Another day at the console, Call of Duty-style.
Culture » July 7, 2010
Virtually Conservative
Most video games—in which you accumulate stuff and/or dominate the world—are the opposite of progressive.
Video gaming is about control. Your participation is restricted to steering and maintaining the narrative flow, altering the course of the story, eliminating hindrances (monsters, or human antagonists) and generally being the only significant individual anywhere in the game.
The numbers are daunting. The Entertainment Software Association reports that in 2009, 68 percent of American households played video games. According to Grabstats, 41 percent of all video gaming involves mission/action/narrative and enacted violence, while 47 percent of gaming (mostly by older people) involves solitaire, word games and the like.
The dollars spent annually on games (to play on consoles or PCs) and on online memberships (to “persistent”-environment games like World of Warcraft) routinely exceed the revenues of the American film industry. Halo 3, the 2007 best-seller, took in more revenue in its first day of sales than Spider Man 3, the highest grossing movie debut as of 2007.
Concerns about how video gaming will impact pre-adolescent and adolescent development is understandably pervasive; a 2007 Psychiatric Times article found that “it was unusual for boys to rarely or never play video games; just 8 percent of boys played for less than an hour per week.”
Adults watch children shotgunning on-screen avatars or wrecking cars in high-speed chases or chainsawing aliens’ limbs off, and we get queasy – especially when we come back in a few hours and the child hasn’t moved from the couch. But the relationship players have to the virtual mayhem, and the narrative worlds that encompass it, is far from simple. Despite scores of studies, psychologists have reached no consensus about whether violent gaming is a pernicious training experience, a healthful catharsis, or a little of both.
The ultimate impact so much gaming will have may be unforeseeable, even as our culture is subsumed by meta-activities long predicted in the fiction of Philip K. Dick. But nobody asks about the politics of the form, the thrust of social meaning inherent in the activity and in the software. In the future, virtual entertainment may take a vast variety of forms, but right now, the real money is spent on shooting games (first person or third person), like Doom, Halo and Call of Duty, or omnipotent strategy games like SimCity, Civilization and FarmVille (a Facebook application reportedly played by about 1 percent of the world’s population).
Either way, video gaming is about control. Your participation is restricted to steering and maintaining the narrative flow, altering the course of the story, using the environment for your ends, eliminating hindrances (monsters, or human antagonists) and generally being the only significant individual anywhere in the game. You are either the shooter Attila or the society-ruling God, the one-man plague or the orchestrator of a greed-based system.
Absorbing a narrative in a film or on TV or in a stage play involves observation but also an exchange of empathy, anticipation, authorial intent and thematic meaning. Playing a game is more single-minded – you dominate the world, accumulate the goods and safeguard your own ass – one way or another.
In this sense, most video games are infantile in nature, and inherently conservative. Think of them as individuated modes of authority disguised as either an escape from authority (the Tea Party esprit) or as benevolent dictatorship (in Spore, you get to control an organism’s evolution, which isn’t evolution, of course, but deism). At the core of the medium is the lust for and the rewards of unfettered control. These are the primitive precepts of conservatism as it’s practiced in the modern world. Whether they realize it or not, devotees of “the free market” (who now resemble Jehovah’s Witnesses failing to predict the world’s end over and over again) are players of a vast gaming schema – a world that they maintain is “free” yet long to dominate.
The one paradigm that differs from this pattern – the ostensibly egalitarian MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) such as World of Warcraft and Ultima – is just as solipsistic, if impossible for an individual to control. You participate in a vast social web, but only in conflict or in commerce. Apparently, this mechanical Zeitgeist has no room for a democratic idea or a genuine social impulse. Profit and power dominate the players’ modus operandi. MMORPG players can buy virtual currency with real money, instigating a subindustry in which (largely Asian) wage slaves “work” in the game for a real employer, accumulating non-existent yet resalable gold and valuables. (In 2008, the BBC reported a richly equipped avatar was itself sold from one player to another for 5,000 £.)
Could there be such a thing as a progressive virtual “game”? Or is a responsible, sustainable perspective the antithesis to immersive role-playing experiences? Let’s hope not, because virtuality is one of the largest and fastest-growing modes of human occupation on the planet. We should figure out how communal politics can be expressed in this medium, to say the least – before our culture completely morphs into one all-encompassing dog-eat-dog meta-landscape, and only the conscience-less survive.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Michael Atkinson has written or edited many books, including Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood (2008) and the mystery novels Hemingway Deadlights (2009) and Hemingway Cutthroat (2010). He blogs at Zero For Conduct.
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Reader Comments
Nice to see a reasoned and thoughtful article on video gaming. As a 40 year old lifelong gamer, my personal gaming experience has certainly been a little cathartic, and a little pernicious. I have often felt guilty while playing Grand Theft Auto, but enjoyed it nonetheless. I played Fallout3 twice (which you might find interesting). The first time I played as a solid ‘good-guy’, always looking for non-violent solutions to any conflict, using violence only in self-defense. The second time around I wanted to play a bastard, but I just felt too guilty and wound up playing a middle of the road waffler instead.
Civilization is an amazing game, that allows victory by peaceful means, although it is much more difficult than military conquest. It provides tremendous incite into the real reasons nations go to war, and should be a part of all high school social studies programs.
Inside MMRPG’s there are some progressive shadows For example players can organize into guilds and collectively share resources for mutual advancement. But it’s true that there is a dearth of progressive messages inside the gaming culture. The best one can find is anti-authoritarian revolution (such as red-planet). Violence is the the norm.
We should be thinking about what kind of social issues could be addressed in gaming, and how they could be translated to an enjoyable gaming experience.
Posted by spacemoose on Jul 8, 2010 at 1:17 AM
Excellent analysis for somebody that obviously never plays games (or pays attention). If we had it your way we would all be back playing with string and toy cars.
If you ever played the new Call of Duty you would know that they have a storyline that goes way beyond the player. They have a better commentary than a lot of newspaper, the way that money pops out of people when they die in Afghan poppeyfields, or Iraq invasion levels. In this games storyline, there are complex examples of greed, betrayal, corruption, etc. Not like what is discussed in many newspapers. (Let alone in the politics itself).
Then in the mario world, we are always looking for a princess, while eating mushrooms and battling lizard people?
Sometimes you have to pay attention to the cut scenes to get these varied strange ways the game makers see the world. But maybe you died before you could make it that far. :P
Posted by imnottelling on Jul 17, 2010 at 1:23 PM
Video games have become a secular religion like so many others, with proponents defending the medium under a ‘freedom of entertainment’ argument, while critics stress the (scientifically unproven) ‘desensitizing,’ or even prescriptive effects of exposure to violent content. Rarely is the narrative form, let alone ideological subtext speaking from it, discussed to any degree of sophistication, but this article comes close, so praise to thee.
Having grown up playing video games, but losing interest as I got older, and in need of more substantial ‘entertainment,’ I can only agree with the grist of this article. Video games, if not the singular cause of social negativity, certainly reflect, and as such help reproduce, the radically limited worldview so ‘natural’ now, the notion of life being but a game of domination and acquisition, or just a meaningless thrill, without the need for more complex social relationships, let alone greater responsibilities.
But then, this may be innate to the ‘heroic’ narrative, which is far from an invention of modern so-called conservatives, but a staple of patriarchal dominating culture. The Greeks weren’t too up on ‘progressive’ mores, either.
However, one could also argue that video games do not ‘encourage’ militarism, or violent means of conflict resolution, so much as desublimate them. That is, they serve as a psychic ‘release valve,’ a harmless means of letting off steam, getting that anger out of your system, if weekly therapy isn’t on the agenda. To me this is the problem of the medium: video games serve as a seductive release for very legitimate anger. You see, kids today SHOULD be angry, we’re looking at a generation under draconic polito-economic control, ideologically pre-programmed from early childhood on to be ‘hip’ to liberal capitalism, manipulated by the best behaviorist psychology corporate money can buy.
The real problem is that in the middle of an apocalyptic crisis like the one we are in now, in which it has become obvious to all but the most obstinate of the lot that young people today HAVE NO FUTURE to look forward to whatsoever - there will be no employment, no middle class, no life-sustaining planet - unless we were to go a zillion miles further than the change-without-real-change marketed under the Obama brand, the real, real problem is that kids remain sickeningly well-adjusted.
I hold video games responsible.
Posted by Don Jia on Jul 19, 2010 at 11:19 AM
I don’t at all believe that violence in video games and their popularity amongt young people is responsible for all the ills of society. With gaming technology as it is these days - as advanced as it is - it is possible to become immersed to an even greater extent in some virtual reality. But to say that this is corrupting us is to subscribe to some ‘hypodermic syringe’ model of media and society. People want an escape from reality and in this sense video games are indulged in as part of this desire for escapism. Browser games, bingo games, console games and all manner of modern gaming makes up an enormous chunk of our leisure activity. Endemic and inate in modern society are the pre-conditions for withdrawal into virtual pleasures. Progression comes in technology but not in content.
Posted by Kay Smith on Mar 19, 2011 at 12:05 PM
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