Entertainment That Makes You Think, Politics in Video Games

Your world has been custom-made by a multinational corporation and your only goal is to serve the human being as your creator. But what happens when you develop inside yourself something that you do not understand and that makes you feel alive as never before?

Il processo that will lead our avatar to take the reins of a rebellion and awaken the consciousness of other beings like him is in itself political, if by politics we mean the art of living together as the Athenian Pericles used to say, a definition perhaps too optimistic for our nebulous times but one that well describes the weight of the choices and the cultural and moral implications of the individual.

Concise and interesting, but not comprehensive in my opinion: politics and video games have a close connection, despite what many industry insiders have always casually claimed, and the roots of this connection go back to a much more distant past if compared to the release of the aforementioned Detroit Become Human: just think of the not-so-dystopian post-Cold War world outlined by Hideo Kojima with the successful Metal Gear Solid series, whose first version dates back to 1987.

Solid Snake, the hero of the game, moves in an ambiguous territory where nations and human beings play a game of chess with the lives of ordinary people, speaking about hot and dangerous topics such as the nuclear arms race, expanding war technology, and the economic-political interests of unscrupulous oligarchs at the expense of the people: Kojima, even in the recent Death Stranding, tells the story of democracy and its degeneration in a dystopian key, using the video game medium as a tool of protest, subtle and disguised as an open-world adventure, of course, but still a form of protest.

Va da sé that developers and production companies (who invest in games and put up the money) do not aim to take sides politically in what remains, after all, a mainstream entertainment context: the plots of first-person shooters or immersive adventures, usually the genres that are most popular as far as adult themes of this kind are concerned, tend toward a simplistic Good-Evil opposition, showing the villains, who are part of totalitarian and dictatorial states, opposed to heroes and heroines who fight for rebel organizations. So, in simple terms, the negative characters are villains with sharp intelligence like the calculating leader Paul Seréne of Quantum Break (by Remedy, the Max Payne guys) or the exact opposite: I am thinking of the horrible mutated Nazi official from the evergreen Wolfenstein, for example.

If it were an Olympic speed competition, video games would start at a clear disadvantage compared with other media such as literature or film, light-years ahead in depicting scenarios in which the keen eye reveals intrigue, corruption, and backroom maneuvers uncomfortable at the root of oppression and geopolitical crises, often to the point of costing people their jobs if not paying even higher prices.

Nel 2013 I played an indie title whose gameplay-driven conduct prompted many reflections in me: it is called Paper, please: as an immigration inspector, we will have to check the documents of the various characters who will appear to enter a imaginary communist-style state, and it will be up to us players, based on clues, details, and our personal (pre)judice, to decide how to act, arresting a potential terrorist or letting the elderly lady with a mild demeanor pass freely, who, unfortunately for us and our lack of professionalism, is hiding a biological weapon in her carry-on bag. Not to mention the bribes we will pocket if we have turned a blind eye to a personality well liked by the politicians of our Country.

The existing politics in the country of the setting plays a fundamental role in the conduct to adopt in the game, a perfect metaphor for the behavior of our representatives, full of many shadows and a few sporadic lights.

Davanti a developments like these, it brings a smile with a mix of nostalgia and tenderness to think back to the mayor of MetroCity Haggar, the stout protagonist of the arcade game Final Fight who settles disputes in town with a flurry of blows, relentless beating if you kidnap his beloved daughter too, incidentally; or how could we not mention Operation Wolf, with a reactionary main protagonist and militaristic icon of American propaganda: storytelling, when conveyed in a certain way, does politics, but politics is not friendly to sales in the video game market, which remains a form of entertainment that is all things considered (still) pure, and perhaps it is better that way.