Ideology and the virtual city: Social critique and conformity in video game power fantasies. Issue 2 (1st June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bailes, Jon
• Is Part Of: Journal of gaming & virtual worlds. Volume 10:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 149
• Page End: 165
• Publication Date: 2018-06-01
• Subjects: Virtual reality -- Periodicals; Electronic games -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Electronic games -- Evaluation -- Periodicals; Electronic games -- Psychological aspects -- Periodicals; 303.4834
• DOI: 10.1386/jgvw.10.2.149_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1757-191X

Abstract

This article analyses three video games based in modern urban settings, Saints Row IV, Grand Theft Auto V and No More Heroes, to consider how they convey different ideological responses to modern consumer societies in their structural and narrative elements. Using Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts, I consider how expectations surrounding work, leisure, property and relationships create antagonisms that individuals must reconcile with life experience. I then show how the three games exemplify different forms of ideology, in the shape of 'power fantasies' that manifest these antagonisms and attempt to resolve them. Throughout the article, I reference social theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Herbert Marcuse to define the 'neo-liberal' cultural background from which these ideologies emerge, and outline their features. Such perspectives help evaluate the games as cultural products of today's neo-liberalized social order, which, I argue, struggle to interrogate systemic issues, but nonetheless contain hints of deeper social critique.