I need a hero

All video games are works of ideology. Often the ideology is so much akin to that of society in which they are developed and consumed that it goes un-noticed.

Games that surface an agenda stick out. A case in point is the new mobile game Airport Insecurity by Persuasive Games. Works that have government backing stick out still further. A couple of years ago America’s Army was the hot topic. So it should come as no surprise after the recent coverage of gaming in China that the Chinese government would want to get in on the act too. Step forward (or is that march forward) Chinese Hero Registry a Virtual World that the blogshpere suggests is planned to be developed by Shanda on behalf of the Chinese government.

Here is what Ching-Ching Ni of the Los Angeles Times says about the game:

“Instead of heavily armed superheros licensed to kill, the new game will highlight the likes of a model Communist soldier famous for helping other people. To advance in this game, players won't gun down their enemies. They'll mend socks, lots of them, and gain points by getting appreciation letters for doing good deeds such as helping old ladies home in a rainstorm and stopping people from spitting on the sidewalk. The prize is a signed virtual copy of Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book. This soon-to-be-released video version of a vintage Communist scenario is part of an effort to clean up the Internet.”

The scope is also interesting

“While it will take as long as a decade to introduce the registry's entire slate of 100 heroes, the first batch of five starters will include historic figures such as the imperial eunuch many believe sailed to the New World seven decades before Columbus, a Ming dynasty general who defeated foreign aggressors, and an incorruptible judge”

OK, sounds dully, really really really dull. But then again Second Life sounds dull to most gamers. Thing is it also sounds virtuous, a game based on being nice to people – what could possibly be wrong with that?

Comments

[Captain Slack]

1.

Any game that lets you play as Jeng Ho and/or Judge Dee is going to have at least one Sinophile wishing he could play it; I speak from experience here. ^_^

[Ronald]

2.

We can just consider this as a Chinese version of "City of Heroes".

[Nick Yee]

3.

I for one have grown tired of being forced to repeatedly slaughter entire families of innocent animals, so saving people from thunderstorms would be amusing to say the least.

And this is a great counter-example to all the attention on "violent games" by the media and psych literature. A video game of altruism.

But I think Ren hits on a key point. Think of all the ideologies we've hidden in our MMOs. Does violence (and killing innocent animals) really solve all our problems? Are there really different discrete "races"?

[W. James Au]

4.

Sounds like a fascinating project; be interesting to see if a Chinese government MMO can take some market share from WoW among its citizenry.

I would say that the "All video games are works of ideology" formulation is way too Frankfurty for my taste, so broad as to be meaningless.

[Ronald]

5.

I agree with "All video games are works of ideology" but I think that the ideology is more in how the game can be played rather than in its superficial subject.

As long as my guildmates (or Comrade) can buff me so that I can send two or more old ladies back home in one run, or I can invest in a bus to do that by packs, I think the game should be as fun as most current ones.

Oh, of course, those "appreciation letters" and Little Red Books must be trade goods rather than "soul binding".

[Bruce Woodcock]

6.

>The prize is a signed virtual copy of Mao Tse-
>tung's Little Red Book.

I wonder how much I can get for it on eBay!

Bruce

[ren reynolds]

7.

James > I would say that the "All video games are works of ideology" formulation is way too Frankfurty for my taste, so broad as to be meaningless.

Sure, like “all acts are political” the notion is all encompassing so lacks distinction and meaning when we put it under any analysis. But I think that in the main we don’t put much of the ideology of video games under analysis.

Roland > I think that the ideology is more in how the game can be played rather than in its superficial subject.

I’m not sure it’s more one thing or another. I think that ideologies worth examining stretch from the very fact of MMOs, through the way we give primacy to their ludic (rather than, say, social properties), their presentation of achievement, the particular ways that they structure social relations, and we have not even got into gender etc.

I know that most of this is touched on by some scholars, but, well, OK, maybe it’s just me. But I find that when I think of MMOs I take so much that is contingent, western etc to be ‘the way it is’ rather than the way it ‘happens to be’ brought about by a serious of choices by actors in particular contexts.

The Chinese Hero Register story first took me aback. I thought, hold on what’s a government doing pushing their ideology through a game, then I thought of America’s Army and the argument Prof Bartle had with them at SoP 1 where the AA team suggested that AA promulgated specifically American Army values and Richard challenged them that actually it was just promulgating ‘Army’ values. Which I agreed with at the time, but I’ve started to re-consider and wonder if actually its just pushing American values and the fact that this is being done through the Army is significant in this.

All this, for me at least, helped me gain what I feel (and of course WoW IS a Feeling) is a more critical stance to what is pushed at me through my WoW interface. On my personal journey I’m worrying a lot more about MMOs being conceived of as games and going with the rhetoric that accompanies it, this is not to deny that they are games, but simply to suggest that there are a lot of instances where this is the least important thing about them. *gulp*

[Peter Z]

8.

Of course mmog are political spheres, just alike any other artifact that are produced. Think about the car for example, what are assumed about the driver, enivoronment, economics, logistics and so on. The major impact of politics within mmog I think would be that the gamer are moving within a system that are close from most normal actions to work against the dominant politics. There are most of the times no way around the fact that either the Scarlet guard will kill you, or you kill him. I've tried to talk some sence into them, but they still kill me while doing that.

Now there are ways to express standpoints and work against the inscribed politics of any mmog. As for example the gnome tea party, but these all have to be performed within the rules of the game. So there's no way around the politics of games.

In this respect I find it many times perculiar that the producers of these mmog hasn't been mose in the focus in gaming research communities. Might be my ignorance, but many time the world as such are assumed as a fact. This is it. But hey! It's a construct by some guys (yes, that is mostly true still) that make a homogenious group. We're basically living in their visions of what it means to be social and what a good game it.

As for the Chineese ideology, well it's not that new. Here in Sweden we had a group some time ago trying to develop a mmog based on the bible. They thought it would be a great way to teach young(!) kids how to be good christians. By knowing the bible one would succeed in the mmog.

So I think the question of who actually decides what the game should look like and what guides them are pivotal! To quote Lessig, "code is law"

[gus andrews]

9.

Ronald > Oh, of course, those "appreciation letters" and Little Red Books must be trade goods rather than "soul binding".

Not if it's a genuinely Communist game... unless trade goods can only be traded on the black market :) does eBay count as a given game's black market? or grey market?

[Mike Sellers]

10.

All video games are works of ideology

Almost certainly true, and almost universally ignored. As Ren noted, in the main we don’t put much of the ideology of video games under analysis.

Consider for example that The Sims was explicitly and consciously ideological. The lesson (missed by many people) was a gentle anti-consumerist one: the more stuff you have, the more time you have to spend attending to your stuff, and the less time you have for anything else. You become a slave to your 'stuff.' This notion broke the surface of player consciousness in moments such as a player saying "maybe I should have my Sim get up and take a walk outside -- waitaminute, maybe I should get up and go take a walk outside!" But otherwise, Will's quiet message seems to have been generally lost on the playing public... and on the subsequent teams that have taken this game to where it is now.

For a contrary example, consider World of Warcraft. WoW could have silently asked interesting questions about the nature of war, why we go to war, how we view others with whom we're at war, etc. Instead we have two static factions, monsters, quests, and the ever-present l00t.

It's possible I suppose that WoW's focus on questing, the end-game, and getting your epic mount is really a story about the emptiness of striving, a Camus-like statement on the meaninglessness of externalized achievement and the ashes-in-your-mouth bitterness of climbing the wrong mountain... but given the recent level-cap increases and such, I kinda doubt it. It's a game. What ideology is there is unintentional, or at least unconscious.

Similarly, Second Life could have carefully nudged players into reflection on the meaning and import of ostentation and commerce, on how our fantasies (sexual and otherwise) reflect our true persona, or how a life lived in pursuit of sensory thrill inevitably ends up achingly empty in the cold light of dawn.

But, nah, that's no fun.

If nothing else, the baseline ideology here is one of distraction and escape. Not an escape to something more true, fundamental, and ultimately satisfying (which the Chinese government is at least trying in their way), but an escape to an unreachable state, a level of satisfaction that's never here but which is always just beyond the next quest, power-up, or virtual skydiving 'adventure.' A fitting ideology for our day, perhaps: unconscious, unanalyzed, unintentional, and yet celebratory of our decadence and self-possession. It's the ideology of self-delusion operating on many levels at once, and one tacitly agreed upon by both developer and player.

[Aaron Delwiche]

11.

Last semester, a student in my course on World of Warcraft did some terrific work on colonial ideologies embedded within the game. She pointed out that Horde races tend to have darker skin color, and they are more likely to display cultural characteristics associated with indigenous cultures.

She makes the following observations:

(1) Gnomes, dwarves and humans seem to signify the West, with gnomes and dwarves closely connected to capitalism and technology. The only alliance race with darker skin is the Night Elves, and they are viewed with suspicion by other alliance members.

(2) The visual iconography of the horde races suggests real-world cultures (e.g. totems, tents, face paint), and the horde in general are portrayed as "primitive."

(3) The trolls speak in recognizably Jamaican accents, and the emotes for the male reinforce highly sexualized stereotypes, including:

"How would you like some of my jungle love?"

"I got a shrunken head. I just came out of the pool."

"I heard if you cut off an extremity it'll regenerate a little bigger. Don't believe it."

Of course, the male trolls also listen to reggae music:

"I kill two dwarves in the morning. I kill two dwarves at night. I kill two dwarves in the afternoon, and then I feel alright. I kill two dwarves in time of peace, and two in time of war. I kill two dwarves before I kill two dwarves, and then I kill two more."

(4) The alliance actually locked the Orcs up in internment camps, a move which she compares to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. She writes, "The Orcs’s bloodthirstiness was subdued during their stay in internment camps, which is a disturbing sort of justification for the imprisonment and enslavement of another race of people."

[Matt Mihaly]

12.

Mike Sellers wrote:

Similarly, Second Life could have carefully nudged players into reflection on the meaning and import of ostentation and commerce, on how our fantasies (sexual and otherwise) reflect our true persona, or how a life lived in pursuit of sensory thrill inevitably ends up achingly empty in the cold light of dawn.

But, nah, that's no fun.

When I started Achaea a decade ago, I was initially going to design the whole game around the idea of Aristotle's Golden Mean: To succeed at the ultimate goal (becoming a God) you'd have to demonstrate through your gameplay that you understand that the balance between the extremes is the best course of action.

Screw that though. Rampant murder, backstabbing, and worship of the extremes is a LOT more fun!

--matt

[JR]

13.

Good old cultural imperialism!

Anyone got a MMOG of 'Dallas' in the works? Looks like the Chinese have beat you to the punch...

[Hamlet Linden]

14.

I think it's only meaningful to speak of a game as having an ideology when it's contained in the *ludic* elements of it in a way that's unavoidable for the player. In other words, if the game is architected in such a way that the player's gameplay forces them into making choices fraught with ideology. (I suggest this principle as a way of avoiding intellectually onanistic stretches like, "Pac Man is a metaphor for the ravenous nature of modern capitalism".)

Now if you have to level up your character in the Chinese Communist MMO to win a Chairman Mao book-- and that's an object you *have* to accomplish, to win-- then we're definitely in the realm of games as ideology. By contrast, I don't see America's Army anywhere on the same spectrum-- the training missions are by intent a simulation of the actual experience of training in the US Army, to the point that they're actually *boring* to complete ("I gotta walk over these tires before I get to the good stuff?") and the combat missions are by design meant to simulate US Army combat as much as possible. There's some language about "defend America" on the log-in screen and some pop-up text messages which describe US Army history and organization in between missions, but none of that is woven into the gameplay.

[ren reynolds]

15.

Hamlet > I think it's only meaningful to speak of a game as having an ideology when it's contained in the *ludic* elements of it in a way that's unavoidable for the player.

No. Very no :-)

If we take what we are terming to be a game as a text or an artefact in a broad media studies type of way then the ludic nature of it is just one of its properties and one of the ways that we may engage with it. I won’t get into packaging and all the other stuff associated with the game but I’ll not that these are well worth studying.

If we do look purely within the ludic frame then choice and possibilities or not choices are all important. Two much discussed examples are the so called “Hooker Cheat” in GTAIII and the availability of same sex relationships in The Sims and the possibility of relating children to the relationship. Both are within the game structure, both are avoidable, but the fact of them seems to me to suggest decisions based upon certain ideologies (the way that players choose to exercise these choices are also interesting - the number of people that have opposite gendered avatars and why they do this in different cultueres is fascinating and says a lot about the conception of mascultity). We could also take the relative openness of Second Life – the possibility for a range of economic systems is coded into second life (all objects could be freely copyable at no $L cost) this freedom for the users to choice is an ideology.

>”Pac Man is a metaphor for the ravenous nature of modern capitalism”
It very well might be. But one does not have to go to this level, one does not have to detect grand sweeping political ideologies to detect choices. In a way I’m more interesting in looking at the ones that many would want to reject as even being choices and work up from there.

So, Pacman has a score and records high scores. It did not need to display a score. I could just have had none or played different music as you progressed. It did not need to get harder or be configured so that one could see how much better one was getting with respect to yourself and others (in the UK there is a quite a debate over whether sport should be competitive, school sports days where ‘everyone is a winner’).

I’ll keep saying this, I’m not saying that the decisions that were made were wrong or that other decisions would have been commercially silly, I’m saying that these decisions and game elements contain within them system of assumed value etc.

>By contrast, I don't see America's Army anywhere on the same spectrum
It’s certainly on the same spectrum, though it might occupy a different space.

One of the purposes of America’s Army (AA) is to recruit people to the US Military. The idea that the any military and, in particular the US, military is something that should be supported is starkly ideological.

At SoP I Col. Casey Wardynski (I believe) stated that one of the purposes of AA was to promulgate US Army values. When challenged on this he re-asserted that these values were unique to the US army and one of the purposes of the game was put them over to players.

In the game, if memory serves, there are elements of PvP. Which ever side you are on you are seen to be the US military and the other side is seen as ‘other’. You don’t role play terrorists or insurgents or what ever. Or even if you do – my point is that these are all ideologically informed choices. This is without getting into the notions of ethnicity in the game, the role of women, the role of sexuality (there are gay interventions in the game that seek to play with this). The there is the degree to which players are or are not called to example the geo-political nature of conflicts that the US Army, has, have and might be involved in.

Again, I’m not saying that the choices made are bad, I’m not being anti-AA, anti-American or anti-anything. I’m just pointing out that games are made up of many many many choices that have within them ideologies. There are scholars that try to look at element of this, I’ve even been on an entire conference dedicated to Computer Games and Ideology, but this MMO seemed a moment to point out that there might be a lot of interesting thing that we as parts of the culture that create a lot of video games naturally find it hard to see, but being confronted with alternate views might shine a light on.

[Aaron Delwiche]

16.

Propaganda is closely related to ideology, but the terms have distinct meanings. According to a textbook that we use at Trinity University in our introductory media course, ideology refers to shared values and beliefs – often experienced as natural – that shape individuals' understandings of institutions and social relationships (Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 2001). Critical theorists such as Althusser identify churches, schools, family, and the media as some of the institutions responsible for the transmission of ideology, but the process is largely unconscious and non-directed. In contrast, propaganda is developed by an organized group and systematically disseminated with the intent of prompting certain attitudes and behaviors. Propagandists may tap into and reinforce existing ideologies, but they do so with the conscious desire to shape attitudes and behavior.

Propaganda is not necessarily a bad thing. Public health campaigns which advocate safe sex, sober driving and clean needles are all examples of socially constructive propaganda.

In my view, America's Army is a classic case of propaganda because the game is intended to increase military recruitment and to build a positive image of the U.S. Army. Developers of the game are quite explicit about their goals. "If you don't get in there and engage [young people] early in their life about what they're going to do with their lives," explained one of the game's designers to the San Francisco Chronicle, "when it comes time for them to choose, you're in a fallback position." According to an internal report released by the MOVES Institute, the game has been a wild success, promoting "positive awareness of soldiering among twenty-nine percent of young Americans age 16 to 24."

Games such as The Sims, WoW, and Second Life are not consciously attempting to shape attitudes or behavior, but they are permeated with ideology. It doesn't feel like ideology, because we experience ideology as "common sense."

Hamlet's point about the breadth of the concept is well argued, but is possible to talk about these things with some degree of specificity. It just isn't always comfortable to do so. For some reason, discussions of ideology tend to make people nervous.

[Yaka St;Aise]

17.

As a sidenote, a videogame company dedicated to warmongering propaganda I don't think was addressed here yet: http://www.kumagames.com/
I would go and rant, but alas am time-deprived lately, so I'll stand back an catch up later on the re-runs. ;)

Cheers,
Yaka.

[Lisa Galarneau]

18.

Nick said:

Think of all the ideologies we've hidden in our MMOs. Does violence (and killing innocent animals) really solve all our problems?

Not entirely relevant, but a small anecdote:

My 2-year old daughter walked in last night while I was whacking a bear for its pelt in Guild Wars.

'What are you doing, Mommy?'

'Whacking this bear'

'The bear is hitting Mommy!'

'It's okay, look, I'm about to put it to sleep with my staff. Don't worry, honey, the bear is just sleeping'. (I say this for my own benefit, as she has no concept yet of death)

I proceeded to whack on an elemental, thinking a monster might be safer territory, but my discomfort with the whole situation remained extreme as my husband and I discussed whether it was a good idea for this young mind to witness such things. But I'm susceptible, too - I studiously avoided wolf pups in Everquest because I couldn't handle the pathetic yelping. Game designers should do us all a favour and not put innocent animals in their games, unless they enjoy imagining our guilt!

[W. James Au]

19.

> One of the purposes of America’s Army (AA) is to
> recruit people to the US Military. The idea that the
> any military and, in particular the US, military is
> something that should be supported is starkly
> ideological.

It's only "starkly" ideological if you want to argue that extreme pacifism-- i.e., the belief that there should be no military at all-- is a coherent or substantial political belief system. This is an extraordinary assumption, because it has little or no formal representation anywhere on the spectrum of political ideology. Pacifism of that level is an apolitical, religious or emotive belief system that really doesn't translate into a political system. (Even far-left Green Parties in the EU support *some* form of military service-- they don't want them abolished, just drastically scaled back.) In the sense that politics is the definition of rule sets that govern nations and their relation to each other, and governments are essentially institutions that have a monopoly on the use of force, an assumption of military service is *inherent* to political philosophy. We're talking apples and hand grenades here.

And "In particular" rather gives the game away, Ren-- you're making this assertion from a bias against the US military as an institution. Or more on point, from objections against American *policies* that the US military carries out. It's perfectly legitimate to have those objections in other contexts, but please let's not undercut an honest analysis by foisting them
onto the game.

> In my view, America's Army is a classic case of
> propaganda because the game is intended to increase > military recruitment and to build a positive image
> of the U.S. Army.

Again, it's only propoganda from the context of an apolitical, absolutist objection to military service as such. It's also only propoganda if the positive image is a dishonest one. But in fact the game very carefully simulates Army training and tactics as they are actually practiced and taught, even goes out of its way to deglamorize elements of service.

To go at this subject from another angle, there are *numerous* computer games where combat is depicted as cost-free and easy, fragging is allowed, the explosions and the gunfire are cool and flashy, the death animations are exciting and dramatic, you play a "Rambo" type who's glamorized and sexualized, the enemy is depicted as filthy Arabs or other racial stereotypes, you're fighting Saddam's army, or Al Qaeda, or other opponents taken from current events, and so on. (By contrast, the "terrorist" skins in America's Army are racially mixed and generic.) These other combat games are much, *much* more patently ideological and propogandistic in the sense being argued here. That the government-funded game about the military is decidedly apolitical and decidedly deglamorized compared to the raft of privately-funded games rather diminishes the idea that it has any meaningful ideology at all.

[Oscar]

20.

I was killing undead for gold and magical items in an MMO one day when my mother asked what i was doing. When i told her, and she watched it, she said 'Oh, so you are coming into their homes, murdering them and stealing their belongings'. Even more reprehensible when you consider that the only reason i do it is not due to an abstracted idea that they, as a species, are 'evil' and deserve to die but rather just because i am greedy and want what they have.

Frightening that i had been doing it for years and never really even thought of it like that.