Bogost Chapter 2

Political Processes

The chapter opens with a comparison of the game BioChemFX with the real life catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. The game is meant to present a hypothetical disaster, showing what can happen (in an accurate way) and leaving the ‘ethical’ decisions of whom to save up to the player. When faced with these decisions in reality after Hurricane Katrina, everyone failed.

In order to continue a discussion of politics and videogames, Bogost must define ‘ideology,’ which he illustrates through the Irish potato famine. He borrows definitions from Plato (although it wasn’t called ‘ideology’), de Tracy, Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, and finally Zizek. Bogost seems to prefer Zizek’s idea of “’false consciousness’ of a social being but this being in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’” (74).

(Wow this is way harder than I thought. I can’t do it in 800 words!)

He focuses on the game America’s Army, noting its ‘realism’ but also its ideology. Since the game features a multiplayer component where 2 teams battle each other, yet both are the US Army (while the other appears in guerrilla outfits). America’s Army is (was) a recruiting tool of the United States Army, but it (perhaps unintentionally) revealed ‘policy’ “don’t think, just do.” It also portrays the opposition as just that, the villain or the enemy (a nameless, faceless bad ‘thing’ that is a threat). Vagueness is the key to keeping situations controlled/ maintained.

A Force More Powerful, a ‘pacifist’ game, has a similar ideology. It features nonviolent resistance, but the historical, social, and economic (to name a few) contexts are not factored into the equation. The idea of overthrowing a regime is made to seem easily transplantable.

The next example Bogost uses is the Antiwargame. Some interesting things of note in this game are that “Military/Business” is one of three categories of possible spending. Military spending is “the same” as business spending. The game is about controlling and manipulating resources, money, people, situations. This reveals the game’s actual opposition to war “by claiming that a broken logic drives post-9/11 conflicts” (84).

Bogost briefly discusses the “rhetoric of failure” through the games New York Defender and Kabul Kaboom. There is no “winning condition” for either game; they are meant to show how things don’t work (85). Another game, September 12, which we’ve discussed in class presents a similar rhetoric. These games reveal how the logic of certain political processes is broken. For example, the “war on terror” ‘s use of strategic bombs was called “surgical,” but by nature, bombs are indiscriminate. If a bomb is dropped on innocent civilians or trained terrorists, it will explode and kill both. There is nothing “surgical” or “clean” about this (87).

The next ‘set’ of games discussed by Bogost could be categorized as “political election simulators” (90). There are President Elect, Power Politics, The Political Machine, President Forever and Power Politics III. The common procedural rhetoric of each of these is that “elections are won by electioneering, not by politics” (91). Several of these games focus on political strategy instead of policy; some even suggest that politics themselves means “election strategy, not public policy” (92).

He brings up a game he helped develop called The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, in which “political symbology, imagery, or verbiage” is used but it does not really show political life (and its processes). (He discusses this game in more detail in Chapter 4, but it doesn’t look like I’ll get that far.)

The games Bush v. Kerry Boxing and Darfur is Dying are proved to be simply skinning recognizable games/ processes and making a weak copy. These games may make “visual arguments” but they lack procedural rhetoric.

Darfur is Dying does not attempt to explain why the suffering is happening in this area; this is where the lack of procedural rhetoric is revealed. The game abstracts the circumstances, which makes ideas or solutions abstract (versus concrete) as well. (This game seems to have made little difference if it was new during the creation of this text in 2005 and the conflict in Darfur is still continuing 6 years later.)

His one page conclusion to this chapter succinctly brings his examples and points together. In a short example, he shows how the games White House Joust and Bush v. Kerry Boxing “appropriate political image” for commercial reasons (where are the politics?). True political videogames should have procedural rhetorics that “make claims about” the relationships of political processes, “why they work, why they don’t work or how society might benefit by changing the rules” (98). Political videogames fail when they simply answer the questions of how these processes work or what they look like or who is involved in them.

Discussion Questions:

1. Does the rhetoric of failure apply to reality? How? (Where did it come from- I mean, it had to exist before video games, right?)
2. What other ideologies (hey kids that took Renaissance Lit last semester!) can be found in the games mentioned in this chapter? Bogost discussed their political ideologies, but surely there are more than just these.
3.  Are these ideologies intentionally placed in these games or are they just present, always underneath the surface of the game? Who is aware of them? How does one become aware of them?