Game for Thought: Games & Politics

• Paolo Pedercini, Game Developer, Artist, & Educator at Carnegie Mellon University & Molleindustria (U.S.)
• Konstantin Altaparmakov, Senior Game Designer at 11 bit Studios (BUL)
• Anthony Longo, PhD Candidate in Philosophy at University of Antwerp (BE)
• Adam Mirkowski, Game Designer & Writer at break the loop (PL)

Check out the full video here:

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A TLDR of things discussed:

• Can games exist in a neutral space, free of politics?
• The responsibility of game developers on including politics in their games
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Can games be free of politics?

Adam Mirkowski: I love games as a form of escapist entertainment, but I think it's difficult to avoid politics in a broader sense. Some end their definition on politics when it's about actual politicians and their talking points, but the definition that speaks to me is "who gets what when and how?", and if you look at it from that perspective, it's almost like the game design of reality.

We are setting the rules for how our world and society should look like, not only about hot political subjects, but also including smaller stuff like public transport or what we get to eat. In that sense I think it's just a matter of spectrum and it's not a binary choice of "this game is political: yes/no", it just varies on how involved a game is in political topics or how it focuses on its own mechanics. Or sometimes games get involved in politics even though they have no political message themselves like when capitalists wanted to buy commercial rights for Tetris from the Soviet Union. Or a game like FIFA could face the choice of having to remove the Russian team in the midst of the Ukranian war. Konstantin Altaparmakov,This shows how it's difficult to avoid politics entirely.

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Paolo Pedercini: Usually when people talk about political neutrality, they actually mean that it aligns with the status quo. When a game isn't perceived as political or thought-provoking it just means that it's portraying things as they are now. That could be an economic sim where the capitalist system is not questioned, or where relationships between characters are reproducing the majority of the situations that are currently out in the world. Political neutrality is pretty much just business as usual.

Do game developers have a responsibility to include politics in their games?

Anthony Longo: The term "politics" in relation to video games is at the same time underused and overused. On the one hand, we see that video game companies will say "no, what we're doing is not political. It's Entertainment. It's art." and at the same time, when a game has a minority playing the main character, it's only political according to the right-wing Gamers that don't really appreciate it. It's easy to assume that a game studio is taking on a political stance just by the design choices they made. And I think it's not a responsibility but an opportunity for game designers to make use of this.

Adam Mirkowski: If you are making a game that is even the tiniest bit inspired by reality, it's very difficult to avoid politics entirely. and if you're not paying attention, it could happen that you're getting involved in a political discussion anyway, even without your active input.

Konstantin Altaparmakov: It's not just an opportunity, but it also brings risk. Developers have some responsibility of which political themes are present in their games. Especially because external parties can pull things into extremes, which can lead to a negative backlash. For example, with Call of Duty and other shooters where the bad guys are always Middle Eastern or Russians. Potentially, you could be planting ideas or preconceptions into players' heads that are then reflected into real life.

What has the biggest impact? Pushing a political message as the main subject of a game, or going about it more subtly?

Paolo Pedercini: It depends on the message and the audience that you're targetting. My games are usually pretty explicit. It's not like they're screaming at you that you have to recycle, but I'm also not hiding my ideology. Especially games that are depicting reality will have incorporated some values in their gameplay and stories, intentional or not. This could be for example a parody of an economic tycoon game that explicitly criticizes McDonald's or the oil industry.

Konstantin Altaparmakov: I think a middle ground works best, like the Deus Ex games, for example. They explore themes like racism, but do it through a non-existing group in reality: augmented people versus unaugmented. It's exaggerated and thought-provoking and conveys its theme, but it's not in your face that the topic is racism while not being so covert that the message didn't come across.

Anthony Longo: I was just reminded of a case where a judge sentenced a teenage boy to read the novels by Charles Dickens to become a better person and I haven't come across like a case myself where that would happen with a videogame, but I can imagine that happening quite soon because it's similar to what we learn from reading novels or seeing films. But it's important to have an intrinsic motivation to start with, or to suspend judgement and having a goal of becoming a better person or otherwise you might not be open to other perspectives.

If a videogame is made to make a certain statement, it also risks portraying it as the only truth, which would be anti-political in a sense. Politics is all about the possibility to challenge a thought, disagreeing with it and seeing the plurality of perspectives.

is the only truth and that would be I think anti-political maybe uh because

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40:32 (from here)

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‍A little who's who on the stream: