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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?"
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?
This isn't insightful, it's totally obvious. Is there any doubt that the game is anything but a recruiting tool? What other purpose could it possibly have? The DoD spends $x (don't know how much, don't care to find out) because it thinks there's a shortage of good, free first person shooters out there?
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games about street gangs on rollerblades, each one based on a ridiculous* theme like sharks, love droids, and 3-year-out-of-date raver culture stereotypes, sticking it to the man via rail grinds, graffiti and pirate radio?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.
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
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
Don't think South Park is political? To me, it's one of the clearest examples of political views being baked into entertainment out there today.
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.
This is only accurate to the degree that everyone else is willing to follow the rule of law. When that is not the case, as seems inevitable, society must have organizations which operate outside the usual limits in order to enforce said laws. There are things the police do that an average citizen cannot. SC portrays the far extreme of that power, which may or may not actually exist. (If it did, by definition we wouldn't know...) While it remains debatable what powers such organizations should have (Patriot act, etc), the need for the existence of such organizations and for people to serve as a part of them is rarely, if ever, debated.
As long as there are those who would operate outside the rule of law, freedom will remain something which must be defended. The perceived nobility of the task, combined with the ability to operate outside of the normal societal limits make such organizations material for video games.
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
Witness "The Passion", which was an enormous success largely because it got people out to movies that normally can't stomach them.
Anyone who can stomach the ultraviolent Passion, but not The Daily Show, has more serious problems than just being politically offended.
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.
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
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.