This week gamers all over had a good giggle when news outlets started reporting that the Tea Party Facebook group had posted an image from Bioshock Infinite that had actually been making fun of the Tea Party’s philosophical foundations. The group quickly found themselves with no lack of folks informing them that they had indeed missed the satirical nature of the image. And a few of the Tea Partiers stuck it out long enough to argue that while the image may have originally been satirical in nature that they found the sentiment true. The text read “For God and Country. It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes” and it shows the great white father holding the liberty bell in one hand and the 10 commandments in the other fending off hordes of stereotypically represented minorities including African Americans, Jews, Asians, Aztecs….you know, the usual suspects.
And all of the time that I was watching discussion about how “stupid” the Tea Party is scroll down my Facebook and Twitter feeds, the only thing that I could do was ask myself if it was that the Tea Partiers were stupid or if the designers over at Irrational Games were just sadly mistaken. Mistaken in their creation of a game that satirized racism so very well that it could have been read (by numerous people) as racist propaganda. It’s the same thing that we have seen with games before. Most recently we saw it (or at least I did) with Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V. While I spent a good bit of time enjoying the game in the timeline of blaxploitation/satirization films that had run the gamut from films like Superfly to Boys in the Hood and thought about how the genre had been re-appropriated as a form of cultural critique I was blissfully happy and then it happened. Other people came into my world and really started to screw things up. There were people who didn’t see it as satire and that forced me to do a re-read of the game. What would a game, like Grand Theft Auto V, look like to me if I didn’t see it as satire. It was a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic mess.
And this latest tea party incident brings up this question again. what does Bioshock Infinite look like if we read it as serious text and if it doesn’t present the kind of message that the developers intend how do we deal with that? Is it the duty of the developer to consider other people’s ignorance and design around it or have games finally been elevated to the status of literary satire like Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal? What do the folks who thought that Swift’s idea of eating babies might be a good one? Were they just dismissed as too ignorant to be viable or should they have been addressed more proactively? While these may seem like frivolous questions it is becoming more apparent that it is one that needs to be addressed. If games and gamers want to be taken seriously they have an ethical obligation to be responsible members of larger society. And what does that responsibility look like? One option is that of opening up a community wide discussion that takes place on the broader internet and not just behind the closed doors on community forums, and that is where we here at NYMG come in. We try to be a vehicle for that discussion or at least conversation starters. Another way is kind of developer post mortems where developers can discuss intent for public consumption. Something along the lines of the book group type discussions that we see going on with authors in CSPAN’s Book TV programming. If we want to be taken seriously as a narrative then we have to step up and put the work in.
