Gaming cultures are connected to violence – but should be considered in terms of the rise of far right political discourse and the prominence of “alt-right” misogyny and racism. While Trump is firmly on the right and the WHO may embody normative centrism, there is an aspect of gaming that should worry the progressive left.
The white male supremacy in gaming has been discussed in the context of the harassment campaign Gamergate and via the link between Trump and gamer message board threads on the 4chan website. Yet it’s not simply that many gamers are right wing, or that the right recruits gamers, but that the logic and pleasure of gaming itself has served and continues to serve the political right.
Games are ideological constructions which push a set of values on the user. Like television and film, they often support the ideologies of their context: in the Bush years, American games endorsed aggressive foreign policy; since Brexit, British games advocate isolationism or nostalgia for empire – and the prominence of anti-Islam games in the 2000s tells it all.
However, video games have at least two unique features compared to other media.
First, rightwing ideologies have been overrepresented and dominant throughout the history of video games. Although affected by context, video games have long focused on the expulsion of “aliens” (Space Invaders to XCOM), fear of impure infection (Half-Life to The Last of Us), border control (Missile Commander to Plants vs Zombies), territory acquisition (Command & Conquer to Splatoon), empire building (Civilization to Tropico), princess recovery (Mario to Zelda), and restoration of natural harmony (Sonic to FarmVille).
Second, video games put the user to work on an instinctual level, making the gamer feel impulsive agreement with these ideologies. Playing Resident Evil is not equivalent to watching the movie, because the controller-wielding gamer experiences the desires of the game as their own desires – not as the desires of another.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan distinguished between “drives” and “instincts”. While instincts come from within us, drives occur when political forces propel us in certain directions. In these terms, video games are drives masquerading as instincts, naturalising rightwing ideologies in a way other media cannot by offering its users the chance to experience them on a personal level…
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Hollywood cinema transformed the desires, empathies and emotions of a global population (even for those who never went to the movies), but it’s harder to recognise the pattern in your own context – and we may need to consider whether we are in the midst of a comparable revolution with video games today. Currently, the new desires incubated by games lean far to the right, and without more progressive games on the market (though some are emerging), the future may be even bleaker than the political present.
He is absolutely right, and for that reason, I would be extremely careful about regulating games in any way shape, or form.
I know why Trump is doing it. The military used first-person shooters to desensitize recruits to the idea of dropping the hammer on enemies. He worries that the way games are designed to give dopamine for killing enemies is potentially triggering school shooters. It may be. But I think you also have to look at games on the whole.
One thing that breeds aggression is familiarity. If you have been in fights, and know what to expect, you are much more likely to jump into it when some mental case begins throwing punches on the subway. You know the dangerous ways to be exposed to attack, and the ways to minimize exposure to attack, and you know how to feel comfortable getting into it and setting up attacks. As a result, your amygdala will be in low gear as you prepare to close in and take out the aggressor.
In contrast, if you have never been in a fight or trained, you will feel vulnerable from the get-go. That is your amygdala not knowing what path of action to take, and amping up the stress level as it spins back and forth trying to measure different costs to different actions on the fly. Mixing it up then has a threshold of action that is so high you will almost never jump in, unless the alternative is death.
Video games may be doing that to the next generation. Todays kids come out of video games feeling as if they have waged wars and killed enemies. They have lost in the games and felt the sting of a cost to some mistake. All of that is building amygdala, and a desire to confront problems and adversity.
Games take kids natural K-instincts and give them flight, while the leftist establishment seeks to rein in those same instincts, in every other way possible, from stopping fights, to restricting speech, to enforcing speech codes and forcing tolerance of every irritation. The kids go to the movies and are bombarded with social justice warrior themes, they read Sci-Fi from big publishers and are bombarded with social justice warrior themes, and they tune in to late night TV and are bombarded with SJW themes. Video games are the last bastion of K that most kids are exposed to. To give the left any established ways to control their content could give the left a great way to eliminate one of the last bastions of K-stimuli our youth are exposed to.
I have long suspected kids today are also more comfortable with assault rifles and guns in general because they feel on some level as if they have already used them in combat many times. Play a realistic combat shooter, and the accuracy of the weapons tech in the game is incredible. Having played those games, to them, getting a real-life AR-15 is just acquiring the same ability they use every day in their games, for use in their real life. The game may even associate the weapon with the dopamine surges of winning, and getting points.
Games are a great gateway drug to conservatism. They should be made as immune to leftist interference as possible.
I hope Trump is aware of this, and his moves on video games are just pointless feints, designed for persuasion more than action. I am guessing, given Trump’s mastery of just about everything in the psychological realm, that they are.
You can tell others about r/K Theory, because all exposures to reality are good for the youth
related tangent, see the rise of the K-games.
a good example is PUBG, player unknown’s battleground—a game that (probably inadvertently) is a real world allegory for r-K theory
go watch some youtube clips of pubg games if interested
Even before you got to losing, I was ready to chime in about the two kinds of gamers. PVP games are more right wing and K selected. I think that the (r) types end up in PVE games, because of the way PVE games are designed now.
Once everything went from “premise based” to “story based” games got way, way dumbed down. When you are buying a premise (jump on turtles, shoot guyz, etc) the game can be hard, because even if you don’t get to the end, you are at least getting to play the whole game. When the game became the story (see scene 1, scene 2, scene 3, etc) then it was more like a movie, and if you watch a movie long enough, you get to the end.
So if you are selling a story, and the game is hard, people aren’t getting what you are selling, because people don’t all finish hard games. They don’t get all the plot twists (“Your princess is in another castle” doesn’t count) and your game gets bad reviews. So what do you do? You make it so that everyone can win, if they play long enough. In other words, in terms of effort, winning becomes free.
Contrast that with PVP games. You are playing against real people, so there must be a winner and a loser. The person who plays better (or pays to win, a separate problem) is going to win, and the other person will not. When the person who does not complains, they are told to git gud. That’s gamer for “Improve or Quit.”
I recently built a recallbox on a raspi, and went back to games in the 80s. They were genuinely hard, super hard compared to today, and they give less than two shits if you finish. When I have kids, they will not be allowed to play any game on any setting less than “Normal”. If I see that game set on “easy” or “casual” you’re going to be grounded.
Planet Side master race.
Also bretty gud, Alpha Centauri (strategy) with the maps on max setting and worst(best?) difficulty. One game took me more than 6 months to finish on those settings, best gaming experience I ever had.
If AC made a game thou, he would make CDDA: Cataclysm Dark Day Ahead for sure, lol.
Dark *Days Ahead
They could be good, just so long as people into them get enough irl experience. I have white male brothers who were too into video game playing in the basement. Dad would shame them by telling them when he was their age, he was out talking to girls, or he’d talk about how in Japan, well-to-do parents were sending their kids to deprogramming camps to get them off electronic device reliance. They turned out well enough, but I have to wonder if video game playing can cause extreme introversion at best or symptoms of autism at worst.
Patrolling the Mojave almost…
Its actually quite simple. Games – at least the big games that require a lot of work put into it, that require the gamer to invest into and play it for hours, etc. – are mostly a male sphere.
So what does a billion dollar industry do? It appeals to their audience and what sells. And oh wonder, games that speak to male natural, biological interests are selling better. It’s like capitalism works as intended.
An oldie but a goodie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UujtfN7hCdo
SJW Game Journalist vs Gamer with a VR shooting range game. Hilarious.
That was hilarious.
There’s still the question of dopamine addiction. I’d imagine it would depend on the game and the approach, as Kharmii mentioned.
Very true.
Many classic games were as the article above describes. And trained the players involved to be aggressive and relentless. With the final result of victory as a result of their efforts.
This is why in contrast the modern conservatives which failed to conserve anything. Men and boys involved in GamerGate was so relentless and aggressive in countering their enemies. They came together and did all that was necessary to win.
You’ll see the K-ifying of gaming when toxic players (a.k.a. Dark Triad traits) are weeded out by the K-type players in PvP. When that hits mainstream and all the games copy the concept then they will come more in line with sport.
Cheating is rampant in online gaming and there is little anyone can do to stop the behavior sufficiently. In a sport where physical contact can occur if someone violates the rules they will be penalized–like accidentally breaking a nose because they took your star player out of the game. But right now in online PvP there is no equivalent penalty and until there is you just encourage the Dark Triad types. When was the last time you saw a bully play sports and last long as either the bully or a player?
That will be the shift in gaming to watch for.
Thoughts on single player games:
In general, high difficulty settings should be encouraged, and low difficulties should be shunned. However, when the game handles difficulty simplistically, such as by giving the bad guys a flat bonus multiplier to health and damage, or other forms of cheating on behalf of the AI, it is understandable to want to prefer Normal out of a sense of fairness.
Outside of simulated combat, another source of amygdala exercise may be certain types of puzzle games. They should include some form of time pressure to be effective. Tetris yes, Candy Crush no. I’m quite fond of Papers, Please, myself.