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I've been posting about Younès Rabii's open letter to The Game Awards this week (which you can still sign if you work in or close to games in any way!) and I've had a few replies, quote-tweets or seen discourse asking questions like: why should the games industry say anything about this? What's the point? Why can't we just Stick To Games.

Something broke in me this year - probably a result of arguing at extreme length with people I don't want to ever have to argue with ever again - and I am enjoying muting people on Twitter and basically forgetting they exist. So instead I've compiled some answers here, and maybe you can send this to people or I dunno, at least I'll have written them out for my own gratification, eh?

So: why would the games industry need to say anything about Palestine?


The games industry is strongly tied to the arms industry

This isn't a weird conspiracy theory or anything, it's a well-known fact! You can go back and find articles over a decade old, like this great feature by Simon Parkin for Eurogamer, talking about the way gun manufacturers view games as an advertising platform. I'm not going to tell you that I don't think guns belong in games - but it's also pretty clear to anyone at this point that games are partly responsible for the normalisation of them in our lives. The arms industry is a huge beneficiary of wars and atrocities like those being carried out in Gaza right now. So I think it makes sense to think about what role games plays in that.

The games industry is strongly tied to the military

Similarly, games are also very strongly tied to the military, especially in the US. The US military uses games as a recruitment tool in just about every conceivable way, no matter how bizarre, but it also uses it as a propaganda tool. Call of Duty has featured soldiers based on real-life Navy SEAL operators; in one completely bizarre twist one of the writers and producers on Call of Duty ended up advising the US Department of Defense. This doesn't just help recruitment, but it also helps paint a picture of some countries - and the US in particular - as Defenders of Freedom.

This is really important when you want to convince people that a slightly complicated situation - like Gaza or the Ukraine - is actually very simple. You see, these people are the bad guys, and we're the good guys and that explains why we need to support these people and sell them lots of guns and bombs and stuff. Amazingly, earlier in the year I came across research into how games like Call of Duty are modded for propaganda, with reference to how games were altered by terrorist organisations. The paper, and I really couldn't believe this so I re-read that section but I'm almost certain I'm right here, does not actually consider Call of Duty as propaganda, only 'extremist' use of the game. I don't think it's malicious on the author's part, I think we just often fail to look at games in this way unless someone Bad is using them.

Games help dehumanise people

Earlier in the year, Younès tried to find positive representations of Muslim characters in videogames, one per day during Ramadan. They failed to find more than a handful. It's easy to find bad or traumatic representations of Muslims in videogames though, they're everywhere. Repeatedly showing a group of people as villainous, barbaric, backwards or helpless has an effect on people, and makes us care less when we see them being hurt in real life. A common refrain over the last few weeks has been to represent the Palestinian people as being subhuman in some way, and if that aligns with literally everything you've seen in TV, film, the news and videogames over the last decade then it probably sounds a lot more believable, doesn't it?

Games are a huge cultural medium

I think we all know this but whenever anyone asks a question in a comment thread they generally already know the answer. "What is the point of The Game Awards talking about Gaza?" is a rhetorical question - you know the answer. It's because it's The Game Awards. People care about videogames, they listen to Geoff Keighley. Do we know why? No. The answer has eluded science for aeons. But it is the case nonetheless. The reason it has so many ads is because people watch and are affected by the sounds and pictures that slap wetly onto their faces.

Games influence people, and so do the people who make, star in and talk about them. That's why people pay these people to be influencers. So if these people stood up and said, hey, this thing is bad, that might... help... people think about whether this thing is bad. I mean this one isn't very complicated, I feel like. The flipside of this is - it's an act of solidarity! Lots of people all around the world have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, and if the games industry - one of the biggest creative industries in the world - collectively added their voice to that it would be huge.


Anyway I know you almost certainly did not care if you came here after asking "Whyyyyyyy" under some article or other, but there you go. Now go away.


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