The video game industry has many, many problems, and one of them is that it tends to reflect a very conservative US- or West-centric ideology. This is reflected in the games that get made, the games we celebrate in the games press, and the games that get utterly left behind. Many of the games outwardly support US foreign policy, like the Call of Duty or Battlefield series. Other games, like the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, the Division series and the Watch Dogs series, focus on specifically Western dystopias and what various rugged individuals can do to fight the forces of collectivism, surveillance and anarchy. Regardless of the surface stories these games put forward, they all celebrate a uniquely Western, and specifically (in many cases) American triumphalism: the infinitely resourceful and powerful (usually American, typically white) protagonists will win and restore distinctly American freedom and democracy wherever they are, no matter what the fight is.
If you don’t live in the global North or the West, I’d imagine this Ur-story probably grates on your every nerve, because what “American freedom and democracy” actually tends to look like is 20 years of drone strikes and shock-and-awe. It tends to look like decades of forced regime change, US-backed death squads and the disease-like spread of “Free Market Economics.” It does not look like white picket fences and a nuclear family for much of the world.
Games made by American or Western developers, be they indie or AAA, invariably come back to this formula. And generally it’s not a bad thing that they write what they know. But there’s a whole other problem here: Western games hold onto a market hegemony.
This is what I think developer Rami Ismail was getting at when he tweeted on Tuesday:
Ismail was met with almost instantaneous backlash from various parts of games Twitter, many of whom were praising Kentucky Route Zero’s final act earlier that day or earlier.
I don’t want to put any more words in Ismail’s or anyone’s mouth. There’s a whole table of discourse around this you can sit down at if you want to get into the weeds with that. And as far as Kentucky Route Zero is concerned, I don’t know if I agree with his assessment in this specific way. I’ll have a review out later this week probably; I’ll get into stuff about that there. But idk man, I do feel like it’s hard to deny that video games tend to cater to a specific audience with a specific story, namely that of a straight white male’s power fantasy, in a way that tends to promote a very specific vision of the West, America specifically, as a global superpower, police force and caretaker. Have I said specific enough yet?
So how do you fight this? Well, short of dismantling America and returning stolen land to indigenous people, I believe the answer lies in decentering Western studios as being the most “important” studios, promoting developers in the Global South and in places you’re not familiar with, working to end the chokehold military and police shooter games have on the industry, hiring non-white people from all over to make and write about games, and generally stop promoting reactionary bullshit politics.
I’d genuinely love to see a moment where the Call of Duty’s and Ghost Recons of the world stop coming out, replaced by an international cornucopia of interesting, horrifying, funny, sad, intense, quiet, well-written, poorly-written, poignant and inconsequential games made by people who love making games but have been otherwise shut out of the conversation. I don’t have a “but” or anything to add to that. I genuinely think it would make video games a better medium for consumers and producers alike.
But what do I know? I live in Oklahoma.