Video games: Advertisements for hegemony

Bolter and Grusin observe in their chapter on computer games that “ideologically, the player [of a video game] is asked to defend or reestablish the status quo, so that even though the violence of the games appears to be antisocial, the ultimate message is not.” In this way, “action games have played out the most aggressive form of televisual monitoring” (93). This idea intrigued me, particularly because of the greatly heated debates I’ve witnessed in my own lifetime about the danger of video games, both in public and personal spheres. While immediacy and transparency of the game play is made possible by the technology, the same opportunities are afforded to hegemonic ideals through the same mechanisms. That is, the plot and world of a game encompass a player who is marveled by the first person perspective and increasingly realistic graphics, and these game features simultaneously imbue in him/her a specific political/moral/cultural agenda. As we’ve noted before this quarter, new technologies are not wholly new. They share much with older technologies, and this notion of articulating and reselling dominant ideology through media is not new to video games. However, the interactivity of video games and the repetition of game play, I think, may make them more pervasive.