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How Video Games Reflect Ideology
A recent article at Bitmob sought to tackle the question of whether games could carry political meaning, arguing the negative since "The money, the media representation, and the general shadow of 'triviality' will always trail the word 'game,' because that is what makes it open to all markets." An opposing viewpoint has been posted by Lee Bradley, who says, "Perhaps the most profound shift in the games industry in the last few years has been the explosion of co-op. Not only are developers dedicating more and more time to providing co-op experiences in their games, they are also finding new ways of exploring the dynamic within it. ... Even in games where the co-operative element of co-op is less pronounced, the ideology is the same; you are not on your own anymore, you are part of a team. What's more, that team is more than likely multi-cultural and/or multi-gender. ... Now, this isn't to say that the lone white-guy hero has been eradicated. Far from it; the bald, white space-marine is one of the most over-used characters in modern gaming. But it increasingly rare that they are lone heroes. A shift towards team-based, co-op featured games is undeniable. In this way, mainstream video games, even those seemingly void of political statement, are implicitly political. While for the most part they are not designed to tackle political issues head-on, or carry overt political messages, they do reflect the values and the popular ideology of the culture in which they were created."
We play games to take a break from reality, and not to think about the same shit as everywhere else.
Far from it; the bald, white space-marine is one of the most over-used characters in modern gaming. But it increasingly rare that they are lone heroes. A shift towards team-based, co-op featured games is undeniable. In this way, mainstream video games, even those seemingly void of political statement, are implicitly political.
No, they're not "political". You can interpret Mozart's Fifth to be racist, but that doesn't mean he wrote it that way. If you keep looking for racism everywhere, you are racist: everyone else doesn't think about it all the time.
One of the best games I've ever played is Bioshock, it goes very deeply into polotics, religion, and idolology. You could fine something of that in every game of the last few years. Games are immitating life, and soon life will probably be immitating games, so it it getting better.
you are not on your own anymore, you are part of a team
My guess is that people are more likely to stick with team games because of this social element, even when they don't feel like playing. The result is team games are more profitable, so they are more likely to survive.
are current games using network technology to push new value ?
or do they use network technology to push old value ?
when internet was non existent,
games were obviously oriented to the gamer,
not to relations with other players.
still look at first network games
in 93 I played Doom and we played more coop than PVP.
And i played it not over Internet but in LAN.
therefore games are more coop nowadays
because coop is much easier with Internet.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Is mostly due to technical limitations.
White people are a minority, world wide speaking, and that's the market for games. So of course you are going to have lots of other kinds of people. There's two kinds of liberalism, media liberalism and movement liberalism, and the two are DIFFERENT. Media liberalism is really just about internationalization so that they can sell the same crappy content to everyone. Conservatives that think that the media is liberal are just blind to this.
This is my sig.
It's like dismissing art as meaningless in all forms.
Any time anyone writes or tells a story they are usually trying to make a case for or against something. Expressing their ideological views on something.
I disagree that calling anything a "game" makes it trivial. People are growing up playing these games. They don't care about the words that describe them. They play the games and may be influenced by the story they are exposed to.
Your favorite book or movie, did it have an effect on your opinion? A video game is no different. The prejudice against them is something the "grown-ups" have to deal with.
What about the possibility that previously in games due to technical limitations of the hardware the only character you could have is your "bald white space-marine" and the co-op was simply to hard to implement.
Therefore, the increase in co-op play is simply because it is now possible to implement much more complex game play elements and the whole "ideology" argument is just a try hard interpretation trying to push politic and racism discussion into what is pure entertainment?
Has anyone played Flower from the PSN before? I'd argue that game certainty puts forth a bit of political ideology. It is a beautiful game, and the political suggestion is subliminal - but there's no doubting it's there. I think it's more or less the vision of the developer - man and nature in harmony, green-peace and all that jazz. The game starts devoid of man-made objects... it gradually descends into a very dark and forlorn cityscape-esque locale, only to re-emerge in a bright and colorful world where the city pieces are blended with the nature pieces. Overtly political, maybe not - but there's no denying that the designer was pushing a message and that gamers, if they are paying attention at all to presentation, will understand that a message is being pushed.
Are all games political? No, of course not. Like movies though, and other forms of media, some are, some are not.
I can't see how America's Army [1] could *not* be called political. What about Super Columbine Massacre RPG [2]? [1] http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/05/0655240 [2] http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/16/1847229&tid=10 and http://www.necessarygames.com/reviews/super-columbine-massacre-rpg-game-free-download-independent-windows-political-contemporary
Here's one thing I've noticed: When I started playing video games in 1980s, the experience was pretty disappointing. Why? The games could have been so much better but the technology just wasn't that good. In the latter half of 1990s, things changed: we got 3D, we got the Internet, we got the processing power and storage capacity. Nowadays, I have zero technological complaints. I can fire up, say, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and say "goddamn it, this is what I wanted as a kid - and so much more - and now I have it".
I'd argue that the same thing is happening with social interaction. Playing is a form of social activity. Duh. We've always wanted social games. Even in my Commodore 64 days, games were always much more fun when I had friends playing games with me - coop just wasn't always that fun because if you were lucky there were some good 2P games. That got slightly better in NES era, but not much. Later Nintendo thought "well, let's put in four controller ports. Everyone wants that." And social games have just got a whole lot better with the Internet. So, once again, it's technology growing to meet the demands of the game designers.
Here in Finland, a computer magazine published an April Fools story about an advanced multiplayer Elite clone in 1989 (I think), and the writers were surprised because no one noticed it was an April Fools story. People really thought it would have been incredibly amazing gameplay-wise and technologically plausible if your computer could make a dial-up connection to your friend's computer when you're flying in the same sector of space. And nowadays we have EVE Online. See? Technology catching up with peoples' dreams and expectations.
Everything we do has an ideological/political/philosophical charge on it, not only in the interpretation but in the creation process itself; and videogames are definetly not the exception. You don't have to go to Wolfstein or Rise Of The Triad to check that.
We fight for freedom and justice in COD4 today as Rambo did in the 80's, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. As Nikita Khrushchev once said, the press is our chief ideological weapon, and if you think videogames are not press, then you're 20 years behind.
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Games are international so must appeal to the broadest market. That leaves no room for trivia such as party politics from any one particular country.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Or it could be that having more CPU/GPU power allows for more AI, animation, etc and thus more teammates. Ditto for co-op play - we finally have networking that doesn't suck. It's more a simple technology question than something cultural or political, IMHO.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
There's no money in politics, so i can't see why anyone would see games as political!?
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I'm sure many will recall the "subtle" (as a sledgehammer) environmental messages of Final Fantasy VII and the religion mocking of X, amongst various other games.
It makes sense really, as a lot of kids will play them and possibly take some of it in... I know I was influenced to some degree by games (and no, I don't go around shooting people! It's pretty obvious where the 'messages/morals' are and where the harmless fun is)
Same with cartoons and anime.
Hey Mr. Egghead Academic... I have a bit of a surprise for you. In real life, even the most elite commandos operate in squads because they're still just people. In real life and realistic games, a lone wolf soldier gets shot and doesn't easily heal. 20 guys can easily overpower him in a head-on fight. Only in a game like Halo where you play a genetically and cybernetically enhanced super soldier with a forcefield around his body armor would it even remotely make sense to have a lone wolf.
It has nothing to do with ideology; it has everything to do with the fact that most gamers aren't stupid and know that it is completely unrealistic to have a "realistic" FPS where a lone wolf can take down an entire battalion in a head-on fight.
As Nikita Khrushchev once said, the press is our chief ideological weapon,
...the press, and fear. We have two chief ideological weapons - the press, fear and surprise !
Amongst our chief ideological weapons are such diverse elements as the press, fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the writings of Karl Marx, and nice red flags.
Squirrel!
I'm not wildly convinced. Obviously, like any cultural artefact, a game is going to reflect its environment to some degree(and the apparent effect of environment will be a lot stronger once you narrow your focus to commercially viable/successful titles, since only things that are resonant with the population at large will sell well); but the effects of technical limitations and the strongly derivative tendencies of the industry are huge confounding variables.
For instance, at any given point in time, console games are going to have greater emphasis on co-op or small scale competitive play than are PC games. Is this because PCs are for rugged individualists and consoles are produced by the people's ministry for prolaterian collective culture? Clearly not, most of the players in the two industries are the same, or quite similar, it's just that the PC only really has single-user input support and tends to be connected to a smallish screen, while consoles have multi-user input support and tend to be connected to larger TVs.
Similarly, the rise in multiplayer only or heavily multiplayer oriented PC and console games is more about the fact that internet access is now quite common, and doesn't cost several dollars an hour anymore, which means that a designer can reasonably assume that a large pool of internet-connected players will exist at any given time.
Or even the summary really, but Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Xenosaga, etc. are all sociopolitical commentaries.
I'd say at least 25% of games are.
Well, you can ask the people at http://www.t-enterprise.co.uk/ if they think there is no ideology in games.
Their game "Rendition : Guantanamo" was picturing a prisoner at Guantanamo and the US soldiers were the bad guys for once.
That was once too many and the US dept of Justice pulled the game out from sales in North America and Europe. That's why you haven't heard of it.
The US dept of Defense intervened to convince this Scottish company not to distribute the game.
The same fate happened to a Turkish film, "The valley of the wolves" in which the Irak war and the Abuh Graib prison were pictured, with the same Hollywood take only reversed, showing the GIs as the bad guys.
No ideology.. Yeah right.
More at http://www.voltairenet.org/article160462.html
http://www.voltairenet.org/en
Of course it reflects when the miltary industrial complex pays for games like America's Army, when the same complex pays and gives tips to hollywood, what do you think they're doing?
About the first real question directly looking at political influence in games. Pity it's modded troll due to the spamlink at the end. Just move the spammy shit to your homepage setting in your user account and you won't get modded troll, doucebag.
I have avoided Bioshock for that reason.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
us vs. them ...and this list could go on and on.
competition
indiscriminate violence
force as a means to achieve one's ends
found money (gold, coin, etc.)
possessions
hyper-masculinity
traditional gender expectations
Not all games, but certainly many. It's hard to create a product (work of art, if you will) that resists or subverts the dominant cultural ideology of where and when it was made. Open up your minds, people.
cheers, -m
I mean, it's so clear to see GTA: San Andreas as a deep, biting commentary on urban poverty and political corruption. It's really quite compelling. I think the Museum of Modern Art should feature footage of it.
Of course $MEDIA will be used for ideological content if the media is powerful enough. Every developer with an opinion has the potential to imbue their game with their ideological or political inclination. All you need is text to embed political content, e.g. all you would really need is a terminal, which have been around forever. Of course, for political content to do much there must be a sizable audience.
Just off the top of my head, Theatre Europe for c64 had political content (e.g. anti-nuclear war) back in 1986. I'm sure this wasn't the first game with political content by any stretch of the imagination, just a random one from my youth that springs to mind. Virtually any war game where you can be cast only as one side in a historical war could be considered political. Chances are there were somewhat political games created in the 1970s, just the audience was limited. I'd be interested to know what the first such game was.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I'm glad cooperative gameplay is enjoying a resurgence... it had always been my favorite mode since the days of the original Contra, hell, even since Clowns on the C64. With a single-player game, sure they might have more control over the experience, but at best you can get good at pushing buttons in an exact, repeatable order. And while watching experienced players breeze through Super Mario Bros. or Quake done Quick is interesting for a spell, it's kind of sad that that might represent the apogee of the single-player experience.... if you're really good, you can do it the same way each time. Multiplayer adds a lot more dynamicism missing from games, and allows you to focus on developing your character in some way that would actually be appreciated by someone else... do you always watch their back? Do you always leave them behind? Which kinds of spoils of war do you leave for them to pick up?
Far from it; the bald, white space-marine is one of the most over-used characters in modern gaming. But it increasingly rare that they are lone heroes.
Actually, for certain genres (I'm thinking traditional adventure, and 3-d platform), the beautiful young white female is the most over-used character.
Wow, I don't know where the author is going with this. He starts out saying, "I'm not so concerned about whether video games can deliver such a [political] narrative." Later he says, "Ultimately, games will never be able to carry a political message". Then in the comments he says, "I certainly do believe games can carry a strong political message".
And then when someone brings up MGS and GTA he says, "Regarding the narrative in MGS and GTA, I think both franchises earned the right to be autonomous." If anyone can figure out what this guy is trying to say, please let me know.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist" -I guess I should leave then
I guess this is why I prefer abstract games which have little connection to anything - like Pacman or Missile Command or Metroid
In 1993 Microsoft published Arcade and Return of Arcade - Atari arcade hits adapted for Windows 3.1.
The entire collection filled all of four floppy disks. Brief essays sketched the history of the each game, with comments from the developers. Missile Command had a visceral impact that few games have ever matched:
The escape from reality could have frightful consequences. The horrifying subject matter of Missile Command had an affect on the developers.
Dave Theuner: "It was pretty scary. During the project and for six months after the project, I'd wake up in a cold sweat because I's have these dreams where I'd see the missile streak coming in and I'd see the impact. I'd be up on top of a mountain and I'd see the missiles coming in, and I'd know it would be about 30 seconds until the blast hit and fried me to a crisp."
Steve Calfee: "Everyone I knew who got really into the game had nightmares about nuclear war."
"We had this big thing about the name of the game. From the beginning it was called Armageddon. The management, themselves, didn't know what the word meant and they thought none of the kids would. Engineering loved the name Armageddon and we always wanted to call it that. From the very top came the message
Ed Rotberg said "The thing about Missile Command is that the world was not nearly as stable politically as it is now. There is a little bit of a spooky message in that whole game when you have that final cloud at the end."
The comment about coop play vs. lone wolf is not a political or cultural thing, it's an evolution of technology. Having played games from the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 to today's systems I can see this. Back in them thar days, games could only be designed to be played as an individual. You would play the exact same enemies/monsters who came at you from the exact same location in the exact same pattern every time like clockwork.
Later with the network play Doom allowed it became more fun to frag your friends who could adjust and were far more unpredictable than the computer characters (except that one guy who was a bit of a dork, but I digress). This has its limitations when you put the game on the internet and allow a free for all of 64 or 128 players shooting at anything that moves. It obviously had to evolve to coop and team play.
There may be some sprinkling of ideology in the games, but they don't last long. It's about fun game play, not messages.
Engineering loved the name Armageddon and we always wanted to call it that. From the very top came the message, "We can't use that name, nobody'll know what it means and nobody can spell it."
Dumb. Even the one arguing in favor of games carrying political messages is ignoring Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, and hell even Final Fantasy XII with all of its historical references.
People ignore the amazing past of video games in favor of shit like "Gears of War".
Clearly Bioshock represents the best of the industry! No chance that games like Deus Ex ever existed!
And the argument that videogames can only be "fun" and "escapism" is stupid. That's like saying films can "only be fun escapism". I have no problem with preferring video games that are fun, but claiming that's all the video game industry can be is arrogant- you're assuming that your definition for what a video game should be is the only one there can be. When anyone says anything to the contrary you get angry. "GAMES R FOR FUN I D0NT LEIK POLITICAL SHITZ LOLZORZ".
So Lee Bradley says:
OK. I understand that people feel that way. But the people that feel that "the way things are" is pretty much always "implicitly political" are the people who find political meaning in Every. Fucking. Thing.
To some people, the color of shirt you put on in the morning is political. The toothpaste you use is political. Everything is political because somewhere, somehow, sometime during the creation of that thing or state of being some person or entity involved had some political leaning that in some subtle way influenced the way they contributed to the process.
People who think like this believe the way I take a dump is political. (Seriously - find somebody who's gone off-grid and uses a composting toilet. Ask them about it. They'd have you believe that the way you urinate and defecate is a political statement.)
I don't buy it.
"Politics is a component of everything" may be true but it's also meaningless. Any statement so broad is meaningless because it has no real, practical impact on anything.
Folks who think like this need to take a big dose of practical pills. There's a political slant to every issue but that doesn't mean it's worthy of note. I suspect games change based on technology and human desires. We want distraction. We want to interact with others. Technology now enables that and some people have figured out how to make a buck meeting those needs by putting out games with a heightened co-op element. Big frikkin deal. Unless you can't win a game without calling your congressmen and demanding action on a bill currently before the House (or some such other real-world, practical political action) then a game isn't political.
It's just a game.
The main form of social organization in a game is the clan. That's kind of interesting. Democracies emerged aboard pirate ships. Why not in clans? What's the dynamic?
on the plus side at least this demonstrated to one man how to avoid such situations.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Just this morning I realized that Civilization (at least the current one, Civ IV) doesn't have the theory of evolution, or Darwin, mentioned in the Tree of Science of the game. I am pretty sure there wasn't in Civ 1, either. I wonder if that was on purpose, in order to not jeopardize sales to a certain demographic?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Any creative work beyond the most utilitarian (and sometimes even those) reflects the surrounding culture, technology level, and aesthetic sense. Archaeologists trace the spread of ideas through civilizations through things like jewelry or decorations on pottery. Do they depict people? animals? animals that aren't native and that they must have heard about from travelers? Are the depictions realistic, or stylized, or clearly fantastic? How complex is the piece, and what does it say about the tools necessary for its creation? Does it imply a stable workshop full of tools and equipment?
It's harder to see exactly what the supporting technology can do if it's not part of what you're looking at. Earlier video games on earlier technology were hard pressed to display a single player and a single opponent, so team operations were out of the question. AI-driven team members appeared as the game systems supported them, and live interaction once the underlying network was up to speed (anybody remember the lag on 1200 baud modems?).
Sometimes you don't even realize the significance of items in artwork until it's pointed out. I thought product placement was relatively new, since the movie era, until I took a tour of Renaissance paintings explaining details like which figures in each painting are the paying customer, or members of his family, or the artist, or someone's mistress (or all of the above). And then comes the political part that we don't see today: In a painting purporting to be a religious figure, who was the model? Is the "sacred virgin" really a picture of a courtesan? And was she known to other people in the circle that would be viewing it?
People like playing on teams, and always have.. The culture supports it. The technology supports it. That's why it's happening more.
Can you guess what political leanings most of the Devs of this game have based on their picture? I can. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/File:Fallout_3_devs.jpg
Not surprisingly, the game is rife with themes like this: The bad guys pretend to be very patriotic Americans, but are actually evil liars, who ultimately just want to establish a "pure" race of humans.
The game then (predictably) attacks that other familiar target of all Leftists: Southern Whites. In one of their add-ons, they make them into stereotypical moonshine-swilling, inbred doofuses - complete with overalls and hokey accents. A fate that would have been entirely unacceptable had it depicted any other race/ethnicity in similar stereotypical terms.
The article is not nearly as good as I would have hoped. I do agree that there is some political ideology and cultural values to be found in many games, but just to make a general statement that most games being single player shows political ideology is absurd. I'll have you know that it is significantly easier to program a single player game than any other kind, so there were more (especially on limited hardware). Multiplayer didn't become such a huge trend until the Internet caught on, which parallels technological changes more than it does political changes.
I find the article pretty weak and the connection between politics in games and the expansion of co-op seems non-existent to me. However, the topic is interesting. I was thinking the other day about Rocksteady Studios, the makers of Batman: Arkham Asylum. I don't think I need to explain Batman; what's interesting is that their (only) previous game was Urban Chaos: Riot Response. A game where you control a cop fighting rioting gangs, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Maybe I shouldn't read into this, but... a Neo-Con studio perhaps?
I'm not wildly convinced. Obviously, like any cultural artefact, a game is going to reflect its environment to some degree(and the apparent effect of environment will be a lot stronger once you narrow your focus to commercially viable/successful titles, since only things that are resonant with the population at large will sell well); but the effects of technical limitations and the strongly derivative tendencies of the industry are huge confounding variables.
(Boldface emphasis is mine)
It's interesting the PP says that. When I saw the submission, the first thing that came to mind was this article, which claims that more zombie-based horror movies tend to come out when a Republican is president of the US and more vampire-based horrow movies tend to come out when a Democrat is president, and even speculates a little on why that might be.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Thank you for saying this better than I would have.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
Nope, it was the press. Now, the islamic radicals are using Mao's playbook for insurrection and Kruschev's approach to the media, and they're winnign. The media is the genocidal extremist's best weapon.
Sure I put "air quotes" around that, but seriously once games are multiplayer co-op they do become more of a team thing - look at MMO guilds and clans. So the game involves sitting on your rear, but it is a team game, just like many more athletic games:
football (American style) games
football (soccer) games
baseball games
basketball games
The point is that people like playing games with other people - not solo against the game or a single opponent. How many solo games do you see out in the big blue room? Golf, chess, and wrestling come to mind - and in the schools, these are still organized into "team" events. Track "teams" go to track meets - while many of the activities are individual, the individual is still part of a team.
Video games have just been a bit slow providing that social opportunity (had to wait for the technology to become ubiquitous), but it is there now. Becasue people do like playing with other people, (game developers included), it makes economic sense. It will not be any more a matter of political indoctrination than the high school coach is for the jocks.
Which leads to an interesting possibility. How much money could be made from coming up with a game that really succeeds as a co-operative e-sport? And by succeeds, I mean to the point that schools would find it an acceptable extra-curricular activity - say on the level of the chess club at least.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Game designers build realities in which the narrative action takes place. The rules of that reality have to come from somewhere. Those rules are based on personal beliefs and dogma.
I remember back around the time when I realized I couldn't play video games anymore, I was playing this game involving soldiers and medieval towns and castles and such. If you performed certain actions, then the local economy responded in very specific ways which reflected a strong belief in the All American, "Let the Market Decide" form of Free Market monetary/social Darwinism which so many geeks are mesmerized by. --It was quite annoying to see unrealistic behavior in the game mechanic when I performed actions which should, in my mind, have resulted in different effects. It was like the game designers and I were in an argument, and they won because they'd set the parameters of the argument and none of it was taking place in the real world.
Dogma verses Dogma.
Games provide a soap box where geeks get to work out their frustrations by building a reality where they are always RIGHT! Very closely linked to this is the same geek desire to have a data jack implanted into the rear of one's skull so that this difficult reality we all live in can be escaped into the VR 'verse where nobody can hurt you or make fun of you.
Add to this that synaptic connections build up based on experience; Playing games for hundreds and hundreds of hours re-wires the brain so that it starts to solve problems based on what it perceived to be the reality in which its stress reactions are played out. So I'd say that video games are not just an effective way to express one's beliefs, but an excellent way to force adoption of those beliefs in others.
That this isn't immediately obvious is rather alarming.
-FL
Next time you kill an umpteenth rifle-wielding Russian, Arab or Chinese guy highlighted red in your favorite FPS, ponder the question whether it reflects some sort of "political ideology". Or just, you know, a coincidence; like falling on the same knife 43 times.
The most common form of social organization in games is the clan. Democracy emerged aboard pirate ships, where the crew elected the captain and the quartermaster. Why is democracy not useful in online games?
I don't know if anyone played Army of Two but that game seems to have HUGE political themes. It came out well inside Bush's term\reign and was all about private military contractors. That was a game that freaked the hell out of me if I thought about it too much. The game is awesome to play with a friend but, when you start thinking about how Blackwater operates and the same rules that apply to all of the other military force contractors that are\were also deployed to Iraq and wherever else and how much of an analog Army of Two is to that...
I think it's entirely possible for a game to contain (strong) political themes and messages. Even more dangerous is the propensity to get drawn in to an "evil" plot and think nothing of it because the game is so fun to play.
This is NOT me saying that this is a huge problem and that games should be taken off the shelves if they fit this definition. This is just me saying it's a valid point. Let me put it a different way:
Republican Gamers: Think about how awesome it would be to play a game where you were a special forces operator who went on spec op missions around the world killing terrorists. During the course of which, you discover that Obama is actually a terrorist about to orchestrate a takedown of our entire economy and it was your job to go "get 'im".
Liberal\Democrat Gamers: Think about how awesome it would have been to play a game where you were a lone vigilante who actually finds and executes Bin Laden. During the course of which, you discovered that Bush had orchestrated all of 9/11 as a massive money laundering\stealing scheme and it was your job to go "correct the problem".
Dear DHS - This post is a product of imagination only meant to prove a point. Please disregard.
Games that promote WAR seem to always get the green light. It's not even disguised now since the advent of such brainwashing simluations as 'America's Army' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Army . Mix that together with all the evangelical proselytizing in the military and you have a very good case for arguing the powerful ideologies at work in games and film (Michael Bay = Military advert, he gets whatever military resources he wants for free).
I'd say that depends on the game, and the movie. If anything, I'd say the game's ability to let the player participate in the story and experience it first-hand gives the medium an advantage over film, where the viewer passively observes the story. Of course few games let you alter the course of the story significantly, but I think games allow you to connect with the characters and situation much more.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Games (and other media) aren't always trying to send a message. Sometimes, there is a specific message intended, the writers/producers/designers had something they wished to convey to their audience and thus they worked it in to their game. Other times, the stuff that's in there is just because it makes a good story. An example would be Deus Ex. The game developers do not think the world is run by secret groups, or is headed that way and so on. They did, however, think that made a pretty bitching distopian future for a game and thus wrote a story based on it. They borrowed from whatever various conspiracy literature they pleased. They weren't sending a message, they were telling a fun story.
Everything is not always just a cover for a deeper meaning, or a vehicle for a special message. Sometimes fiction is just for fun. People want to make something entertaining, and they do. They aren't trying to change the world, just entertain people.
For many people, it is simple:
I like games, I have friends who like games, we wish to be able to play games together. As such, we purchase games that feature co-op play. Really as simple as that.
Basically, technology has reached the point where we can easily do co-op games, and as such people are interested. We needed high speed internet to get fairly prevalent, since doing realtime interactions on a modem is hard, and if you want voice on top of that is nearly impossible. Also CPUs have to be powerful enough that a unit can be both a server and client at the same time. Now we've got that, on computers and consoles, as such people are interested in playing with friends.
I buy a good deal of co-op games for that very reason. I want to play games with my friends. We aren't interested in playing against each other, we want to play together. I still play single player games, and I still play competitive games, I just also like co-op games a lot.
In one of their add-ons, they make them into stereotypical moonshine-swilling, inbred doofuses - complete with overalls and hokey accents. A fate that would have been entirely unacceptable had it depicted any other race/ethnicity in similar stereotypical terms.
Interesting point, although I LOL'ed at the rest of your angry right-wing ranting. Another game I thought of with stereotypical hillbillies in it is GTA:SA, but then I remembered that just about every character in that game is a stereotype.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's one of the things that's pushed me away from MMORPGs and the like, actually: the whole concept that you're playing "with" someone else, preferably in a team based environment. Why would I want to do that? It's not fun, and it's mostly a poor replacement for emotionally unstable people who can't handle "losing".
Take FPS games, for instance, for team based gameplay as a microcosm (like Team Fortress). You've got your medic, tank, engineer, and balanced characters. Why do people pick a given character? Certainly part of it comes down to the personality of the player, but it always comes back to the same basic concept of "what will allow me to do best?" Teamwork is a mere means to an end of not dying, or being valued to the others. If it serves no purpose, then people will all just (say) pick the heavy weapons character, or some other single-sided gameplay.
What we need in the MMORPG arena is the ability to solo play and not miss out on any part of the game. IE, think Fallout 3 or Deus Ex or some similar RPG, but in a universe instead of a world. Everyone is a part of the game, and there are factions - but it does not define you as a character, and your identity as a character is just as, if not more important, to your character as the faction/team you're on. To the player, the character is what matters, just as in real life, and trying to push a "socialist" type game world on a player only detracts from the quality of the game.
IMO, what we need is a good MMORPG post-apocalyptic game which effectively combines role playing/character stats and development with FPS gameplay (again, see Fallout 3 and Deus Ex as how such a thing -might- be conceptualized). If you're good at the game, your level 5 might take out someone else's level 80 - but as a result, that level 80's team puts a bounty out on you, or some such thing. I think it'd work really well in an urban desert type environment with gang factions (which would be fully organic, no pre-conceived groups but some weak ones to get the first players started). Gameplay could be team based, but you're just a human with a gun and a molotov cocktail fighting block to block and hiding or running when you're outnumbered, taking safe harbor when you can.
Eve kinda gets it right here, but it's also a dull and fairly slow-paced space game. However, cast a FPS game within the same MMORPG framework, and I think they'd have somethign incredible.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Nerdy bloggers have still to take the castle of high culture. In the two quoted articles they already managed alot: Art critics squirm and Lukacs and Brecht both vigorously twist in their graves.
It may not be particularly interesting to look at the political significance of your turds, but as video games continue to grow as a medium of expression, the importance of attempting to understand their political and social relevance should be obvious.
As a side note, is it really so threatening to look for deeper meaning in the mundane aspects of your life?
Citing sandbox games created over a decade ago doesn't reflect the real modern landscape of gaming. For example: http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/gaming/previews/2009/06/e3-2009-richard-ham-discusses-the-deeper-meaning-of-brink/
This is such bull. People have wanted to play co op games since Year Dot. It just didn't exist as much because there wasn't the same network infrastructure to allow that to happen, and probably not the same technology to include it the kind of games that merit it. Me and my brother have played games together for donkeys years, and it's only recently (relatively speaking) that co-op has become a proper option in the big budget titles, but it's nothing to do with politics, the games companies just realise that hooking people up together to play games is good business. I suppose you could call that some kind of social commentary, but it's a stretch.
I think this is just a really fancy way of saying people really like to play "Capture the Flag" in Call of Duty. I like to play that one too :-)
If I'm not mistaken, the design for scientific method is the ape to man picture.