A bit over a year ago I posted a blog post to this site as my “grand manifesto” for why I thought writing about video games was important in an age where shit was hitting the fan on a daily basis. I… wish I could go back and kiss that adorable thembo on the forehead and tuck them into bed for that bad take because fuck, man, it’s gotten a lot worse in the year since. It’s not even that the take was terrible, it was just kind of underformed. And, well… I think it’s time to reimagine No Escape‘s mission statement.
The world is not doing so hot right now – particularly the United States, but most of the globe is also having their own bad time at the moment. We’re stuck in our homes. If we do dare to leave, we have to stay away from others at all times. The consequences for disregarding this – for going to bars and restaurants, for gathering in large numbers at all – are painful, deadly, and demoralizing. There is widespread unrest, caused by the police and exacerbated by the same. Calls for reform, for a modest restructuring of society, are stricken down by authorities – who have the gall to call the ensuing chaos “looting” and “anarchy.”
We are faced with a high probability that this upcoming election may be the nation’s last for a while, if not forever. Of course, if our path as a species isn’t corrected, climate change might take care of whatever an impending fascist dictatorship in the “Land of the Free” fails to squash. Capitalism has failed, utterly, to deal with the changing landscape of our social fabric, and the alternatives are sparse and rooted in theory from two centuries ago. There is a desire felt by many to simply avert their eyes and pretend that what is happening simply isn’t happening, but we will have to reckon with the mass evictions, the hundreds of thousands dead, and the growing acceptance that hey, social authoritarianism ain’t so bad if you can ignore the stench from the concentration camps.
Video games aid in this attempted distraction. We play them – and I am guilty of this – to stop thinking about what is going on out there and instead focus on the little lives and little stories in the little worlds in here. And look, I’m not going to pretend this isn’t significant: how many people bought Nintendo Switches, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Ring Fit Adventure? How many people got into Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft or Destiny or Warframe this year because of the world around them? I certainly did a few of these things (though maybe it’s because I was already depressed that I didn’t form a habit out of any one of them).
Video games are also a means of entry. They are a form of propaganda. They inform – and are informed by – political doctrines that create the perfect environment for fascism.
Take, for example, Ubisoft’s new title, Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad. It’s a mobile game, and in a recent ad they showed the game’s enemy faction: a shadowy world-spanning organization (called UMBRA) fomenting leftist revolution using something that wasn’t quite Black Lives Matter (but was absolutely a dogwhistle for Black Lives Matter, the Black Power fist) as its means of garnering popular support. The answer to this problem, naturally, is to gather all the heroes and villains of the Tom Clancy-verse in an Avengers-style superteam to… extrajudicially assassinate the members of this organization, naturally.
Or look back merely a week to Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, a fun new look at the progressive era of the 1980s, when Reagan was definitely a hip dude definitely not suffering from the early onset of Alzheimers and definitely on-board with the queer community! He will even respect your character’s “classified” neopronouns! How exciting. What makes the ahistorical revisionism even more nonsensical here? It seems like your whole job is to commit the absolutely real crimes of the Reagan Administration but now through the lens that Iran-Contra, the funding and training of Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan that directly led to 9/11 twenty years later, and the fucking invasion of Grenada were all cool and good and fine!! You’ll be a badass!!! Robert Redford Will Be There!
But aside from their occasional function as propaganda, video games are cultural objects with things to say. The games we’ve covered here have often provided new insights or perspectives into questions big and small – about how we see and interact with the world, about our place in the cosmos, about the limits of our power to shape our realities and change our fates. There are games worth playing, even if some others decide to be modern renditions of The Birth of a Nation.
It is necessary to write about video games, to have political discourse about them, because they are part of our social fabric. Almost everyone plays some kind of video game, and dismissing their importance or their potency to shape people’s worldview comes at the dismisser’s great peril. It may not always be fun to write about video games, even though many games’ sole object is to be fun – but it’s absolutely necessary.
No Escape is not the only voice in the chorus seeking to change the way the conversation around games happens. If you like what we do, consider also reading and supporting Uppercut Crit, Bullet Points, Deep Hell, Gayming Magazine, Just Add Monsters, Arcade Idea, Sidequest, Glitch Out and Videodame, as well as Cole Henry, Autumn Wright, Toussaint Egan, Dia Lacina, Grace Benfell, Jeremy Winslow, Khee Hoon Chan, Sam Greszes, Jeremy Signor, and I could go on forever, honestly. And I know I’m missing people and websites I love.
Video games are not an escape from the realities we face. But we can make our own escape route.
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