Artists Stage Political Interventions in Video Games

Re: Freedom and Dead In Iraq.
As an artist, gamer and anti-war activist I really want to like these interventions. But at least in the case of Freedom, I’m not sure that I do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Freedom totally lacks a creative analysis of its medium’s potential. Moreover, I would argue that both projects ultimately fail as effective political interventions.

I am a bit bothered by the almost comically inflated terms in which McLeod discusses the responses of the other players. It all comes off as a bit… clueless. Because when you get right down to it, the interactions that this article presents as representative of these projects generally fall into two neat categories. In Freedom, the artist is basically treated like a n00b. In Dead In Iraq, the artist is perceived as a spambot.

In other words, both interventions have in fact failed to “destabilize assumed relations between gamers”. Quite to the contrary, each has managed to replicate a common and familiar role in the online gaming food chain. Anyone who is even slightly familiar with online gaming culture will notice that the other players in the room quickly placed the artists into categories that amount to very mundane sorts of nuisances in their world. The so-called “very violent reactions” are actually quite typical responses in this light. I would define a successful intervention as one that is at least perceived as an *exotic* or *interesting* nuisance before it is dismissed and assimilated into the broader social spectacle.

In other words, the fact that “DeLappe and Mattes come from outside of any in-group within these games spaces” might actually make them far less equipped to effectively “resist the rules put in place by corporate and military game spaces.” Those who are highly conversant in the rules of a space are far more likely to successfully avoid simply enacting a set of pre-established roles instead of subverting them.

Not only are these interventions immediately assimilated into the pre-established social ecology of the game environment (after all, a traditional street protest is assimilated just as quickly and as easily), they seem to actually fail to be meaningfully legible as either artistic or political acts to the other players. This is a major failure.

Perhaps a comparison to one of the more successful ‘interventions’ in online gaming spaces might be in order- an intervention that has proven to be both disruptive in the immediate term and highly memorable in the long term. Lets take the infamous 4chan Habbo Hotel raids as our example. The Habbo Hotel raids made clever use of the particular features of their gaming environment in order to both disrupt the activities of the other players and to broadcast a kind of undeniable and unignorable intentionality. As utterly nihilistic and generally fucked up as the raids were, they managed to take over the gaming environment and make it perfectly clear to the other players that Something was happening.

And not only did the Habbo Hotel raids cleverly use the technical features of the game itself to achieve their goals, they also utilized the social nature of the medium to do so. Organizing and coordination were integral to the project’s success and cultural legacy.

So how can we loosely apply some of the lessons of the Habbo Hotel raids to these two projects? Lets start with Freedom. To my mind, Freedom is pretty half-baked right out of the gate. So you log on to Countr Strike and ask people not to shoot you. Cool story, bro. Why Counter Strike? That just seems like a lazy choice to me. Wouldn’t a game that allows for a greater range of avatar customization and gesture (“emotes”) make more sense? If the point is to be a non-combatant in a warzone, why not pick a game where you can use clothing and gestures in order to broadcast your commitment to that role? A deliberately customized and visibly unarmed avatar with its hands in the air is far less likely to be mistakenly identified as just a n00b who doesn’t understand the game. A dozen matching avatars marching in a coordinated pattern would broadcast the artist’s message even more clearly and dramatically. To quote Arlo Guthrie’s famous anti-war song:

“You know, if one person, just one person, does it, they may think he’s
Really sick and they won’t take him.
And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and
They won’t take either of them.
And if three people do it! Can you imagine three people walkin’ in, singin’
A bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and walkin’ out? They may think it’s an
Organization!
And can you imagine fifty people a day? I said FIFTY people a day . .
Walkin’ in, singin’ a bar of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ and walkin’ out? Friends,
They may think it’s a MOVEMENT”

Of course, the performers of such a piece would likely be pegged as ‘role-players’. But at least ‘role-player’ is a subjectivity that is at the very least adjacent to ‘performer’ and ‘artist’, and it is one that the other players are far more likely to be receptive to than the ‘clueless n00b’.

And wouldn’t a persistent massively multiplier world make a better proving ground for the ‘freedom’ theme of the project than a game that subdivides its population into rooms of 20 or so players?

Dead In Iraq is a *far* more well thought-out project. America’s Army is the Pentagon’s official propaganda game. It basically chooses itself. The text is similarly well selected. And while the artist’s commitment not to respond to the other players might make him look like a spambot to the other players, it also adds a kind of solemnity to the whole affair. As does the ritual of typing out each line and marking the page after the end of the game session. And while the medium doesn’t really allow for avatar customization and range of gesture, the artist at least does what he can by dropping the gun. While it might not play very well on the game server, it works well enough once it is documented and uploaded. Something that I cannot say for Freedom.

The organization and coordination aspect of a successful online intervention cannot easily be applied here without somewhat denaturing the project. While filling a large number of America’s Army servers with actual spambots reciting the names of the dead might be a more impactful political protest, remaining a lone witness is an artistic decision that I can at least understand and respect. Mattes’s choices on the other hand seem to lack any such coherence.