Playing Politics
The Contemporary Wrestling between Games and Political Correctness
It is safe to say that politics and games are very much in the opposing trenches of a war on information. Game developers fire mortars of contemporary-themed media that challenges the status quo of contextualised information. Politicians attempt to suffocate the games industry of its artistic license of violence and misinterpretation. Caught amidst the cross-fire and left to consume the wave of attacks from the opposing camps are the most important part of this war: the players, the voters.
Modern media has reached a pivotal stage in the publishing of information. Social media has taken over from television broadcasting as the place to receive the latest news and events of the day. The commander of information has significantly shifted from corporate broadcasting companies to the people due to the introduction of Facebook, Twitter and the power of the internet. With this provides a platform that has showcased a cultural dynamic of the past decade: not the right of free speech, but its power.
In this technological age, the public have as much to do with the portrayal of news and opinions as the broadcasting companies and politicians. Within this rift, an emergence of games has surfaced that pose challenging yet mind-provoking judgements on almost any topic imaginable: culture, society, history, religion, race, and so on. From this stems a situation: should developers adhere to the “political correctness” of society, or should topical games be accepted as a medium of expression and belief?
As both a student of games design and a student-elected representative of welfare and education, both sides of the argument appeal to my current interests. On the one hand, I am an advocate for the freedom of expression and independence, and developers should feel free to design games based on their beliefs or moral standings if they wish: it is up to the public, as consumers, to either take the bait of the content, or be repelled from the message of the game. The flip-side is that games are reaching out to a wider audience and content is becoming more sociologically-heavy in some cases (which is not a bad thing, as I have stated previously), but the caution of ethical design has become more apparent in recent times.
On a personal side-note, to put the argument into perspective of other media, I was horrified when my English teacher (from my days at school) showed our class La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful), a 1997 comedy based on the Jewish persecution of the Nazi regime. On reflection, I can understand that the film provides a light-hearted view from the life of a Jewish family, but my beliefs of the event lends itself to no space for humour.
Can the same be said about certain current games? I believe they can, both in a positive and (controversially) negative way. To answer this sentiment, I will look to one developer in particular that has caused both a stir of contention and a radical movement: Molleindustria.
Molleindustria is the brainchild of Paolo Pedercini, first concocted in 2003. Via the company website, Pedercini intended Molleindustria to be a short experimentalist project. However, ten years on, the project is still developing, and has focused on topics such as the Twin Tower attacks, the media attention circulating Catholicism, and scathing business simulations of McDonalds. To say that Molleindustria develop “tongue-in-cheek” games is an understatement: Pedercini states in the company manifesto that the projects motivation is “the independence of games from the market’s domain and its radical transformation in media objects able to criticize the status quo”.
Let’s take The Free Culture Game as an example. The game divulges the topic of copyright: players control the “cursor”, which regulates the flow of circular objects known as “knowledge”. The game plays similarly to the classic board game Hungry Hippos: “consumers”, small humanoid graphics, must consume the knowledge before they are starved of creativity. The player is required to direct the knowledge to these consumers. However, the “vectorialist” (controlled by the AI) is tasked with absorbing the knowledge from the player’s control for themselves, inducing the notion of copyrighting the knowledge and forcing consumers to become “passive”. The final aim for the player is to turn all the humanoids into consumers and avoid any of them becoming passive.
This game attacks the debate between copyright encroachment and creative commons head-on. Molleindustria make their view of this game apparent: the encroachment of copyright drains the creativity of media and the public are falsified into consuming from the market. The game highlights this notion through the depiction of the player in the form of the copyleft logo, signifying their intent to have the player agree with the notion of creative commons.
As stated previously, Molleindustria can be found hinged in an argument between political correctness in games and using games as a means of self-expression. With the platform of the internet, Molleindustria has become synonymous as a viral campaign against the status quo of media production. I don’t fully believe that the debate lies solely between the political correctness of society and the expressive nature of topical games. Rather, I believe the consumers and players of such media are the forgotten, passive faction in this war. Players are smart enough to hold their own moral, social and ethical values, much like voters in politics. Both politicians and developers of “social impact” games are contesting the same battle: support for their campaign.
My opinion leads me to argue that the future voting of governments will rest on the shoulders of media content, whether that is books, films or games. Rather than trying to pin their opponent for a three-count, can politicians and game developers form a formidable tag-team?
