In any sufficiently convoluted discussion of videogames and narrative, fiction, or speech, the idea of videogames as a communicative medium inevitably comes up. The communication of facts is simple enough in any media, although making them “stick,” i.e. making them sufficiently comprehensible and memorable, is rather more difficult, especially if the medium in question is one that is widely perceived to have “failed” should boredom set in. But facts, stubborn things though they are, are generally not what people are referring to when they speak of “free speech” or a “marketplace of ideas.” Ideas that are not easily empirically verifiable must not only inform but persuade a given audience. What videogames do so effectively, and where I believe lies much of the medium’s potential, is the creation of worlds that in some aspect resemble our own, and set the rules to encourage and discourage behaviors, determine the outcomes of actions, etc. To whatever extent the gameworld resembles our own, what I find most intriguing about the possibilities of the medium is the creation of worlds inherently biased toward certain viewpoints.

There are a few names out there for the general type of viewpoint to which I’m referring–James Paul Gee’s “cultural models” comes to mind, as does the general idea of “worldview”–one of which is the rather troubled term “ideology.” (Another is propaganda, which is a different post altogether.) In Ideology: An Introduction, literary critic Terry Eagleton lays out sixteen commonly accepted definitions for the term:

(a) the process of production of meaning, signs and values in social life;
(b) the body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
(c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
(d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
(e) systematically distorted communication;
(f) that which offers a position for a subject;
(g) forms of thought motivated by social interests;
(h) identity thinking;
(i) socially necessary illusion;
(j) the conjuncture of discourse and power;
(k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
(l) action-oriented sets of beliefs;
(m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
(n) semiotic closure;
(o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
(p) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.

These definitions are frequently mutually contradictory, but many have obvious relevance to socially conscious videogame design. “Action-oriented sets of beliefs” certainly relates to this project, and one might argue that the conditional “confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality” is more or less what happens when one plays a sufficiently immersive videogame. The current economic realities of videogame production have led some to suggest that definitions b, c, and d have great relevance to the videogame industry as it currently stands, but there’s no reason to assume that this is an inherent feature of the physical technology, as opposed to the economic basis of its production. (Then again, a Marxist might be hesitant to separate those two, and McLuhan might agree.) In parsing out just what ideology is or is not, Eagleton brings up a point of unequivocal importance to anyone interested in the persuasive potential of videogames:

[I]n order to be truly effective, ideologies must make at least some minimal sense of people’s experience, must conform to some degree with what they already know of social reality from their practical interaction with it. […] They must be “real” enough to provide the basis on which individuals can fashion a coherent identity, must furnish some solid motivations for effective action, and must make at least some feeble attempt to explain away their own inconsistencies. In short, successful ideologies must be more than imposed illusions, and for all their inconsistencies must communicate to their subjects a version of social reality which is real and recognizable enough not to be simply rejected out of hand.

This almost reads as a primer for how to involve players emotionally in the in-game decision-making process: make the players recognize the world on an intuitive level, regardless of the obvious differences, motivate them to do the things you want to do, and have some explanations for the more obvious holes in the simulation. This last one can be especially tricky; as Matt noted at the last meeting, the more “free” a game is, the more obvious and glaring the walls will appear. While the connections may not be intuitive, the embattled notion of ideology, and literary/political theory in general, may provide some useful new ways to interpret videogame texts, helping to delineate what they are, what they do, and when/why they fail.

– Peter Rauch