Abstract
Video games are often sold by publishers as being apolitical because they are mainly accessed in our leisure time, but their potential for communicating political content and ideologies should not be underestimated. This relationship between politics and video games is intrinsically linked to the medium’s origin, with many war simulations among the first video games. In addition, many innocuous games, such as Tennis for Two (1958), showed some affiliation with military projects. While early digital worlds, such as The Bradley Trainer (1981), targeted military personnel, later games, such as America’s Army (2002), were intended for the public. These games flaunt their agenda, namely creating positive associations with the US military in their players, and as cultural artefacts are, in Marx and Engels’s words, “a mere training to act as a machine.”
This paper asks whether Cold War video games played from an American perspective and created by American or Western game studios after 2000 act as Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses by reproducing anti-communist ideologies. For Althusser, ideology is defined by two key characteristics: it “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” and it “has a material existence.” Unlike Marx and Engels, who argued that ideology creates a false consciousness and hides the real world, Althusser contents that ideology displays the “imaginary relationship of individuals” to reality. Ideology, then, does not reflect the real world but a state that is already removed one step from reality. The reason for this is that we need language as a tool to establish our reality and, thus, we cannot have unmediated access to reality. For the second characteristic, Althusser notes that “ideology always exists in an apparatus” and that it prevails through actions, such as cultural practices or norms. Through performing these actions, and through the relationship established to them, the individual becomes a subject in a process of interpellation.
This paper asks whether Cold War video games played from an American perspective and created by American or Western game studios after 2000 act as Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses by reproducing anti-communist ideologies. For Althusser, ideology is defined by two key characteristics: it “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” and it “has a material existence.” Unlike Marx and Engels, who argued that ideology creates a false consciousness and hides the real world, Althusser contents that ideology displays the “imaginary relationship of individuals” to reality. Ideology, then, does not reflect the real world but a state that is already removed one step from reality. The reason for this is that we need language as a tool to establish our reality and, thus, we cannot have unmediated access to reality. For the second characteristic, Althusser notes that “ideology always exists in an apparatus” and that it prevails through actions, such as cultural practices or norms. Through performing these actions, and through the relationship established to them, the individual becomes a subject in a process of interpellation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | PAIDIA |
| Publication status | Published - 21 Jan 2021 |