell a story that involves human beings that would not become "political" if it has any degree of elaboration.
Example:
"Bruce Wayne's parents were shot in the alley one night." OMG ANTI GUN AGENDA!
"Your parents were poor and sick, and being unable to afford medical help died when you were at a young age..." OMG SOCIALIST MEDICINE AGENDA!
Both of these are fairly standard boiler-plate backgrounds, but fall under the article's scope of questioning.
You know the Bush-huggin' righties must be desperate for "proof" that Iraq had WMDs when all they have for references are nutball web sites and vague sentences buried in 300-page reports.
Let's not kid ourselves; if there was real, concrete proof that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and planned to use them against the United States, George W. Bush would have a press conference inside of an hour to trumpet their discovery, and he'd be flogging it in every other sentence on the campaign trail. The fact that Bush-Cheney 2004 is making so much noise about John Kerry's medals instead is an implicit admission that the Iraq WMD stuff was all bullshit.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
One night while inebriated and playing Vice City, I came to a realization: it subtly reenforces society's morals on the player. If you kill someone, they send cops. And if you kill the cops, they send more cops! Rob a store, cops come. Bump your car into a cop, cops chase you. It's through the operant conditioning of cops chasing you making the game harder, that it pushes the messages of not killing, stealing, and driving responsibly.
-no broken link
There are two basic categories for evaluating a games politics.
- How well does the simulation match reality. This applies even for fantasy games, because while the physics may be fantasy or hightly simplified, there are still elements that symbolize abstract features of real things.
- The second is what moral framework the game provides for its simulation. This is no different from a novel, whether realistic or fantasy.
For instance, you are blowing up other ships/people who are presumably sentient beings. Hopefully there is a good reason for this. If the reason is "it's fun", that is politics. If the reason is "to stop them from destroying me first", that is a different kind of politics.Well, maybe, but not even trying is IMHO the whole problem. There are plenty of "realistic" scenarios that aren't judgmental, nor preaching a particular ideology.
E.g.:
- SimCity was already mentioned in the article: it does not try to tell you that this ideology is better, or that other ideology is to blame.
- Capitalism II would sound like an obvious target to pick on, but here's the rub: it doesn't actually tell you that capitalism is better. It just is. You're a capitalist in an ideal capitalist world (i.e., something as inexistant as ideal communism), now go make some money. Nowhere does it say "well, see, if it was communism, everyone would starve now."
Nor does it try to spoon-feed you any particular consequence of your actions, to reinforce some ideology. It does not even attempt to judge social effects of your paying larger salaries, or being more environment friendly, or whatever. It doesn't tell you "greedy republicans have caused a recession" or "bleedin' heart socialists are costing the economy a fortune." It stays neutral.
- Steel Panthers is one of the most realistic turn-based WW2 simulations. It takes more factors into account (e.g., armour slope vs trajectory height) than the whole C&C series combined. You'd think it would be a logical choice for getting preachy, right?
But it doesn't preach anything. It just happens in WW2. We all know what happened, we all know who was evil and who was guilty of what. So the game doesn't need to keep stappling upon your forehead "you're an evil sonofabitch for playing a Wehrmacht officer" nor "you've chosen to play as one of Stalin's minions, you commie traitor". If you want to play with German Tigers or Soviet JS-3 tanks, there you go.
- I'll even say that Jet Set Radio isn't necessarily _that_ guilty. A future in which _someone_ is an oppressive dictator, isn't that hard to imagine. The problem would be if the game force-fed you ideological stuff like _who_ is going to be the evil dictator, or _why_ is your country going to the dogs.
Now contrast it with other games which feel a need to not only preach, but preach total unproven bullshit. They don't even feed you some neutral fact, like "by 2034, computers should be 1 million times faster", they feed you an _ideology_. A _dogma_.
Like that in the next 30 years we're all going to be flooded because we didn't stop global warming. Never mind that not even most meteorologists aggree on that, never mind that only 2% of greenhouse gasses are produced by humans, never mind that the last 20 years have brought a steady global _cooling_, never mind that even before that the grand total warming was 1 degree in a whole bloody century, never mind the evidence that it may just be a change in how much heat the sun sends this way, etc.
I.e., regardless of whether you want to believe in it or in the contrary, it's something still not proven and still not understood. But the game already feeds you one particular political view, and shows you some "consequences" like they're a proven scientiffic fact.
Or like this or that economic approach _will_ bring us all into poverty and oppression. Sorry, as the saying goes, even if you put all the world's economists end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. There are people who've studied all their life how the economy works, and they _still_ don't fully understand it. If it was that simple, obvious and fully understood, everyone would know exactly what to do to get perpetual growth and never a recession.
But no, a game designer with no clue of the economy, feels like he's more qualified than thousands of economists. Not only he knows what't the One True Way (TM) the economy works, he also can extrapolate and show you an accurate result of what it will be like in 100 years from now. And exactly why.
Laughable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.