Economic and political ideology was even more to the fore in The Sims (2001), for example, a God game in which you look after little people in a house, with some of the voyeuristic kick of a reality TV show. Rapidly becoming an extraordinarily successful multi-tentacled franchise, it is the soap-opera version of Pokémon, and an advert for the “American way”. Buy a Sim a large mirror and she will be happier, by virtue of being able to gaze at her reflection. Buy him a new oven, and he’ll become more popular after giving dinner parties. Help your Sim climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. This is a game in which the brutal rules of free-market capitalism are everything. More money makes a Sim happier; social dissidents are not allowed. You want to drop out of the rat-race, wear charity-shop tweed suits and spend your days playing chess in the park? Sorry. Such gameplay possibilities are ruled out by the political assumptions buried deep in the game’s structure.
It would be nice to think that the famous episode in Shenmue where you actually have to go and get a job driving fork-lift trucks within the gameworld was an ironic acknowledgment of the job-like nature of too many games. But perhaps it is inevitable that, as products of decadent late capitalism, most videogames will, consciously or not, reflect the same values. You go through a period of training, and then it’s all about success and shopping, keeping your head down, doing what the system expects. Make- believe jobs, as the Marxist Adorno might have concluded, are the opiate of the people.
After George W Bush announced the “war on terror” in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a surge of jingoistic online gamers, on servers for games such as the squad-based shooter Counter-Strike, dressing themselves up as digital versions of Osama Bin Laden. And the military-entertainment complex has become more close-knit than ever before. While commercial games such as the excellent Call of Duty (2003) were recreating in ever more detail historical conflicts such as the second world war, the US military itself paid for the design and free distribution of a highly realistic commando simulation, America’s Army, the first version of which was released on July 4, 2002, and explicitly described it as a propaganda tool to show American teenagers how exciting a career in the military might be.
The idea of showing school-age consumers exactly how accurately-modelled US-issue weaponry works, and schooling them in commando tactics, elicited off-the-record condemnations by some commentators close to the American military who talked to me. Furthermore, one might wonder just how good an idea it is to code all this realistic information into a game that is freely accessible for download. It doesn’t take much to imagine members of Al-Qaeda — who, after all, reportedly schooled themselves on commercial flight simulators — taking more than an academic interest.
These developments serve to emphasise that the more naturalistic videogames become in their modes of representation and modelling of real-life phenomena, the more they will find themselves implicated in political questions, and will need to have their ideology interrogated. A game like Dropship (2002), for example, supposedly a near-future combat flight simulator, blithely borrowed geopolitical capital by requiring the player to bomb terrorist camps in the Libyan desert, and overthrow a Colombian drug-lord, thus
