Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War
When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games. Now the wheel has come full circle as they use game-style interfaces for real-life tools of war.
Soldiers stand next to an ad for the US Army’s computer game America’s Army, which was unveiled May 22, 2002, in Los Angeles. (Mike Nelson / AFP via Getty Images)
By the 1990s, video games were mainstream, both as a creative product delivering new and profound moments of joy and as a space for political actors to create political realities. As profits soared, this creative industry succumbed to the claws of financialization and corporatization.
It was a decade of bursting creativity and the calcification of business practices. Games like Cosmology of Kyoto (1993) or Vib-Ribbon (1999) were revered by art critics, and even acquired by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art for their profound aesthetic and conceptual aspects.
On the flip side, studio sizes grew, leading to a bloated managerial class, with their lingo and auditing of certain creative ambitions. The orientation of games as products, or artifacts of popular entertainment, along with the mechanization of production and marketing processes, rendered the games industry homogeneous in terms of both output and cast of creators.
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