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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.
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.
It studies statues of gods?
I think you meant idleology, the study of crap stories on slashdot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dude, its 6 am, and i've been up for 24 hours, i don't think i should have posted that, and your right. just cut me some slack.
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.
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
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.
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
It may not be realistic, but it is often fun.
You know, the -other- reason to play games.
semantics are everything!
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."
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.
I have avoided Bioshock for that reason. I'm not enthusiastic about how it demonizes objectivism for a cheap plot point.
How do you know it's a cheap plot point if you haven't played it? Maybe it's a very profound plot point?
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.
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.
since an Objectivist society would never work without upwards of 95% rational actors
No offense, but 95% of Objectivists aren't rational people. It's a third rate philosophy set forth in fourth rate books by a fifth rate mind.