That's the question being asked by Christopher Quach over at bitmob.com. His opening query is to consider whether it would 'be beneficial for the industry to pursue and discuss issues such as social class, gender, and racial inequality? Would the industry gain a wider audience if it delivered a serious debate surrounding crime and punishment?'. He responds in the negative, arguing that not only would it not be beneficial, but that the video game industry itself should not take on these kinds of responsibilities.
He concludes:
- Ultimately, games will never be able to carry a political message because it’s more about a game having high market saturation as opposed to the spiritual or humanitarian in-game message...Too much is at stake beyond the message. The money, the media representation, and the general shadow of “triviality” will always trail the word “game,” because that is what makes it open to all markets. Video games will always be associated with the words such as pastime, relaxation, fun, children, fictitious (the list would go on), and that's why game will never have a serious political voice.
While the analysis is well-presented, thoughtful, and quite cogent in terms of how video games are perceived, there are some limitations that warrant consideration.
First, the understanding of politics that grounds the analysis is way too narrow. The political status of video games is not necessarily linked to how closely they match up to issues that are commonly defined as a part of politics. Politics is more than elections, laws, or discussions of inequality. At its heart, it is about the establishment of a social order that is able to define some people, places, and things as properly political while defining other people, places, and things, as properly not political. And this is important because we commonly associate politics with challenge and contestation whereas the non-political sphere is understood to encompass 'natural' outcomes that cannot be questioned or transformed.
Second, as any anthropologist will tell you, games and the activity of play are socialization processes. They often function as a means of introducing, teaching, and normalizing particular social structures, dynamics, and relationships. Thus, the political content of a video game goes well beyond the obvious elements like plot, theme, or visual representations--as important as these may be. It is tied up in the rules and structures that govern the game! Even the most seemingly banal video games--like the classic Lemonade Stand--have rules and governing structures that normalize particular understandings of the world--in this case capitalism-- and how we are supposed to act in it--as rational self-interested profit maximizing agents.
Finally, political power is at its most effective when it is able to remain hidden. This is often done by labeling highly political processes and/or outcomes as natural, scientific, or the result of a-political technical reasoning. Similarly, by calling them 'trivial', one is masking the presence of explicit and implicit elements within video games that are highly political. Ultimately, presenting video games as non-political increases the chances that they will be seen as mere simulations of how the world naturally works--albeit with elements of fantasy, fiction, and spectacle for the purposes of entertaining--making the unthinking acceptance of their deeper messages far more likely.
Photo credit: hsingy
Comments