Propaganda and video game politics.

With the rise of social media, and “influencers” propaganda has inexpensively spread to every entertainment industry.  If it has an audience, it has people that they can push their agenda on.  Engagement is a powerful tool for propaganda because it forces people to get emotionally invested.  The main goal is to muddy the waters of complex issues, and make it into a black or white situation, basically dumbing down the situations avoiding outside opinions.  Money and power are the reason to push an agenda, ignorant and apathetic populations are the easiest way to achieve money and power.  They want us dumb and/or apathetic, that’s the goal.

“Violence video games cause school shootings!” The beginning:

While this was pre social media, the history just feels important to include. This was the first major effort to propagandize video games, and used paid options, but had to do “grassroots” movements to get onto network news to gain traction, instead of spamming bots online.  This one has famously been funded by the NRA.  Every time a large shooting occurs this is resurrected with the main goal to deflect blame and get people arguing over something inconsequential to the main talking point.  It insults intelligence, and critical thinking, by keeping the talking points simple and off topic. Every time gun control and violent games come up on the political stage two industries benefit, gun makers and video game makers. Streisand effect baby!  The best thing that ever happened to Rockstar was free advertising from anti-violent video game actors.  

GamersGate, Woke, and DEI. The litmus test:

With the stage already set to push both political power and sales, it is clear it works and we have officially entered the social media landscape.  While we do not know for fact who funded these, if you think about who aligns or makes money from it, it makes sense.  Why should/would we ever have a backlash towards people making games (something you don’t have to buy) with strong female characters that aren’t overly sexualized? Inclusion in video games is good for sales yet there is a big push against it. This is both external and production.  The later is to focus on making things easier by narrowing your focus group and the previous is to push political agenda on teenagers and young adults.  Sex sells but insecurity sells faster.  The volume of backlash of Starfield(US) vs Baulders Gate 3(SWED) about LBGTQ just kinda proves this.  The hot topic at the time is that the much more anticipated game that let you choose your pronoun got way more shit than the less popular game that literally let you run around as a nude tranny with dicks and tits floppy even in the cut scenes.  Algorithms are used to choose the more popular games to gain the most traction. Country of origin could also be a factor in this case, as censorship could be the intended goal, but I see it more as just culturally dumbing down. 

The best customer is a dumb customer:

Dumb people buy dumb shit.  Dumb shit is cheaper to make than quality products.  They want us dumb so they can sell us AI slop, and have us begging for more. They do not respect your intelligence. I cannot stress this enough. Sports games are a great example of this. After licenses, they are extremely cheap to make, because its all reused assets, with a few updates.  Sports don’t ask for critical thinking from its fans, the dumbest people on earth can enjoy the entertainment without asking why.  Its turn off your brain, and cheer/jeer for 2-3 hours, type of fun. Lets also look at this trend with streaming services. They have started to adapt to distracted people, ie people on their phones.  The plots are easy to follow, the dialog is easy to follow, and if you stop watching you still somehow know what’s going on. They are tossing out low effort slop, and we keep gobbling it up. The less effort they put in, the lower, our expectations get, we accept the slop as normal, and the cycle continues and profits grow.

Live service multi player games and balancing:

Where we are now, and the reason I wanted to write an essay.  I am attempting to leave out bias on this part so, I am avoiding naming names, and specific examples.  Live service and MP games can make a lot of money, but also adds a large cost of constant staff for updates.  It starts to blur the line of a streaming service, video games and social media.  It has created a huge market, high competition and a lot of passionate fans.  A hot bed for spreading propaganda.  

Balancing a multi player game is simple in practice but incredibly difficult to do well.  Sure its just opening a spread sheet, and moving sliders in practice, but every one of those changes has unintended consequences for everything else. Even the very best in the industry still push out balance patches, where they accidentally something on the other side of the game.  It is resource expensive and needs to be done often to properly keep players coming back. That is why children are almost the perfect customers, they are dumb, lack critical thinking, thus are easily entertained, will beg for slop, and buy as many add-ons as their allowance can buy. But children are also poor, they don’t have jobs.  Now what would be very beneficial to this problem would be to use social media to drive players conversations in ways that avoid critical thinking, and encourage less balancing.  

Enter “Never nerf only buff!!”  The perfect opinion to spread if you want to push for power creep.  Why would a company want power creep in a game? Its cheaper, and further pushes for easier games, which are easier to balance.  Same reason streaming services want their audiences on their phones.  Its not even an argument, its an opinion to make these types of games easier, with lower quality.  While we see it from all games, I have especially noticed this canned opinion aimed at the smaller development teams putting together passion projects, that are introducing new ideas, raising difficulty, and overall increasing  quality in the industry… Expensive things that are cheaper to steal.  We saw this same trend when soulsbornes became popular, attack difficulty and get people fighting online about it. While it might accidentally boost sales, and popularity of the target,  you also gain people willing to fight for the opinion of lower quality, while you copy ideas into your own lower quality version.  

in conclusion.  I started to notice more and more propaganda on video games the past few years, and I wanted to explore why.  You may not agree with who or why, which is why I avoided naming specific companies and games, but the framework is there.  I wanted to share out of my personal frustrations, of getting caught up arguing with a bots, or someone mimicking bots opinions.