At the LA Review of Books, Elliot Murphy makes the case for the role that video games can play in radical politics, arguing that they encourage players to critique the world as it is and imagine a more just world to come. Check out an excerpt:
The radical politics of the small selection of video games surveyed here demonstrates the potential for, and the existing constraints on, interactive gaming that subverts, or offers alternatives to, contemporary neoliberal culture. While gameplay itself does not constitute the kind of resistance against corporate capitalism seen in mass demonstrations, sit-down strikes, and boycott, it nevertheless can, in its best iterations, encourage something these forms of activism also do: serious reflection. As Gonzalo Frasca put it in his 2003 essay “Simulation versus Narrative,” “the potential of games is not to tell a story but to simulate: to create an environment for experimentation.” The writer and blogger Richard Seymour stressed last year that “a form of leftist hyper activism can act as a type of passivity, insofar as it prevents one from having to address a real problem,” and so video games can yield a certain distance from everyday tactical decisions while both constituting and representing radical alternatives to neoliberal politics.
This final point is crucial: Many games surveyed here do not in themselves have the depth of exposition required to deliver the sort of counter-narrative seen in polemical essays or academic lectures, but they can nevertheless suggest a particular direction, as when the BioShock developers point the player in the direction of Bakunin. Video games are permeated with a mindful and lively sense of optimism about the possibility of change, both political and personal. It’s for this reason among many others that they will continue to be embraced in increasing numbers, exposing the contradictions and flaws of the modern world.
Image from BioShock via deviantart.com