+1000 (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, February 18, 2021, 08:06 (1156 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I guess it’s just semantics at a certain point. All of those things are also politics.

As with everything, it’s a spectrum. Making a game devoid of politics is impossible. There’s probably an essay out there somewhere about the politics of Banjo-Kazooie or Crash Bandicoot. It’s a lot easier to accept Super Mario as just a video game that’s supposed to be fun without really considering the values of the Mushroom Kingdom. A game like Six Days in Fallujah is undeniably political. Every decision they make with that game is political. What they leave out absolutely speaks just as much as whatever they put in.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Going back to the topic of cultural landmarks, I think our tendency today to read politics into everything says more about us than it does about politics. It’s really easy for all this stuff to get lost down a semantic rabbit whole, but politics to me is more of a surface-level manifestation of far deeper issues and motivations. For example, politics were obviously involved in WW2, but to limit one’s understanding of that war to the political level is really to fail to understand the whole thing.

As far as this specific game, there’s no doubt that it is a politically contentious issue, and many people who play the game will have political feelings about it. So if the game fails to reinforce their preconceptions, they may see that as a political statement in and of itself. For this reason alone, I personally wouldn’t recommend anyone make a game about this event unless they’re planning to address the political context in a serious and nuanced way, but that’s just me. It’s totally possible for someone to write a little human-drama story about a few troops on the ground who have no clear view of the larger picture and are just caught up in some personal life-or-death struggle. Such a story wouldn’t need to be political at all. Whether or not such a story would be generally well received is a totally different question, though.