When Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the alleged U.S. spy sentenced to death by Iran, confessed to his captors that he had been designing video games for the CIA, it seemed to confirm our darkest fears. When governments routinely practice "information operations" in the real world, why shouldn't they do the same in our virtual worlds?
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Hekmati's confession was delivered from an Iranian jail cell, so one has to assume it was made under duress. There is reason, however, to suspect that spooks are looking to the video game market to advance their agenda -- as the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. And it's not paranoid to note that Hekmati's former employer, New York-based Kuma Games, publishes Kuma War, a free shooter game played over the Internet, where players can assume the role of U.S. soldiers in 85 missions with titles such as "Baghdad Surge" and "Assault on Iran." Although there is no evidence that Kuma is a CIA contractor, its games are a propagandist's dream.

Kuma isn't the first company to produce games that would warm the heart of any neocon. Blockbuster shooter titles such as Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty, which portray U.S. soldiers fighting traditional bogeymen such as terrorists, Iran, and China, already take a stridently nationalist tone. What Pentagon press officer wouldn't love a game where American warriors embark on a whirlwind of slaying mujahideen, destroying Chinese tanks, or fighting North Korean invaders in San Francisco?

A growing number of so-called "serious games" also consciously seek to deliver a message. Perhaps the most successful is America's Army, the popular first-person shooter designed as a U.S. Army recruiting tool. Other games have been used to publicize genocide in Darfur or treat cancer-stricken children.

The U.S. Army is also transforming games into a cornerstone of training -- an inexpensive way to reach 18-year-old recruits who would snore through a PowerPoint lecture. And if the U.S. military can use games to destroy its enemies, why shouldn't America's enemies return the favor? Hamas and Hezbollah have produced their own video shooters, while in Iran's "Special Operation 85," it's the turn of U.S. and Israeli soldiers to be slaughtered by an Iranian commando unit.

Video games would seem to be ideal propaganda tools. Where comic books and newsreels once enthralled the Greatest Generation, today's millennials are in love with video games. American consumers, for example, spent $25 billion on games in 2010, while gamers worldwide play 3 billion hours a week. Games also offer advantages over traditional propaganda mediums like television or newspapers: They are interactive and immersive, they and deliver challenge, competition, and the hands-on triumph of personally gunning down enemies. When Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the alleged U.S. spy sentenced to death by Iran, confessed to his captors that he had been designing video games for the CIA, it seemed to confirm our darkest fears. When governments routinely practice "information operations" in the real world, why shouldn't they do the same in our virtual worlds?
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Hekmati's confession was delivered from an Iranian jail cell, so one has to assume it was made under duress. There is reason, however, to suspect that spooks are looking to the video game market to advance their agenda -- as the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. And it's not paranoid to note that Hekmati's former employer, New York-based Kuma Games, publishes Kuma War, a free shooter game played over the Internet, where players can assume the role of U.S. soldiers in 85 missions with titles such as "Baghdad Surge" and "Assault on Iran." Although there is no evidence that Kuma is a CIA contractor, its games are a propagandist's dream.

Kuma isn't the first company to produce games that would warm the heart of any neocon. Blockbuster shooter titles such as Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty, which portray U.S. soldiers fighting traditional bogeymen such as terrorists, Iran, and China, already take a stridently nationalist tone. What Pentagon press officer wouldn't love a game where American warriors embark on a whirlwind of slaying mujahideen, destroying Chinese tanks, or fighting North Korean invaders in San Francisco?

A growing number of so-called "serious games" also consciously seek to deliver a message. Perhaps the most successful is America's Army, the popular first-person shooter designed as a U.S. Army recruiting tool. Other games have been used to publicize genocide in Darfur or treat cancer-stricken children.

The U.S. Army is also transforming games into a cornerstone of training -- an inexpensive way to reach 18-year-old recruits who would snore through a PowerPoint lecture. And if the U.S. military can use games to destroy its enemies, why shouldn't America's enemies return the favor? Hamas and Hezbollah have produced their own video shooters, while in Iran's "Special Operation 85," it's the turn of U.S. and Israeli soldiers to be slaughtered by an Iranian commando unit.

Video games would seem to be ideal propaganda tools. Where comic books and newsreels once enthralled the Greatest Generation, today's millennials are in love with video games. American consumers, for example, spent $25 billion on games in 2010, while gamers worldwide play 3 billion hours a week. Games also offer advantages over traditional propaganda mediums like television or newspapers: They are interactive and immersive, they and deliver challenge, competition, and the hands-on triumph of personally gunning down enemies. When Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the alleged U.S. spy sentenced to death by Iran, confessed to his captors that he had been designing video games for the CIA, it seemed to confirm our darkest fears. When governments routinely practice "information operations" in the real world, why shouldn't they do the same in our virtual worlds?
COMMENTS (1) SHARE:
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Reddit

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Hekmati's confession was delivered from an Iranian jail cell, so one has to assume it was made under duress. There is reason, however, to suspect that spooks are looking to the video game market to advance their agenda -- as the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies. And it's not paranoid to note that Hekmati's former employer, New York-based Kuma Games, publishes Kuma War, a free shooter game played over the Internet, where players can assume the role of U.S. soldiers in 85 missions with titles such as "Baghdad Surge" and "Assault on Iran." Although there is no evidence that Kuma is a CIA contractor, its games are a propagandist's dream.

Kuma isn't the first company to produce games that would warm the heart of any neocon. Blockbuster shooter titles such as Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty, which portray U.S. soldiers fighting traditional bogeymen such as terrorists, Iran, and China, already take a stridently nationalist tone. What Pentagon press officer wouldn't love a game where American warriors embark on a whirlwind of slaying mujahideen, destroying Chinese tanks, or fighting North Korean invaders in San Francisco?

A growing number of so-called "serious games" also consciously seek to deliver a message. Perhaps the most successful is America's Army, the popular first-person shooter designed as a U.S. Army recruiting tool. Other games have been used to publicize genocide in Darfur or treat cancer-stricken children.

The U.S. Army is also transforming games into a cornerstone of training -- an inexpensive way to reach 18-year-old recruits who would snore through a PowerPoint lecture. And if the U.S. military can use games to destroy its enemies, why shouldn't America's enemies return the favor? Hamas and Hezbollah have produced their own video shooters, while in Iran's "Special Operation 85," it's the turn of U.S. and Israeli soldiers to be slaughtered by an Iranian commando unit.

Video games would seem to be ideal propaganda tools. Where comic books and newsreels once enthralled the Greatest Generation, today's millennials are in love with video games. American consumers, for example, spent $25 billion on games in 2010, while gamers worldwide play 3 billion hours a week. Games also offer advantages over traditional propaganda mediums like television or newspapers: They are interactive and immersive, they and deliver challenge, competition, and the hands-on triumph of personally gunning down enemies.

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"Blockbuster shooter titles such as Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty, which portray U.S. soldiers fighting traditional bogeymen such as terrorists, Iran, and China, already take a stridently nationalist tone"

Did the author actually play these games? They portray conspiracies of ultra-nationalists who hijack these respective countries and start a senseless war. At the end of Battlefield 3, you have to shoot your American commanding officer based on the word of a Russian intelligence agent who's also going against his government to try to stop a nuclear war. Not exactly a nationalist message.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually played Call of Duty, but I've seen summaries that describe it's plot the way I described it.)

I have come across non-so-subtle propaganda in video games. Like in BioShock, where there is a Libertarian/Objectivist utopia that was created in a grand underwater city. When you set foot in the entrance, a large banner reads "No Kings. No Masters." I like it. And as you venture forth, you find that the place has become a dystopia where apparently religion (specifically Christianity) became outlawed. You find crates of bibles and crucifixes that were being smuggled in, and the grim remains of the smugglers. Oh, the persecution. The game lets you set fire to many things but it won't let you burn those crates. Boo. And funny how where aren't any crates of items related to any other religion besides Christianity. It seems that the BioShock authors assumed that a society that has no need for religion would actually bother banning it.

There's also the problem of the demographics. Let's face it, the majority of people playing a First Person Shooter are probably going to be males from their teens to twenties (maybe thirties). Those people historically don't vote in large numbers and aren't noted for following international affairs. If you want them to come out in support of attacking Iran you're probably wasting your time.

Of course that isn't taking role playing, platforming, fighting, action, real time strategy games and other genres into account (although several of those are also dominated by young men) but turning a game into propaganda would probably be at least as hard as making a decent propaganda film (there's a reason besides nationalism for why we don't see many Soviet or Chinese films in the U.S).

Incidentally at least one Palestinian militant group has made a game for children where they fire rockets at Israeli tanks.

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I have no idea how far this will go, but you can already notice changes in today's youth and this is in some part owed to video games. I recently meet a friends kid - he is 7 years old and he plays games o0n his computer all the time. I asked him if he knows how to count to 10 - he responded that of course he knows - he started with 1 and ended with 0. There are also a lot of cases that I know of, where kids managed to, for example escape an animal attack by using skills he learned from video games. Actually a video games can have a huge impact on kids brain, and the violence can only bring bad news. Of course games can also help in a positive way, for example there are some http://www.imocentral.ro real estate games that teach children how to classify, buy or manage a property, and there are also games that can teach you about finance - mostly programed by broker companies - true. I can't stop thinking that games are used in a lot of fields in order to implement an idea and that companies will take advantage and build games, just like the CIA did, to brainwash our youth.

Think of the most successful MMORG ever: World of WARcarft. Why isn't the most successful MMORG ever World of *Peace*craft? Why Starcraft is all about war, war and more war, instead of peaceful colonization, mining, and economic competition? And, as the Facebook game "Farm" (or something) proves, War and assorted butchery is NOT the ONLY theme that sells. Like someone said, the youth is fed war and violence by the ton in video games, because someone, somewhere, who is pulling the strings, decided that the foreseeable future is going to be dominated by war, and the best prepared to win it is going to be a youth bred & shaped with exceedingly violent and war-themed video games. If the System wanted us to be sheep like the hippies of the 60's, the best selling MMORG would have been World of peacecraft, and US soldiers would play Creme Of Duty instead of Call of Duty.

As a vehicle for ideological propaganda, games probably don't provide as much "oomph" as the CIA might like, for the reasons cited by the author.

But. Most of the popular titles are quite violent. If your aim isn't indoctrination, per se, but merely to desensitize people to violence, then games might be just the thing.

If your aim is to pump up nationalistic, tough-guy feelings (remember George W. Bush's 'Bring 'em on!' quote?), or to convince a young man that having his finger on a real trigger and shooting actual people will be as much fun as Call of Duty, how far can you take that ambition with violent games?

Psychologists don't seem to know. A few studies have shown short-term effects in this direction, but whether games can form lasting attitudes about the use of force to achieve objectives (national or personal) is an open question.

One thing seems certain, at least to me. Our society is indeed becoming less sensitive to violence, particularly violence perpetrated by the state. How else to explain the limp public reaction to the revelation that the US tortured suspects? Or is openly assassinating people, sometimes US citizens, far from any battlefield? We once thought of ourselves as a nation with a moral conscience, repulsed by such tactics. No longer.

You can't lay this desensitization entirely at the feet of video games, of course. For decades now, if you watched prime time TV, you saw dozens of murders every week and plenty of heroes solving their interpersonal problems with other humans by using violent force. Violence draws eyeballs and generates ad revenue. Hollywood movies offer more of the same: violence glamorized.

Adult cognition has likely solidified by age 25; past that age, adults probably aren't as affected as teens by media-presented violence. But teens and younger adults, whose cognition is still in flux, may be more easily influenced. Those younger people are exactly the main target demographic of violent video games. And in that age demographic there seems to be a rise in griefing and cruelty; you see it everywhere on the internet, not the least being Anonymous and Encyclopedia Dramatica, where griefing and cruelty are the centerpieces of cultural identity. Civil discourse often breaks down on the internet, ad hominem attacks as a substitute for rational argument are ubiquitous, and I have to wonder where all of this cultural sociopathy comes from.

Pro-war nationalist ideology may benefit from a cultural trend towards desensitization to violence, and that may in turn dovetail into the objectives of the military-industrial complex, which profits greatly from every foolish war which the public will tolerate. So I will not take it as a given that violent video games cannot be exploited to further their aims.

Another drawback for games:

Like literature, there is a movement in games towards moral ambiguity. Look up the reviews of any sandbox or other game with a moral choice system, and you'll see critics crucify the developers if the choices are overly simplistic good and evil.

That makes it harder to push say, an "All these people over hear are evil" meme needed to drum up war support.

Good games are challenging, both in gameplay and thought, clearly at odds with the aims of propaganda.

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One thing seems certain, at least to me. Our society is indeed becoming less sensitive to violence, particularly violence perpetrated by the state. How else to explain the limp public reaction to the revelation that the US tortured suspects? Or is openly assassinating people, sometimes US citizens, far from any battlefield? We once thought of ourselves as a nation with a moral conscience, repulsed by such tactics. No longer.

You can't lay this desensitization entirely at the feet of video games, of course. For decades now, if you sex watched prime time TV, you saw dozens of murders every week and plenty of heroes solving their interpersonal problems with other humans by using violent force. Violence draws eyeballs and generates ad revenue. Hollywood movies offer more of the same: violence glamorized.

I have seen Call of Duty many time. i think that it is a nice film. It is also very significant. However, I just think it's so visceral, and it's so intense. There's more of a method to the madness of it. It's also not bogged down in a lot of bullsh*t. Modern Warfare 2 was like you're actually in this game. You're with your friends, and you're on this tundra, or you're on this snowy arctic base. There's something so intense about it. It really felt like you were with your buddies playing this game. They did such a great job