A funny thing occurred to me while reading E Pluribus Aluminum’s inaugural bareknucklin’. E makes not one, but two references to videogames. And in doing so, he implicitly suggests that the medium is a presence that we need to reckon with in discussions of contemporary discourse. Er, right, E?
E gives two examples of games: one, educational software that proved able to powerfully develop the lexicons of its young users, and the other, an action-strategy game that is potentially so addictive and immersive that it proved fatal to a player. These disparate examples suggest that videogames have an awesome power which we should try harder to understand, or at least acknowledge. But while some far flung scholars have begun to think critically about gaming, those in the fields of English, American studies, cultural studies, and public history largely have not.
In the last decade, gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry with production values and grosses that rival the movies. Veteran voice actors and skilled script writers augment high powered 3D graphics engines to deliver narratives that envelop users within worlds that are almost as realistic as our own. But just as with movies or books, such realism is shaped by the particular worldviews of the medium’s architects. Games adhere not just to conventions of genre or audience expectations, but also to the authors’ own ideologies, and those of dominant discourses to which they are subject.
I suppose a game must be big if Doonesbury devotes a whole week of comics to it. Black Ops is the latest in the Call of Duty series, which has proven to be a cash cow to its publisher -- it made $650 million in gross receipts on its first five days in stores. The Call of Duty games, along with other military games, like those in the Medal of Honor series, and a variety that are produced by Tom Clancy’s game studio, comprise the United States military’s number one recruiting tool.
Remember the early 2000s, when movies like Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers and Blackhawk Down capitalized on the country’s post-9/11 hawkish attitude? Cultural critics suggest that popular culture has now adopted a more nuanced, liberal tone, if not one that is outright anti-war. But the Call of Duty games have never been more popular. Just as Two Scoops suggested that procedural television shows inundate viewers with images of a crime-ridden America, so do military video games present a country that is constantly under siege by foreign threats.
And if the developers of these games should choose to make them a wee bit more nuanced, like say, by allowing the player to be a terrorist in multiplayer deathmatch? The military will simply threaten to ban the games from their bases. Furthermore, game makers rely upon the military’s cooperation in order to create the most “realistic” combat simulations. Not only is it un-American to offend the U.S. military, it’s also bad business.
Military games aren’t the only ones to champion Americanism. The summer’s mega-success Red Dead Redemption reinvents the western genre for a neoliberal age; the dialogue is so hokily populist and anti-government that it appears as though Sarah Palin must have written it. The player traverses the American West on horseback, revelling in the freedom of the frontier, and hunting down the game’s primary villain: an insane socialist. Where are historians Richard White and Patricia Limerick when you need them?
One game series dares to critique American exceptionalist ideology. The popular Bioshock has the player discover a lost underwater city, created by a megalomaniac to be a clandestine bastion of individualism while the rest of the country presumably was on the road to serfdom after WW2. A half century later, the player explores the deteriorating city and finds that the villain’s individualistic experiment has gone terribly wrong, albeit in a cool freaky, sci-fi sort of way. With characters named “Atlas” and “Andrew Ryan,” and elsewhere, the developers make subtle references to the works of Ayn Rand. Hint: they’re not fans.
The latest game in the BioShock series is set to come out next year, and will place the player in an alternate history, set in early 20th century America, where cities float among the clouds, and demonic, demagogic politicians put up posters of George Washington holding the Ten Commandments while fighting off dirty immigrant hordes. Should be cool. But games like these are few and far between.
Of course, there’s also the question of how much of this gamers get. (I think it’s hard to ignore the above image.) One interesting controversy arose when a game called Shadow Complex was released in 2009, in which the main character has to rescue his girlfriend from a diabolical radical leftist syndicate. The game was based on the literature of Orson Scott Card, a right wing science fiction writer, and some gamers tried to boycott the game, although not for its storyline, but because the writer himself is fiercely anti-homosexual.
Of all of the corporations involved in the gaming industry, it was Microsoft that actually did something rather progressive recently: it overturned Don’t Ask Don’t Tell -- for the soldiers on XBOX 360, at least. You see, if you play a game through Microsoft’s online gaming service, or any service for that matter, within the first few minutes you will be called “gay” or “homo” or “faggot.” Probably because you used a shotgun when you should have used a grenade, and thus you got fragged, and not because of your actual sexuality. So in order to protect people, Microsoft banned users from identifying their sexual preferences, or their race or ethnicity, anywhere in their profiles, including their “tags” or usernames. But people complained, and the policy changed. And as far as I know, simulated barbeques have not been affected.
So maybe games can be for a force for good. Because after all, if virtual soldiers of all sexualities can team up with each other to frag virtual terrorists in the most realistic of simulations, then maybe the same can happen in the real world. Can somebody pass the controller to John McCain?
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