Problem This Solves
Games are often treated as neutral entertainment, but they inevitably embed the values and power structures of the societies that produce them. When fictional games appear in stories, they compress and make visible ideological systems that might otherwise remain invisible. Without an ideological lens, analysts miss how fictional games function as miniature models of sociopolitical order -- and creators miss one of the most powerful tools fictional games offer for social commentary.
Gualeni and Fassone draw on Janet Murray's concept of "symbolic dramas" and Althusser's ideological state apparatuses to show that fictional games replicate, reveal, and sometimes challenge the dominant ideologies of their fictional (and actual) worlds.
Key Principle
Fictional games function as symbolic dramas (Murray 1997) that "synthesize and compress aspects of human experience into finite, regulated objects." They also operate as ideological state apparatuses (Althusser) in two senses: they represent dominant ideology by offering content that underscores its necessity, and they ensure its continuation by producing goods and services within the ruling economic regime.
A fictional game's rules, affordances, and criteria for success are never ideologically neutral -- they are synecdoches for the larger social and political organization of the fictional world. Values are communicated through three channels: mechanical elements (rules, win conditions), narrative components (framing, fiction), and aesthetic/stylistic choices.
Good Examples
Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979): A deadly board game played on a five-sided wooden board in a frozen, dying world. The game's lethal stakes and rigid structure mirror the brutality and fatalism of the society that plays it. The game does not merely reflect the dystopia -- it is the dystopia in miniature, its rules encoding the social order's indifference to human life.
The game of Virtues and Vices in More's Utopia: A fictional game in which virtues battle vices, directly encoding the moral ideology of the Utopian society. The game is not entertainment separate from ideology -- it is ideology made playable, a pedagogical instrument that reproduces the society's values through structured play.
Murray's reading of Monopoly as "an interpretation of capitalism, an enactment of the allures and disappointments of a zero-sum economy." This illustrates how even actual games function as symbolic dramas -- fictional games amplify this function by making the compression explicit and deliberate within the narrative.
Bad Examples
Reading a fictional game's rules as purely mechanical without asking what values they encode. If a game rewards conquest and resource hoarding, that is not neutral design -- it is ideological content.
Dismissing Murray's reading of Tetris as "a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s" as mere overinterpretation. While Eskelinen (2001) accused Murray of projecting content onto non-representational games, the authors argue such readings may be "deliberate appropriation rather than fumbled hermeneutics."
Assuming fictional games only carry ideology when they are figure games (plot-central). Ground games -- background worldbuilding games -- also carry implicit ideological freight through their rules and structures, even when they appear merely decorative.
Key Quotes
"games synthesize and compress aspects of human experience into finite, regulated objects" -- Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), cited in Chapter 2
"games provide a compelling arena where humans play out their beliefs and ideas" -- Flanagan and Nissenbaum, Values at Play in Digital Games (2014), cited in Chapter 2
"games, like other technologies and like social practices, systems, and institutions -- have values embedded in them" -- Flanagan and Nissenbaum (2014), cited in Chapter 2
"digital gaming may prove to be a cultural practice so deeply mortgaged to an economy of technophilic, high-energy overconsumption, and to ideologically toxic memes of domination, that it must be jettisoned completely from any postcapitalist future" -- Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2021), cited in Chapter 2
Rules of Thumb
- When analyzing a fictional game ideologically, consider two claims: (1) games always replicate, at least in part, the systems that maintain the conditions under which they are produced; (2) audiences inevitably project their systems knowledge onto the games they encounter
- Values in games are communicated through three channels: mechanical elements (rules, win conditions), narrative components (framing), and aesthetic choices -- analyze all three
- Symmetrical games (equal access to means and tools) imply fairness as a core value; asymmetrical games imply hierarchy
- Ideological readings can be contested or subverted -- games with apparently inescapable ideological structures can still be misplayed or leveraged as countercultural tools
- Ideology and utopia form a dialectical pair: where Chapter 2 shows games replicating power structures, Chapter 3 shows games subverting them
Related References
- Fictional Games: The Core Framework -- Foundational definitions; ideology is one of the four thematic uses of fictional games
- Ground and Figure: Analyzing Narrative Prominence -- Ground games carry implicit ideology; figure games make it explicit
- Fictional Games as Utopian Devices -- The dialectical counterpart: fictional games that subvert rather than replicate ideology