How Video Games Are Fuelling the Rise of the Far Right
13th September 2019
Like other reliable Voices of the Crust, the Guardian sees its job as sounding the alarm about things that normal adults would never notice. The problem is that ‘raising awareness’ is virtually indistinguishable from ‘panicking at nothing’.
Violent, isolationist and misogynist desires course through games – and push rightwing ideologies on players
‘Beware, Comrades! You are being threatened by unseen forces that only the Party can detect and from which only the Party can defend you! Place your fate in our hands if you want to survive the coming apocalypse!’
Games are ideological constructions which push a set of values on the user. Like television and film, they often support the ideologies of their context: in the Bush years, American games endorsed aggressive foreign policy; since Brexit, British games advocate isolationism or nostalgia for empire – and the prominence of anti-Islam games in the 2000s tells it all.
Translation: Games are about situations that most people want to play rather than what Social Justice Warriors would like to see dealt with. Shooting monsters is more fun than saving the planet from plastic straws.
First, rightwing ideologies have been overrepresented and dominant throughout the history of video games. Although affected by context, video games have long focused on the expulsion of “aliens” (Space Invaders to XCOM), fear of impure infection (Half-Life to The Last of Us), border control (Missile Commander to Plants vs Zombies), territory acquisition (Command & Conquer to Splatoon), empire building (Civilization to Tropico), princess recovery (Mario to Zelda), and restoration of natural harmony (Sonic to FarmVille).
Translation: Games deal with the desires of normal people, not Leftist ideologues. And we really hate that.
Games are designed so that people will buy them, and so cater to normal people’s desires; from a proglodyte perspective, What Normal People Want are Rightwing Ideologies. I take comfort in that.