part0014

The final chapter of this book arose from a seemingly straightforward yet ethically complicated question: as a gamer selecting an avatar, why would you choose to play as Augusto Pinochet, one of twentieth-century Latin America’s most murderous tyrants, responsible for the torture, imprisonment, killing, and disappearance of thousands of Chileans during his seventeen-year dictatorship? This question resulted from a specific experience I had during the early stages of researching this book. While rereading the essay “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” one of the foundational texts by Gonzalo Frasca, the Uruguayan game designer and theorist whose work I have referenced throughout this volume, I came across a footnote that at once raised important and timely questions about verisimilitude in cultural representation in video games, and at the same time brought to my mind one of the reasons that the “real” meaning of video games is so difficult to pin down—because of the complicated and culturally contingent role of humor. Frasca’s footnote offers a stinging critique of Tropico , the resource management simulation game in which the character plays as a recently installed dictator of a fictitious Caribbean island nation—and chooses from avatars including not only fictional characters but also real life despots like Pinochet (figure 6.1 ), “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. For Frasca, this game is clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but misses its mark: “While this simulation is definitively a parody, its extreme use of clichés and simplification are a clear example of a colonialist attitude in video game design. Having grown up myself during a dictatorship in Uruguay, I find the game insulting. I would not object to a simulation that dealt with issues such as torture or political imprisonment if it aimed at understanding politics and sociology. In this case, however, it is simply used for entertainment, which is nothing short of disgusting. Alas, I guess South American oppressed are not yet a powerful lobby in the land of political-correctness.” 1 Whether one has played the games in the Tropico series or not, there is certainly much that rings true in Frasca’s critique: if a game uses historical tragedy as mere entertainment fodder or as a superficial joke, it will unsurprisingly be regarded as disrespectful to those whose families and friends were affected by such tragedies.

And then I played Tropico . And despite the fact that it uses the names and faces of some of the most infamous figures of Latin American history for the purposes of a game, I found it fascinating. Moreover, playing the game destabilized my preconception that its basic framework was “an example of colonialist attitude in video game design,” as Frasca had asserted. In fact I believe Tropico can be seen as an attempt at the opposite—an example of anticolonialist attitude in game design, precisely because of its nature as a parody, an expressive form whose meaning is never as it appears on the surface. Robert Hariman explains succinctly how meaning works in parodies: “The parody is not what it claims to be, to reveal that the discourse being parodied is what it claims not to be.” 2 That is, parody places discourse beside itself in order to reveal its underlying falseness and limitations. “What had seemed to be serious is in fact foolish,” Hariman argues, “and likewise the powerful is shown to be vulnerable, the unchangeable contingent, the enchanting dangerous. Parody works in great part by exceeding tacit limits on expression—the appropriate, the rational—but it does so to reveal limitations that others would want to keep hidden.” 3 Understood as a parody, Tropico can be seen as less a colonialist enterprise than an exposure of US interventionism in Latin America and the atrocities perpetrated by the dictatorships it supported, an attempt to destabilize the imperialist discourse being parodied. Simulation, which Frasca characterizes as “an alternative to representation and narrative,” 4 is both a broad game genre and a software framework in which meaning is made in ways that are nonlinguistic, nonnarrative, and nonrepresentational. However video games often make meaning through representation and narrative as well as simulation, and the effects of games’ attempts at realism and verisimilitude, as well as their use of irony, satire, and parody, must be considered when examining games that incorporate Latin American history and cultural heritage into their products. Without taking these factors into account, we cannot offer satisfying answers to some of the most complex questions about cultural representation in video games.

Why would a player choose to play as Pinochet? That simple question can lead down a great many paths. What are the ethical implications of the choice to play as the Spanish in The Conquerers expansion of Age of Empires II , or any number of other historical factions of ill repute in any number of other historically based simulation games? What makes playing the game as the morally good or bad team a good or bad choice? In short, why would a moral player be compelled to do immoral things in a game, or even to embody the most evil avatars of real history for the purposes of play, and what is the significance of such decisions in the context of a simulation? This chapter aims to provide compelling answers to those questions, by way of a thorough exploration of the ways meaning is conveyed within the framework of video game simulations.

Simulation games revolve around the player’s manipulation of a dynamic system to produce a range of possible results. The umbrella simulation genre includes several subgenres: broad-based resource management simulations like those discussed in chapter 5 , including Utopia and Sid Meier’s Civilization ; business simulations like Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon (MicroProse 1990) and RollerCoaster Tycoon (MicroProse 1999); city-building simulations like SimCity (Maxis 1989) and Cities XL (Monte Cristo 2009); and government simulations such as Caesar (Sierra Entertainment 1992) and Anno 1503: The New World . In addition to these management simulations, there are open world simulations, those featuring dynamic environments that respond to player decisions and can be explored along multiple paths. Examples of these open world simulations include early titles such as the space simulator Elite (Imagineer 1984), 3D “sandbox” games like Super Mario 64 and Shenmue (Sega 1999), and a number of recent examples discussed at different points in this book that are set wholly or partially in Latin America, including Just Cause , Mercenaries 2: World in Flames , Red Dead Redemption , and Grand Theft Auto V . What these games all share is the underlying coded structure of a simulation, a dynamic system with the potential to produce culturally meaningful experiences in several unique ways. Simulations enable the player to make decisions about consumption and production, political discourse and economic policy, and imperialist expansion or inward-focused nationalism, adopting, building upon, and remediating longstanding dynamics in human society and cultural production. Success in a simulation depends on mastery of its internally coded mechanisms of gameplay, but also requires the player to access skill sets acquired from experience in real-world cultural contexts.

This capacity to make decisions and adjustments that impact progress through the game in different ways is a distinguishing feature of the simulation genre. Unlike linear narratives or two-dimensional images, whose basic content will remain the same upon multiple readings or viewings, simulations offer the capacity to have a new experience each time the game is played, through a novel combination of the adjustable factors at the player’s disposal. William Uricchio defines simulation as a “machine for producing speculative or conditional representations,” 5 while Frasca more poetically describes it as “a kaleidoscopic form of representation that can provide us with multiple and alternative points of view.” 6 This signifying exchange between subjective player actions and the game software’s coded rules is what is often referred to as the algorithmic structure of video games. Therefore Manovich defines the algorithm in procedural terms, as the end goal in a process of discovery on the part of the gamer: “As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by the game. She learns its hidden logic—in short, its algorithm.” 7 It is this “hidden logic” that players of nearly any game must go about discovering in order to unlock its meaning and ultimately achieve success—step by step, they must discover the best maneuvers in order to clear the obstacles in their path to victory. In simulations, such barriers include both “internal forces” like crime, pollution, and rebellion and “external forces” like natural disasters or military invasions, all of which must be balanced by the player in order to progress. 8 It is through this algorithmic process of trial and error that the player comes to unlock the keys to mastering the internal logic of a simulation.

Due to their algorithmic nature, simulations are fundamentally different from linear narratives because they deal not with historical fact but ahistorical possibility. As Claudio Fogu asserts in “Digitalizing Historical Consciousness,” “[d]igital history enters the twenty-first century exclusively under the sign of the possible; we are now interested only in what may happen and are no longer concerned with what had happened.” 9 As opposed to linear narratives, simulations are speculative systems offering a chance to carry a single scenario through to several possible outcomes. Simulations do not allow for the types of predetermined, teleological narratives that written histories of human culture tend to privilege. While a cultural object or historical event carries some referential ties to its conventional “real-world” meaning into a simulation, that meaning is transformed within the simulation, subordinated to its significance as a calculable factor within a dynamic system. This recalls Zimmerman’s assertion, cited in the introduction to this book, that a football is not a football within the context of a game, but rather a means of scoring points. That is to say, nothing in a video game simulation means what it appears to mean conventionally, or at least it does not mean only what it appears to mean conventionally.

To provide an illustration, the player of Sid Meier’s Civilization must first choose a real-world historical civilization from a predetermined selection of choices. In the most recent iteration from the series, Civilization V , the player could choose from eighteen playable civilizations upon the game’s release, with an additional twenty-five added as downloadable content in game expansions. The Aztecs are led in the game by Montezuma I (a.k.a. Moctezuma I), the predecessor of Moctezuma II, who was the leader in power when Hernán Cortés arrived at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1519. In the Civilization universe, Montezuma has appeared as a playable avatar since the very first Civilization game in 1991, growing in detail and context with each successive installment in the series. Civilization V features animated leaders for each civilization that speak in their native languages, so Montezuma speaks in the Aztec language of Nahuatl, the Incan leader Pachacuti speaks Quechua, Pedro II of Brazil speaks Portuguese, and Queen Isabella and Simón Bolívar speak their own variations of Spanish. The performance of the Aztecs in the game is determined by sixty-three variables, each of which is assigned a numerical value from one to nine. Montezuma (and thus the Aztec civilization) scores high in the areas of “Boldness,” “Bullying,” and “Conquest of City States,” as well as “Likeliness to Declare War.” But they also rate highly in historically anachronistic categories like “Nuke Production.” The Aztecs are also assigned values for variables such as “Chattiness,” “Meanness,” and “Military Training Buildings Production.” The Aztecs in Civilization V have a relatively high emphasis on “Culture,” “Wonder,” and “Happiness,” but a relatively low emphasis on “Science,” “Trade,” and “Great People.” Within the algorithmic structure of Civilization V , the cultural traits assigned to the Aztec civilization are calculable variables that affect the way meaning is produced in the simulation, but do not necessarily or accurately reflect real-world traits of the civilizations in question.

Therefore it is problematic to analyze games in ideological terms based strictly on the conventional rather than the algorithmic and contextual meaning of the historical elements they employ. As Galloway argues in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture , attempts to link cultural simulations with real-world entities and events inevitably end in slippage—this is because such elements do not invite a conventional allegorical or metaphorical interpretation. Rather, within a simulation, cultural identity “is a data type, a mathematical variable.” 10 Galloway’s concept of “algorithmic culture” also points the way toward an answer to my initial question in this chapter, paraphrased here: Why would a player choose to play as a dictator? Because the dictator’s identity, like that of Montezuma and any other leader represented in the context of a resource management simulation, is not—or more accurately, is not only —a real-world historical figure, but is (primarily) a collection of particular values for a given set of mathematical variables within the game’s algorithm.

Games are related in innumerable ways to the traditions that have preceded and coincided with them in spheres like literature and film, but games remediate these traditions in important ways. Realism, for example, takes on a different set of meanings in relation to an electronic game than it does with other traditions of cultural production. In literature, realism arises out of the nineteenth-century realist novel in France, which Georg Lukács saw as a superior means of expressing the human condition: “Balzac’s many-sided, many-tiered world approaches reality much more closely than any other method of presentation.” 11 Of course, the contribution of Honoré de Balzac and his realist contemporaries was not simply offering a realistic representation of their world, but rather literary realism has always implied a degree of social critique. In his 1953 analysis of the French realist novel Erich Auerbach enumerates the foundations of nineteenth-century literary realism: the serious treatment of everyday reality, the appearance of previously excluded groups as subjects for problematic-existential representation, the use of a fluid historical background and the embedding of random people and events into the course of history. 12 The same schematic definition basically holds true for cinematic realism, in which persuasion is also privileged over documentary objectivity. In What Is Cinema? André Bazin explains that in realist films such as Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), “the thesis of the film is hidden behind an objective social reality which in turn moves into the background of the moral and psychological drama which could of itself justify the film.” 13 Thus nineteenth-century literary realism and the cinematic tradition that followed it are responsible not only for making the quotidian the focus of cultural production, but also for highlighting the role of the underprivileged, underrepresented, and historically marginalized, demonstrating the realist way of critically portraying reality with no pretension of objectivity.

While simulations like Second Life (Linden 2003) and The Sims follow the literary realists in elevating the everyday into the subject matter of cultural production, realist video games in the conventional sense—those that offer social critiques and highlight the historical role of the marginalized—are relatively few and far between. Some of the best examples from Latin American designers are highlighted in chapter 2 : Rafael Fajardo’s Crosser and La Migra , Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez’s Turista Fronterizo , and Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th . On the one hand, these are realist games because they offer a “serious treatment of everyday reality” in spite of their sometimes-humorous tone, representing the impact of labor, consumption, transit, economics, and politics on the daily lives of their simulated characters. On the other hand they are realist games because of their particular focus on historically marginalized groups—undocumented migrants in Crosser and La Migra , a domestic worker in Turista Fronterizo , and citizens of a Middle Eastern village besieged by assault drones in September 12th . These are the rare activist games that, like Bazin’s model realist filmmakers, hide their thesis behind representations of objective social and political realities, requiring the player to unlock their meaning procedurally.

But there is another, much more common meaning for realism in video games, the one used in promotional materials that advertise games based upon how realistic they are in terms of graphic or historical fidelity or both. As Manovich explains, this type of realism is a prevalent measure for success in the game industry: “In media, trade publications, and research papers, the history of technological innovation and research is presented as a progression toward realism—the ability to simulate any object in such a way that its computer image is indistinguishable from a photograph.” 14 And while game developers have long sought to create a sense of representational realism in their products, they achieve this effect not through total fidelity to the real world being represented, but rather through the creation of a sense of the realistic through design considerations. The “reality effect” or effet de réel was Barthes’s term for partial realism—he noted that even in the case of the nineteenth-century French literary canon, “its realism is only fragmentary, erratic, restricted to ‘details,’” 15 as of course the goal of realism was never really to create a one-to-one equivalent representation of the world, but rather to critically evoke a world through subjectively selected representative elements. The realism that game designers seek to create is also partial, fragmented, and metonymical, with details standing in for the broader cultural and historical elements they represent.

What is most important in a simulation is not necessarily documentary exactitude or attention to minute detail, but rather that all of the components of the game work together to create a sense of harmony for the player. King and Krzywinska use the term “functional realism” to describe the way realistic gameplay can consist of “mechanics of weaponry and vehicles, physics of weather conditions and golf swings, meters covering emotion and other psycho-emotional aspects, etc.” 16 For players of video games, the predictable and consistent functioning of gameplay mechanics can contribute as much to a sense of realism as an airtight historical plot. For example, in a flight simulator like A-10 Cuba! relatively little in the interface seems to indicate the cultural or historical context of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, however the historical selection of aircraft and equipment available along with the proper functioning of the altimeter and numerous other gauges in the user’s heads-up display creates a heightened sense of functional realism for the player. This is why game designers seek to produce “sufficient functional realism to create an impression of ‘something like’ the real thing,” 17 a context that is believable enough to evoke the real-world location and historical epoch it represents, even if it cannot promise a photorealistic representation.

Verisimilitude is related to functional realism in game design, focusing on the creation of a feel or sense of overall believability rather than a 1:1 representation of reality. Verisimilitude is required of a video game’s cultural context as well, meaning that cultural elements are incorporated into game design only if they can be made to function harmoniously with game mechanics. Take, for example, the differences in the portrayal of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira in Tekken 3 (Namco 1997) and more than two decades later in the Brazilian-designed Capoeira Legends: Path to Freedom (Donsoft 2009). The lone practitioner of capoeira in Tekken 3 is Eddy Gordo, one of the first Afro-Brazilian characters in video game history. Regarding the depiction of capoeira in Tekken 3 , Juul suggests that practitioners of the martial art “would undoubtedly feel that the game was an extreme simplification” since “[c]ountless moves have been omitted, and the available moves have been simplified and are only available as either/or options: perform a handstand or do not perform a handstand,” taking away much of the “expressive potential” of this particular style of martial arts. 18 In fact, Juul’s hypothesis has been confirmed by none other than the “real-life Eddy Gordo,” Marcelo Pereira, the mestre de capoeira who provided the motion-capture moves for the character in the game. Asked whether he was pleased with the way Eddy Gordo was represented in Tekken 3 , Pereira offered the following analysis: “On a scale of 0-10, I give Eddy Gordo a 6. As I mentioned before, tradition is an important fact. Capoeiristas have authentic nicknames such as Ze Faisca (“Joe Spark”), Cobra Verde (“Green Snake”), Gato Preto (“Black Cat”), etc. … It would be O.K. if the name was in English, but Eddy is not a Brazilian name and Gordo in Portuguese means fat! In the same issue of names, the names chosen for the capoeira movements are pretty off the wall and are not like the traditional names I called the movements as I was motion captured.” 19 Pereira adds that Eddy’s attire could more accurately reflect realistic capoeira standards of dress, and that a strong drum beat or traditional capoeira music would have added further cultural relevance, though he recognizes that “Namco had to deal with thousands of details for all the characters and strategies of the game.” 20 Clearly, for the designers of Tekken 3 , the functional realism that allows for consistent and predictable manners of interaction between characters trumped the cultural realism that a practitioner of capoeira might desire. More recent titles, like Martial Arts: Capoeira! (Libredia 2011) and particularly the 2009 Brazilian game Capoeira Legends: Path to Freedom , attempt to merge functional realism with cultural verisimilitude to a greater degree in order to provide the player with both an enjoyable gameplay experience and a sense of cultural authenticity. Capoeira Legends is set in 1828 among the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, with the player operating as Gunga Za, a young slave and capoeira practitioner seeking his freedom (figure 6.2 ). The game’s designers describe Capoeira Legends as a way of learning the history of this particularly Brazilian art form, as well as a fundamentally cultural game—“uma incrível experiência cultural” (“an incredible cultural experience”). 21

It is important to remember, of course, that a simplified cultural context is not always the result of oversight on the part of game developers, but rather a factor inherent to all video game simulations. As Kevin Schut has argued, “presenting greater cultural complexity challenges the bias of the medium: Because various cultures have to be turned into an airtight system of programs and game rules, modeling more than a few truly distinct cultures (even if they are greatly simplified) becomes exceptionally difficult.” 22 Following this logic, it would be difficult to substantiate the claim that “[b]lackness is erased from the island” in Tropico , 23 because Tropico is not an island—it is a computer game that simulates an island, which in its every dimension is a constructed, artificial, and coded space. This is not to argue against the need for greater cultural diversity in video games, but rather to recognize that game designers’ possibilities for creating cultural context are defined by the parameters of the medium and the genre in question. Therefore not every game provides the opportunity for players to act out every imaginable scenario—a player “may wish for the Zulus in Civilization to pursue a different technology tree, for instance, but it is not going to happen because it is simply not part of the game.” 24 Cultural environments in video games are built from the ground up, and every element programmed into the game is the result of conscious decision making on the part of the designers. This is why it is so important for game designers to continue to expand their efforts in portraying cultural diversity among their characters, making their products more appealing to audiences of different ages, genders, sexual orientations, and racial, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Precisely because games are the result of conscious programming and design choices, it is essential to keep in mind the many ways culture can be incorporated into game design in order to create more meaningful experiences for the player.

It is a commonplace in certain critical circles to refer to video games as part of the “military entertainment complex,” 25 given the historical and ideological links between game design and the defense technology industry. This is due in part to the fact that a number of pioneering early video games were first developed within the context of US military technology, including Spacewar! (Steve Russell et al. 1962), widely considered the first video game, which was designed by MIT grad students with funding from the Pentagon. The link between video games and the military has been further established by the government funding of game projects including the America’s Army series (United States Army 2002). This has led many critics to assert that video games are an essentially imperialistic form of media reflecting a militaristic worldview. For example, building on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue in Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games that “[v]irtual games are exemplary media of Empire,” indeed “the media of Empire,” since they “originated in the US military-industrial complex, the nuclear-armed core of capital’s global domination, to which they remain umbilically connected.” 26 Likewise, Nina B. Huntemann asserts that “military-themed games advance a worldview that military intervention and use of force are the only viable responses to global conflict, and that war is inevitable and perpetual, with enemies unmistakably on the side of evil,” 27 echoing other critiques of games’ consistent framing of “the ‘civilizing mission’ as a battle between good and evil,” 28 their reliance on an “us against them” framework that “helps to reinforce simplistic ideas of a collective Self and its hostile Other,” 29 and their overall “function as a ‘soft sell’ of ‘hard power.’” 30 The proponents of this ideological critique argue that video games represent an imperialistic or militaristic worldview, and that players are distanced from engagement with broader issues related to warfare when violence is portrayed in military-themed games. Huntemann explains that the depiction of war in video games is “cleaned up, void of horrific consequences, civilian casualties, and psychic devastation,” leading to the “normalization and sanitization of war.” 31 Greenfield echoes this assessment, adding that “the histories of oppressed peoples, those who fought on the ‘other side’ and the victims of war cannot be told” because “[c]ries of ‘Stop the killing!’ and stories of civilian casualties and immense suffering are not the stuff of entertainment.” 32

The main assertions of the ideological or anti-imperialist critique of military-themed video games are that (1) they are inextricably linked to the military entertainment complex; (2) they justify and normalize a state of permanent warfare as a response to geopolitical problems; (3) they reinforce an “us against them” perspective, emphasizing the division between the self and foreign other; and (4) they sanitize violence, omitting and obscuring morally objectionable issues from their depictions of violence. These points are doubtlessly valid for the analysis of certain military-themed games; however, it is essential to take a closer look at the suggestion that a focus on warfare represents not only these games’ content but also their ideological message.

First and foremost, whom do we suppose is playing these games? It seems problematic to assume that players are universally susceptible to the same sorts of ideological manipulations, or that all players interpret games’ meaning in a consistent manner. What does it mean when more educated adults are playing video games than innocent schoolchildren? What does it mean for Mexican players to play games based on the contemporary drug war in their own country? Or for a Cuban, Brazilian, or Venezuelan citizen to play games about his or her homeland being invaded by foreign forces? As Galloway argues, in order for a player to experience believability in a video game, “there must be some kind of congruence, some type of fidelity of context that transliterates itself from the social reality of the gamer, through one’s thumbs, into the game environment and back again.” 33 This “congruence requirement” is what enables a gamer to “play along with” the worldview presented by the game. Fidelity of context is a fundamentally cultural concept, meaning that players in different contexts will have opposing ways of reading video games’ content. Juxtaposing America’s Army with Special Force , an FPS released by the Lebanese organization Hezbollah in 2003, Galloway explains the relationship between cultural context and the ludic experience of realism: “To put it bluntly, a typical American youth playing Special Force is most likely not experiencing realism, whereas realism is indeed possible for a young Palestinian gamer playing Special Force in the occupied territories. This fidelity of context is key for realism in gaming.” 34 Likewise, US gamers—young and old—may be less likely than Latin American gamers to focus on the details of the cultural depictions of Latin American countries, or may focus on them in different ways. Players familiar with the cultural contexts being represented are likely to be more critical of stereotypical or reductive representations, but this does not mean that players who are not familiar with the cultural contexts represented are necessarily blind to such factors. The danger of exaggerating the imperialist overtones of games is the tendency to assume that games’ messages are free from fidelity of context, and that their messages are universally and consistently legible.

The anti-imperialist critique’s invocation of a “universal gamer” can lead to critical overstatements regarding factors that may already be self-evident to an increasingly diverse populace of gamers of all ages. To paraphrase Latin American literary critic Brett Levinson, the problem with many of these arguments is not that they are too good to be true, but that they are too true to be good. 35 Levinson criticizes some within the decolonialist vein of Latin American cultural studies (to which he pertains) for overstating the obvious in their critiques, contributing to a “ceaseless unearthing of an already unearthed Eurocentrism” by critics of literary works that themselves offer complex interpretations of the relationship between self and other. 36 Likewise, it is possible that much of what is being criticized with regard to the militaristic frame of video games is readily apparent to anyone who has played the games in question, making it necessary to further problematize our analyses of the ways these games relate to violence and imperialism.

For instance, why should we assume that cries of “Stop the killing!” have no place in video games in particular? Whether in video games or other media, such cries are indeed well established as the “stuff of entertainment” in a centuries-long literary, artistic, and cinematic tradition. To exclude games is to come dangerously close to the oversimplified view that they are—and can only be—child’s play. Too often, the anti-imperialist critique of video games suffers from what Juul refers to as “video game exceptionalism,” which treats games as “more dangerous than other forms of culture” without sufficiently reflecting on the multiple levels they make meaning beyond what is superficially evident. 37 This, I believe, is the root cause of an overstatement on the part of the anti-imperialist critique of the equivalency between games’ (military) theme and their (supposedly militaristic) thesis.

Are military games imperialist? Many critics have demonstrated the ways in which they are. But too few have paid attention to the ways in which they are not. Too often it is taken for granted that any game about warfare is in favor of warfare, another form of video game exceptionalism. Juul points out that critics are frequently guilty of ignoring the real experience of gameplay, providing narrative-driven analyses that fail to account for the multiple layers of meaning making that we readily accept in literature, the visual arts, and film: “The audience of a movie does not automatically assume that the protagonist does good , and neither does the player of a video game believe that the protagonist of the game does good . A game is a play with identities, where the player at one moment performs an action considered morally sound and the next moment tries something he or she considers indefensible. The player chooses one mission or another, tries to complete the mission in one way or another, tries to do ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ Games are playgrounds where players can experiment with doing things they would or would not normally do.” 38 Basing his analysis on the unpredictable and highly variable practices of play, Juul offers a reminder that there are multiple avenues for interpretation of meaning, even in some of the most seemingly straightforwardly imperialist games.

If in fact imperialism is an element within the ideological framework of many games, it can at least be shown that it is not the only ideology that these games convey. Indeed, a great many military-themed games can be seen to critique imperialism through their content and the scenarios they portray. When players of Call of Duty: Black Ops II participate in a mission that involves illegally framing Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega by planting duffel bags of cocaine in his hotel room, they are not just experiencing the justification of empire, but an implicit critique of its immorality and underhandedness. When players of Just Cause witness the US intelligence agents in charge of the invasion of the (fictitious) island of San Esperito whittling away their time gulping down tropical drinks while playing military-themed video games and reading books like Regime Change in 7 Days , they are not seeing the legitimization of an imperialist worldview, but its critique through elements of irony, humor, and satire. To truly understand how video games relate to empire, we must steer clear of critiques that are too true to be good, or those that are too straightforward to accurately reflect the complexities of the simulations described. We must recognize that multiple meanings are transmitted in games, above and beyond those that seem most evident on the surface.

In Misplaced Ideas , his 1992 analysis of literature and society in late nineteenth-century Brazil, literary critic Roberto Schwarz argues that parody “is one of the most combative of literary forms, so long as that is its intention. And anyway,” he adds, “a little contemplation never did anyone any harm.” 39 Schwarz speaks of the way that cultural standards, when imported to one context from another, undergo a process of mimesis that invariably leads to parodic adaptation, as the importers use and misuse the cultural mechanisms newly placed at their disposal. “In countries where culture is imported,” Schwarz explains, “parody is almost a natural form of criticism: it simply makes explicit unintentional parodies which are in any case inevitable.” 40 Schwarz’s analysis hinges upon the inherent critical capacity of parody, which has been referred to both as the most dangerous form of humor, and an “essential resource for sustaining public culture.” 41 In simulations, parody can play an important role in determining the signifying context through which cultural meaning is communicated and interpreted. In order to adequately interpret the cultural messages communicated in video games, it is essential that we consider the tone with which those messages are transmitted. Even humorous games provide real, valid, and culturally contextualized experiences for their players.

Humans have valued games that make us laugh since the dawn of civilization—so what is it that motivates contemporary gamers in particular to play humorous video games? John C. Meyer explains that through “the relaxing elements of humor, parties can lower defenses and be more open to seeing the new perspectives required to appreciate humor,” meaning that players can be as receptive—or more receptive—to messages transmitted in “a ‘comic frame’ ” than those in “a rigid ‘tragic frame.’” 42 Meyer appeals to the “incongruity theory” of humor, which states that “people laugh at what surprises them, is unexpected, or is odd in a non-threatening way,” opening them up to meaningful messages expressed in humorous terms. 43 In this way, players can find as much meaning in humorous simulations of history and culture as they do in games seeking to convey historical gravitas. Certainly, the critical value of satire, irony, and parody can be seen in some of the persuasive games from Latin American designers in chapter 2 , such as Turista Fronterizo , Crosser , and La Migra , or the newsgames like La Mordida , Portillo el Tontillo , and Guerra Política discussed in chapter 3 . Messages containing sarcasm and irony can offer serious critiques even while they seem diffuse or frivolous. 44 However, it is essential to keep in mind that different individuals have different ways of interpreting messages, regardless of the medium through which they are transmitted. Therefore it is important to take note of what types of messages are procedurally suggested by the experience of game-play, in order to comprehend what a game means above and beyond what it says or portrays .

Toward that end, there is perhaps no better example on which to focus than Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, which is both one of the most controversial and one of the most commercially successful game franchises of all time. Chapter 5 discussed the ways culture is incorporated into the spatial and sonic framework of the game’s open world environment. In addition to the role of space, it is essential to consider the way that a game’s expressive tone affects its meaning. In Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games , Paul offers an analysis of the problematic role of humor in the series: “GTA contains heavy touches of irony and satire. Humor changes the dynamics of a text, potentially leading to multiple kinds of readings about what the text ‘means.’ […] Within the context of GTA , some may appreciate the humor, while others will not. This polarizes the audience; you either laugh with the game or find it even stranger that anyone could like it. For those who laugh, the humor bonds them to the game and becomes memorable, pushing them away from those who just do not get the joke.” 45 This is also why Meyer refers to humor as a “double-edged sword,” due to its capacity to produce multiple subjective interpretations, and thus the concomitant multiplication of possibilities for (mis)interpretation of the intended message.

As at least a few critics have noted, Grand Theft Auto may be the most misunderstood video game series in the history of the medium. 46 The unabashedly graphic series is frequently subjected to moralizing readings of fragments and sound bites extracted from its endless hours of open world gameplay, all of which takes place in an off-color yet thoroughly complex environment. Likewise, although the GTA series has had a greater degree of cultural diversity than most, frequently featuring protagonists of diverse cultural backgrounds along with the complex cultural dynamics of the game environment discussed in chapter 5 , scholars have characterized the series as racist much more frequently than they have lauded the diversity of its characters and settings. For example, David J. Leonard argues, “San Andreas does not merely give life to dominant stereotypes but gives legitimizing voice to hegemonic discourses about race, whether it is ‘illegal aliens are invading the country’ or that ‘Latin America has less culture than a toilet bowl.’” 47 The latter two statements are made by callers on GTA San Andreas ’s talk radio station, West Coast Talk Radio , which perhaps not surprisingly is replete with scathing satire based on exaggerated caricatures of conservatives and liberals alike. In this signifying context, and in the mouths of characters who are supposed to come off as laughably ignorant, these messages are not the sort of straightforward legitimation of hegemonic discourse that Leonard portrays them as, but precisely the opposite: they are elements of a parody meant to destabilize the discourse they appear to represent. To return to Hariman’s maxim cited earlier: “The parody is not what it claims to be, to reveal that the discourse being parodied is what it claims not to be.” We don’t label a film about World War II-era Germany anti-Semitic because its Nazi characters say things that are anti-Semitic, and to characterize GTA as straightforwardly racist based on its use of racist characters fails to account for the ways the series really makes cultural meaning.

Other critics of the GTA series have looked carefully at the complicated role of humor in its portrayal of race and culture, but have still found plenty to critique. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter contend that “GTA is a cynical game that simultaneously satirizes, indulges, and normalizes individual hyperpossessiveness, racialized stereotypes, and neoliberal violence in a self-cancellation that allows these elements to remain intact, a structure that is, in a very precise way, conservative.” 48 Dean Chan echoes their sentiments, arguing that the series is “complicit in the pathologization and fetishization of race” since “there is a fine line to (t)read between parodic critique and discursive reinscription, especially in relation to the deployment of racialized archetypes and the persistent linkage of these archetypes with criminal elements.” 49 Taken on its face, it is easy to see Chan’s point—a game that consistently portrays black characters as criminals and white characters as police officers, for example, would be highly problematic. But are these “racialized archetypes” truly persistently linked to criminality in GTA ? Or is GTA being called racist by virtue of being racial? The Grand Theft Auto series features a diverse cast of characters (both playable and nonplayable) from all walks of life. Among the Latin American characters in GTA V , for example, there are newly arrived immigrants, both documented and undocumented, as well as second- and third-generation Latinos and Latinas; there are monolingual Spanish and English speakers, bilinguals, and speakers of Spanglish; there are men and women, old and young (though no children); there are gangsters and grandmas, playboys and paupers. Given both the notable cultural diversity and the overall criminal orientation of the GTA universe, it is difficult to sustain the argument that the game is racist based upon its representation of any particular racial group as any more criminal than another. In short, if there is an argument that GTA is inherently racist, it has yet to be articulated in a way that sufficiently accounts for the complexity of the ways cultural meaning is generated in the series.

An examination of the way Latin American culture relates to the simulated framework of GTA helps illustrate the procedural and algorithmic ways that meaning is made in the series. Though they are all based in fictionalized versions of locations in the United States, all of the games in the GTA series incorporate significant elements of Latin American culture in a variety of forms. For example, GTA V features a number of side missions categorized under “Strangers and Freaks,” as well as hidden “Easter egg” characters that pop up when the player randomly approaches them on the map. In one series of Strangers and Freaks missions, Trevor gets involved with a bizarre duo calling themselves the “Civil Border Patrol” and consisting of Joe and Josef, an anti-immigrant “patriot” with a southern accent, and an equally anti-immigrant sidekick who puzzlingly speaks only Russian. They hire Trevor to drive them on absurd hunts for documented immigrants including mariachis and cement factory workers, with Trevor growing suspicious of the duo as they use their tasers on victim after innocent victim of their vigilante racial profiling. Eventually, one of the mariachi captives, Manuel, informs Trevor that the Civil Border Patrol has been harassing Mexican-American citizens of the area for years, and challenges him to quit supporting them and to make things right. The player, as Trevor, then encounters Joe and Josef in the midst of an attack on a Mexican family’s farm, and in a characteristic fit of rage resolves the situation by slaying the Civil Border Patrol members in an act of vengeance for their years of racist persecution of the local population.

Another of GTA V ’s Easter egg characters, referred to online as the “Secret Mexican Mariachi Easter Egg” or “El mexicano desesperado” (“The Desperate Mexican”), is an actor who complains in vibrant detail about being assigned the same stereotypical acting roles in Vinewood movies over and over again, among the many other injustices he faces as a Mexican in Los Santos. This desperately overqualified thespian, who explains that he is handicapped only by his lack of English-speaking abilities, proclaims, “¡Este país es el país de las mentiras, y la mentira más grande es que todos somos iguales! No hay ni un caso en el que seamos iguales—ni en ingresos, ni en impuestos, ni en derechos, ¡ni en nada! ¡Es una mentira a la cual se pueden adherir los idiotas!” (“This country is the country of lies. And the biggest lie of all is this—we are all equal! There is not one single area in which we are equal—not income, not taxes, not rights, not anything! It’s a big lie for the idiots to cling to!”). In addition to offering a biting social critique about discrimination against Mexicans in the United States, this mariachi/actor brings us back around once again to the role of humor in negotiating cultural meaning in video games, as he exclaims, “¡He estudiado Lope de Vega! ¡Aquí tengo suerte si juego el papel de cartero en el rodaje de una película porno!” (“I studied Lope de Vega! Here I’m lucky if I get to play the mailman on a porn shoot!”). If the ironic Civil Border Patrol missions left any doubt, this pointed piece of satire demonstrates the difficulty of reading GTA as a simplistic or unilateral reinforcement of conventional discriminatory attitudes. If we understand GTA as a parody and account for the significance of that fact with sufficient critical rigor, it becomes clear that, while the game may appear to be a culturally conservative reinforcement of hegemonic cultural attitudes on its surface, it is not that—or at the very least, it is never only that. As a parody, the discourse of GTA is often the opposite of what it claims, in order to reveal that, in fact, hegemonic attitudes about culture and race are not as all-encompassing and universal as their defenders would like them to appear.

A critical reader may argue that I am not approaching Grand Theft Auto like a normal player, but rather as an academic, using theory and criticism to make an argument in favor of cultural relativism. Surely there are those players not sophisticated enough to pick up on the multiple layers of meaning at work in a parody like GTA , those who “don’t get” its jokes and those who are simply turned off by its (at times outrageously crude) attempts at humor. But at the same time, one should not assume that players are blind to the way that a complex game like GTA plays with meaning. A 2008 study of “at risk” youth gamers playing GTA: San Andreas noted that the players saw the game as “a satire of media representations,” and even concluded that “there was some evidence that a gaming disposition, when activated around a game with such deep social satire, opened space for these marginalized kids to critique contemporary social structure.” 50 This study is a reminder of players’ capacity for what Sicart calls “ludic practical judgment” and “ludic maturity,” even while engaging in actions that may or may not adhere to real-world ethics “because those actions have meaning within the game for the player-subject.” 51 At the same time, it offers a reminder of the increasing diversity and complexity of the game-playing populace, as well as the role of contextual fidelity in defining the meaning of video game simulations.

Parody is a potentially productive means of transmitting cultural meaning in video games due to the ways subversive and satirical representations can expose cultural fallacies for what they are. When analyzing a game’s ways of representing culture, it is important to remember that, as much literature on games and education has suggested, video games teach the player on multiple levels. In particular, humor in games “can work in support of social or emotional results,” meaning “that humor can enhance persuasion” in video games by combining these results with cognitive functions in the player including attention, recognition, awareness, stimulation, clarification, differentiation, problem solving, retention, creativity, and divergent thinking. 52 In fact, Claire Dormann and Robert Biddle argue that “[s]erious games are often too serious, and the ability of humor to mediate learning suggests that the best games will be both serious and funny.” 53 Dormann and Biddle’s critique offers a reminder that intentionally “serious” or “persuasive” games on political topics are not the only games that have cognitive influence on players. This illustrates the need to intensify our critical examinations of the simulation of race and culture in video games, in order to more realistically assess how tone and other components of communication can affect games’ meaning.

Having surveyed examples of the ways realism and verisimilitude, as well as irony, humor, and parody, affect video games’ meaning, I would like to return now to the question with which this chapter began: Why would a player choose to play as Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in Tropico ? Like most management simulations, Tropico is a game that revolves around decision making and its repercussions. At the beginning of a game session, the player chooses one of several scenarios, each of which places relative value on a different factor, for example, avoiding invasion by the US or USSR, or a revolution from within the country, or both, or achieving a certain percentage of “Happiness”—as a calculable variable—among the island’s population. Based on the task at hand, the player then selects an avatar for that round of play, choosing from a pantheon of famous dictators, revolutionaries, and other leaders—Anastasio Somoza, Manuel Noriega, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Juan Perón, Eva Perón, and Pinochet among them—as well as several fictitious characters. Each of these avatars is described in terms of their title, how they came to power (“Bought Election,” “Elected as Socialist,” etc.), two positive qualities (“Hardworking,” “Patriot,” etc.), and two negative qualities (“Lazy,” “Paranoid,” etc.). As with the example of Montezuma in Civilization examined earlier, these characteristics and attributes do not add up to a historically accurate portrayal of the leaders in question, but rather their meaning in the game hinges upon their ludic value. For example, a leader’s manner of coming to power—through democratic means or corruption, whether it accurately reflects the history of that particular figure or not—affects the Tropican population’s level of trust in the leader, as well as their own sense of “Liberty,” factors which can lead to stability or revolution, depending on the avatar the player chooses.

While the variables attributed to the avatar continue to have calculable effects on gameplay, the name and face of the particular dictatorial avatar that the player has chosen fade quickly into the background, as all leaders are addressed simply as the character of “El Presidente” within the game’s ongoing satirical dialogue. The specificity of historical characters is fleeting in a framework that ultimately is less about history than it is about the conventional stuff of the resource management simulator—building industry and infrastructure with the right balance—as well as the political simulator, which requires the player to balance public opinion. After the opening moments, then, gameplay is only vaguely related to the embodiment of a particular personality, with the player’s control over environmental agency being measured in the output of their island’s cigar factories and rum distilleries, levels of education and employment, the population’s government approval rating, and a number of other factors with varying repercussions depending on the particular scenario being played out.

Notwithstanding these algorithmic considerations as well as a lengthy tradition of “playing dictator” in other forms of media (like the well-established genre of the dictator novel in Latin America), 54 Tropico ’s scenario positing the player as the recently installed autocrat of a fictitious Caribbean island makes it an apt target for the ideological critique. First and foremost, there is the lengthy footnote from Frasca with which I began this chapter, a condemnation of the game that I take very seriously. Though he recognizes that the game is a parody, Frasca argues that Tropico ’s “extreme use of clichés and simplification” represent a “colonialist attitude in video game design,” concluding that the game is “insulting” and even “disgusting.” Building upon Frasca’s critique of the game’s apparent colonialist overtones, Magnet argues that the game functions as “a landscape of colonization for players who would be kings” 55 in an analysis that offers significant insight into the trope of tropicalization and its implications for the game’s meaning. Magnet chose Tropico as the object of her analysis “because of the interest some players have shown in using Tropico as an educational instrument to teach American children about governance,” finding it noteworthy that “the Tropican gamescape is so effective in concealing the underlying assumptions of the game, many of which are intimately tied to ideas about US imperialist expansion, that it could be posited as a useful education tool.” 56 Magnet’s analysis is a critique of the hypothetical possibility of the game being used “unreflexively as an educational tool,” as she explains in her conclusion:

Caution must be exercised in thinking about the educational possibilities for Tropico . In an article on the potential of using video games to teach kids, Squire (2002) suggested that games such as Tropico could serve an instructional purpose with respect to teaching children about “island governance.” Given the ways in which Tropico represents a gamescape of colonization, careful consideration as to the kind of cultural and capitalist messages that the game articulates would have to be an essential part of the educational process. It is frightening to imagine that a game such as Tropico , which represents essentialist stereotypes about Latina/os and Latinidad, could be used unreflexively as an educational tool. 57

The reasons not to play as Pinochet, then, are all too clear from the perspective of the ideological critique: the game is colonialist and demeaning, and its veiled essentialism contributes to the hegemony of imperialist discourse. So why, then, would educators advocate using this “frightening” colonialist simulation as a way of teaching governance without any further critical reflection in the classroom?

As it turns out, the answer is simple: they wouldn’t, and they weren’t. The basis for Magnet’s argument—the assertion that “some players” had sought to use the game as a straightforward (yet unconsciously colonialist) educational tool—was actually aimed at the same text mentioned in the above quote from her conclusion, namely a 2002 article by Kurt Squire in the academic journal Game Studies titled “Cultural Framing of Computer/Video Games.” In that article, Squire in fact argues against using any of these games as a straightforward political text in the classroom in any “unreflexive” manner, primarily focusing on the importance of exploring the pedagogical implications of games including SimCity and Civilization , with Tropico thrown in as one of several minor examples. 58 In a speculative article about how management simulations might possibly be used in future educational settings after their pedagogical potential is better understood, Squire suggests that “students might spent 25 percent of their time playing the game, and the remainder of the time creating maps, historical timelines, researching game concepts, drawing parallels to historical or current events, or interacting with other media, such as books or videos,” so that “the educational value of the game-playing experiences comes not from just the game itself, but from the creative coupling of educational media with effective pedagogy to engage students in meaningful practices.” 59 Just as importantly, Squire raises questions about how these games might be used and misused: he asks whether games such as these “impact players’ conceptions of politics or diplomacy,” making the critical suggestion that students “be required to critique the game and explicitly address built-in simulation biases” as part of using a simulation like Tropico within a pedagogical framework. 60

These details reveal the problem that all too frequently afflicts the application of the ideological critique to complex cultural products like Tropico . Such a critique comes from the perspective of the informed player, but is built on the normative assumption of a “naïve” player, uninformed and incapable of interpreting irony, satire, or parody. This player is akin to what Levinson describes as the “subject-supposed-not-to-know” by the postcolonial critique in Latin American literary studies. 61 For a player who has spent significant time with the game, however, it is difficult to accept the argument that “the user is unconsciously incorporated into the game ideology and, as a result, unproblematically reproduces a particular kind of colonial landscape without being aware that Tropico ’s game rules naturalize certain historical specificities—such as a US-centric worldview.” 62 Indeed, for any mature individual who has played Tropico , it should be no revelation to say that it somehow reflects imperialism—that is exactly what the game is about. It is a broad parody on the theme of imperialism and revolution in the Cold War, with two main targets: propagandistic utopian regimes like that of Fidel Castro (represented by the paternalistic and all-powerful El Presidente), and the imperialist interventionism of the United States in twentieth-century Latin America, a threat of which the player is constantly reminded as leader of their island nation. Once again, to say that the game somehow supports the ideology of any one of these leaders over the other, or that it is in favor of totalitarianism because the player embodies a dictator, is to equate theme to thesis, and to set aside the significance of simulation and parody in favor of a straightforward answer to a question that is anything but.

So what are acceptable reasons for a player to play a game as Pinochet, or as Hernán Cortés, or Moctezuma, or any other historical figure responsible for the deaths of many? My answers, perhaps not surprisingly, are more ludic than ideological. In Gamer Theory , McKenzie Wark offers an antidote to the view of games as spaces where colonialist players who would be kings play out their imperialist pretensions, explaining why good people do bad things in games:

Gamers are not always good Gods. It’s such a temptation to set up a Sim to suffer. Deprive them of a knowledge of cooking and pretty soon they set fire to themselves. Build a house without doors or windows and they starve. Watch as the algorithm works itself out to its terminal state, the bar graphs sliding down to nothing. This violence is not “real.” Sims are not people. They are images. They are images in a world that appears as a vast accumulation of images. Hence the pleasure in destroying images, to demonstrate again and again their worthlessness. They can mean anything and nothing. They have no saving power. But even though the images are meaningless, the algorithm still functions. It assigns, if not meaning, if not veracity, if not necessity, then at least a score to representations. 63

This is what is too frequently forgotten or set aside by the ideological critique: the player is not a dictator, and she is not participating in the assassination of real people any more than she is participating in the cultivation of real crops. Rather, the player is learning to read the game’s algorithm by playing with variables that can frequently be reduced to numerical factors.

This leads me to a dirty little secret that helps destabilize a strictly ideological critique of the way this particular game represents history and makes meaning: Tropico is really just Railroad Tycoon II (Gathering of Developers 1997) with a skinned veneer of political parody (figure 6.3 ). The Tropico series was the brainchild of Phil Steinmeyer, a programmer and designer who had done prior work on the Sid Meier’s Civilization series. Steinmeyer founded Missouri-based PopTop Software in 1993, releasing Railroad Tycoon II as its first major title in 1997, and the original Tropico in 2001. Steinmeyer says that he had mulled over the idea of Tropico for years, and that it was “a nice coincidence that the Railroad Tycoon II engine happened to be a fairly close fit for what Tropico needed” in terms of a software framework capable of running the game’s operations. The combination of a resource management simulation with a political simulation has its roots in a lengthy tradition of games, but Steinmeyer also had a specific inspiration: “The idea for a game where you’re the ruler of your own island, for better or worse, is one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Waaaaay back, there was a game for the old Intellivision console called Utopia , where you ruled an island, built farms, hospitals and housing and fought rebels. It was arguably the first graphical strategy game ever and a favorite of mine, and obviously, we’re touching on a lot of those same elements in Tropico ” 64 (figure 6.4 ). In the beginning, work focused primarily on software functionality—after a year of development, Steinmeyer explains, “the engine was working, the people moved about and behaved fairly realistically, the building interactions worked. … Then we had about seven months to mold these basics into a finished game, layering in politics, balancing things, etc.,” an order of operations that reflects the primacy of simulation over narrative for the game’s designers. 65

One implication of the Railroad Tycoon II framework is that the player’s avatar is ultimately of much less significance than the NPC “miniatures” that make up the Tropican population. Steinmeyer was particularly proud of the way NPCs were diversified in the original game of the series, explaining that in order for the “political and social elements to work we needed deep, realistic people,” which meant coding each NPC in Tropico with “over 50 unique characteristics—from innate qualities, like their intelligence and courage, to their immediate needs like their hunger and rest level, to things like their political views and level of religious belief, to family relationships.” 66 While the attributes of the player’s avatar affect the way the game plays out, those of the multitudinous population can be of even greater significance in determining success or failure, meaning that the particular despot chosen by the player is ultimately of less relative weight in the game than the ideological critique would seem to suggest.

So what exactly is the significance of the player’s choice of avatar in Tropico ? The answer depends on the demands of the situation. Each avatar within the game is assigned certain characteristics. Take, for example, how this plays out in Tropico 3 (Kalypso 2009), an installment in the series that returned to its parodic roots and that clearly evidences the algorithmic analysis I wish to carry out here. In Tropico 3 , each avatar is attributed with a leadership style, a means of coming to power, two of thirteen available positive traits, and two of fifteen available negative traits or flaws (see table 6.1 ).

In turn, each of these qualities is assigned a value that has an impact on the population’s attitudes about the leader. Compare, for example, the relative profiles of Castro and Pinochet in the game:

As might have been predicted from previous examples, these assigned characteristics offer a nod to reality from time to time—Castro rises to power through communist rebellion, and Pinochet through a military coup, for example. However, whether they are accurate or not, these historical details are subjugated to Tropico ’s algorithm, meaning that they are ultimately placeholders for a number of underlying mathematical equations that have little or no correspondence to historical reality. Did Cuban communists gain 10 percentage points of respect when the real-life Castro declared himself a communist? Did farm production increase by exactly or approximately 10 percent? Of course not: these are factors that produce rippling algorithmic effects that make the game interesting as a product of play, not a simulation focused on verisimilitude or accuracy in any “real” sense. In short, these seemingly ideological factors are in fact the superficial skinning over a coded framework: vis-à-vis the context of Railroad Tycoon II , for example, Tropico ’s rebels replace train robbers, while intervention by the World Bank replaces a stock market crash. Considered this way, the real-world referents are nothing more than the superficial décor overlying the code.

But what about players who really do have colonialist fantasies, or perhaps even worse, sadistic dreams of being tyrants who torture, murder, and disappear scores of individuals in their country’s population? Quite simply, those players’ fantasies have no chance of being fulfilled by a game like Tropico . As King and Krzywinska note, the player “is far from entirely free to determine policy in Tropico […] and can face interventions from the game that mirror real-world constraints; the player who runs up too great a budget deficit, for example, faces intervention from the game’s version of the World Bank, an enforced capping of wages of the workforce.” 67 Likewise, if the player starts to assassinate members of the NPC population, the NPCs’ family members and friends will grow increasingly oppositional to the player’s rule and will eventually spark a revolution. As much as a player—or a critic—might want Tropico to be a game about “playing dictator” and carrying out imperialist fantasies, this is ultimately not a satisfying characterization of the possibilities opened up in this particular simulation. Instead, Tropico is a resource and political management simulation whose satirical surface narrative conceals a critique of colonialism that exposes the inherent fallaciousness of a would-be hegemonic discourse.

Our critiques of games’ meanings will be more accurate if we do not base them on the presumption of player naïveté, or the straw man of a subject-supposed-not-to-know. We are better off assuming that players of games like Tropico are, in fact, capable of ludic practical judgment and a nuanced understanding of the multiple levels on which the game produces meaning. As Beth Simone Noveck argues, the player, under the auspices of his avatar, “may act in antisocial and even pathological ways—ways in which the ‘real’ person never would,” because the avatar “is a citizen—a legal and moral personage distinct from the private individual—who acts in a social capacity” determined by the particular rules of the game in question. 68 This is why a player exercising ludic maturity can undertake actions that would be ethically questionable in the real world. It is also why we should recognize that many, if not most, players “get” the jokes made by a game like Tropico (or at the very least, they get that a joke is being made), and therefore they are able to move past the game’s superficial imperialist discourse to the underlying ideological critique that was always already contained within its parodic frame. Contra the naïve player of Tropico , I advocate for an analysis of how a historically themed parodic simulation like Tropico makes meaning for mature and experienced players of video games, the individuals most likely to play a complex resource management simulation like the one in question. Mature players, as we know, do not simply do “what is right” in a real-world moral sense when they play games, but base their in-game behavior on the specific demands of the particular coded environment with which they are interacting.

For a player with ludic maturity, Tropico ’s parody is not just apparent but all-encompassing, impossible to miss. For example, as El Presidente, you are guided through the world by your “enthusiastically loyal” servant, Penúltimo, who mentions early on that he’s working on a project of his own, asking if El Presidente knows a good pharmacy that sells cheap poison (wink, wink). When not pumping the Caribbean rhythms that drive gameplay along, the game’s radio broadcasts are dominated by two competing satirical voices: revolutionary radio host Betty Boom and El Presidente’s lapdog DJ Juanito. Betty Boom vociferously condemns the player’s every move in a hilarious parody of over-the top rhetoric—build a wind turbine, and she will take to the airwaves to provide a vitriolic denunciation of El Presidente’s false environmentalism and ignorance of the real problems of the island (complaints that sometimes have the ludic effect of directing the player’s attention to neglected factors and variables). Juanito, meanwhile, is basically an adoring microphone for his leader, in everything from political reportage to meteorology: “And for our evening forecast,” Juanito explains at a random point over the radio, “El Presidente predicts the weather will be fair, clear and sunny. Remember, El Presidente is right, even when he’s wrong !” I do not believe that any critic could realistically conclude that players are taking messages like Juanito’s at face value. Rather, players of Tropico know that leaders are not right even when they are wrong, and therefore probably find some humor in this parodic piece of dialogue. Critically, we can’t have it both ways—we can’t posit a player capable of engaging in a complex parodic environment that is clearly couched in humor and satire, and at the same time argue that the player is incapable of seeing past the game’s colonialist surface.

If we do take players seriously and assume that they are capable of critically assessing the way a game deals with historical representation, we can envision a scenario in which players could not only succeed in certain scenarios in Tropico 3 more efficiently by playing as Pinochet, they could also benefit from playing as Pinochet by finding the motivation to further explore the history of violence and exploitation. In such a case, a passing familiarity with the darkest reaches of Latin America’s history could lead a player to learn more about that history, even going on to make a difference in the world, or at least in their own personal worldview. If that sounds overly idealistic, I would like to at least offer one small piece of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. When I first purchased Tropico 3 online through Amazon.com , that website used its own algorithms to provide marketable answers to the question, “What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?” The first item recommended, surprisingly, was not a video game, as it almost always is when a customer is browsing games on the site. Rather, it was a regional historical survey by Peter Bakewell that belongs to the Blackwell History of the World series: the most purchased item for Tropico 3 buyers was A History of Latin America .

In the best of cases, culturally and historically contextualized video games can serve as a springboard to player interest in the subject matter at hand. Galloway argues that identity in Sid Meier’s Civilization , the flagship of the management simulation genre, “is modular, instrumental, typed, numerical, algorithmic,” and that “the more one begins to think that Civilization is about a certain ideological interpretation of history (neoconservative, reactionary, or what have you), or even that it creates a computer-generated ‘history effect,’ the more one realizes that it is about the absence of history altogether, or rather, the transcoding of history into specific mathematical models.” 69 This “absence of history” evokes some familiar ideological modes, political perspectives, and cultural tendencies, but does not put them into an order that coincides with real-world history, creating a meaningful void that the player may indeed seek to fill. This is evidenced in a number of phenomena, for example the Civilization Wiki , an open-source site that goes into depth about the playable civilizations and other mechanics of the game series. This Wiki, and many others like it centered on other games, go into detail that far surpasses what is necessary for playing the game, informing the player about real-world events and cultural traditions that fall outside of the would-be magic circle of gameplay.

So, once and for all, why would you choose to play as Pinochet? I hope that this chapter’s discussion of the multiple and coinciding roles of realism, verisimilitude, irony, satire, and parody in generating the meaning of video games has offered sufficient explanation. In short, games are not a form of narrative history—or at least they are not primarily that—and they are of course not real, but rather a means for playing with different factors in order to see the different possible outcomes to a situation. Therefore gamers are not so much “playing dictator” as they are choosing a set of variables—it makes sense to play as Pinochet if the scenario calls for support from the “Militarists” and “Nationalists” for example, but it would be a bad ludic decision to play as Pinochet if the scenario were to involve high democratic expectations on the part of the population or a need to praise others in speeches (as Pinochet, in the game, can only praise himself). In a ludic framework like that of Tropico , it makes little sense to make decisions based on real-world ideology, because they will not allow the player to make progress. Engaging in play requires the player to do things that they cannot or would not do in the real world, including taking actions that would be considered questionable or even reprehensible by real-world cultural standards of morality or decision making. And even still, such actions embody good ludic decision making, because they make sense within the logic of a simulation’s algorithm.

Of course my algorithmic interpretation of cultural meaning in Tropico is not the only one that is possible. Others may interpret it as the opposite of what I have suggested, and this is an inherent quality of works of parody and satire. “One risk for the satirist,” Lisa Gring-Pemble and Martha Solomon Watson have explained, “is that a reader may find the satire amusing, especially when it involves reductio ad absurdum , without sharing the author’s attitudes or viewpoints.” 70 This is true of Grand Theft Auto , it is true of Tropico , and it is also true of scores of other video games from throughout the history of the medium. But when we examine this body of cultural production, which is ever-diversifying in its means of conveying meaning and experience, we must not abandon the critical sensibilities that have guided us through the interpretation of centuries of human civilization that came before. As critics, we have much to say about the way history is conveyed, but up to now we have been too quick to apply incompatible frameworks when explaining how history works in the systems of meaning making particular to video games. Likewise, we must not abandon critical distance and sensitivity when we look at games, but show an understanding of how tone affects meaning. Being too serious can lead to taking games’ messages at face value as if they were expressing their ideological arguments in every snippet of dialogue, and in order to comprehend games in all their dimensions, one of our responses has got to be laughter. In other words, to truly understand the way meaning is made in many video games, we must not lose our sense of humor.