When Games Get Political: What Wins Praise, and What Wrecks a Reputation?

As game companies stake out different positions, players — whose goodwill keeps swinging — discover where they themselves actually stand.

In the opening of Life is Strange 2, two Mexican-American brothers run into the things most likely to happen to them in America in October 2016: after shopping, they are suspected of stealing because of their immigration status; a white neighbor leaves a note lecturing their father, "you can't follow the rules the way an American citizen does"; and when the younger brother is bullied and the father steps in, a jumpy police officer overreacts and fires his gun. Scroll through the protagonist's texts with a friend and you find the two of them watching an anti-immigration politician on a televised debate while chatting: "Seriously, there's no way he actually wins, right?" and "Then I don't want to live on this planet anymore."

The game is really about superpowers and a road trip between two brothers, but its fantasy sits on top of the present-day world: the protagonists' immigrant status, and the tragedy it brings them, cannot be pried out of the story. What players experience depends on the choices they make along the way, but to finish the game they have to follow the two Mexican-American brothers into the hostility of an anti-immigrant society — hostility that usually takes the form of unthinking cruelty.

The first game focused on a character's past and dealt in passing with cyberbullying, domestic violence, suicide and a teenage girl's exploration of her sexuality. The second, set in the present and looking ahead, is more ambitious. Through a character, Dontnod looks the player in the eye and says, "Everything is political." It plants reality inside the game so players will find out "how hard it is to be an exile on the margins".

Almost every review praised this undisguised political stance. It shows the world as it is, and it gives players a different kind of experience through the eyes of a marginalized group — the character they usually control is white, and never meets the problems this game puts on screen. That is one of the most distinctive things about the Life is Strange series: unlike the big studios, which shy away from talking directly about marginal or political subjects, Dontnod is making a fantasy series and still refuses to look away from what is actually happening. That "transparency" is genuinely refreshing.

But this is not the norm. It is a game that deals with politics head-on and got unusually kind treatment in return — its LGBT-friendly first installment had already filtered out the players with little tolerance. Plenty of well-known games of similar or larger scale got no such treatment. Some never intended to make anything of politics at all, and were still accused of fouling a pure gaming space and forcing their views on players.

Three days before Life is Strange 2 shipped, the 2013 strategy game Total War: Rome II was hit by a wave of review bombing on Steam. Players had decided that female generals turned up too often in this ancient-Rome strategy game, and that it made them uncomfortable: "feminazi"; "I play games to escape extreme political propaganda in real life, not to embrace it — this was a bad call"; "Disappointed. After five years with this game, Creative Assembly shoved 'diversity' down my throat."

In fact, if players want to read into it, everything carries political meaning, including unconscious probing at the edges. "Politics" covers so much — ideology, feminism, race, war, freedom versus order, the right way to run a revolution — that offending someone is far too easy.

At E3 in June, the post-apocalyptic survival game The Last of Us Part II was accused of "forced political correctness" for a trailer shot of the female lead kissing her girlfriend. In May, the trailer for the action game Battlefield V drew mostly negative reactions for putting a woman at the center of a World War II story: "this is a feminist version of World War II," "already canceled my preorder." In April, the strategy game Frostpunk had players making decisions for a surviving human community in brutal cold — whether to put children to work, whether to extend working hours, whether to crush dissent by force. Its finely tuned mechanics won unanimous praise, and players were still furious about the closing line, "Was it all worth it?", feeling they had been judged unfairly by developers who held different politics.

Like every other field, the games industry is both brave and conservative. It has the most forward-thinking designers, and it has some of the most immovable audiences. As the news turns dramatic, plenty of games try to hitch a ride on current events for extra heat, then back off the moment a subject gets genuinely serious. Among developers and the executives who run game companies, some care only about pleasing whichever audience pays best, and some care only about artistic expression.

Still, when a game with political content wins universal praise and when it turns into a PR disaster is not really unpredictable. It all comes down to what the developer set out to do.

Games Really About Politics Have Always Been Bold

People rarely attack a game that openly bills itself as political for being too "political." When a game works as a way of stating a view, spreading information or making art, and when its identity as a work of art outweighs its commercial numbers, players accept it the way they accept an independent film. It is hard to criticize an indie film for cramming in too much politics, because you already assumed that was exactly what the creator wanted. You chose to accept it going in, and you are willing to think and argue about the questions it raises.

When these political games arrive wearing the "indie" label, they get an exemption. The label also filters out the crowd that only plays AAA titles, players with no patience for niche work, and people unwilling to entertain other views. Now, each side having confirmed it will cut the other more slack, developers and players can finally hold a patient conversation through the work itself.

That was the intent behind 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. It is less a game than a documentary full of interactive elements. Over a two-hour journey, players take the role of a protagonist from Iran's upper class who comes home from America to record the revolution with his camera and is inevitably swept into it, facing life-and-death choices at every turn. (Do you throw stones at the soldiers and police? How do you spot the informant among the rebels?)

Game director Navid Khonsari was born in the years of the Iranian revolution. The first job in designing a game is entertainment and immersion, but his team chose in the end to build an adventure game against the backdrop of a real revolution, so that players would stand in the middle of it — feeling the moral ambiguity, the impossible choices ordinary people faced, and the passion and tragedy of a revolution that carried a spirit of resistance, was full of ugly elements, and led to an extremely complicated ending. "A million people took part in the revolution. We wanted to give every one of them a voice."

As a form, the documentary game was a new discovery and a new experiment. It draws on interviews with more than 40 people in Tehran, photographs taken on location, a mass of news reports and archival footage, and feedback from academic, political and religious advisers. "These mediums are starting to merge, depending on what form of experience people want to consume. Presenting a documentary in an interactive setting is a brand-new field to explore. Not every story suits that kind of adaptation, but anyone who really wants to tell stories, who is committed to tearing down walls rather than building them, can try it. In the smartphone era especially, games can reach more groups of people. This could become a landmark new wave."

Bury Me, My Love is just as unembarrassed about its political subject. It is a Lifeline-style game in which you send instant messages to help your wife flee a war zone and reach Europe, with game time running in sync with real time. Players help her past the many obstacles of a long migrant route, offering survival advice and emotional support, helping her pick a road, budget sensibly, and handle border patrols and human traffickers. It is based on the notorious sea crossing that has killed tens of thousands, with its details drawn from refugees' own accounts.

"Like any medium, games can dig into any subject," says developer Florent Maurin, who stresses that he is not a human-rights activist and has no advocacy group behind him — he was simply moved by what Syrian refugees had been through. "What responsibility do European citizens bear in this? With xenophobia spreading, we have a duty to share this information and pass it on."

The best of this genre is unquestionably Lucas Pope's Papers, Please. A border visa officer in the fictional Eastern Bloc country of Arstotzka spends his days checking the papers of people coming in, while the state of Arstotzka unfolds slowly in the background through newspapers and constantly updated customs rules. The wildly assorted stories left behind by unusual travelers weave into the most vivid portrait of life in an authoritarian state. The way story, mechanics and political expression reinforce and lift one another is a real surprise: border policy changes from one day to the next, throwing up new problems so that the "simple" job of checking documents never becomes routine, and the choices forced on players at key story beats make the whole thing feel unusually immediate and real.

The Orwell series — Keeping an Eye on You and Ignorance Is Strength — uses similar mechanics. Playing a government agent, you protect "the national interest" through surveillance, searches, breaking into systems and whipping up rhetoric, using any means available to suppress the press and the opposition. In a way it is educational too: your sense of privacy sharpens, your trust in the internet drops further, and you come away with some idea of what the secret services actually do.

Almost no one questions their outspoken politics. Independent work leans toward artistic expression anyway; it does not need to make everyone happy. Rather than pull in a mass audience, these games do better aiming at the people most likely to pay for them, and a deliberate stance becomes a filtering tool. By the moment they decide to buy, players have already accepted the political argument that comes with the game — some buy it for the argument. In the best cases, the high points of the mechanics and the political ideas lift each other, and the game easily earns the kind of word of mouth that says it is not only thoughtful, it is fun.

In the end it rests on an understanding developers and players reach naturally: one side narrows its audience, the other accepts an unusual subject, and together they carry out what may be the most civil exchange of political views in modern society.

The Most Mainstream Players Produce the Most Mainstream "Political Stance" in Games

In the post-Trump era, big games that brush against politics arrive more loudly, and usually make headlines twice: once for touching some hot topic, and again for the publisher's denial — "Don't get us wrong, this absolutely is not meant to mirror reality, it really carries no political meaning."

Predictably, developers at big studios do not have enough say to decide whether a game is "political." Players are not the only people they answer to, and the freedom granted by executives and investors, many of whom come from outside games, is not unlimited either.

If the fight is purely over sales numbers, then beyond the quality of the game itself two things are essential: heat, and not making too many people angry. So studios keep up with the times by dropping in topical references, raising the game's "cultural relevance" to catch the eye, while staying vague enough not to offend anyone, start an argument and set off a PR storm.

Hence a whole string of textbook "tease, then deny" cases.

Ubisoft gave the same explanation twice in a row, for Far Cry 5 (its first story set inside the United States, with a gun-toting cult in the American South as the villain) and for The Division 2 (a near-future setting with a dictatorial government to fight): "We're not making a political statement". Deus Ex: Mankind Divided tells a science-fiction story that gives you plenty to think about, and its publisher, Square Enix, repeatedly denied that the segregation and internment camps in the game had anything to do with real-world racial segregation. For Wolfenstein, whose main storyline has players hunting Nazis in an alternate world, publisher Bethesda took care to add: "Bethesda doesn't make games to issue some special statement or start a political discussion."

This year's hit narrative game Detroit: Become Human could not look more "political." Its main plot is a human-rights revolution, drawn straight from the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s. Its creator, David Cage, still says the game is simply about androids, and that how you read the whole thing is up to each person.

"Having political elements in the content is the key to staying relevant. Whether or not they mean to touch politics, underneath there is always an intent to make the work more meaningful," explains a media studies expert at the University of California. "But creation and publishing build a much bigger context. After a team goes through concept work, development, production and the feedback that follows, the result can come loose from its original motive."

The key reason companies deny it is money. "It's all about the money," an industry insider said. "Work with a bit of current-events relevance feels fresh and artistic, but talking about politics means risking a backlash. And backlash is expensive."

The backlash comes from the people game companies serve. Every one of these decisions traces back to catering to the most mainstream, loudest group of players. That group is not known for being forward-thinking or tolerant, but it is the stable audience for hugely profitable, traditional, middle-of-the-road products.

The streak of escapism every player carries to some degree hands this group a widely shared reason not to touch politics. Developers have seen the same feedback in their communities countless times: "I play games to escape reality, not to meet it again in your work."

What that line actually means is: "I don't want to meet political views I disagree with inside a game."

Social networks, livestreaming, multiplayer games and the communities that form around them give conservative players an ideal platform for their displeasure. Any idea that even looks like pandering to liberals can draw a coordinated attack. To protect their own patch of pure ground, extreme players can raise enough noise to produce another GamerGate. It took incidents like these to show people that gaming's audience is far more conservative than they assumed, however young it may be.

Traditional players want games to stay pure entertainment products, which suits the big companies and the investors perfectly. No company wants its product at the center of an argument. Developers may genuinely have something to say, but setting an "interpret it however you like" tone in advance, taking no side, costs nobody anything. The model for most companies in their growth phase is clearly the Hollywood studio, which chose caution and safety for the sake of a wider audience — not everyone is willing to carry a seven-figure crisis-management bill.

The games world has an old-fashioned, smooth-talking caution that does not match its age, and that is understandable too. Next to other, more forward-thinking parts of pop culture, it is a young industry, still trying to get a footing in public argument. Its first goal in society is not to act as a radical political force to match its advanced technology and vision; it is to keep growing at a steady, lukewarm pace, protecting the users it already has, even at the cost of its own artistry, and to cool down both the mainstream output that runs too far ahead and the users who are always ready for a fight.

But Escapism Is Out of Date

In past arguments about "politics in games," more than one voice has pointed out that no medium can have its politics stripped out entirely.

"They express our perspective and understanding of the world. Like film, books, or any art form, we can agree or disagree with those views, but all media is political."

Escapism makes little sense, because it carries a political implication of its own (escaping what?), and the act of making a game is bound up with politics. Even with generations of developers trying to stay neutral, a game's difficulty and the pleasure of conquest it stirs up carry a bias: they lean conservative, patriarchal and imperial, and a large share of games are about domination and violent conquest.

The line between political and non-political also keeps getting blurred from one context to the next. In a discussion organized by PC Gamer, editors noted that far more people protest the "forced" appearance of LGBTQ characters in a game than object to the politics of Metal Gear Solid. "That line is an illusion. Why is playing a terrorist or a counter-terrorism soldier in CS: GO non-political, while any game with a gay character in it gets the 'political correctness' label?"

All of which turns back into a study of the player base: what can they accept, and what makes them feel offended? As the developers of Total War: Rome II see it, the generation rate for female generals never changed; playable factions can gain more female family members through marriage alliances, so the recruitment rate for female generals rose with it. 11 bit studios told us that Frostpunk, like This War of Mine, tries to express something other than entertainment through a game, but never set out to "judge" players' choices or force a viewpoint on them. Naughty Dog had already brought its female lead out of the closet in The Last of Us DLC — who would have guessed players would still attack a same-sex kiss?

Players' attitudes look fairly settled. Once they have spotted a political element they consider central to the gaming experience, the views they already hold are unlikely to shift. And if a developer shows even a trace of intent to pass on a message or get people thinking about another point of view, most players will not necessarily take it.

Two contradictions seem to run through gaming communities. Like any competitive activity, games gather users of different backgrounds and views online to chase one goal or share one experience, creating a common feeling — nowhere more clearly than in multiplayer games — and they still cannot stop fierce collisions of opinion. The two sides in an argument rarely convince each other; the gap widens and views polarize. Meanwhile games with a political intent and open-minded players choose each other, and never manage to carry the message to more of the "outsiders" — the very people who most need to open their minds were excluded from the start. The political elements in games mirror the world, but they rarely change it.

Players on the receiving end are hard to change, so developers who want to pass something on may need to think about gentler methods. "If you want them to play for hours on end, the game can't be as boring as an educational film you watched in middle school."

The Witcher series passes on plenty of political views through its huge world and its rich characters, without announcing them. BioShock has a story loaded with political insight that fuses with the level design built to match it. This War of Mine takes the perspective of civilians trying to survive, which makes the game demanding and worth replaying while leaving players a psychological experience bleak enough to beat many an anti-war film. If the story team and the mission team work well together, open-world RPGs with a lot of freedom, story-heavy action shooters and survival games can all fold certain messages seamlessly into their design.

Compared with inserting a political declaration outright, opening more room for expression through a turn in the narrative or a new mechanic seems better for real thought and real progress. David O'Reilly's Everything was not the first game to invite you to switch perspectives between subject and object; Prison Architect, back in 2015, already had players thinking as both the prison's designer and its inmates, and once their heads were full of the contradictory pull of escape and confinement they may find it easier to use the same habit of mind in life and accept other perspectives. A larger attempt came from Assassin's Creed III in 2012: after four earlier games had players siding with the liberty-minded Assassins, three chapters in, this one lets players realize the character they are controlling is a sworn enemy, a Templar who defends absolute order. The once black-and-white division into two camps quickly made room for more, and deeper, political argument.

As for why anyone would deliberately seek change, why anyone would deliberately pay attention to politics, Hideo Kojima answered in a blog post written in 2003, while he was making Metal Gear Solid:

"When we were kids, the whole world was full of anti-nuclear movements. Now? In the 21st century? There is basically no such movement left. A lot of Metal Gear Solid 2 players complained the game was too preachy, but these days we can't expect Hollywood to make a Planet of the Apes, or a company to publish a manga like Barefoot Gen (*an autobiographical manga about the atomic bombing) — that's why I keep delivering anti-war and anti-nuclear messages, at least in this series. Today's entertainment industry is far too commercial, just like film, books and music. It's only about making products that sell, and creators take no position at all. The market and the business come first.

"What about the future of the kids who grow up with this as their textbook?"

Game art deserves to be read as a culture that goes beyond entertainment. Staying busy with escape and denial will not make it any better.

Cover image from Life is Strange 2 and This War of Mine