What video games can teach you about yourself

I will come see you when they let me

Until then close your eyes

and I will walk with you,

even if it is only through

your memories of a country

we no longer recognise

Written from the perspective of a political prisoner in India writing to his lover, this is poetry at its most haunting. Yet, it is not just poetry. This is the text for the video game ‘Folds of a Separation’, inspired by the Bhima Koregaon 16, a group of activists, lawyers and journalists arrested in 2018 for reportedly inciting violence at an event in Pune. ‘Folds of a Separation’ was created by Dhruv Jani’s Studio Oleomingus, an independent game studio in Gujarat. Its games are deeply rooted in the Indian idiom, addressing head-on issues that the traditional media would give a wide berth to. But how do they get away with it in the current political climate where the space for dissent is fast diminishing? According to Jani, this is because, unlike other media, video games are strangely under the radar despite being so big.

“We seem to be in a small window of time where video games are treated as irreverent,” said Jani at a session with author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Rollo Romig on the politics of video games, at the second edition of Manorama Hortus in Kochi from November 27-30. “They are placed well outside the spectrum of both popular and critical culture. And that’s great because it lets you, as a video game author, say things that you cannot get away with in other media right now.” What was eye-opening for many at the session was the immense potential of video games, far beyond the realm of a ‘fun’ pastime for teenage boys, nerds and social outcasts. Video games, said Romig, can make you look at the world in new and wondrous ways. In fact, you do not just ‘look’ from a different perspective. Because of how immersive and interactive they are, video games let you ‘live’ that perspective. Take ‘Papers, Please’, a simulation video game created by indie game developer Lucas Pope, in which you play as an immigration officer at the border of a fictional country who has to process the papers of those who want to cross the border. As the game progresses, the rules around who you are allowed to let in become increasingly elaborate. If you let in too many of the wrong people, your pay is docked and your family suffers. “And so there’s this enormous tension,” said Romig. “On the one hand, it is about the process of borders and immigration and how tense this process can be. On the other, it is also this ethical simulator where there are people coming to your booth who desperately need to get into the country, but whose papers are not in order. And so you are confronted with a moral choice: am I going to let this person suffer or am I going to suffer by letting them in?”

This idea of complicity is encoded deep in the DNA of some of the best video games, in which you are not an indifferent observer to injustice and violence; often, you are a participant. Take Studio Oleomingus’s game ‘The Indifferent Wonder of An Edible Place’. Inspired by the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the razing of Muslim homes and buildings in recent years, the game compels you to play as a municipal building eater. Even as you are increasingly aware of the horror and damage you are causing, you continue to ‘eat’ buildings, tacitly acknowledging your complicity, not just in what is going on in the game, but in what is going on in your country at large.

So why take up the challenges that video games offer when you have enough challenges in your life as it is? “It is because we want to feel something,” said Romig. “Often, video games give us an opportunity for self reflection, the experience of watching ourselves taking on challenges.” He referred to something that a video game writer called Frank Lantz once said. If paintings are the aestheticised form of looking and music is the aestheticised form of listening, then video games are the aestheticised form of thinking. They provide an opportunity to watch yourself make decisions, analyse how you react to situations and overcome challenges.

The charm of video games, said Jani, is also that they do not yield to propaganda, unlike films, because those who make the games often have to relinquish authorial control once the game is made available to players. “With films, it is possible to bend them to propaganda or violence in very particular ways,” said Jani. “Video games have proven incredibly resistant to this. When they are used for propaganda or used to advocate a specific kind of violence, they break miserably and often turn out to be pretty bad games because they are not open enough to other authorial interpretations. You have to relinquish control and allow players to interpret the game as they are playing it. That is a fundamental tenet of making games.” Romig gave the example of ‘Disco Elysium’, a video game designed by a group of Estonian Marxists, in which you play as a detective trying to solve a murder mystery. Even though the designers have a specific political stance, they don’t impose it on the players, who are given a lot of latitude in choosing their political perspective. “But no matter which approach you take, the game is going to roast you, even if you become a Marxist,” said Romig. “But it roasts you the hardest if you choose to be a centrist, because it knows that some people try to get out of being political by choosing the middle road.”

But the world of video games is still veiled to many, mostly because we lack the critical vocabulary to understand and describe their impact, and to codify which ideas they are uniquely suited to explore. That is because video games are still a relatively young medium. Just like cinema, in its first few decades, was not taken seriously or considered as art, the potential of video games today is also largely not exploited.

Also, the video game industry, for the large part, is still insular and has, for a long time, been a medium of privilege, said Jani. Even as indie games explore the world through nuanced perspectives in weird and wonderful ways, the mainstream industry continues to remain fascinated by first person shooter and third person adventure games that have very little to do with detailed storytelling. And it offers stiff resistance to those who try to break the mould. Jani gave the example of Gamergate in 2014-2015, when a group of right-wingers and white male players organised an online harassment campaign against diverse voices and representation in video games and game cultures.

But resistance has a way of thriving the more it is quenched. In increasingly popular corners of the internet, developers continue to play around with form and content, coming up with fascinating video games like ‘This War of Mine’ (which explores the mental health of youngsters in conflict zones) and ‘Consume Me’ (about the compulsive nature of eating disorders), which let you experience in ways that no other medium can the incredible privilege and pain of being human.