Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War

Many kids who grew up with games between the 1970s and 1990s became important players in this new billion-dollar industry. By the time the new millennium rolled over, the technology in games had become sufficiently advanced to focus not only on the exciting mechanics of the game; storytelling could begin to truly take center stage. What kind of stories were to be told, of course, was up for debate. At the same time, a certain stratification was under­way, too.

A few popular game genres could be trusted to release a signifi­cant dose of endorphins. Shooter games like Duke Nukem, horror titles like Resident Evil, platformer games like Super Mario World, racing games, sports games, strategy games, role-playing games, or horror games all had signif­icant fan bases and ever-growing production teams, and they produced healthy revenues. The technological advances accommodated not only singular, linear stories with two-dimensional characters, but also entire worlds, side quests, and labyrinths of plot devices.

Players could now focus not just on the plot, or the mise-en-scène of a game, but also on the broader message. What type of values or narratives did this produce? Video games were now suf­ficiently sophisticated to build a chronicle of persuasion. Those eager to popularize a particular ideology — be they opinionated game developers, publishers courting a particular demographic, political spin doctors funding the projects, or other cultural influ­encers wishing to diversify their storytelling techniques — wasted no time getting involved in this innovative medium.

Strategy games like Freeciv or Sid Meier’s Colonization and shooters such as Tomb Raider were already independently peddling colonial or jingoistic fantasies. In these games, the plot usually unleashed tropes of imperial land grabs, white supremacy, and racist depictions of non-Western pop­ulations, ranging from “primitive” to full-on terrorists.

By the late 1990s, the US Department of Defense was beginning to sense the power of the games industry over adolescent men — the Department’s main audience — and created a campaign of recruitment and manipulation around gaming. Serious institutional power underwrote the move to tie the global video games industry to the Western military complex. The Pentagon spent more than $150 million on military-themed games or simulations in 1999 alone, with another $70 million injection in 2008 and still more since, all on projects with their own, very particular political agenda.

America’s Army, released in 2002, developed and published by the United States Army in the wake of the post-9/11 military boost, was the starkest and priciest example of this practice — with a ten-year development and marketing budget of $50 million, on top of the investments mentioned before. This round-based team tactical shooter with realistic combat scenarios was described in a review of the time as “the most realistic portrayal of weapons and combat of any game.”

The game has collected a number of awards over the years and has managed to attract several million players, on both personal computers and consoles. This so-called “strategic communication device” was “intended to inform, educate, and recruit prospective soldiers.” On the official Frequently Asked Questions page, the developers confirmed that one of the reasons people outside the United States can play the game is that they “want the whole world to know how great the US Army is.”

Not subtle, then. Nonetheless, video games were a perfect vehicle for the purpose of state propaganda. When the franchise was eventu­ally discontinued, a total of forty-one versions of the game had been released between 2002 and 2014.

Themes around militarization and armed resistance were instilled in games to build narratives around a variety of conflicts. Jane’s IAF: Israeli Air Force (1998) was clearly intended to raise publicity for the Israel Defense Forces. The content of the game included two types of campaigns.

The first covered historic oper­ations of the Israeli Air Force in the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the 1982 Lebanon War. The second type included fictional futuristic operations in Iraq, Syria, and Leba­non. On the other hand, a Syrian game studio released the action game Under Ash in 2001, which recreated moments from the history of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli military occupation.

This attention and the seemingly popular acclaim military-themed games received in the early 2000s inspired an entire generation of neocolonial video games that underlined Western military agendas and values as a prime moral objective. Develop­ers of the Conflict: Desert Storm, Medal of Honor, and the now-infamous Call of Duty franchises found it relatively easy to secure funding during this moment. The revolving door of consultants going back and forth between the organized military complex and the enormous Call of Duty franchise is well docu­mented, albeit hardly spoken of.

A colonial narrative can be transmitted through the story plot and the cast of characters fea­tured or, sometimes even more significantly, omitted. Bias can be transmitted through choices as simple as the color grading for different settings: yellow for Africa and the Middle East, signify­ing “dusty,” “historical”; blue for the West, that is, “modern,” “civilized.” Other choices include what languages players hear spoken in the background, and the tone of voice used.

All these aspects invite an interpretation that often reflects a certain ideological affiliation. In gaming, the introduction of such narratives alongside the development of technology strong enough to support them presented a double victory: a moral judgement and a desensitization toward massacring anyone deemed to be a state enemy.

Today, the modern military complex uses experiences that are styled to look like video games to train soldiers. More disturbingly, they apply an aesthetically pleasing user interface akin to that of a video game in targeting machines for real-life remote bombing action. A 2007 video, which WikiLeaks titled “Collateral Murder,” depicting US soldiers engaged in a helicopter strike that killed two Reuters employees and a number of civilians, has a distinct video game look to it. The user interface in today’s drones was in fact designed to replicate that of a video game.

Electronic sports events and gaming conferences are now reg­ularly funded by local state military bodies. It’s a win-win strategy. Games companies represent governmental organizations and boost their own public image in the process. An image of being close to the state allows studios to receive lucrative tax breaks, too. And the military outsources the building of cumbersome training simulators and attracts new recruits in the process.

Critics of such arrangements and the tight relationship between the mili­tary and games companies are rarely listened to. While these camouflage-tainted collaborations may benefit one side of the global games industry, more progressively minded studios suffer when they’re drowned out by these slick and bombastic displays of aggression.

As the arms industries got involved, the propaganda and prof­it-making got bolder and more cynical. Weapons companies, including Colt’s, Barrett Firearms, Kalashnikov Concern, Zenitco, Remington Firearms, Daniel Defense, Troy Industries, Insight Technologies, Aimpoint, and Eotech, have their guns actively licensed by numerous games companies in order to appear in video games; details of such deals or the money changing hands are undisclosed.

Arms companies and various advertising agencies were not the only ones beginning to sense that digital games were worth inves­tigating. The dopamine hit that reaches the brain after a correctly solved puzzle or a well-placed shot could be applied to areas other than mere entertainment. In 2008, the concept of gamification began to surface in the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds.

Other fields had already adapted elements from video games — for instance, some work in learning disabilities and scientific visualization comes from user interface inventions in gaming. Venture capitalists soon started to experiment with incorporating social, rewarding aspects of games into their software. Elements of game design that were originally intended to increase the satis­faction of a player experience, such as points, badges, leaderboards, performance graphs, and slick button design and audio effects, could be extended to other digital implementations.

In their 2014 book The Gameful World, editors Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding chronicle the wide adoption of gamification. According to the authors, with the rise of Web 2.0 business models in the mid-2000s, web start-ups were increasingly faced with the challenge of how to motivate users to sign up with the offered service, invite people they know, and interact with their products regularly. They needed new tools for raising engagement.

For instance, in 2007, IBM contracted communication researcher Byron Reeves, who published a white paper on the role of online games for business leadership. In 2008, a question-and-answer platform for software develop­ers titled Stack Overflow was launched using a reputation system with points and badges inspired by the gaming experience of its developers. It quickly gained cachet in the technology industry.

In March 2009, the iPhone app Foursquare debuted at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival and demonstrated that game design elements can drive the initial adoption and retention of users. The following August, Bunchball’s Rajat Paharia registered the domain gamification.com. The video-sharing site Vimeo added a “like” button in November 2005, and Facebook followed suit four years later. Adding a calculus, a playful interaction into the interface, increased the sites’ engagement rates.

Today gamification is a widely adopted technique that is almost seamlessly incorporated into how we engage in various digital scenarios, such as organizational productivity, self-help apps, knowledge retention, employee recruitment and evaluation, phys­ical training, traffic rules learning, and more. Naturally, the biggest adopters of gamification have been marketing agencies; 70 percent of Forbes Global 2000 companies surveyed in 2013 said they planned to use gamification for the purposes of marketing and customer retention.

Gamified shopping experiences are now common online, but companies have also added video game visual components to their brands. Games theorist Ian Bogost writes:

Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they’re doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding “a games strategy” to their existing products, slathering on “gaminess” like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant’s indulgent sales lunch.

On the other side of the spectrum, many video games now offer a “labor” angle: complete tasks, collect points, solve problems, and grind your way to the next high score. From the farming simulation sensation FarmVille to the modern cult classic Euro Truck Simulator, game companies now unapologeti­cally invite the player to labor all day, and this toil has been embraced by the player base. In November 2022, A Little to the Left, where players tidy shelves or cleaning items and do other organization tasks, was released to rave reviews and branded as the “cosy” game of the year.

The highly successful social simulation series Animal Crossing, launched in 2001, was praised by players for providing them with a sense of security, no matter how unreal. Many reported that com­pleting the tasks gave them a feeling of accomplishment, stability, and safety, and that they found the tasks impossible to resist. To players, this game personified the promise that capitalism made to them: that there will be rewards for their labor.

It is tempting to judge these players as capitalist subjects, doing laborious profit-making exercises for somebody else’s gain. None­theless, fans of Stardew Valley (2016) — another staple of the genre — would probably argue that in a world filled with so little certainty and sense of control, the predictable, repetitive results of the actions in these games have a calming effect. And who am I to argue with that?