What goes into a video game? Creativity, intellect, art, humour sure, but also exploitation, injustice and despair. Many of the so-called 'rare earth' minerals used in modern electronics including game consoles - are mined under appalling conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Consoles and peripherals are then built by Chinese megacorps such as Foxconn, notorious for treating their workers poorly. Games themselves are developed by relatively privileged people in the rich world, but their employers are hostile to labour unions and they are routinely expected to work insane hours to hit the release deadline for Come To Honor: Final Headshot 11.
It doesn't have to be this way, Marijam Did proposes in her passionately argued new book, Everything To Play For. The author might be shaky on her videogame history, but she is a clever and often funny critic of aspects of the industry as it is today, from the "deeply conservative nature of overtly wholesome narratives" to the evergreen obsession with improving aesthetic fidelity: "One more eyelash can always be added to a character," she notes wryly, though logically that would eventually lead to videogame heroines with one million eyelashes.
More problematically, though, Did wants videogames to be judged on their "social efficacy" their ability to promote desirably "progressive" change, to be "politically useful".
One might think here of Soviet propaganda art featuring heroic blonde farmers, but it is certainly true that games have already long been used to promote militaristic and right-wing views. (Hello, America's Army and all those 'war on terror'-era FPSes.) You have to be purer than pure, though, to get in this author's good books. Here, Lucas Pope is subjected to a bafflingly hostile write-up which claims that his Papers Please displays "semi-colonial tendencies"; Did also complains that the plight of migrants "did not enter into [his] speech while collecting his BAFTA" (Er, it was a 25-second speech in which Pope thanked his wife.) Only once does Did appear to consider the limits of reading games exclusively as political propositions.
"Aren't games a terribly inefficient way to make a point?" she asks. Well, yes. If you just want to make a point, write to The Guardian.
There are limits, too, to how seriously one can take the anarchist utopia that Did vaguely sketches as an alternative to our evil present.
At one point she wonders: "What would gaming look like for us, the post-work inclined?" If you're inclined to the condition of post-work, as I must admit I also very strongly am, you can hardly demand that other people carry on working to make games for ...
It doesn't have to be this way, Marijam Did proposes in her passionately argued new book, Everything To Play For. The author might be shaky on her videogame history, but she is a clever and often funny critic of aspects of the industry as it is today, from the "deeply conservative nature of overtly wholesome narratives" to the evergreen obsession with improving aesthetic fidelity: "One more eyelash can always be added to a character," she notes wryly, though logically that would eventually lead to videogame heroines with one million eyelashes.
More problematically, though, Did wants videogames to be judged on their "social efficacy" their ability to promote desirably "progressive" change, to be "politically useful".
One might think here of Soviet propaganda art featuring heroic blonde farmers, but it is certainly true that games have already long been used to promote militaristic and right-wing views. (Hello, America's Army and all those 'war on terror'-era FPSes.) You have to be purer than pure, though, to get in this author's good books. Here, Lucas Pope is subjected to a bafflingly hostile write-up which claims that his Papers Please displays "semi-colonial tendencies"; Did also complains that the plight of migrants "did not enter into [his] speech while collecting his BAFTA" (Er, it was a 25-second speech in which Pope thanked his wife.) Only once does Did appear to consider the limits of reading games exclusively as political propositions.
"Aren't games a terribly inefficient way to make a point?" she asks. Well, yes. If you just want to make a point, write to The Guardian.
There are limits, too, to how seriously one can take the anarchist utopia that Did vaguely sketches as an alternative to our evil present.
At one point she wonders: "What would gaming look like for us, the post-work inclined?" If you're inclined to the condition of post-work, as I must admit I also very strongly am, you can hardly demand that other people carry on working to make games for ...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024