Mini-Essay Six

Not surprisingly, I’d never  really connected politics and videogames until reading Ian Bogost’s section on Politics, despite the fact that almost every argument made about videogames has been political. Bogost, of course, is discussing politics and videogames from a totally different perspective: the political processes that can be understood best (or better) through video games, and how many so-called political videogames fail to take this into account. Bogost first begins his discussion with a fairly long retelling of the events of Hurricane Katrina and the problems that arose during such a disaster. At first, I was completely unaware of how such natural disasters and our complete lack of helpful resources could have anything to do with videogames, until Bogost pointed out that certain commission reports on the failures of our response to natural disasters occurred because of lack of imagination and initiative. Of course videogames make perfect sense when one is  attempting to come up with more imaginative ways to handle political problems.

Unfortunately, according to Bogost, the videogames that have arisen in the political arena have been greatly lacking in imagination, partly because of their lack of procedurality. Many of these so-called political games attempt to re-work “non-political” games, (“skinning” them, as Bogost puts it) but they haven’t taken into account what needs to be done to make a good political game. In his discussion of ideology, Bogost notes that “Western philosophy generally follows this trend of valuing the ideal over the material” (73). This seems to be the case in many political games because the creator has assumed that the ideals are already in place (and the most important), therefore the material (the game) doesn’t really matter. Bogost then explains that political videogames “use procedural rhetoric to expose how political structures opperate, or how they fail to operate, or how they should operate” (75). Unfortunately most of the videogames he uses as examples fail to do this. They fail because they aren’t using procedural rhetoric, it seems.

One of the most interesting aspects of Bogost’s political section was the idea of failure in videogames. It hasn’t made sense to me that some videogames have no end point or are unwinnable; however, in the context of political games it makes perfect sense. Because politics are so often an “unwinnable” themselves, the games that portray them should be unwinnable in some cases. One of the games he brought up, which we discussed a number of times in class, is September 12. This game seems to be unwinnable because as you attempt to kill terrorists, you’re accidently killing civilians and, thus, turning their loved ones into terrorists. Despite this, as Dr. H told us in class, one can almost win in this game by not playing at all. If you don’t shoot at the terrorists, they eventually turn back into civilians. This is a paradox because to win the game, one must not play it. This seems to have many implications in the political/ real world.

Bogost’s next chapter discusses the idea of political discourse as it’s seen through the videogames, taking into account that verbal rhetoric often occurs in digital rhetoric/visual rhetoric/procedural rhetoric (which he mentioned in chapter one but it didn’t register at the time). Through a study of videogames and the effects they have (if designed correctly), the idea presented by Lakoff that “citezens tend to assume that language and its carriers—from politicians to news media—are netural” (119) is definitely called into question. For the people who believe that videogames are a waste of time, seeing how political rhetoric is used within the games can certainly be an eye-opener.

Finally, in Bogost’s last chapter directly involving politics (though I imagine politics has a great bearing on the rest of his chapters as well) entitled “Digital Democracy,” there is a turn to the procedural rhetoric that makes “good” political videogames useful. When describing 9-11 Survivor, he discusses the importance of "embodied experience" in procedural interactions. I find that this embodied experience is one of the most important aspects of procedurality. I found his discussion of his own political game to be extremely informative, especially since he described both the “good” game and the “bad” game he created. The difference between the two games is, of course, procedural rhetoric. In the first Howard Dean for Iowa Game, there were a few superficial lessons to be learned—for example, politics (especially for the grassroots members) can involve menial and repetitive tasks. However, PopMatters.com reviewer Sean Trundle explained the problem best when he noted that the game didn’t distinguish Dean’s political ideology from anyone else's—the first game seemed merely an attempt to make politics more interesting—and thus, it failed in the way that so many other political games failed. Though the games are fun and entertaining, they just aren’t what we would describe as “good” games” because they haven’t accurately represented the semiotic domain of politics.

Questions:

1. How does Gee’s semiotic domain principle play into political games?

2. Which of the political games presented do you find to be most interesting and why?

3. In his discussion of GTA, Bogost notes that race and class play a role in the game. How do race and class possibly play a role in America’s Army game? Are the stakes the same?