Laurence Dodds

Video games can't beat Isil

ord Carlile wants to use video games to fight Isil. Speaking on Radio 4, the Lib Dem peer urged British developers to marshal their “best brains” towards convincing teenagers not to become extremists.

In doing so he echoes a long tradition of attributing to games a near-supernatural power to change the minds of their players. It began in the Eighties, when Dungeons

and Dragons – the pen-and-paper precursor to so many modern digital games – was condemned as a gateway into Satanism. The attempted suicide of a child prodigy, James Dallas Egbert III, in the steam tunnels under his university, wrongly linked with the game by a clueless private investigator, sparked fears that a whole generation was losing contact with reality. Evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick even depicted a coven of witches using it as “occult training” to snare innocent teens. Soon, bloody fripperies like Doom and the decapitation-happy Mortal Kombat were blamed for school shootings.

This belief in the unique power of games persists today – albeit with a dippy Silicon Valley sheen. Jane McGonigal is a game designer who wants to channel the fanatical focus of a commuter playing Candy Crush into socially useful ends. Think of those fitness apps that try to reprogram you by giving you points per kilometre. Couldn’t games also end world hunger, stop climate change, or make workers happier? “Reality is broken,” says McGonigal. “Game designers can fix it.”

She’s not wholly wrong. During the Cold War, mathematicians tried to learn how to avoid the apocalypse with games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They assumed that humans usually do what they’re rewarded for doing, and avoid whatever they’re punished for. From this belief springs the mania for targets, incentives and “nudges”. Think how a bad relationship or stifling bureaucracy can modify your behaviour. A video game is just such a system.

And there are games with political messages. The American professor Ian Bogost calls them “persuasive games”, and builds them for clients such as CNN. Because they are interactive, they’re very good at helping people understand big, complex systems (show me a person who struggles to distinguish debt from deficit and I will show them Democracy 3). As the proverb goes: “I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.”

But the case for “games against terror” ignores one crucial thing: players. Players are chaotic. They don’t care what you want. Players, allegedly, forced the closure of the online children’s game Lego Universe by frustrating every possible effort to stop them building giant penises. Even when they do what they’re told, they may only do so cynically, out of a desire to be entertained. Bennett Foddy, an Oxford don who designed perhaps the only video game intended to be played on a trampoline, puts it best: “I don’t play video games to escape reality. I enjoy the reality of the fact that I’m playing a video game.”

Even persuasive games are just like any other political communication, and depend on a willingness to learn. Crude attempts to use games as propaganda invariably fail; a Hizbollah game in which you shoot Israeli soldiers ( Special Force 2) or a neo-Nazi one in which you massacre minorities ( Ethnic Cleansing) may grab headlines, but only convince the converted.

The real persuasive power of games, if it lies anywhere, is not in their messages but in their fun. A study of US army recruiting found games had more impact on potential soldiers than all other methods combined. Blockbuster shooters such as Call of Duty make war look exciting, meaningful, and not at all boring. It’s so effective that Isil peppers its own videos with obvious video game homages. But before you get excited about how we can exploit this appeal, consider that the biggest, most popular, most eye-wateringly expensive games are already about Americans killing foreign baddies. If games could fight terror, Jihadi John would be a Navy Seal.

So Lord Carlile has fallen into a familiar trap. As Bogost has written, these debates are not really about games but about using games as props in existing arguments. To the Silicon Valley dreamer, they can save the world. To the hardline Christian, they’ll damn the eternal soul. To a British peer, they are a part of the national armoury that is not being exploited. But really they are just an art form like any other, with diverse effects and intentions. They have no special power over our children.

Let me venture a guess as to why people join Isil. In every age there are people who want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Once, it was Christianity; then it was Marxism; now it’s fundamentalist Islam. Playing a video game won’t give anyone meaning if they feel it’s lacking in their life. The pursuit of artistic truth just might. Perhaps we should persuade people not to play games, but to make them.