Gaming World Politics: Meaning of Play and World Structure

Abstract

Critical IR theory engages with popular representations of global politics, particularly films, photography, and literature (Amoore 2007; Bleiker 2001; Danchev and Lisle 2009; Shapiro 2009). Gaming plays an increasingly large role in popular culture: the launch of video games, such as Halo, Call of Duty, or Gears of War, garner as much money and attention as blockbuster films. The Entertainment Software Rating Board presents the following picture of the industry: 67% of US households play video games—40% of whom are women, with sales in $10.5B in 2009 (ESRB 2011). Global sales of $40B make it equal to other entertainment industries, such as music ($30-40B) or movies ($27B). Consequently, we must take gaming to be as much a part of the imbrication of global politics into the everyday as movies, music, or literature. The taken-for-grantedness, the unremarkability of games that use tropes and figures of global politics functions to render unproblematic the common sense of international relations. Just because these games take place in the basement, the living room, or in the rec halls of Forward Operating Bases, and not the UN Security Council chambers, does not make them any less a vital part of the construction of IR. When IR theorists invoke the “rules of the game” or game theory as a frame for systematically separating agents from structures, and the conditions of possibility for politics, they are limiting the bounds of play—ascribing a set of primarily social conventions (rules) to an abstract structure of world politics (the game). Play and these ludological tropes are as vital to our political imagination as a self-styled “serious” reading of politics. We must look at gamic representations of the world and international relations—not as decision-making tools but as artifacts of popular culture (Grayson, …