Horror Must Break the Taboo Of Politics in Video Games
James Winspear
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Let’s get real here for a second, folks. Things are grim. In fact, things are completely dire, and they’re only going to get worse. This July was the hottest month in recorded human history. North Atlantic sea surface temperatures have literally been off the charts, while Antarctica shrunk to record lows in July. Mega-fires in Canada have burned an area roughly the size of Greece while flooding from torrential rains has killed thousands in Libya. While the climate collapses, politics is becoming ever more undemocratic, with far-right populism and outright neo-fascism surging across the Global North and South. Do you want horror? Look no further. But have video games—a medium with larger revenues than the global film and music industry combined—addressed any of this?
Gaming’s most pernicious line—a line spouted by certain cynical publishers and particular gaming communities—is that video games are politically neutral. Not only is this conceptually absurd, but it’s a bare-faced lie in many cases.
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Take the argument in the abstract. Any piece of media has a social context. Its content reflects—consciously or unconsciously—not only the creator’s biases, concerns, and interests but the wider cultural milieu of which they are a part. Its very form is dependent on a society’s technological and economic base, from the spoken word to printed books to modern digital media. All media is engaged with the world, materially and dialectically. Hence, all media is inherently political. Even the most abstract piece of escapist fantasy doesn’t get a free ride here. By its very abnegation of reality—by throwing its hands up and claiming to make no comment on anything except itself—it actively engages in a submission to the wider status quo by refusing to challenge any of it. This is the very essence of politics.
But we don’t need a sociology 101 lesson to call bullshit on the “gaming isn’t political” idea. There are far more tangible examples ready at hand. To name just a few, for a long while, it was standard industry practice for shooters to pay licensing fees to arms manufacturers to use gun names. At one point, EA even put links to gun companies like the McMillan Group and Magpul on its Medal of Honor: Warfighter website.
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Or take the FIFA video games, which help funnel money into their namesake, an organization awash with corruption scandals, dodgy oligarchs, and clubs owned by oil-rich autocrats.
Or again, there’s the case of Oliver North, a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, serving as an advisor, pitchman, and even minor character in 2012’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Yet Treyarch head Mark Lamia had the gall to claim that the developers were “not trying to make a political statement with our game.”
Horror itself is far from immune from this kind of thing. Resident Evil 4 has players running and gunning their way through a European village as a US federal agent recovering the President’s daughter. The recent remake even has said daughter espousing a desire to (I quote) “protect the US from any and all threats” in the late game by joining the special service. Such a sentiment apparently goes down without a ripple from the gaming public. One wonders how different a reaction the game would have garnered if we’d been playing as an agent from a covert, paramilitary organization belonging to another country like China or Russia.
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Yet still, the go-to justification for calling games apolitical is to say that they’re just entertainment. Gaming is just what you do for fun, right? It’s almost tautological. But this is a sleight of hand. It relies on sneaking the ‘just’ part of the phrase ‘just entertainment’ past critical inspection. Limiting an entire medium’s role solely to that of mindless distraction is itself a political action. You wouldn’t get away with it if you tried the same argument with books, music, or films.
Somehow, the narrative of gaming as an apolitical form of entertainment has become embedded in its growth over the past 30 years. There are several possible causes for this. Video games are still a very young medium. Their evolution has taken place nearly entirely within the context of postindustrial Neoliberalism in countries where this system hasn’t been seriously challenged by different socio-economic models. As such, it has yet to be politically stress-tested.
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Likewise, games have only begun to develop an ecosystem that can sustain them as an art form instead of just commercial products. Government arts funding, film festivals, independent booksellers—games are still developing an equivalent network. It’s also true that gaming remains an intensely technical discipline. The tools for making them have yet to become accessible enough to the point where developers don’t have to invest hundreds of hours just to learn how to use them. Diversity has also been a critical issue, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, when games were overwhelmingly made and marketed to straight, white males in their early teens to late 20s.
Whatever the cause, the result has been a games industry that is not only not apolitical but conservative by default. Jingoistic shooters like Call of Duty are only one aspect of this. AAA gaming’s self-censorship on anything vaguely ‘political’ has created a vacuum in which a toxic, reactionary minority is often allowed to run rampant. While there are a few notable exceptions (Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind), shooters often fail to address the danger of the worldview their mechanics impart: that violent force is a fundamentally efficacious means of solving problems.
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Nor should the real-world economics of the games industry be ignored. Having long ago grown beyond a niche subculture of hobbyists, gaming’s peak is now a certified Big Business, with all the unsavory practices that come with it: misogyny in the workplace, mass layoffs while CEOs rake in ever bigger bonuses, and exploitative labor conditions as exemplified by crunch culture.
The time is long overdue for us to reject forcefully the disingenuous façade of gaming as a politics-free space. Cracks in the edifice are already appearing. After years of diligent groundwork, trade unionism is a growing force within the industry. If the opposition Atomic Heart met because of the Ukraine War was anything to go by, gamers may be getting less tolerant of attempts to fence-sit in an increasingly multipolar world, although this trend could easily devolve into reactionary nationalism.
There are even a few games finally taking a proactive stance on politics rather than simply keeping schtum by dallying in make-believe or bowing to the powers that be. Two recent examples stand out. The indie hit Endling: Extinction is Forever is the first game to put climate collapse and biodiversity loss at the front and center of its narrative. More boldly still, War of Heroes – The PDF Game (PDF – People’s Defence Force) is a mobile game actively raising funds for the pro-democracy resistance in Myanmar, which has been in a state of civil war since its repressive military took power in a coup in 2021.
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Yet more needs to be done. A watershed moment is needed where gaming emphatically embraces political discourse. Only by doing so can games be elevated to a true art form. With AAA gaming stuck in creative stagnation, the moment is ripe for change. Horror games can—and should—be at the forefront of this transition.
For one thing, its indie-friendly credentials and its emphasis on thematic rather than mechanical or graphical fidelity means that it already has a degree of wiggle room in terms of commercial viability. As Five Nights At Freddy’s and Slender proved, a low-budget horror game doesn’t have to look or play great to become a success. It just needs to terrify.
But most importantly, horror is the genre that works when it doesn’t pull its punches. Think of gaming’s most harrowing titles, games like Amnesia, Silent Hill, or Detention. These titles have repeatedly proven to us that video games don’t have to be fun to be engaging. In horror, the audience signs up to be taken into the heart of darkness. It’s in horror that games can address the injustices and crises of our world without fear of upsetting delicate constitutions.
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The challenge of breaking the false taboo on politics shouldn’t be underplayed. The industry problems listed in this article are immense, indeed systemic; they cannot be solved by individuals alone. But there are things that readers can do.
Perhaps consider supporting the games I’ve mentioned and let developers know that there’s a space for politics by voting with your wallets. Hell, on the off chance that you’re a developer yourself, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you want to have a chat about writing a political horror game – I’d be happy to try and help if I can. Call out companies with shitty work practices on social media or those that try to ape the frisson of political struggle in their stories without having the guts to take a coherent stance on anything. But most of all, I’d urge you to get involved with politics at a local or national level. Find a local party group, attend a picket, sign petitions: the true value of gaming, like any media, lies in the actions it can inspire.
We are entering a period of unprecedented crisis. The time has come for our games and passions to look squarely at the world, not retreat from it, and fight for a better future. And the horror genre must be there at the forefront.
Categorized:Editorials Horror Gaming
