Is Gaming Changing Our Politics?

On the whole I think that when we consider video games and their effect on our politics those of any progressive sympathies are likely think of them as a force for reaction. After all, whatever the potentials of the gaming medium as a whole (the idiosyncratic, the experimental, the "indie" does not count very much for my present purposes) the games that have historically dominated the market have been a highly corporatized big-budget mass market product. Gaming has also been associated with diversion, escapism, even mental stultification--to the disadvantage of attentiveness to everyday reality, and even the faculty of critical thought. And looking at the actual content of the games would, I think, reinforce rather than diminish the impression that they work in favor of the status quo rather than against it. After all, they tend to have for their theme physical heroics, often violent physical heroics, in contexts defined by the simplicities of myth and the fantasy of personal power from primitive quests of monster-slaying and princess-rescuing, to militaristic-jingoistic war scenarios, to competitive sports, and even "petty bourgeois" fantasies of criminality, all while frequently displaying a Futurist Manifesto-like reveling in speed, danger and destruction--even before one gets to the "frat house" atmosphere so often seen in online gaming, or the impression left by the (admittedly far from nuanced) coverage of Gamergate.

Yet considering all this I also find myself thinking of Edward Castronova's writing of the possibility of an "exodus to the virtual world" two decades ago that seems, if anything, even more timely today. In spite of the hype surrounding the Metaverse all these years later our means of "entering" a virtual reality are not much better, the entrant still looking at a screen rather than bodily immersed in another world the way so much '90s-era science fiction told us we would be. Still, much more than was the case when the World of Warcraft was a hot topic people can, and do, carry their virtual world everywhere with them on their smart phone, all as virtual life now involves far, far more than Role Playing Game-style questing in the age of the chatbot, with today's moral panic-mongers making Futurama's Space Pope's injunctions against dating robots part of the discourse. (Thus are Republican legislators rushing to ban "robot marriage," no, I am not making this up.) And of course there is what Castronova had to say about the matter that very few acknowledge, namely that the virtual is as attractive as it is because of the unattractions of real life, unattractions that, Castronova warned, required society to address its problems if it was to avoid such an exodus, something it has signally not done, and which have if anything signally worsened in the polycrisis-ridden decades since he published his book.

Of course, the talk of an "exodus" may seem to simply affirm what I said earlier about video gaming being a vehicle for escapism that affirms the status quo rather than encouraging a critical outlook and a willingness to achieve positive change. Still, any escape into virtuality with anything like the technology we have can only ever be partial given that, again, people have their bodies and minds out here and not in those machines--and so have no choice but to deal with this world, however much they would prefer to not do so, with the tension inhering in that perhaps having its effect on the thinking of some of them. Certainly there is the argument that the increasing immersiveness of video games has made "gamers" place a higher value on the leisure time they are able to devote to them than they did before--which, it stands to reason, makes them more resistant to, more questioning of, the demands that a society which expects its members to live for economic striving, to "live to work" rather than "work to live," etc., as those demands drag them away from their virtual world they prefer to this one. ("No, I'm not trading my weekends for workends . . . I gots a game I'd rather be playing.") It may also be that the experience of video gaming, not simply as a vicarious out-of-this-world adventure but as a chance to see sustained effort actually make them good at something and being good at something pay off in some manner, however trivial ("You've leveled up!"), has sharpened their sense of the dissatisfactions of "real life," and what real life is so often an euphemism for, society, as summed up in the jokes long found on the Internet and elsewhere that "Life is a broken video game." ("Maybe the economy isn't really a meritocracy. Maybe hard work doesn't pay off in it the way they say. Maybe the American Dream is a cruel lie.") Their attention to gaming may even have sharpened their critical stance toward the technology companies that Authority has for so long presented as capitalism's best face, as the devoted gamer, the more in as they live in an era in which games are so much more than before an online experience subject to assorted controls by capitalist firms quite prepared to subject their customers to totalitarian forms of surveillance to defend their copyrights, consider the ways in which business takes advantage of the consumer. (Think, for example, of the present outcry over Sony's decision to cease producing physical media.)

That same preference for the virtuality of their games may even prompt them to think about the people who actually make the games, whose work is the basis of their play. As it happened the Byakuya gang arc of the anime version of the Naruto spin-off Boruto saw the eponymous protagonist, through contact with the laid-off maker of a video game he enjoyed, driven to consider the social system he lived in for the first time. As one may guess given the broad tendency of popular culture when it purports to deal with serious issues David Bordwell described all too well, and in particular the more conformist tendency of anime these days, that plot's resolution was fairly centrist in outlook--admitting that society wasn't perfect, but only gesturing vaguely toward redressing its problems (the old "We'll work on it" without saying what anyone would do, exactly) while being vehement that the radicals did not have the answers, that they were plain and simple bad guys cynically exploiting the pain of the unfortunate. But all the same, it brought Boruto face to face with those questions--and he might not be the last to find his love of gaming's virtual worlds making him look at the real one in a way he had not done before.