Angry Planet - Like video games? You may be playing with government propaganda.

Episode Date: April 21, 2016

Video games are an industry worth tens of billions of dollars. Games make more money than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Video games can be great fun and even great art, but they can also be great propaganda. A new game called IS Defense puts players on the shores of Europe to defend the continent against waves of faceless Islamic attackers. The FBI, North Korea and even PETA have tried to use games to get their points across. It doesn’t always work and it’s often silly, but governments are only just getting started.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. So the FBI's Counterterrorism Game has a full title of Don't Be a Puppet, pull back the curtain on violent extremism. and it's been under fire for getting the psychological processes of developing extremism wrong.

This week's War College focuses on video games and the way the U.S. government uses them. We examine the propaganda and morality embedded in games and also a certain strain of subversiveness that's crept in. You may not be familiar with all the games mentioned, but we'll include links to descriptions in the show notes. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor of War is Boring.

Today we're talking with George Weidman, better known to his fans as Super Bunnyhop. Weedman is a video games journalist known for his cerebral, long-form YouTube videos. Recently, he covered the FBI's attempt to make a game to counter violent extremism. George, thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's an honor. George, can you tell us about the FBI's counterterrorism game?

So the FBI's counterterrorism game has a full title of Don't Be a Puppet, pull back the curtain on violent extremism. And it's less of a traditional video game in the sense that it is a game-like website. It's a collection of reading and video material interspersed with quizzes and one very, very bizarre reflex challenge that totally is a video game. And the whole presentation has been under fire from a lot of advocacy groups for promoting stereotyping of Muslim students who would effectively be exposed to this as it was intended to be a part of, teaching material and social studies courses, and also for getting the psychological processes

of developing extremism wrong. How does it get the psychological processes of violent extremism wrong? The common complaint from these advocacy organizations that you see is that it more or less promotes the idea that there is a identifiable process for developing extremism. The game encourages players to be wary of people who express political discontent or speak in terms of sending government organizations a message. There's one little creepy part of this game where you're asked to identify a Facebook post that might be written by an extremist. and underneath one post that says I'm going to a political rally is another one saying, I'm going to send this animal testing rights group a message, which the implication is that that could also be a certain form of political rally and protected speech or violent extremism,

which, if you pick that one, is the correct answer on how to pass this quiz. All right, so this is not effective, then. That should be a really complicated question, but, I mean, really, I have a very simple answer, and that's just no. Although I kind of hate the idea of discussing whether or not it's effective propaganda because

I feel like shedding more light on this topic might end up giving certain parties better ideas on how to make more effective propaganda games, which is a little bit of a catch too when doing media related to propaganda right, you run the risk of telling people

how to do it better, which I think is what we're actually about to do. I know, right? So, video games are this new and powerful medium and art form. Eventually, all art becomes propaganda or is used for propaganda. So, George, have you seen anyone who does it well yet? I'm sure there are some close examples we're going to go through.

There is the wildly successful America's Army actually made by America's Army for promoting America's Army. It was used as a recruitment tool way back in 2002 and is still to this day being updated and iterated with new versions. But for the most part, actually, it's not happening this year for some reasons, one of which I think is an overall failure of this concept to catch on. But in an election years and cycles past, you would see a lot of very cheesy, catchy, flash-based web games show up either demonizing or prostitilizing their political party of choice. And I feel like those examples very, very classically illustrate the problem that a lot of political parties have when it comes time to make a video game promoting their party. It's the same problem that this FBI

counterterrorism game falls into, and that is kind of applying their ideology to systems that don't reflect it. Or it could just be that they're not very good at it, too. I mean, it seems like there's propaganda is often ham-handed, and the good stuff you don't even necessarily notice is propaganda, right? Can you go into that a little? One of the examples in your video that I think is very clear are the Pita games. Right, yeah, PETA puts out a lot of them. They more or less paste their imagery, their message on top of game concepts that already exist. There's a disconnect between the two. They have you platforming through a Mario clone, except you're playing as a little chick who's saving other chicks from chicken processing plants,

it's kind of unrelated. I feel like if they really wanted to get serious, oh no, here I go, it's happening. A management sim of a chicken processing plant might actually get that point across way better than something that ends up looking really kind of bizarre and unrelated. A lot of the audience finds this stuff bewildering. It's very easy to mock if you take video game seriously. And maybe also on one certain level, that's the point. It's less about it being effective propaganda than it is being outrageous propaganda that people will make news stories about. Basically, any video game, or really any video game with a world contextualizing its rules, is almost the perfect propagandistic imagery. You have a closed environment of rules and systems that

are all geared to manipulate a player into acting a certain way. A player of any game is forced to obey rules even if they don't know it. And the implications for making effective propaganda there should be clear, but for some reason it tends to get lost on most government agencies trying to utilize that. Let's take that and transition into one of the most popular game series out there, Call of Duty. How does what you're talking about, those closed systems and those rules,

apply to Call of Duty? How is that game propaganda without the players even realizing it? I think what ended up happening is that there is a huge market for propagandistic video games that the government is not as easily able to tap into as the market. You have more red tape, you have more of a bureaucratic procedure going into making these things, typically less of a budget, and also more controversy when, as evidenced by America's Army itself, which is actually a very infamous program compared to Call of Duty,

which more or less pushes out millions of units every year without many problems getting in its way. It's a very well-oiled machine at this point compared to, there's something like 10 Call of Duty games compared to, I think, two big iteration versions of America's Army. So whatever economic forces are at play in our country are able to have government propaganda get made almost more easily by agencies that aren't necessarily the government,

which also gives them creative licenses to subvert that expectations in some weird ways sometimes. There's, the storylines of a lot of call of duties aren't always jingoistic, pro-American stuff. They have a reputation for that, but I think a lot of that started with the earlier World War II games, which also, like the FBI counterterrorism, don't be a puppet game, was, pseudo-builder's edutainment. In the old call of duties and Medal of Honors, you had historical World War II battles depicted with high-octane first-person action in between these very quiet, serious slideshows where a narrator explained real-life World War II footage, moments which were similarly disconnected from the core experience of the gameplay and also easy to mock.

Right. But it also helped. with load screens too, didn't it? Oh yeah, yeah, you can hide a load screen with some some uninteractive video footage and if it's something interesting to watch, players probably won't complain. Well, so if we could just talk for a second about, like, let's say like last year or last couple of years versions of Call of Duty, usually you have the option to play is a couple of different roles, only one of which is a U.S. soldier, right? I mean, they'll move you back and forth, sometimes you're the bad guy, sometimes you're the good guy. How do you think the rules fit into that? I mean, I'm talking about the rules the way that, you know, that you're directed

through the game. Is it on both sides of it? You can't, you know, the bad guys suck and the good guys are always great? I mean, not always. That's also why I wanted to catch myself earlier and say that there is some creative license behind it. The way Call of Duty stories usually go, will involve an evil foreign terrorist with an accent, screwing, things up and providing an easy bad guy for the player to be shooting at their minions for, but at the same time there'll be a plot twist where there's usually a corrupt

American military official, also pulling strings behind the scenes all along and that way, in many ways these plot twists might have been developed as kind of a response to criticism over Call of Duty being too jingoistic, but it also feels like

tokenism in another weird way. And it goes back and forth sometimes, if you look at any varying year of a given call of duty installment, you'll see stories that may or may not throw in that degree of tokenism, depending on, I guess, on how politicized the writers might feel. Well, that makes sense, and it also goes along with, you know, our enemies change, depending on how people feel. There was, I don't remember if it's last year or the year before.

The enemy was actually a big security corporation. Yeah, yeah. It also follows the same plot formula I was explaining earlier where you start out in the game, kind of quelling foreign rebellions. You're not shooting Americans until a plot twist halfway through. Let's switch gears a bit. We've mentioned America's Army a few times. I want to jump into that and hear your thoughts on it. Also, if you could tell our audience exactly what it is. America's Army is a first-person shooter multiplayer competition between two teams who aim to complete an objective or entirely shoot down the other team. What's noticeable about America's Army is that it is sponsored and totally explicitly marketed as a recruitment tool by the military. But another fun feature that they folded into this game from that point of view, is that the other team always looks like the evil foreign terrorists. No matter which team of the game these players are playing on,

because it is a multiplayer game, played across the internet between two teams of real people, whoever is on the other end of the field will always look like the enemy, and whoever is always on the players team will look like American military soldiers. That's interesting. So the player always gets to be an American soldier and the enemy always looks like a bad guy, even if they're played by another player. Yes.

And there's been pushback against this game. Yeah, that's one of the subtle rule changes that I think is more effective when trying to go for propaganda. They put players in a system where they're always seeing the kind of image that they want this, propagandistic view of the world to look like. Yeah, I mean, that's the boogeyman of the moment, right? Yeah, yeah. It has garnered controversy several times for just the whole concept of marketing a video game to teenager to promote Army recruitment. Is it free or does it cost a little bit?

It is free. It is totally sponsored by your tax dollars as far as I know, so they do not charge an admission for it, which is why I like to categorize this discussion of propagandistic games between one sponsored by the government and also commercial products, either sponsored by government or political parties running for government positions, or commercial products sold to customers and paid for by customers. On that note, what do you think of Tropico, which is essentially a Castro sim, right? It's a Cuba sim.

Yeah, and it's done with black humor. It's adorable. And I think that's also a perfect example of what I'm afraid of the so-called bad guys figuring out, is that it is a system, a simulated system where rules are being applied that are subtle enough that the player might notice, but also, like I said, it's presented with enough black humor that the idea of the game is obvious to anyone paying attention. But games like Tropico, and another favorite example is Papers, please, this job simulator where you are playing a border checkpoint paper pusher kind of processing people's passports trying to enter a fictionalized country. And Tropico, which is a town simulator, you have these two games that are simulating nonviolent activities, but still doing it with conflict and political rules being applied to the system that make your decisions interesting in a political concept.

because when you have a game, you also have a system of rules, and when you have a video game with a story attached to it, you're contextualizing that system of rules within a fictional world. You can simulate a firefight or an aircraft, but how different is that from simulating a country or a city, and then how different is that from simulating that country

or that city being under the rule of either a party you do or don't like? Since it's a game and not a 100% accurate, simulation, almost any rules can apply to the simulation and make it fantasy, but with enough polish and attention, enough of a budget, you can make a simulation look and feel real. I think that's interesting, and I think the most powerful thing to me about Papers, please, is that you can't win. There's not a good end state. The game certainly stops, but it's usually an unpleasant stop. The system is very much rigged against you. You have you playing a gamified version of government work. You're exploring the conflict between the morals of upholding the system

that employs you versus the need to make money and survive and feed your family. At the end of every simulated day of pushing these papers, you have these gameplay tokens representing the player's family and then a little bit of money to spend for keeping them well. And someone always ends up being sick or cold or hungry, and it's up to the player to allocate those resources, which are going to be decisions that are manipulated by the systems at play, one of which is an amazing moment in this game for me happened when that decision was being manipulated by a representative of an anti-government rebel organization who presents the player with a large bribe, and because money is so harsh in this game, the difficulty is so high that the

player gets a sense for that bribe representing real value. And suddenly you have empathy. You have a game creating a situation where the player might understand why people do things that are against their rules. So give or take a few hours of this game, you'll have frustration, relief, and a general inconsistency of the emotional experience of it that can lead to frustrations and anger that can actually convey the frustrations and angers that lead to real world political issues. Orwell has an essay about that where he argues that all art is propaganda. I think the line is really thin, actually. And I think the outright propaganda that will be the best or most effective is the stuff

that gets as close to that blurred line as possible that looks the most like art for art's sake. This actually brings up something kind of interesting for me anyway. Well, actually, the game sounds great too. but what do we are we saying when we're talking about propaganda versus like the typical manipulation of people's feeling that is art yeah it could very easily be argued as such which is why we're talking about call of duty in the same vein as america's army they're extremely similar products but one is explicitly propaganda the other is is entertainment for entertainment's sake. It's closer to whatever your definition of art probably is. I think it would be a little

reductive to imply that any masterfully designed propaganda poster, for example, that picture of Obama that says hope with his caricature kind of drawn in red, white, and blue. Right, right, right. Yeah, there's clearly an amount of artistry and technical expertise put into that. So is, Is it a little insulting to say that a piece of propaganda such as that would not also be art? No, I mean, I think you're right. It's very hard to argue. I mean, something can be aesthetically pleasing. It can have emotional content. It's just a matter of whether you feel that you enjoy the message or not. I'm going to change tracks again and start bringing us home.

Governments are going to figure this out eventually. The people who grew up playing video games are going to become politically powerful. So, George, what do you think these games will look like when they're actually effective propaganda? And how close are we to that? So one thing that I feel like people are going to have to be looking out for as conscientious consumers of media when playing video games is what sort of political and perhaps propagandistic design decisions are being put into the media they consume, like the video games they play. Another example, you brought up Tropico on the flip side of that coin. is SimCity, a town builder management game much in the vein of Tropico, except it's not explicitly marketed with the kind of black humor of presenting life under a different political society

rather than being a simulation, but nonetheless a fun, video-gamy, kid-friendly simulation of urban planning. And the decisions that go into building the rules for that kind of situation, the effect that the players' tax cuts are going to have. have on which systems and what the people of the city are going to demand that the mayor build, those are all political decisions that have the potential of being propaganda. Right. And it's actually built off, if I remember, I think you care a lot about things like waste. You have the option to recycle and things like that, that's clearly, I mean, there's realism to it, but I mean, it's obviously got an ecological bent that, you know, that's, you

you might not have found in another game or a game that had been made many years before. There was actually a little bit of controversy following the release of SimCity Societies, which I think is the either 2008 or 2009 version. They included features related to global warming in that game. So, of course, you had certain portions of the audience claiming that it was brainwashing players into caring about global warming? What about all the other Sim cities that didn't include anything about global warming?

If we're talking about the political aspect of propaganda, and you're talking about games that are, by their nature, really violent, I mean, you have, and they're also posed all sorts of interesting moral choices where, you know, you'll have the bad guy in your grasp, and do you kill him, or do you, you know, just throw him down on the ground? Do we think that something like that is actually pretty effective? Do you think anybody has ever joined the Army because they played a lot of call of duty?

Or, you know, are they already inclined to join the Army and they just happen to like call of duty because of that? Yeah, I don't think it's really kosher or considered valid these days to make a direct causation argument between media, directly influencing people to do things. so much as we all live in a system together where little bits of our lives add up to the greater whole, one of which may be an interest in the same sort of subject matter that these games tackle that may be reflected in the major life decisions you make, such as joining the military or not.

Well, right. I mean, that makes sense, but it also is something that's constantly being, you know, Hollywood's constantly being accused of that anyway. Yeah, it might play a part in developing those interests rather than. than directly leading from A to B, which was a common argument back in the 90s, but I think the overwhelming popularity of video games and the, generally, when you want to look at the statistics of it, the less crime rates and wars that exist in the world compared to, I don't know, say from here to the 80s, there's, it's not empirically backed up. As video games become more popular as the world, statistically speaking, becomes more peaceful,

There would actually seem to be an opposite correlation, even though you don't really want to make assumptions on either side. All right, George, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, you may want to check out other Reuters podcasts, including Keeping Score, which tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the business of sports and has interviews with some of the leaders in the business. You can find it in the iTunes store by searching for Keeping Score. Next time on War College.

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