Video Games with an Agenda

What is it with London and video games all of a sudden? Well anyway, my favourite London cinema The Curzon Soho is hosting Video Games with an Agenda from October 16th to November 7th.

The curators of the exhibition are Gonzalo Frasca & Ian Bogost of Watercoolergames (and other places); and it features a number of ‘political’ works including their piece The Howard Dean for Iowa Game which we discussed here on TN back in December.

Comments

[Timothy Burke]

1.

The odd thing about an exhibition (or category) like this is that it takes for granted that a game like The Sims or Sissyfight or even Grand Theft Auto doesn't have an agenda. It also seems to me that when you collect all the named games for the exhibition together, it doesn't rebound real well on them as a group: even in an exclusive universe of agitprop across multiple mass media, these games would stand out as unusually crude and didactic. (I'd say that they seem that way even compared to Chris Crawford's Balance of Power or other older games with political themes). I can't help but think there are more subtle, imaginative and ultimately powerful ways to use the medium of games to make a political point.

[Ian Bogost]

2.

Thanks for the post Ren.

Tim -- you're right that The Sims and GTA bear ideology, but do they have an agenda? This exhibit is meant as a small introduction, for a very general audience, to current ideas of using games explicitly for carrying political and social commentary, for the sake of that commentary as a principle goal. Here we also touch on the idea of official endorsement, which is a whole other ball of wax from commercial game publishing.

Still, we're continually working to improve political expression in games. Readers might want to take a look at some of the games Gonzalo and I have done individually that are not in this exhibit, including Madrid (game, commentary), Activism (game, commentary), and Take Back Illinois (game, commentary). Some of these may carry a different subtlety of expression than the specimens in the exhibit.

[greglas]

3.

Madrid and TBI have also been discussed on Grand Text Auto, btw.

http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/03/14/newsgamings-imadridi/

http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/09/22/take-back-illinois/

Some more poltical games links/commentary on my old post here about 9/12.

I think Tim's point (correct me if I'm wrong) is that all game play is political (well, maybe we can argue about Tetris). I think Ian and Gonzalo would probably agree. They're doing something a little different, though, by trying to pull politics to the forefront and showcase games that attempt to politicize the player's interactive role. So I think calling them "didactic" and "crude" might not be a very strong critique -- they're meant to have that kind of impact. I read these types of games not as poetry to be admired by the detached critic but more like a participatory happening, a form perhaps better suited to games.

[Ian Bogost]

4.

I think Tim's point (correct me if I'm wrong) is that all game play is political (well, maybe we can argue about Tetris). I think Ian and Gonzalo would probably agree.

I'd agree that all games have ideology, and players participate in that when they play. Yes, even Tetris :) I've written about the infamous Murray-Eskelinen conflict and hopefully that will be published soon.

Oh, and incidentally there is indeed didacticism in these games. They are trying to influence opinion, and thus they are drawing attention to their positions, rather than obscuring those positions in gameplay.

[dmyers]

5.

> I'd agree that all games have ideology...

And I then must wonder, when reading such claims, what grand and glorious things in this great wide world do NOT "have" ideology.

It would seem that if all things have something, then it makes very little sense to use that something to distinguish one thing from another.

Perhaps it would make more sense to distinguish between those critics who claim that all games have ideology, and those that don't.

[greglas]

6.

dmyers> And I then must wonder, when reading such claims, what grand and glorious things in this great wide world do NOT "have" ideology.

Hmm... Suppose I build a house on a plot of land with eight trees and I cut down the seven birch trees and leave the one oak tree standing -- does the oak have an ideology? Do I have an ideology about tree types? Is the oak an expression of my ideology?

dmyers> It would seem that if all things have something, then it makes very little sense to use that something to distinguish one thing from another.

Hmm... does "ideology" have an ideology?

More to the point, you might say that all physical objects have mass while still using mass as a means of distinguishing objects. But point taken -- I'm not how we'd measure ideological mass.

dmyers> Perhaps it would make more sense to distinguish between those critics who claim that all games have ideology, and those that don't.

I guess Ian is Type A, then. :-)

[Timothy Burke]

7.

My point would be, whether we're talking about these particular games or certain other forms of agit-prop or consciously, programmatically political culture, that didacticism is a lousy modality for achieving the goal of influencing opinion or motivating an audience to particular actions. There's no sense in which "September 12th: A Toy World" is not providing preloaded answers or is trying to provoke open-ended inquiry. I think people can legitimately disagree about whether it or any other similarly didactic text is effective in achieving some desired relation to an audience, but there's a difference between didacticism and pedagogy, in my mind.

I would say this in particular about games, and there's an odd thing that I can't help but think about both some of the didactic games which have been made and some related work in performance art that makes use of games in some fashion, and that is that they not only preach to the politically converted, but to audiences on the left who are discomforted by the medium of video games and the genres and tropes which dominate gaming. In other words, the didactic effectiveness here is not to reach and transform gamers who were previously apolitical or uncertain about particular issues, but to confirm already existing opinions about a particular issue while also collaterally confirming preconceptions about video gaming as a mass medium.

To my mind, this misses the possibility of games as a platform for the creation of meaning (which includes the creation of political conviction). To really make it possible for audiences to discover in a text the preconditions of a way of seeing and being in the world, I think you have to build in the freedom for them to not discover what you think they ought. The signal aesthetic possibility of computer games is that they permit a gentle but powerfully useful form of alienation from both author and self-as-reader. We can believe we encounter the world in the text when we're playing a computer game because the computer allows a veiled relation between author and audience--it can serve as an alchemical operator, a black box where the action of the player is mediated by code whose resolution might surprise both player and programmer. Think of all the times that game programmers are themselves surprised by what complex code (or programs built around autonomous agents) actually do. Then think of the political and interpretative possibilities of seeing games that way. Suppose in an alternate-world version of "September 12th: A Toy World", not every act of retaliatory violence creates a terrorist, but instead unpredictably affects a world inhabited by BDI agents and emergent dynamics. Suppose the player encounters a simulation whose organicism makes it persuasively mimetic--so that the player says, as we sometimes do when we play SimCity, 'kind of like real life!'--while also reminded us of its "game-like" character, of the gaps between reality and representation?

That seems a vastly more powerful strategy for influencing opinion. It's just that such a strategy concedes the unpredictability of its effects--it trusts in the audience to make meanings and do things with the experience which are unanticipated by and possibly even undesired by the author. If you don't come to September 12 already thinking that retaliating against terrorists makes more terrorists or to Horde of Directors beliving already in the nepotistic relation between state and corporate capitalism, I doubt you're going to come away from those experiences newly convinced--unless you imagine the possible audience as mentally inert, as clay who will be remoulded by the encounter with anything counter-hegemonic--which, if so, I would say one is again playing to a particular stereotype beloved by some on the left about the effects of mass media on popular audiences, and the effects of games in particular on gamers.

[greglas]

8.

Tim> That seems a vastly more powerful strategy for influencing opinion.

I take your point about the dangers of fringe art preaching to the converted. But I don't know if I feel nearly as optimistic as you do about either the potential for emergent play as a way to persuade, or the desirability of more subtle messages.

The great thing about simulation gameplay and emergence is that the player can become the author in significant ways. But if you're setting out to do rhetoric, you can't depend on emergence to get you there.

So you can subtly construct the environment to let people "reach their own conclusion." But if you take that route, I think you end up creating simulations that tend to mislead rather than instruct. The kind of political persuasion that occurs in Counter-Strike or America's Army, e.g., is a very effective form of persuasion, imho, and mostly because it goes so completely unnoticed by the players. Players learn all sorts of things through socializing within the game structure, and they trust in some degree of correspondence between the simulation of the things they encounter and the true things being simulated. But how good do you feel about that kind of "instruction"? Isn't it a little more manipulation than art?

The thing about didactic games is that they *can* convey messages that get people angry and that challenge assumptions. I'm not a big fan of the fauvists, but I'll give them one thing: if you look at a Matisse, you know you're seeing a painting about color and shape.

[Timothy Burke]

9.

If you're saying didacticism is a superior mode of political persuasion because it's so bloody obvious and monochromatic that it either produces an identification with the didactic message or an extreme rejection of it, I think that is somewhat orthagonal to the justification of didactic art as influencing opinion--it admits that instead the goal is a confrontation with the audience, a binary division of the world into the righteous and the wrong.

If one is interested in persuasion, then I'd think the very subtlety of effect that you're talking about in something like Counter-Strike would be immensely attractive. Maybe for good reasons (because you believe in the meaning-making capacity of democratic audiences, and trust them), maybe for bad reasons (because you're looking to infiltrate and subvert the will of others rather than communicate overtly with them).

With persuasive art, I'd personally rather something in between the two--something that has clear communicative messages, but also a complexity of texture and possibilities to it. Something that sets out to change people's minds so subtly that they don't even notice it happen and something that sets out to bludgeon people didactically and divide them into those who get it and those who don't both strike me as wrong, not just as a mode of political art, but as statements about what the subject of politics really is.

But I'm also from the tribe of Cultural Studies people that think that the proposition that players simply don't notice what's going on in Counter-Strike, or that the meaning we think we see there is the meaning being made in the consciousness of its consumers, is both empirically and philosophically wrong. I don't think there's anything in popular culture that is that simple, nor any mimesis that comes so easily. Just for starters, one could look at Counter-Strike and note that it allows--in fact, demands--that players inhabit the subjectivity of "terrorists" as well as counter-terrorists...

[greglas]

10.

Tim> If you're saying didacticism is a superior mode of political persuasion...

No, I'm saying didacticism is an *acceptable* mode of political *rhetoric* because it's so bloody obvious and monochromatic that it *forces people to confront the political message and critique it.* And yes, the goal is a confrontation with the audience -- and the result of that confrontation for me is not simply identification, extreme rejection, or a "binary division of the world into the righteous and the wrong."

Tim> Maybe for good reasons (because you believe in the meaning-making capacity of democratic audiences, and trust them), maybe for bad reasons (because you're looking to infiltrate and subvert the will of others rather than communicate overtly with them).

Well, if I understand this right, the democratic meaning-making you're talking about is made problematic by the fact that it is susceptible to an infiltrated and subverted simulation, right? Kind of like electronic voting?

Tim> Something that sets out to change people's minds so subtly that they don't even notice it happen and something that sets out to bludgeon people didactically and divide them into those who get it and those who don't both strike me as wrong, not just as a mode of political art, but as statements about what the subject of politics really is.

September 12 didn't bludgeon or divide me -- it took me all of 60 seconds to play it, but I survived the experience fairly well. Much more subtle influence seems to me to be the default position in most games -- though I'm not sure the designers are any more aware of the messages they send than the players.

Sure, a middle road would be great -- but could you provide an example? The nature of simulation and games makes that middle ground problematic. Take, for example, Hidden Agenda, essentially a graphical IF game about ruling a small Central American country. To some extent, it's exactly the kind of political subtlety I think you're calling for -- you get to chart your own political course (within the options available), decide how much the U.S. should have a hand in your country's affairs, how aggressively to pursue land reform, how to deal with revolutionary or reactionary elements. But that complexity itself is problem for the game's political message: it's a simulation, and as in all simulations, the game's code dictates the outcomes. You can't learn anything other than the designer's understanding, and you only learn that through trial and error.

And what's the political message of Hidden Agenda? Is it simply the win/lose states? Is it the simulation itself? If you don't know much about the history of Central America, can you even understand how you're being persuaded and educated politically and separate the "facts" of how things work from the political message? (Note that the review I linked to describe it as "one of the most beneficial methods for learning about the dynamics of social, political and economic life in Central America, or the third world.")

Tim> Just for starters, one could look at Counter-Strike and note that it allows--in fact, demands--that players inhabit the subjectivity of "terrorists" as well as counter-terrorists...

And when kids play Cowboys and Indians, I suppose this game demands that they inhabit the subjectivity of the Indians? ;-)

I whole-heartedly agree with you that nothing is simple, and that players are free to read the games as they wish. I'm not saying advergames are always subtle art, I'm just saying that there is a place for them, just like there is a place for political cartoons. Didacticism, be it full-blast or administered in a camouflaged soupcon, is what you're going to find in political rhetoric.

[Timothy Burke]

11.

Hidden Agenda is a good example--at least it was stretching for something a bit more complicated in how it delivered a very pointed message. I think I like the way Sim City has historically worked in this regard as well--aspects of the game are quite explicitly political in that they preference particular orthodoxies about economic development and so on--but some versions of Sim City have given you the tools to adjust those underlying assumptions, which both gives players freedom and makes them think about what they think and why they think it.

Anyway, I'm arguing a particular preference here that goes beyond games--it would surprise no one who has gotten this far in this thread that I don't care for Michael Moore, either, which is less about the content of his message (at least on Iraq) and much more about the form and style of it.

[Ian Bogost]

12.

Yikes, I think I got caught in the "Terra Nova Effect": took me too long to come back and now I can't catch up. I'll just make one additional comment here:

Timothy> There's no sense in which "September 12th: A Toy World" is not providing preloaded answers or is trying to provoke open-ended inquiry

Sept 12 has been played upwards of half a million times and generated significant discussion on major game forums, email lists, and in the popular press. That's not my opinion, it's a matter of fact.

I'll try to come back and make more commentary later; I have to go do some off-blog work today tho!