Not to mention the fact that both Wolfenstein and Far Cry 5 were in development long before Trump was elected, and since Hillary was “guaranteed” to win, they would have had to somehow put them into development, or change their content as late as November 2016. Impossible.
Failed premise.
How does the author account for MachineGames reboot of Wolfenstein when Obama was President?
Word counts don’t fill themselves, but my god. “Billion-dollar entertainment corporation shies away from hot-button political issue” is about as dog-bites-man as it gets.
There’s nothing the media hates more than a missed opportunity for huge drama.
“Just think about all the stories we could have written if Ubisoft put Fuck Trump on the cover of Farcry 5!”
The remake of the remake of Red Dawn is already underway (not really). My bet is Iran.
Coincidentally, here is a better piece in a similar vein. Specifically, if you draw from the Tom Clancy well for all your action military games, maybe you should think about the politics involved?
“Techno thriller” is the label given to all this, but I wonder whether a better one is “military procedural”. As with accounts of crime scenes in detective fiction, Clancy’s books are essentially about raising order from chaos, but where detective yarns celebrate the mess and dazzle of human intuition, Clancy’s sleekly choreographed infiltrations, airstrikes and gunfights are homages to something vast and unlovely - the resources and reach of the US war machine, its construction and mobilisation of time and space. Every fleeting second in a Clancy action scene is indexed and paced with recourse to a beefy handbook of acronyms and call-signs, protocol and intelligence data, gadgets and go-words.
Decades after Ubisoft acquired the rights to his name, the publisher and its imitators have buried the author so handily that the views that animate his fictions now slip by uninterrogated. While Clancy the man was outspoken about the political dimensions of his work, Clancy as a brand is terrified of taking a public stand on anything, even as the games themselves deal freely in the policing of rogue states and the trampling of due process in the name of the greater good.
The Tom Clancy games may draw upon the testimony of architects, firearms experts and special forces teams but they are always represented as firmly neutral, as mere entertainment, and the result is not an apolitical experience but politics by stealth. They are games that quietly advocate hawkish attitudes and philosophies while trying to lose the player in their lethal machinery, in the smooth interlocking of components and command structures. Ubisoft’s pretence of inconsequence might be its most detestable quality, as a publisher - you might as well talk about landmines as though they grew from the soil of their own accord - and sadly undervalues the artistry and relevance of the worlds that have flourished under its banner.
I don’t know that this argument necessarily follows - of course you can make a political game out of the Clancy universe, I just don’t know that you have to. What about the Bond movies, they never really think too hard about the double 0 status, that agents can pretty much murder with impunity, and have to in order to do their jobs quite often. Sure, he’s lost the status a couple of times, but have they really analyzed what it means to have killers on the books? Not to my knowledge, it’s not really territory they are wanting to cover. A lot of games, The Division included, toe that line as well.
I am not surprised companies that spend 50-150 million dollars on their games are not particularly enthused about pissing off significant part of their customer base. Writing a book is quite a bit cheaper than making a triple A game.
If they don’t want to take a political stance, maybe not use source material that’s so political. Cool guns doesn’t require a license.
Tom Clancy books are pretty damn popular though, using it for kickstarting the popularity of classic Rainbow Six games was pretty smart.
“Cool guns” is, arguably, inherently political (in the context of police/military action), as it presents a presumed world where guns are effective at solving problems.
See, for instance, Battlefield: Hardline, which didn’t need a license to become mired in political controversy.
Oh I understand why they do it, but if they’re going to do that and not take the whole package, the political part, they shouldn’t get to excited when someone calls them out on it. It comes with the territory. They deserve to be challenged for doing that. They choice the source material, after all.
Sure but we have an entire genre basically based on guns, so if you take original material and do an FPS, it would be harder for people to say hey, you took this but not that because its in-house.
I see we’ve moved from “Are videogames art?” to “VIDEOGAMES MUST BE ART!” Interesting to see journalists demanding that developers create games in a certain way. And by interesting I mean depressing.
No, it’s not that it HAS TO BE ART, but more that the very nature of the work they are translating can never be completely divorced from politics. The setting makes certain implicit assumptions that are baked into it, and playing neutral, and failing to acknowledge this political element, is accepting this inherently political position.
Things like the use, and efficacy of force, the role of the military as global peacekeeper, even the way conflicts are presented. Notice how much acclaim Spec Ops the Line got for merely acknowledging and engaging with these factors. The presence of civilians in warzones is generally ignored, in this attempt at neutrality. But the way these things are presented can never be fully divorced from political engagements.
From wikipedia:
Spec Ops: The Line was a commercial failure, selling less than anticipated by Take-Two.[96] The sales of Spec Ops: The Line, combined with Max Payne 3, was lower than the combined sales of L.A. Noire and Duke Nukem Forever.[e] The low sales of the title contributed to Take-Two’s disappointing financial results in fiscal year 2013.[97]
Critical success means little if it isn’t coupled with financial success. These companies are making the decision to ignore the politics so they can have a better shot at financial success.
This should not be a surprise to anyone.
Like the movie business, there are going to be games that put the politics up front and there will be games that don’t. But to suggest that all games that have guns, or a modern setting, must do so seems harsh.
I mean do you really think cutscenes where Duke Nukem thinks about the nature of violence or about how that girl could be someone’s daughter would make it a better game?
Nobody is saying differently. What that article is saying, and what I agree with, is that even the choice to ignore the politics can never truly do so. There are portions of that setting that are inherently political, and even choosing to be otherwise neutral does not mean that a work is completely apolitical.
So just because Ubisoft is not making political works, the works they are drawing upon have an inherent political angle endemic to the setting.
Of course, saying all games must engage with the political implications is for sure too high a bar to be reasonable. But I think engaging with our assumptions set by out media landscape is always a useful endeavor. On the infrequent occasions that I interact with network television, I am shocked by the degree to which the American entertainment landscape is dominated by police and military fetishization.
“Apolitical” works in this context often just mean “in support of the status quo”.
True. And until recent events I would have said that it was safe to have Nazis as the enemy. Because, who likes Nazis?
This seems true and fair, and some games will mine that material. But let’s think about another example:
The A Team. Did anyone ever stop and think about what’s really going on there? Would it have made the show better if they spent time thinking about their place in society, about corrupt cops and people stuck in terrible situations? Or was it OK that you got a 30-minute, somewhat-silly action show every week.
Maybe a bad example because I imagine someone is gonna say “Yeah, I would have preferred politics!” but you get it.
You could probably make an argument that the A-Team actually engaged more directly with politics than Ghost Recon does, containing as it did critique of the Justice system (jailed for crimes they did not commit), and given how frequently the targets of their missions are saving common folks from wealthy fat-cats that think they’re above the law.
It’s not like they needed long monologues as Face-man interrogates the status of criminal justice to the camera.
(I don’t really believe the above argument, per se. But I do think there are multiple ways to engage these topics, which the gaming industry tries very hard to avoid.)