"It's a powerful thing to have people tell me how important this game is to them": Interview with Merritt Kopas

It's been too long since I wrote here, and I wanted my first post of 2013 to go off with a polemical bang. But now that we've given the holodeck a bruising, I'd like to post up some of the full interviews from my second piece for the New Statesman: political games.

For that article I wanted to really go beyond platitutes about games wot have politics in them and ask what it means to try and simulate a political situation - to impart an intellectual or emotional message about a system by building and pointedly contextualising a model of that system. One game that did this to interesting effect was Lim, by Merrit Kopas (@m_kopas on Twitter).

"We need empathy simulators, not another game about being a white savior": Interview with Porpentine

pic: porp

Yesterday, I got an article up in the New Statesman about text games which challenge mainstream representations of war. I talked to a bunch of IF authors and game developers to write it, but only a small amount of what they said made the wordcount.

So this week I'll be posting my full interviews with all the cool people who gave me quotes. To make things simple, I am going to post them up in alphabetical order of surname - a system which our first guest, Porpentine, has already glitched by having none.

The Political Uses of Fear

Edited screenshot from Lim, by Merritt Kopas

This post is in response to Blogs of the Round Table. Trigger warning for street harassment, passing anxiety, rape culture. 

Here in videogameland we relish fear like children relish Halloween. Actually, we relish Halloween like children relish Halloween. But our uses of fear are essentially escapist, even hedonistic: we lust after the adrenaline rush of shocks and frights and cathartic thrills like the psychologist in Psycho who has a little too much fun delivering the denouement. Games are very good at fear, too, though when we mention this it's usually just before we note how bad they are at ~*love*~. But that primal, animal emotion, that evolutionary hangover that cross-wires nuclear bombs with teeth and claws, is good for more than rollercoasters. It has political uses. By harnessing fear we can trap even the most privileged players in the frightening subjectivity of another. The scariest things are not the ghosts and goblins of seasonal kitsch, but the hidden, suppressed suffering our society produces as if it were a machine specifically constructed for that purpose.