When Video Games Hit a Political Nerve

Thailand's military junta seized power by launching a coup, imposing martial law, and muzzling the media—all tactics the regime doesn't seem to have a problem with, unless they happen in a video game.

According to an AP story, the National Council for Peace and Order, the military junta that seized power in Thailand in May, just banned Tropico 5, a computer game that lets users play dictator.

The concept of Tropico 5, the fifth installment of a successful city-building simulation franchise, is quite simple. You, under the guise of a "El Presidente," have to erect your Latin American-style city, and then run it through the ages, doing whatever it takes to cling on to power. Election-rigging, political assassination and merciless crushing of dissent are just some of the techniques that Tropico's caudillo can resort to in order to go to next level.

That game seems to have touched a nerve among Thailand's top brass. The reason for the ban, a spokesperson of video game distributor New Era Thailand told the AP, was that "some part of its content might affect peace and order in the country."

The exact issue is unclear, but there are certainly parallels you could draw between the idea of the game and events in Thailand. The junta has detained activists without charge, imposed curfews, and restricted the media.

Regardless the cause, the fact that a political entity has felt the need to ban a video game in the first place is interesting. Thailand's case is admittedly quite exceptional, but there's also a more general trend of video games being censored not only on the basis of the usual sex-violence dyad, but for political reasons.

China is unsurprisingly among the most active when it comes to vetoing video games that deal with issues it considers taboo. Ten years ago, Beijing blocked the sale of Football Manager 2005 because it recognised Taiwan and Tibet as separate countries, when China considered them part of its territory. Something similar—the depiction of Tibet and Taiwan as independent entities—triggered the ban of strategy game Hearts of Iron in 2005.

In 2013, China's Ministry of Culture went on a rampage against another war video game, Battlefield 4, ordering downloads to be deleted immediately. Battlefield 4's plot revolves around an uprising in China, something that authorities considered a threat to national security and a "form of cultural invasion." Other nations have taken issue with how video games have presented their country in combat scenes; similar bans were adopted for various games in Pakistan last year, and Iran in 2011.

There was a similar rationale behind the politically-motivated ban of a video game in South Korea in 2011. Homefront, a first-person shooter, envisioned the invasion of South Korea (and the US) by North Korea. As the relationship between the Koreas was particularly strained in 2011, the game was likely banned to avoid worsening diplomatic tensions.

Like other forms of art, video games can act as interactive political cases for the views of their authors. Sometimes it happens in quite a blatant way. Over the last few weeks, as the conflict in Gaza intensified, many "instant games" inspired by the conflict popped up in Google Play and the Apple App Store and were swiftly removed by the companies. In almost all cases, they were poorly disguised soapboxes: In Bomb Gaza, the player had to kill "terrorists" in Palestine while avoiding civilian casualties; in Gaza Hero, you had to touch Israeli soldiers to transfigure them into food and medicines.

The issues there are pretty clear-cut, but it's equally important to recognise that political angles in video games can also be used in a positive, much more nuanced way. Just think about Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series and how it raises questions about the global military-industrial complex: With hindsight, Metal Gear Solid 4 looks like a powerful heads-up about some of the issues we are dealing with right now, from the privatization of armies to drone wars.

Unlike the Gaza-inspired "shoot-the-bad-guy" games that are mushrooming today, Metal Gear had a solid, nuanced narrative and treated the topic of war and technology in all its shades of grey. The white knight-black guard narrative was often turned upside down—and the solution was almost never attainable just by going berserk and shooting everybody.