Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War
When video games went mainstream, the Pentagon realized their potential as a promotional tool, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on war-based games. Now the wheel has come full circle as they use game-style interfaces for real-life tools of war.
Soldiers stand next to an ad for the US Army's computer game America's Army, which was unveiled May 22, 2002, in Los Angeles. (Mike Nelson / AFP via Getty Images)
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This is an extract from Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World by Marijam Did, now available from Verso Books.
By the 1990s, video games were mainstream, both as a creative product delivering new and profound moments of joy and as a space for political actors to create political realities. As profits soared, this creative industry succumbed to the claws of financialization and corporatization.
It was a decade of bursting creativity and the calcification of business practices. Games like Cosmology of Kyoto (1993) or Vib-Ribbon (1999) were revered by art critics, and even acquired by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art for their profound aesthetic and conceptual aspects.
