Far from being averse to it, videogamers don’t seem to mind creeping political propaganda being inserted into their games. Some actually crave it, feeling it will lend greater sociological importance to the game and thus elevate their ‘medium’ (the videogame) to that fabled pantheon, ‘art’. And with non-governmental organizations and politicians getting in on the act, perhaps it’s high time to rethink their stance on the matter.
Table of Contents
War/Geopolitics
Balance Of Power
Back in the early ’90s, Chris Crawford (game designer of Balance Of Power) channeled Freud when he struggled to come up with a term for what he perceived as a collective inferiority complex when it came to the videogame industry in general. He chastised videogame developers (and Trip Hawkins in particular) for slavishly trying to imitate Hollywood. “This is an ego trip, pure and simple. Let’s face it, folks, we will never have the glamour of Hollywood”, Crawford stated matter-of-factly. And looking back at it today, he has been proven right so far. But reading through his essay, he falls somewhat short of coming up with a solution to the disease. His solution seems to consist of videogame designers having their own epiphany, in the process throwing FMV cutscenes, high polygon counts and licences overboard and coming up with some of the most involving ‘experiences’ ever that couldn’t have been possibly conceived on celluloid.
13 years on from that (slightly self-righteous) piece, videogame designers of Chris Crawford’s ilk still feel a little self-conscious and harbor an overriding need to have to prove to themselves they alone can create something that eclipses being a mere ‘videogame’. Injecting current-day geopolitics into Balance Of Power: 21st Century is a good example of this, and is what prompted me to write this blog posting in the first place.
Reinforcing convictions/myths
The Guantanamo Bay Xbox 360 videogame barely lasted a week before the developer pulled the plug on it due to an intense backlash by a US veteran organisation. Similarly, Six Days In Fallujah is provoking outrage from people who feel that current-day events with political overtones ought not be trivialized or turned into throw-away entertainment.
The game has you playing the President of the United States exactly one day after the September 11 attacks. While the goal is clear from the onset (projecting US hegemony across the globe), Chris Crawford maintains that you, the player, can make up your own version of history as you go along, and that you are not bound to the limits of the designers’ imagination.
The initial writeup of each country portrayed in the game, far from being impartial, reveals a very slanted and skewed perspective on foreign affairs (perhaps that was the point, in a tongue-and-cheek way, but it’s hard to tell). Talking attributes for a moment here, the ‘clout’ of the United States, for instance, is set to ‘Very high’, whereas Russia’s ‘clout’ is set to ‘Very low’; Iran is likened to the aggressor (some idle speculation on why nuclear weapons would fit into their agenda), while the whole government-sanctioned WMD ‘conspiracy theory’ in Iraq is basically lent credence to (one has to wonder if the game has the audacity to present as a possible parameter ‘Paint fake warplane in UN colours, fly it over Iraq and have Saddam shoot at it as a pretext to war‘, or ‘Present fabricated, phony evidence to the UN creating the illusion of a Saddam Hussein stockpiling WMDs to strike at America’).
In short, despite whatever protestations Chris Crawford may come up with, the initial storyline feels the need to reinforce particular nation-state myths (the United States as a stumbling giant that by sheer accident turned Iraq into a quagmire;from a dialectical and partisan perspective, were Bush not elected, none of this would have ever happened) and moral relativisms/convictions (‘the Russians are a paranoid people and want to bully the European Union and weaken the US.’). The western world – the United States, the European Union – are conveniently kept out of the cross-hairs: no mention is made of Europarliamentarian fat cats sitting in their ivory towers rubber-stamping policies/treaties they haven’t even read, license plate tracking cameras conveniently not reading their cars’ licence plate and thus having the convenience to speed as much as they want (in an Animal Farm-esque ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’ way). Nor is there any mention made in Iran’s profile of a CIA-backed coup led by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddeq and install the Sjah. It does feel the need to reintroduce Bush-era propaganda concerning its nuclear program, though; apparently Iran is under the mistaken impression that the US wants to do it harm (silly them; Dick Cheney proposing dressing up Navy Seals as Iranians and shooting at them to provoke war was simply Cheney’s way of reaching out to an ‘isolationist’ Iran), and has chosen to ally itself with Russia and China to get back at the US.
The mythical Bin Laden figure, meanwhile, is hidden somewhere inside a cave in Afghanistan, and the player has the option, through this interactive narrative system, to either do business with him (assuming he did not die of kidney failure years ago and the bit parts he played in recent IntelCenter videos were courtesy of a CGI model/look-a-like actor) or have Afghanistan hand him over to the US (someone has never been able to explain how, with all the satellite systems and global positioning equipment at the US’ behest, a man with limited resources is able to go by undetected for the better part of eight/nine years). As far as deus ex archetypes go, Bin Laden has got to be the best ever crafted – eight years on, countless Al-Qaeda number two’s imprisoned and killed later, and he still finds the time to grace us with a new annual audio recording/press release. It’s hard to tell where the myth ends and the man begins, or whether there was actually a man at all, in a Nineteen-Eighty Four, Emmanuel Goldstein-esque way.
Chris Crawford would protest and quip back: ‘Hey, if you want to write your own sodding game where you flount your un-American, conspiratorial ideas, you can, through my SWAT toolkit!’. And he would be right, in a sense. But this illustrates the problem with introducing politics in videogames: there’s no way to get it right. Politics is not based on fact or truth, but resides in its own verbal universe. It relies on the mass media (television, film, games, newspapers) to make it ‘real’. To paraphrase a line from Jacques Ellul’s 1973 book Propaganda:
“Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs and indications of true believers. For modern man, propaganda really is creating truth. This means that truth is powerless without propaganda.” – Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, p235
Thus, Balance Of Power: 21st Century really exists for the sole purpose of reinforcing existing convictions/opinions while at the same time amusing people by giving them the freedom to construct their own branch paths in the story, or allowing someone to write their own scenario. Whether unknowingly or clumsily, Chris Crawford’s work is prima-face evidence of propaganda. To borrow a quote from Jacques Ellul’s book again:
“Why always fall into the error of seeing in propaganda nothing but a device to change opinions? Propaganda is also a means of reinforcing opinions, of transforming them into action.” – Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, p104
The opinion meant to be reinforced here is that America, despite its transgressions in the Middle East, was not collectively to blame. The torture, the lies being formented about WMDs, the patsies, the encroachment on civil liberties: that was all a particular deviate President’s doing. By replacing the ‘frontman’ (the President), one could arguably do a better job of keeping the empire intact, and possibly in a more humane and ‘civil’ way, too. Was Balance Of Power meant to re-embolster America’s moral superiority? If not, why make entertainment out of a non-trivial subject matter?
Western self-reflection
In one of many flip-flops, the Obama campaign aggressively exploited online videogame advertising during the fall 2008 elections - putting up massive advertising billboards in videogames such as Burnout Paradise with campaign slogans such as 'Vote for change'. And even though Obama apparently disapproved of games such as Grand Theft Auto IV luring the youth away from their college books, he apparently didn't resist the temptation of duking it out with Sarah Palin in a similarly-styled game, Pivotal Studio's Mercenaries 2: World In Flames. Putting up 'Obama' for sale as a DLC-downloadable character is in keeping with the cult of personality that has been cultivated around him; from comic-book hero appearances to underwear brandishing his name and likeness, Obama has become not so much a president or national leader as much as an assembly-line product, a sort of halfway house between a politician, a celebrity and an actor. If by any chance Schwarzenegger becomes the Republican nominee for 2012's elections, the Governator's product placement campaign shouldn't have to try so hard - which kid nowadays hasn't seen a Terminator film?
To address this criticism, Crawford could have allowed for a wider forum[1]. When writing one of the branch paths of his game, for instance, did he take into account the NIE report published in late 2007 (compiled by over sixteen intelligence agencies), that suggested Iran was at least 10 years removed from having the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon? What if Israel strikes Iran first in a mulled preventive strike? Do we chastise Israel for causing unnecessary civilian casualties on the basis of a hypothetical scenario where Iran was inching to ‘wipe Israel off the map‘? How about giving Iranians their own way to play the game? Let’s pretend the game would allow for the following scenario: Iran gets to build a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes, and succeeds, miraculously, sanctions and all, to stop Israel (a nation with over 400 nukes) from carrying out a preventive strike on them? That Iranians are less inclined to play the game than Americans is besides the point: that act of impartiality by itself would serve ‘US’ interests in the eyes of the middle-east – a rare case of self-reflection.
More to the point: do we really want to go down this road? A scenario A in Six Days In Fallujah where the Iraqi insurgency kill the American Blackwater mercenaries that they feel were guilty of lewd and thuggish behaviour, and a scenario B where the Blackwater mercs return the favour?
Taking the middle road
It is ultimately up to the designer to draw the line: he/she could either try to take real political issues and wrap them inside a fictional universe (BioShock and Hail To The Chimp do this admirably), or aim to be as impartial as possible and cover both sides of the fence. (Deus Ex comes to mind – where the player is a transhumanist secret agent that is between somewhat of a rock and a hard place – little by little he learns that the organization he thinks is fighting terrorist groups are actually the ones doing the terrorist acts – and the previously perceived bad guys are actually resistance fighters.).
Any other approach is bound to offend or annoy somebody – whether he or she is an Iranian, Israeli, or an American. A lot of fuss is being kicked up over alleged racial insensitivities in Resident Evil 5 by the likes of N’Gai Croal, yet that could be regarded almost as a wedge issue in the grand scheme of things. What is of concern here is whether videogames can stay clear of deliberately serving as ‘political education’ – a technique that has as its hapless victims people of every single creed and race.
Are games to be free of politics or are we going to be seeing more of it? Let’s not kid ourselves here: the former seems unlikely to happen, but if we are going to see more of it, perhaps developers (and in particular US ones) should attempt to stop projecting their own collective insecurities and prejudices less on external enemies (in the way that Chavez was made to be a scapegoat in Mercenaries 2: World In Flames) and actually pick up a political science book from the likes of Jacques Ellul. I argue that Metal Gear Solid 4, for all its faults, is more politically relevant to the times we’re living in than, say, Six Days In Fallujah, abstract universe and all. Hideo Kojima dares to think outside the box and project a not-too-distant future where the battlefield has been digitized and wars are conducted between private military corporations as if they’re soccer matches. (the seeds of which are being sown right now in Iraq with hundreds of PMCs running the show, reducing the American military to a support cavalry) It provides food for thought and yet doesn’t even come close to offending anyone’s particular moral convictions. Kojima felt no need to include ‘Blackwater’ as one of the warring factions – preferring instead to opt for fictional PMCs. Neither did he need to name-check Iran, Israel and Palestine and portray them in a particular light to get his sociopolitical message across. In this case, Japanese developers’ own attempt at ’self-censorship’ actually appears to be a boon – it goes beyond each nations’ particular beliefs and convictions, and has a universal message anyone can relate to.
In closing, Edge Magazine made a good point in their June 2009 review of Balance Of Power: 21st Century, questioning the game’s underlying game scoring mechanism in a non-abstract manner:
According to the game, Israeli recognition of the Palestinian state is only ’slightly desirable’ to the US. But whose political interests does this describe? It won’t always be the player’s, who may see ending Israeli dominance in the region as key to tempering the hostility of Middle Eastern nations towards US interests.
Global warming/Sustainable development
Media blitz-krieg
“So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” - Stephen Schneider, 1996, APS News Online August/September 1996 Edition.
In Earth No More, a 2009 videogame, 'Earth has turned against Man', according to Scott Miller, founder of the now-defunct 3D Realms. It's a disaster-movie-turned game where the catastrophic effects of global warming have caused poisonous red vines to spread all over the Earth, simultaneously strangling and terraforming the environment. The 2005 remake of War of The Worlds had a similar geo-engineering subtheme.
In a previous article, the subject of climate change was brought up and how the music industry helped engender strong feelings [on the subject] in the youth. Music bands such as U2 and Radiohead have used up nearly every possible avenue to insert environmentalist themes into either a) their music, or b) their promotional campaigns. In 2008, Radiohead, for instance, declined a promotional tour in the US because of global warming. At the same time, Bono joined Al Gore at the annual Davos conference. “The G-8 are not making good largely on their commitments. About half, I would say, is where we’ve got,” Bono said. Al Gore meanwhile was on to his usual spiel – that even the worst predictions offered up by the United Nations‘ Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change were mild in comparison to the catastrophic ordeal that is about to ensue.
What is astonishing is that, despite cries that anyone who dares to disagree with the the man-made contributions to ‘climate change/global warming’ theory is vastly outnumbered by those scientists in favour of the theory[2], an overwhelming consensus on ‘climate change’ simply doesn’t exist[3]. If anything, more and more scientists and armchair journalists are finding chinks in climate change proponents’ armour. Meanwhile, ridiculous new hypotheses (fat people cause climate change because they consume high-potrein food) threaten to take the whole climate-change issue into the realm of Byzantine theological discussions. But whereas those medieval historians were mulling over how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, today’s high priests in the white coats are busy pontificating the impact of e-mail spam on greenhouse gas emissions (even McAfee sees an opportunity here to increase sales of their spam filtering software).
Getting the youth onboard
Britain's Lord Puttman has put out a climate-change awareness directive to videogame developers. Two games have already been developed with the tacid approval of the authorities, 'Climate Challenge' (UK Department of the Environment) and 'Operation: Cimate Control' (developed by BBC). The 'PC CD-ROM' label seems to indicate these games were made on a low budget and intended for a casual audience. More traditional 'hardcore' games such as Earth No More might prove more effective in terms of reinforcing climate change gospel.
Previously, when launching a massive propaganda blitz on a given subject, it would suffice as a ‘propagandist’ to cover television, music and cinema. These days, however, videogames have become just as important a market for the demographics that matter most to ‘propagandists’. What’s more, they seem more ‘dedicated’ to the medium and more emotionally attached than they do to others, which would make them [videogames] ideal fodder for disseminating doctrines/ideologies among the teen/twenty-something demographic[4]. Therefore, it didn’t take long for climate change-lobbying Non-Governmental Organisations to reach out to console manufacturers and the industry in general.
The first initiative to raise eyebrows is Microsoft’s amateur developers competition called Xbox 360 Games For Change. It is a collaborative effort between Microsoft and Serious Games (the latter an initiative kickstarted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars memorial in Washington, DC, out of which Games For Change later developed as a splinter organization). According to Wikipedia’s ‘Global warming game‘ article:
The Xbox 360 Games for Change Challenge is a collaborative effort between Microsoft and Games for Change (G4C), a subgroup of the Serious Games Initiative. The challenge is a worldwide competition to develop a global warming game with Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express software. Winners will be awarded scholarships from Games for Change and Microsoft, and the winning games will have the possibility of being available for download on the Xbox LIVE Arcade service.
A cursory glance at Games For Change reveals it is a collaborative effort between local and state governments, academia, foundations, and most importantly the United Nations. Garnering press releases in the mainstream media seem to be the least of their concerns given their clout. Take, for instance, this favorable article in the Huffington Post:
“A game developed for the United Nations is a great example. UN Food Force helps young people learn about feeding those in need: they lead virtual campaigns, manage rations, ride in a helicopter, do food crops, and experience what it’s like to be an aid worker. The potential to help young people shift their view of the developing world — and make New Radical career choices — is clear. “‘I want to be a humanitarian when I grow up’ isn’t something you expect to hear teens saying. But, with this game, they just might.” – Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder and president of Games For Change
When one speaks of ‘propaganda’ in derisive tones, one must be able to recognize ‘propaganda’ when they see, hear or play it (that is, for his opinion on the matter to have any validity at all). Regardless of how one might think about helping the ‘developing’ world, the aim of the game is quite clear: to inculcate or perhaps even reinforce a favorable public perception of an organization (in this case, the United Nations) on a subliminal level, and certainly not with the subject (the child/player)’s prior awareness he is being indoctrinated. Or perhaps he is indeed aware of the process, but thinks it’s for a laudable cause. But even that doesn’t change the fact we’re dealing with propaganda here, even if he is able to cite examples where the perception of the United Nations as a universal do-gooder was upheld. Just to quote Jacques Ellul again:
“The individual’s adherence to his group is “conscious” because he is aware of it and recognizes it, but it is ultimately involuntary because he is trapped in a dialectic and in a group that leads him unfailingly to his adherence. His adherence is also “intellectual” because he can express his conviction clearly and logically, but it is not genuine because the information, the data, the reasoning that have told him to adhere to the group were themselves deliberately falsified in order to lead him there.” Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, p81
Footnotes
1. [^]To cut Chris Crawford some slack, he was the first to admit as much in an interview (Edge Magazine issue 194, November 2008): “One person, me alone, doing interactive storytelling adds up to a pukey, pathetic little effort. A lot of people need to be involved, bringing their creativity to it, pulling it in directions.”
Link: – http://www.storytron.com/play-bop2k-launch.php (Balance Of Power: 21st Century)
2. [^]Michael Crichton, in his book ‘The State Of Fear‘, would argue that an overwhelming majority of scientists/politicians supported ‘eugenics’ as a science, which led to such atrocities as the Holocaust and thousands of sterilized lower-class Americans – all on the basis of a eugenics court’s verdict and decidedly pseudo-scientific theories.
“Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out. This theory quickly draws support from from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthrophies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.” – Michael Crichton, State Of Fear, Appendix: Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous, p681
3. [^]Since this is a highly emotive topic, one can expect hostile reactions from those who have jumped on the global warming bandwagon. Jacques Ellul explained this phenomenon quite succinctly in one of his books (that of the ‘propagandee’ becoming ‘agitated’ by counter-propaganda in a journal/periodical he thought reflected his own views). Perhaps this is something to ponder over, especially to those who might be inclined to feel this article does not reflect their own views on the issue, or those with the predisposition that this article by itself constitutes global warming ‘denial’ (a ‘conditioned reflex’ all the same):
“The fact is even more striking with regard to the newspapers, for the reader buys a paper he likes, a paper in which he finds his own ideas and opinions well reflected. This is the only paper he wants, so that one can say he really wants to be propagandized. He wants to submit to this influence and actually exercises his choice in the direction of the propaganda he wishes to receive. If by chance he finds in his “newspapers” an article he dislikes or an opinion that he deviates a little from his own, he cancels his subscription. He cannot stand anything that does not run on his rails. This is the very mentality of the propagandee, as we shall see.” – Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, p104
Link: – http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?d9a076a1-bfd2-4b14-a96e-0b88975cbc52 (Hawaii Reporter: Climate Change: Science Manipulated)
Link: – http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/james_delingpole/blog/2009/06/01/kofi_annan_300000_people_die_every_year_from_climate_change_nonsense (Kofi Annan: 300,000 people die every year from climate change. Nonsense)
Link: – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/13/arctic-non-warming-since-1958/ (What’s Up With That? Arctic (Non) Warming Since 1958)
Link: – http://newsbusters.org/node/11149 (Newsbusters: Media Ignore Al Gore’s Financial Ties to Global Warming)
Link: – http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb (U. S. Senate Minority Report: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Scientists Continue to Debunk “Consensus” in 2008 – Released: December 11, 2008)
Link: – http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25401759-25717,00.html (Herald Sun: Global warming alarmists out in cold)
4. [^]The president of Games For Change seems to be quite aware of this when she says:
“All these kids who’ve perhaps never even considered the impact of the environment are going to be getting knee deep in environmental issues. That’s really exciting. You know kids really respond to this medium of video games in a way they don’t to a newspaper or a heavy documentary. And I think that’s the key. It’s that we’re reaching them on their own turf.” – Suzanne Seggerman, Living on Earth: Global Warming Games
Link: – http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=07-P13-00025&segmentID=3 (Living On Earth: Global Warming Games)
Link: – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhSZvjl4nRs (YouTube- Xbox 360 – Games For Change)
