A few popular game genres could be trusted to release a significant dose of endorphins. Shooter games like Duke Nukem, horror titles like Resident Evil, platformer games like Super Mario World, racing games, sports games, strategy games, role-playing games, or horror games all had significant fan bases and ever-growing production teams, and they produced healthy revenues. The technological advances accommodated not only singular, linear stories with two-dimensional characters, but also entire worlds, side quests, and labyrinths of plot devices.
Players could now focus not just on the plot, or the mise-en-scène of a game, but also on the broader message. What type of values or narratives did this produce? Video games were now sufficiently sophisticated to build a chronicle of persuasion. Those eager to popularize a particular ideology — be they opinionated game developers, publishers courting a particular demographic, political spin doctors funding the projects, or other cultural influencers wishing to diversify their storytelling techniques — wasted no time getting involved in this innovative medium.
Strategy games like Freeciv or Sid Meier’s Colonization and shooters such as Tomb Raider were already independently peddling colonial or jingoistic fantasies. In these games, the plot usually unleashed tropes of imperial land grabs, white supremacy, and racist depictions of non-Western populations, ranging from “primitive” to full-on terrorists.
By the late 1990s, the US Department of Defense was beginning to sense the power of the games industry over adolescent men — the Department’s main audience — and created a campaign of recruitment and manipulation around gaming. Serious institutional power underwrote the move to tie the global video games industry to the Western military complex. The Pentagon spent more than $150 million on military-themed games or simulations in 1999 alone, with another $70 million injection in 2008 and still more since, all on projects with their own, very particular political agenda.
America’s Army, released in 2002, developed and published by the United States Army in the wake of the post-9/11 military boost, was the starkest and priciest example of this practice — with a ten-year development and marketing budget of $50 million, on top of the investments mentioned before. This round-based team tactical shooter with realistic combat scenarios was described in a review of the time as “the most realistic portrayal of weapons and combat of any game.”