Playing at Politics
Video games can and should be full of interesting politics. So why aren’t they?
By Laura Bartkowiak and Brian J. Sullivan
The last days of October saw one of the biggest video game releases in recent history. Red Dead Redemption 2’s opening weekend set a $725 billion record, second only to Grand Theft Auto 5’s $1 billion launch. Twelve days later, it had already far outpaced sales for the original Red Dead Redemption.
Yet the excitement was marred by director Dan Houser’s proud boast to the New York Magazine of working “100-hour weeks” to get the game out the door. His comments, as Kotaku writer Jason Schreier wrote, drew attention to a “culture of crunch” at Houser’s Rockstar Games, in which employees are routinely pressured into weeks of backbreaking overtime. According to Guardian critic Keza MacDonald, such conditions are epidemic to a game industry which “prioritise[s] long hours over employee’s welfare.”
This growing recognition of the game industry’s brutal worker exploitation has grown parallel to another frustration: the politics embedded in video games’ stories. Also writing in the Guardian, critic Alfie Brown laments the mediocre politics we find in most video games. The gaming site Kotaku struck a similar chord, criticizing the confused, tepid politics players are…
