Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on why videogames have always been political
Frank Zappa once asked, as the title of a 1986 live album, Does Humor Belong In Music? He meant the question as an ironic ventriloquy of his critics, implying an answer in the affirmative. Today, by contrast, a vocal subset of the geekerati is asking “Does politics belong in videogames?”, and shrieking “No!”
It is, to be sure, an odd time. This summer, Ubisoft has said that it doesn’t make “political” games, just “mature” ones, while Obsidian has insisted it doesn’t want to “lecture” its players, and so its forthcoming RPG The Outer Worlds is not going to be “politically charged”. This is odd since The Outer Worlds is set in a galaxy dominated by corporations, while Ubisoft’s recent output has included a game in which Americans are encouraged to kill other Americans, of the white-supremacist type. Not political?
An innocent reading all this might assume that there was an age in which videogames were just ‘fun’, until someone ruined their escapist pleasures by imposing political ideologies on our purely neutral, er, murder simulators. Of course videogames, like all art, have always been political. And not just the explicitly interventionist ones, such as Metal Gear Solid V’s critical representation of Guantánamo Bay, or the indie artgames of developers such as MolleIndustria ( UnManned) and Lucas Pope ( Papers, Please).
Yes, Mario Kart is political, because it reinforces the capitalist trope of monetary inducement (coins) to compete against your worker peers (drivers). Yes, Missile Command is political, because like an actual nuclear war it is unwinnable: after the player is overwhelmed by too many missiles the inevitable end-state is the nuclear devastation of her territory. Even Tetris, one could easily argue, is political, because it promotes the fantasy that if you simply tidy up objects (typically, of course, a gendered chore), they will cleanly vanish: it erases the consumerist world of clutter, landfill, and plastic in the oceans.
More obviously, any action game that celebrates torture and other depredations of a hegemonic military is inherently a vehicle that disseminates the propaganda of what I have called “National-Security Ideology”; and any game that features microtransactions is intervening in the real political economy – that prefix ‘micro-’ is itself an example of Unspeak, since the transactions are not so small when blithely clicked through by a child or a gambling addict.
The current controversy only starts to make sense when you realise that the word ‘politics’ itself is being used in a special way. Players who complain about their hobby being ruined by the ‘political’ only ever mean the kind of politics that seeks to redress issues of ethnic or gender underrepresentation, or to say anything that challenges the worldview of your basic altright dude. Such a person (most likely a man) thinks that his second-hand Ayn Rand-style libertarianism, his adoration of the military, his fear and mistrust of migrants, his fear and mistrust of women, and so on, are not ‘politics’ at all: they are simply normal. What counts as politics for him is only something he does not already agree with.
Hence the disgusted reaction from this demographic to CD Projekt Red’s trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, in some frames of which you can espy a glowing advertisement featuring an apparently transgender person. “I just want to have fun without having politics shoved down my throat,” complained one typical anti-fan, a choice of language that in its implicit fantasy of fellatio was, as it is when expressing homophobia, revealing. From other quarters, the same fictional advert was criticised for being tokenistic, but at least the developers did, to their credit, not join in their industry colleagues’ disowning of politics: Cyberpunk 2077, they insisted, was an “inherently political” game – and how could it not be? Speculative fiction has been inherently political for its entire history.
Such polemical disagreements recall the wider political phenomenon, in our age, of politicians disparaging politics as such. It is a particular rhetorical move of right-wing parties to respond to criticism by accusing their opponents of ‘ playing politics’ with some sensitive issue. What they really mean is that their adversaries are treating a subject as a game, but the effect is to degrade the idea of politics itself as a serious activity. But no social being can somehow live apart from politics. And when we are playing a videogame, we are playing politics too.
Of course, videogames, like all art, have always been political. And not just the explicitly interventionist ones
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net