#26 What does it mean for a game to be political?
One of my major hopes (if not an outright prediction) for 2021 is that the games industry, and in particular the world’s biggest publishers and developers, will finally embrace their potential to be political.
It’s something there’s an understandable, but frustrating wariness around across industry. I’ve worked with communications teams from some of the world’s biggest developers and they’ve always trained their spokespeople to shy away from politics or deny that the themes and stories of their games are in any way commentaries on the real world.
This leads to some absurd situations - how can you look at Call of Duty’s cartoonish take on Reagan or the fake dictators who make up the majority of villains in Ubisoft’s open world franchises and believe for a second the person who wrote their lines had no intention to commentate on the world around us.
But as I thought more about this prediction, I realised that it might be the word ‘political’ that is the problem, rather than the idea of engaging with politics more generally. And this realisation was sparked by this off the cuff comment in a ranking of Radiohead's best albums.
While I think of something being political if it looks to commentate or shape on issues within the real world, it’s clear that for many people that’s not the meaning they draw as the screenshot above illustrates.
For anyone who thinks this way, being political means directly commentating on the actions of governments and politicians. And when you see it through this light, the unwillingness of gaming companies to engage with the notion becomes far more obvious - most of these companies rely on generous tax breaks to help fund production and no one wants to bite the hand that feeds.
Nor in our hyper polarised world, do they want to alienate a significant portion of their audience if they’re seen to be against one political view or the other. So spokespeople are wheeled out to deny any political connotations in their game to appease these two major audiences.
That’s not to tarnish every studio with the same broad brush.
Of all games - it’s the wonderful Football Manager franchise that confronted Brexit most directly - showcasing the challenges football clubs would face in a no deal scenario.
And it was unsurprisingly divisive - generating mainstream media discussion in the UK around what is normally a niche passion. But, crucially there was no significant drop in their sales - showing games companies can engage with their direct political environment without harming their bottom line.
And of course indie studios are a different story all together - they don’t share that same need to appease the crowd and so can freely comment on party politics, global issues and anything else they like. And they’re doing so with relish - I wrote about Papers Please and it’s unvarnished take on immigration policy in last week’s newsletter and this week I want to highlight the equally brilliant Not Tonight which tackles a similar subject through the lens of a nightclub bouncer. It's well worth a play and a great example of how a game can comment on the context it's created in.
Let's get political
Even if they won’t engage with party politics - that doesn’t mean AAA studios get a free pass. To get the debate started here’s four ways studios can engage with causes and issues and there’s doubtless a whole bunch more I’ve not considered today which someone will remind me of on Twitter.
1) World building
The most obvious one - let the major issues help inform the background of your work. Have characters talk directly to your main character about the wider concerns of your world and ask for their take on it, but also indirectly, through half caught conversations, adverts and posters, radio clips, newspaper articles, book excerpts - however your game builds a sense of itself.
And make it overt - don’t leave it as something only a tiny number of players will ever discover because the mentions are hidden off the beaten track. If games about war and combat can occasionally rouse themselves to question the impact killing has on an individual’s psyche or question whether it’s ok to invade another nation over oil, it’s the least every other genre can do.
And have people mention these wider events as part of the bigger narrative - even if your game’s major story isn’t about the issue at hand, it’s ludicrous to think the main character wouldn’t occasionally stop to think about something other than the issue at hand - even if it’s just while resting between assignments.
2) Hold up a mirror
What if a world was getting significantly colder, not warmer due to the actions of humanity? Would people respond with doubt or would we see the world pull together to tackle it? I have no idea, but i’d love to be given the chance to explore it through the medium of a game.
You don’t even have to make the main character a politician - take inspiration from something like Kentucky Route Zero or Death Road to Canada and tell a story of someone trying to survive in a hostile environment where humans are pushed to their limit by the world around them.
You can imagine the set up - a story about a family fleeing to the equator as life nearer the poles get ever more unbearable. This would also create an incredible opportunity to reverse the immigration debate - how would things change if it was wealthy white westerners flocking to Asia and Africa in search of a better life?
3) Make problem solving the focus
Vikki Blake wrote a brilliant feature for NME last week exploring whether VR and modern video games engines could be used to solve real life murder cases. It’s an intriguing concept which excites and terrifies me in equal measure - while it could lead to justice being done, what if the online problem solvers get things wrong and a lynch mob targets the wrong person?
It’s something which sounds great in theory, but may never work as a playable game - even if the technology exists, there’s a genuine reason to question whether it should ever be made available to the public.
But, that doesn’t mean there’s other areas which aren’t more viable (and less potentially threatening to people’s lives). For example a game could take inspiration from board game phenomenon Pandemic and put the player in the shoes of an organisation like WHO - responding to a respiratory pandemic on a global scale, using real world information to see how things could have played out differently.
Games as activists.
Finally - I'm fascinated to see how games can be used to campaign for real change. Not just asking players to explore hypothetical, but how can games be used to encourage an audience to take real world actions. Just think how compelling these experiences can be and then imagine how you could mobilise the audience to do something. That call to action needn't exist directly within a game, but wouldn't it be great if the end credits or other prompts within the game encouraged the player to donate to a cause, voice their support or help solve a problem. Of course, this only works if the studio behind it is also making significant strides towards tackling the same problem - otherwise it becomes just another example of a brand co opting a cause to sell more units.
I hope this got you thinking - I’ve barely scratched the surface of what games can accomplish if they embrace their role in the world and I plan to check in on this space from time to time to see how things develop.
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