From Reason Magazine, an article analysing the ways that video games influence our politics and world-view.
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."
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.
(via Terra Nova)
