Simulating and Playing Geopolitics in Digital Games
Digital games have become part of everyday life and engage billions around the globe. Compared to other popular media, play is a distinctive feature of digital games and enables a unique form of encountering geopolitical content. This raises the issue of representations, especially in simulation games featuring war. How is virtual war portrayed? How does it play out? Contrary to other genres, simulation games advertise their supposed realism based on intricate play possibilities rather than visual appearance. Since simulation games claim to mimic the physical world in great detail, I deconstruct the developers’ interpretations of war. I do so for two different perspectives: from above in the strategy title Hearts of Iron IV and on the ground in the shooter Arma 3.
Further, I illuminate how virtual war is engaged with. Because global game production is unequally distributed, I see the need to look at an audience outside of core Western and Asian markets. Singaporeans sit at the crossroads of both cultural influences and provide the unique opportunity to analyse how those players make sense of war in the selected games. Moreover, some players go beyond playing games. They change them, re- and overwrite source code according to their own imaginations and adapt the imaginations laid out by developers. Game modifications are an intriguing case of participatory culture in face of a very spatially concentrated production network of digital games. Hence, I examine modifications of the selected games and how local perspectives are incorporated.
My research expands critical geopolitical scholarship towards hitherto neglected cultural products, i.e., simulation games, and audiences, i.e., non-Western. I cover the issues of representations, consumptions, and prosumptions through an assemblage approach based on critical geopolitics and game studies, reflecting on the dynamic nature of play and digital games.