participating in a certain totalising idea of foreign policy without ever examining its own assumptions. Other developers are already seeing the problem and avoiding it: the squad- based combat sequel Conflict: Desert Storm 2 (2003), for example, was set like its predecessor during the first Gulf War, so as not to be embroiled in controversy about the 2003 war on Iraq.
But videogames are also becoming a site for a certain sort of symbolic political protest, as in the example of artist Anne-Marie Schleiner’s Velvet-Strike(2002), which represents what you might call aesthetic counter-terrorism. Schleiner says she was disturbed by the post-9/11 militarism in the online gaming community, particularly by one game modification in which Bin Laden was represented as an Arab liquor store owner in the US, and the gamer was enjoined to enter the store and shoot the proprietor. In response, she developed a series of provocatively pacifist graphical “spray paints” which can be used as graffiti on Counter-Strike servers. Stealthy spraying in the midst of the macho violence drops ironic images into the environment: gunman silhouettes form a big heart; a teddy bear holds a rifle; two soldiers embrace in various homoerotic poses. Sprays with provocative verbal slogans include “Hostages of Military Fantasy”, or “We Are All Iraqis Now”.
Velvet-Strikeis not a game in itself but an attitude. The idea of invading online spaces that exist for no other reason than to gratify militaristic fantasies, and then gently defacing them with anti-war slogans, is not just funny (though funny it is), but also a demonstration of how online gameworlds, even those of apparently simple shooters, are already sophisticated enough to be arenas of political debate, sites of symbolic activism.
Steven Poole
London, May 2004
