Space-G

At least have an idea about the Abyss before you talk to it.

This is a re-post from my personal website.

Let me tell you, I had some trepidation when I saw that People Make Games did a video about the military industry’s involvement in wargaming and the numerous connections between the games industry and the military. After all, they have a bit of a track record of missing structural and systemic problems in their video’s subjects and instead overemphasise the role of individual responsibility in them.
However, I was not prepared for a solid hour of barely challenged military propaganda, followed by a very weak and pointless call to action at the end, that frankly I didn’t bother to watch to completion, because in my eyes the damage had already been done at that point.

The video falls on its face right at the beginning and never really manages to get anywhere from there. It starts with them repeatedly mentioning how desperate the military games sector is for new game designers, when the game industry itself is currently in a phase of repeated mass layoffs, which causes a lot of anxiety and desperation within the workforce.

Honestly, the first fifteen minutes of the video almost sound like a job advert.

It then continues to repeatedly allow people who work in that sector to put out deeply flawed statements about the function and position of the military industry, foreign policy and potential future conflicts, without ever challenging them.
Obviously I don’t know what other questions they might have asked the people they were interviewing, but I generally feel that you can do better than just asking someone who works for the military whether or not they are okay with developing systems that will be used to efficiently kill human beings. I feel if you already work on these things, you probably found a way to justify this and once again, allowing these justifications to stand without challenge, turns it into a vessel for propaganda.
Even when Quinns oozes out his personal discomfort of it all, he still ends up saying “I want to live in a country with good tanks, because otherwise I don’t feel safe” and then just moves on as if this in itself isn’t a position worth examining.
Either way, whatever personal discomfort he and other members of the team might have about this subject, the general message of the first hour is: “We might not like it, but actually a strong military is a good thing to have in these days.”

They then point towards potential civil uses of these modelling tools, but that whole sequence to me felt a bit like when car manufacturers tell you that they need motorsport as a way to develop new technologies for road cars, when actually it’s primarily a marketing vessel.

Over the entire first hour, military representatives of a western capitalist nation, with a long history of military and economic aggression against smaller countries, are allowed to present their employer as a purely defensive and reactive force against evil expansionist nations, when they are actually quite the opposite.
Why is there talk about future wars related to climate change? Why is there talk about a potential war around Taiwan? Whose interests are being projected here? Why is there only a mention of Russia’s attempt to mess with elections, when there’s a good track record of US services doing something very similar?
This isn’t me going “actually Russia is perfectly justified to rampage through eastern Europe”, and I understand that this war makes having an anti-militaristic stance a bit more difficult. However, you can advocate for support of the Ukrainian military (as well as some way to end that conflict entirely), without just accepting the narrative that’s coming from an organisation whose chief purpose is securing markets and resources for its nation’s companies.

The problem with this video is that it goes into its subject matter without any working hypothesis about the purpose of nationalism, militarism and which forces are currently driving the rise of both forward. There’s a casual mention of how War Games are suddenly popular with the military again, but no examination as to why. It’s just something that magically happened.
Without this working hypothesis, they instead approach the subject with the assumption that the statements from the military representatives are true. There is no frame around these statements that put them into a larger, overarching context. No real counterpoints are given, aside from occasionally adding some small nuances.
So what I get from this then is that the people who made this video generally believe that the state as it exists today, and the use and deployment of military forces to secure national interests are morally neutral at best, or actually good things at worst.

I said it at the beginning that People Make Games already had a few moments in the past, where they failed to examine structural problems with their subject matter, and instead focused too much on elements of individual responsibility and personal discomfort.
In that sense it perfectly reflects most other “critical” media we get these days, in that they are all very good at unearthing the numerous moral failings of our present days, but never manage to offer meaningful solutions, because they fundamentally look at them through the lens of individual, “rational” actions, and not the results of systemic pressures and failures.
As a consequence, all they can ever offer is “awareness” and then leave you alone with having to make an “informed decision”.
The problem here is that most of us are pretty powerless, so our best way to influence things then is via our consumption habits, and if we’re lucky via our workplaces.

And while that might work to a degree and while we might be able to buy games that explicitly divest themselves from military funding, or have workers that force their companies to do the same, the structures that push us towards imperialistic expansion are still in place. And because none of us can survive in this world, without partaking in it, the material pressures exerted on us will sooner or later force people into doing things that are obviously reprehensible. Maybe there’s a bit more shame associated with it this time around, but the video already demonstrated the human mind’s capacity to rationalise evil actions.

Feeling guilty about your involvement with this, is understandable, but also meaningless. We are all guilty of the atrocities that are committed in the name of the market, even if we long for its destruction. However, you cannot absolve yourself from said guilt by making informed decisions about what media and food to consume, because the root cause for it all lies elsewhere. It lies with private companies and it lies with nation states whose sole purpose is to further and protect said companies’ interests.

People Make Games doesn’t seem to understand this problem and thus repeatedly ends their videos with these milquetoast “just do good please! Maybe the world is less fucked up if we all do good instead of evil” calls to action, that while understandable, are completely pointless.
It’s fine if you think that this isn’t a big problem. We all have different ideas on how to overcome the problems we are all facing, and obviously there’s nuance to everything.
However, this specific video is a demonstration of what can happen, when someone approaches the abyss without having a critical understanding about what the abyss actually does and thus allows themselves to get turned into a marketing instrument for it.

They basically did the equivalent of handing a microphone to a nazi and just letting them talk without ever challenging them and then at the end go “well, there are some points to their argument, but I feel very bad about it?”

To be honest, as much as I was disappointed about the video, because it was way worse than I thought it would be, what concerned me more, was how little it was challenged once it was published. Now I’m not that involved with big social media platforms anymore, but I’ve barely seen any criticism of it, but instead a lot of “oh this is really good and so important!” and friends:

No, it’s not.

It’s bad.

It’s propaganda.

P.S.: The gif is from Episode 42 of 00 Gundam.