Games are not simply another channel through which artists communicate but a means by which individuals take control. That control is brought to bear in a new and dynamic community where no topic, assumption, icon, or milieu is entirely safe from scrutiny.
Because they want fun, not lectures, players have been known to skip scripted scenes -- or to wreck them just to see what will happen. Well-designed games get back on track despite such mischief, but they can't force an indifferent player to pay attention to the story. My father has played the war game Red Alert (Virgin) and its sequels for years but has never tackled the scripted missions. Instead, he plays in "skirmish" mode, which delivers strategic challenges without the movie clips or story. He never finds out who ends up ruling the world, nor does he seem too concerned about it.
Or consider State of Emergency (Rockstar Games), a putatively radical riot simulator. In Salon, Wagner James Au quotes a man who searched for some sign of game-inspired political expression on a popular Internet bulletin board. Instead he found "a lot of posters begging for the code that makes people's heads pop off when you punch them." Another critic writes, "State of Emergency is all about rioting and the story just gives you a reason to bust some heads." With the rise of open-ended games, it becomes even less certain that injected story lines will reach their audience.
So implicit politics might be the better way to influence player opinion. But as a political vehicle, games may have an inherent bias. Bridging an ideological chasm, libertarian Iain Smedley and socialist Julian Stallabras agree that computer games possess a native individualism. Writing a decade ago, Smedley noted the "heroic and individualistic philosophy" of video games, in which the player "does not merely cheer on the hero in [his] struggle; the player's actions determine the outcome." Writing contemporaneously in New Left Review, Stallabras concurred: In games, "the passivity of cinema and television is replaced by an environment in which the player's actions have a direct, immediate consequence on the virtual world." For Stallabras, this makes computer games "a capitalist and deeply conservative form of culture."
Game Realism
Stallabras' wide-ranging indictment of computer games is remarkable for its combination of savvy ("in Doom...all the corpses of a particular monster always look exactly the same") and pessimism ("The defining image in all this comes, not from any game, but naturally enough from a blockbuster film, Terminator 2; it is the jarring crunch of human skulls under the bright chrome of a robot foot"). Stallabras contends that many offensive traits of games are concealed by "chrome," by which he means slick user interfaces and graphical eye candy. What would he think of the recent release whose title is Chrome? Probably the same thing he writes about the video game as a medium: that it tricks players into imitating idealized markets and sweatshop labor through repetitive manipulation of game objects and numbers, that it is shaped by "the parameters of the computer industry's links with the military," and that its innate objectification "leads to...an ever greater blurring of the use of people as instruments in the world and the game." But he might appreciate the irony that Chrome developer Techland is located in Poland.
Computer games, as a class, do appear to favor civil and economic liberty -- not because they simulate sweatshops (no more so than, say, music lessons do) or capitalist exchange but because of the same human tendencies that free players from domineering storylines and inflexible rules. Games naturally turn players against contrived limits and inconsistencies. And this mind-set necessarily takes on a political aspect as games themselves grow more political.
While storytelling games use film clips and unrealistic physics to control plot and pace, politicized games use simulated laws. But there is little reason to suppose players will enjoy barriers more when they're expressed in legal terms. This is not to deny that players like exercising power over others, as violent 3D action games and civilization-building "God games" attest. But just as gamers do not cotton to cartoon physics in their gritty military simulations, so will they frown on obviously broken market mechanisms, whether hauling goods between planets in Freelancer or, like one reviewer, trying to revive an abandoned industrial sector in SimCity 4. Frustrated by the failure of that game's artificial intelligence to demolish old buildings while he dealt with, among other things, "money-sucking parks and amenities, and ever-more-expensive garbage disposal," Jakub Wojnarowicz asks, "where's the private initiative in the city?"
Georgia State's Ted Friedman has observed that making sense of games' inner workings is central to playing them successfully. In the process, players inevitably notice breaches of realism. Is it too easy to earn first downs in NFL Fever 2003? Why can an archer's arrow destroy a cruise missile in Civilization III? Politically suggestive material will get no free pass. If game characters fail to react to markets or to Sim bureaucrats in a believable fashion, players will step back from the fantasy. Friedman insists that all games are "ideological constructions," implying that they are equal in this respect. But some simulations imitate real people and economies more closely than others, just as some physics models produce more authentic collisions.
"Challenge Everything!"
Realism is delivered in part by means of reductionism -- that is, lower-level rules governing game events. Games that allow characters to pick up and carry any small object, or to push large, freestanding ones, are using reductionism. They are thereby becoming laboratories of emergent dynamics. Not only do such games enable experimentation; they reward it with interesting, unscripted behavior. Low-level political simulation methods, such as individual-based models and tracking of supply and demand, extend this new experimentalism into social dynamics. Electronic Arts' commercials whisper conspiratorially, "Challenge everything!" And players just might. Freed from service to narrative and empowered by low-level rules, they can dispassionately test political assumptions without consequences. Their simulated civic tinkering will prompt no real nation to topple, no real person to suffer.
Then there's the extended gaming community, which endlessly critiques, modifies, and debates the limits of games. It equips this accidental laboratory. Its Web sites dissect and disseminate game mechanics. Its members demand the power to customize game software. "Level editors," used to create game maps and content, are now standard game features. But gamers did not wait for slick interfaces before diving into do-it-yourself development. The history of user-modified games -- "mods" and their more ambitious cousins, "total conversions" -- demonstrates the lengths to which technically facile fans will go to extend favored titles. These modes of customization reinforce games' experimental potential by opening game architecture itself to players.
Comics theoretician Scott McCloud has asked if gaming can "'rewire' us in some way," and journalist Steven Poole has concluded that games are "rewiring our minds." If so, they just might be pushing us toward individualism, encouraging us to resist both authors and authoritarians. Stories do fulfill a distinct need, and computer games are unlikely to break completely from them. For those so inclined, it will always be possible to glue a dramatic collectivist veneer over a rigged simulation. But like Stallabras' chrome, this facade warrants little worry. It may take some ingenuity, but free minds eventually break through fake dungeon walls to explore their potential and live their own stories.
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