[lbo-talk] Conservative Mona Charen thinks new Bond film is too leftist

[C W Sedley]

There are videogame plots, which often involve sinister
super-corporations and have a left tinge, but there's also the formal
experience of playing, which tends to necessarily emphasise individual
heroes struggling to suppress evil mass movements, or at least masses
of moving cyborg goblins. Games which emphasise solidarity over
individualism are difficult to implement on a practical level and
often boring to play. The SimCity games did not actually simulate a
city, but the experience of being some kind of weird dictator
mayor-for-life who can demolish and rezone structures by decree and
who lives forever. "Massively multiplayer" online games tend to
promote the formation of small entrepreneurial units - corporations or
"guilds", usually with the goal of accumulation by dispossession,
although I think the space-sim EVE has a fairly complex economy which
includes mining, share trading, and variable levels of state economic
intervention by the robo space police.

Co-op shooters encourage squad-level solidarity but also normalise the
idea of arbitrary, let's-you-and-him-fight Punch-and-Judy battles,
much like the violent team sports that elite private schools force on
their students, the future military officer class, to habituate them
to immediate commitment to pointless wars of aggression. "America's
Army", the highly dodgy recruitment tool developed and released by the
US Army, has the best immanent critique of this. Players participate
in a battle between US soldiers and "terrorists" who carry
Kalashnikovs and don't wear uniforms. But obviously the game designers
couldn't have players identifying with the terrorist team or having
fun blowing up Yankee soldiers -- so whichever team you join appears
on your computer as the US Army, and your enemies as the terrorists.
When a player kills an enemy terrorist (who sees him/herself as an
American soldier), they can pick up the corpse's AK-47, but the
instant they touch it the gun will metamorphose into an M16. The game,
to avoid implying that it's fun to be a militiaman killing Americans,
ends up making the argument that there is no serious distinction
between the United States and its "terrorist" enemies beyond
superficialities of clothing and quality of equipment.

Cheers

CWS