In our conclusion to Kiersey and Neumann’s Battlestar Galatica and International Relations, Peter Henne and I lament the relative lack of interest among cultural-turn international-relations scholars in video games. Our case rests on a comparison of the number of people who have played franchises such as Halo and Mass Effect to those who have watched the re-imagined BSG.
But the downside to neglect isn’t simply about the size of audience and consequent real-world significance. Non-gamers may not know it, but recent years have seen a wave of experimentation in video games driven by the rise of independent developers. Sure, much of the work has been, at best, incremental and, at worst, hackneyed, but the overall trend has pushed gaming into something more recognizable to non-gamers as artistic expression.
I have no idea if Papers, Please is any good (although the Metacritic score suggests that it is), but it certainly should be fodder for international-relations and comparative-politics scholars–especially those ready to critically engage with video games. From the Eurogamer review:
What we have here is the literal opposite of the usual power fantasy. You don’t play as anyone special, just a downtrodden citizen of the ominous Soviet-styled nation of Arstotzka in the dying months of 1982. Assigned by a labour lottery to work for the Ministry of Admission, you spend your day stuck in a dank booth at a border checkpoint, responsible for deciding who gets to enter the country and who gets turned away – or worse.
Here’s what your working day entails. You start by reading the diktat handed down by your superior, detailing any changes or restrictions to the immigration laws. Then you pull the lever that opens the grille, and use the tannoy to summon the first shuffling figure in a long snaking line of poor souls hoping to enter Arstotzka, either temporarily or permanently.
They appear in your booth as a lumpy, pixellated sack of human desperation, and dutifully hand over their papers. It’s up to you to check them over for any suspicious information or discrepancies and then stamp the passport: green lets them in, red sends them packing.
Mistakes trigger a dot matrix communiqué from your superiors. Turn away a valid visitor or let in somebody with dodgy papers, and you’re in trouble. The first few slip-ups are allowed to pass without sanction, but after that you’re fined five Arstotzkan dollars for every blunder. You don’t earn much and every deduction is a huge chunk out of your salary.
It’s here that the game gets seriously bleak. After each working day, you have to balance your domestic budget, dividing your pittance between heating and food for your family, while also allowing for medicine when they get sick, gifts for birthdays and the like. Inevitably, you can’t afford everything, and it’s all too easy to be heading home to a dying wife and starving child, knowing you’ve not earned enough to save either of them.
Check out the rest of the review. What do you think? Should we pay more attention to video games? And to which ones?
I know that some of our readers have been doing work on the subject…..
This collection of essays might be of some interest to those interested in using games in the college classroom: https://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/gamesineducation/
I will eventually get to it, had an undergrad code a bunch of games and a new pol comm Prof wants to tackle the project. I just need a free moment which should come in 2025 at this rate.
I’ll be free around 2030 if you want to collaborate.
Black Ops 3 provides an interesting view of drone use in the future. P.W. Singer (author of Wired for War) was a consultant on it.
Half Life 2 is definitely worth a look. It provides an incredibly detailed insight into the mechanics of totalitarian regimes. Sure, the government may be an alien race attempting to enslave humanity, but its setting in Eastern Europe clearly draws comparisons with Soviet Russia.
I dunno; I think that HL2 totally gets the aesthetics and appearance of the Soviet regime as an inspiration for the Combine, but IIRC it doesn’t really tell us too much about the Combine’s actions as a political entity. Am I forgetting something in there? (Entirely possible, it’s been years since I played HL2)
Fair point but I think in the opening levels when you can interact with the common citizens living under Combine rule it captures the dynamics of living in a oppressed society pretty well.
I think there’s a lot of politics in many mainstream games.
“Deus Ex: Human Revolution” has an interesting story to tell about self-augmentation and future society. The “Fallout” series has a lot of post-apocalyptic politics. The “Witcher” series has racism, political intrigues and civil war in a medieval/fantasy setting, and you have to pick sides. “Dishonored” is another action title with a steampunk setting and similar political ambiguities. “Tropico” is a series dealing with how to run your own tropical dictatorship.
None of these (except “Tropico”) are as explicitly focused on politics as “Papers, Please”, and they vary in their portrayal of good versus evil. Some are more naive/simplistic, while others give the players freedom of choice and show that there really are no easy answers…
(Oh, and obviously there are many, many strategy titles covering economics, wars and diplomacy…)
Don’t forget Bioshock Infinite! And the original Bioshock!
Does Bioshock Original have any particular discussion of IR beyond “here we have John Galt leaving both the US and USSR to do his own crazy libertarian thing”?
Skyrim is full of themes and plotlines that would make for intriguing illustrations of IR-scholar problems.
There’s certainly some treatment of international (well, interstellar) relations in Mass Effect, but it’s on a cursory level similar to what you might find in an episode of TNG. (Don’t get me wrong, I love the series to bits, but the political discussions are minimal at best.)
There might be some grist in the international dynamics present within XCOM (and its 1991 predecessor) regarding coordination and cooperation between nations.
I suspect that some of the grand strategy games (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria) might also be useful, but I can’t comment in more detail, since CK2 lurks on my desktop, taunting me with its UI complexity.
Regarding XCOM: Yes, but the different regional blocs seem to act pretty randomly, and the nationalities of your team don’t really matter, right? Could have been designed better.
Well, the regional blocs act based on how responsive you have been to combating UFO activity in their area. It’s a bit more evident in the original X-Com, where you have to do a lot more regional tracking.
The team nationalities don’t matter, it’s true (an individual soldier isn’t significant in the cooperate/defect calculus for each nation), but how you interact with the nations is where it gets kinda interesting. It’s not a 100% spot-on type of thing, for sure.
The “decadence” dynamic for Muslim rulers (landless sons -> decadence->being attacked by tribesmen with more asabiyyah) in CK2 makes me think one of the designers read some of Peter Turchin’s work (a kind of formalized version of Ibn Khaldun cycles).
Dammit! I *have* the Sword of Islam expansion, but I can’t even play the tutorial before the game crashes.
And you’re making me want to play even moooore.
Old news, but Splinter Cell: Blacklist initially included had a torture scene where the player used the joystick to twirl a knife already in a shoulder wound to gain information. The official release did drop it (https://bit.ly/XgRYiS). There have been games with torture scenes, but I think this is a first for actually integrating player control, not just A or B button.
Are there any apps that can be used in IR-related courses that you have used/experimented with?