Free play: the politics of the video game

Reason, April, 2004 by Kevin Parker

Computer games, as a class, do appear to favor civil and economic liberty--not because they simulate sweatshops (no more so than, say, music lessons do) or capitalist exchange but because of the same human tendencies that free players from domineering storylines and inflexible rules. Games naturally turn players against contrived limits and inconsistencies. And this mind-set necessarily takes on a political aspect as games themselves grow more political.

While storytelling games use film clips and unrealistic physics to control plot and pace, politicized games use simulated laws. But there is little reason to suppose players will enjoy barriers more when they're expressed in legal terms. This is not to deny that players like exercising power over others, as violent 3D action games and civilization-building "God games" attest. But just as gamers do not cotton to cartoon physics in their gritty military simulations, so will they frown on obviously broken market mechanisms, whether hauling goods between planets in Freelancer of, like one reviewer, trying to revive an abandoned industrial sector in SimCity 4. Frustrated by the failure of that game's artificial intelligence to demolish old buildings while he dealt with, among other things,"money-sucking parks and amenities, and ever-more-expensive garbage disposal," Jakub Wojnarowicz asks, "where's the private initiative in the city?"

Georgia State's Ted Friedman has observed that making sense of games' inner workings is central to playing them successfully. In the process, players inevitably notice breaches of realism. Is it too easy to earn first downs in NFL Fever 2003? Why can an archer's arrow destroy a cruise missile in Civilization III? Politically suggestive material will get no free pass. If game characters fail to react to markets or to Sim bureaucrats in a believable fashion, players will step back from the fantasy. Friedman insists that all games are "ideological constructions" implying that they are equal in this respect. But some simulations imitate real people and economies more closely than others, just as some physics models produce more authentic collisions.

"Challenge Everything!"

Realism is delivered in part by means of reductionism--that is, lower-level rules governing game events. Games that allow characters to pick up and carry any small object, of to push large, freestanding ones, are using reductionism. They are thereby becoming laboratories of emergent dynamics. Not only do such games enable experimentation; they reward it with interesting, unscripted behavior. Low-level political simulation methods, such as individual-based models and tracking of supply and demand, extend this new experimentalism into social dynamics. Electronic Arts' commercials whisper conspiratorially, "Challenge everything!" And players just might. Freed from service to narrative and empowered by low-level rules, they can dispassionately test political assumptions without consequences. Their simulated civic tinkering will prompt no real nation to topple, no real person to suffer.