Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on a future in which politicians gatecrash our games
Just imagine how the rebooted Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare might have been improved if, after the notorious ‘Highway Of Death’ section, an avatar of Jeremy Corbyn had approached the player and suggested asking the Russians if they really had done the bombing before jumping to conclusions. The outcome of the UK’s recent general election might have been very different.
That, at least, is the kind of future envisaged by an academic paper published in the journal Acta Ludologica about the future of political content in videogames: “Political Marketing In Digital Games: ‘Game Over’ For Traditional Political Marketing Methods”, by Radoslav Baltezarevi , Borivoje Baltezarevi , Vesna Baltezarevi , Piotr Kwiatek and Ivana Baltezarevi . Videogames have always contained political implications in their presentation of imaginary worlds, the authors note, while in more recent decades the single-issue campaigning minigame – such as iCivics’ Win The White House – has become a more popular consciousnessraising tool. But, the authors argue, such webgames are “very simple games, with a very short circulation period, about general political issues whose main goal is just to inform and motivate players without delivering any significant analysis”.
More exciting – at least for these authors – is the prospect for videogames to feature targeted “political marketing”, which is a polite phrase for propaganda. After all, the old media vehicles seem to be losing their potency: studies suggest that political ads on TV do not much affect voting patterns, and the bad PR over Cambridge Analytica, plus Twitter’s announcement that it will ban political ads, means social media is viewed with more suspicion than it was a few years ago. But for propaganda in specific electoral contests, games are alluring virgin territory.
The great innovator here is Barack Obama, who in 2008 became the first candidate to buy adverts placed specifically in front of videogame players, via Xbox Live. Now, the authors argue, political marketers ought to adopt a digital-first strategy: “Political candidates, in the near future, may be able to interact with voters in virtual worlds and customise the political message to each voter separately.” And so Donald Trump might be able to pop up in your shooter and scream racist epithets while building a wall for you to crouch behind. Or a cynical politician might use the invitation to “customise the political message to each voter separately” to promise entirely different things to different people.
The authors of this paper are not the villains here; they are merely pointing to the inevitable. Indeed, it would be surprising if Boris Johnson’s advisor, Dominic Cummings, were not already looking into how to leverage bubble-popping tablet games to brainwash a new generation with his brand of machinelearning-enabled anarcho-libertarianism. But the paper is too hasty in its dismissal of the power of politics in videogames today. Games such as Molleindustria’s Unmanned and Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please are celebrated because they are powerfully realised games as well as instantiating fiercely political arguments.
And to understand how politically potent even the tentpole virtual-entertainment circus products can be, just look at how authoritarian governments react to them. In 2013, Battlefield 4 was banned in China after authorities predictably took exception to its depiction of heroic American armies battling the evil Chinese. An editorial in a Chinese military newspaper observed: “When western countries would make war games in the past, they would settle on Russia if they needed an imaginary enemy. But in recent years, with the boosting of China’s national strength, China threat theories run rampant, and foreign companies are increasingly keen to put the Sino-US conflict in their games as a gimmick to attract attention. The use of videogames to discredit one country’s image in the eyes of other countries is a new form of cultural penetration and aggression.”
That, of course, is true, and is not made false by the fact that, when it suits it, the Chinese government can adopt such weapons to its own ends – as when, at the end of last year, it made available an online game entitled Fight The Traitors Together, in which players were encouraged to knock over the Hong Kong protestors with slaps and rotten eggs. Perhaps future elections in democratic countries might be enlivened by the intrusion of politicians into one’s favourite game, but videogames are already a powerful force of propaganda for all Earth’s factions.
Future elections in democratic countries might be enlivened by the intrusion of politicians into one’s favourite game