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Nordlit 42: Manufacturing Monsters, 2019. Digital object identifier: https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5016.
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MANUFACTURING CONSENT IN VIDEO GAMES—
THE HEGEMONIC MEMORY POLITICS OF METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE
PHANTOM PAIN (2015)
Emil Lundedal Hammar (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
Abstract: In this article I argue that the structural conditions of global capitalism and
postcolonialism encourage game developers to rearticulate hegemonic memory politics
and suppress subaltern identities. This claim is corroborated via an application of
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model to the Japanese-developed
video game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. This case study highlights that the
hegemonic articulations of colonial histories are not exclusive to Western entertainment
products where instead modes of production matter in the ‘manufacturing of mnemonic
hegemony’. I also propose that the propaganda model, while instructive, can be
improved further by acknowledging a technological filter and the role of the subaltern.
Thus, the article furthers the understanding of the relation between production and form
in contemporary technological phenomena like video games and how this relation
motivates hegemonic articulations of the past in contemporary mass culture.
Keywords: cultural memory; political economy; video games; postcolonialism.
Introduction—Playing the Cold War
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain1 is an action-stealth video game that lets
consumers play with Cold War colonialism in the Soviet-Afghan war and the Angolan
Civil War. As the rogue US soldier ‘Venom Snake’, players do mercenary contracts for
either the US or the Soviet Union. As part of this mercenary work, MGSV positions
players as neutral between the warring imperialist interests, so that neither the US or the
Soviet Union are seen as more legitimate than the other—i.e. both imperial nations in
the game are part of the same hegemony with “a common interest in opposing military
structures” (Kaldor 1991: 112). Players are tasked with building up Snake’s own private
paramilitary army called the ‘Diamond Dogs’ by taking up mercenary contracts in
Afghanistan and Angola for either US- or Soviet-backed movements such as the real-
historical ‘União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola’ (UNITA) and
‘Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola—Partido do Trabalho’ (MPLA). Player
activities consist of procuring resources from Afghanistan and Angola, killing or
capturing enemy soldiers for players’ own gain, and destroying their military
installations. The game’s main narrative covers political themes such as the loss of
language through cultural imperialism, the interests of colonial powers, and the
dynamics of managing a paramilitary mercenary force, something of which I elaborate
on later. Yet despite these relatively refreshing political themes in mass cultural
entertainment, I claim that the game still ‘manufactures mnemonic hegemony’ in its
Cold War depiction of Afghanistan and Angola.
1 Hereafter referred to as MGSV.
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
280
Before proceeding, by memory politics, I refer to the political aspects of how
individuals and collectives construct understandings of the past through culture (Erll
2011; Rigney 2016) where multimodal interests compete over the formation of cultural
memory. Here, contemporary power relationships affect the dominant consensus of our
recollection of the past; what Berthold Molden terms ‘mnemonic hegemony’ (Molden
2016). As he writes, “access to and control over the means of communication and
diffusion of historical narratives are of utmost importance for the establishment and
maintenance of mnemonic hegemony” (Molden 2016: 134). By manufacturing of
mnemonic hegemony, I here denote the process where cultural expressions, such as
video games, construct dominant cultural memory that, among other things, reduces
already marginalized groups and counter-hegemonic ideologies to dehumanized
monsters or antagonists (Hall 1997; Said 1979 [1978]), if not subaltern (Pandey 1995).
The latter, especially, are represented with little agency, few capacities to express
themselves, and fewer conditions for ethical consideration (Hartmann 2017). The
subaltern are positioned within mnemonic hegemony2 so that they cannot articulate
themselves inside it (Spivak 2010 [1988]). Such positions of subalternity can be
reinstated with the help of hegemonic cultural expressions. In mass media, the subaltern
are often left without a voice or humanity (Beverley 2001: 54), if not explicitly depicted
as dangerous monsters (Calafell 2015). As I argue, this mnemonic hegemony and the
reproduction of the subaltern can be seen in the case of Afghanistan and Angola in
MGSV. To account for this, I trace the game’s memory politics to the game’s context of
production where capitalist and postcolonial structural conditions reign.
As a Japanese game, it is pertinent to inquire how MGSV affirms mnemonic
hegemony of the Cold War. In my analysis of the game, I inversely follow Paul
Martin’s (2018) reading of the Japanese-developed Resident Evil 5 (Capcom 2009),
where he argues that the game’s apparent white colonialist fantasies are a product of
Japanese history and imperialism. In contrast, I read MGSV as a product of global
hegemonic culture rather than only as a product of its origins. As Soraya Murray writes
on MGSV, the juxtaposition between the game’s Japanese origins and its memory
politics “becomes extremely complicated” (Murray 2017: 143) by virtue of the game’s
affirmation of US mnemonic hegemony despite being created in Japan. MGSV, I argue,
frames the Cold War proxy wars in Angolan and Afghanistan with little consideration to
the memories of those most affected, and instead follows Western mnemonic
hegemony. This, I argue, derives from its modes of production.
The game was primarily directed by Hideo Kojima, a 30-plus years games industry
veteran, who is regarded as an auteur (Green 2017; Higgin 2009b), a rare label in the
landscape of blockbuster game development (Nieborg 2011). Co-workers close to
Kojima have stated that he does not care about the money nor the budget of a project in
order to ensure the execution of his vision (NationFusion 2015: 0:34:57). Such
complexities of a non-profit-oriented auteur nuance my argument on the relation
between production and form in MGSV. Therefore, my reading both challenges the
perception of Kojima as a renegade auteur of the industry and the persistence of
Western mnemonic hegemony in mainstream video game production.
2 That is to say that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, the subaltern should not be tied to a nation-state, but
seen as “fragmentary and episodic” (2002: 34).
Emil Lundedal Hammar
281
MGSV is part of the popular Metal Gear series (Stanton 2015) spanning multiple
video games since the first entry called Metal Gear (Konami Computer Entertainment
Tokyo [KCET] 1987). The series is developed and managed by Konami, and directed
by Hideo Kojima and co-developed by hundreds of workers in each entry. The series
emulates the US cinematic spy and action genre (Wang 2014), and it invokes political
themes of espionage, military conflict, nuclear warfare, the Cold War, transfer of genes
and memes, post-traumatic stress disorder, and child soldiers. In addition, contrary to
the norm of mainstream military video games, the series has criticized militarization,
nuclear armament, and governmental power structures (Keogh 2015). Yet, even though
the game tangentially evokes the themes of Cold War colonialism and proxy wars,
players are primarily tasked with rebuilding their military operations via extracting
resources from Afghanistan and Angola, rather than, for example, assisting the
imperialized peoples in them.
Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model
To understand the causes of MGSV’s memory politics of war and colonialism I apply
the ‘propaganda model’ by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002 [1988]). They
originally made several cases for how US news media is more about selling a product
conforming to dominant narratives than about informing their readers about world
affairs—something still apparent today (Edwards/Cromwell 2018), and something
which applies to video games like MGSV. While theirs is not a theoretically exhaustive
model, it is nonetheless instructive in determining some of the factors that motivate
media to serve the interests of the ruling elites. Here, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony is useful (Femia 1987 [1961]; Gramsci 1971 [1929–1935]), where the ruling
classes do not necessarily employ means of coercion to enforce their ideology, but
rather make use of culture to create consent (cf. Hall 1982: 86), while those in the
margins, such as the subaltern, are ‘culturally imperialized’ (Young 2004) and made
voiceless outside the established consensus. It is this manufacturing of hegemony and
marginalization in US news media that Herman and Chomsky (2002 [1988]) investigate
by means of the propaganda model. Using case studies such as coverage of the Vietnam
war (169), the elections in Nicaragua (134), or the Indonesian invasion of East Timor
(33), they aptly identify how counter-hegemonic perspectives are filtered out in leading
US news companies. In turn, what gets produced is ‘propaganda’ that in turn helps
‘manufacture consent’ about contemporary US imperialism (iix).
Herman and Chomsky characterize the propaganda model via the ownership filter;
the advertising filter3; the sourcing filter; the flak filter; and finally the anti-communism
and fear filter (Herman/Chomsky 2002 [1988]: 6)—each of which I define in their
respective sections below. They argue that these filters exclude those perspectives that
challenge the dominant consensus. Or inversely put, these filters establish consensus
regarding what the public at large considers to be common sense.
While Herman and Chomsky focus on news media, similar processes of filtering are
relevant for other media industries, such as Hollywood film and US television
programming (Alford 2015; D’Acci 2004; Molina-Guzmán 2016). Mass culture
undergoes similar manufacturing processes that reproduce and re-affirm hegemony—
3 I do not include advertising as a filter in my application of the model to MGSV. Advertising is simply
not present in this particular instance (Alford 2015).
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
282
the stories told, the perspectives included, the groups represented, etc. are framed by
similar filters that preclude counter-hegemonic expressions.
Although there seems to be a sharp epistemological distinction between news media
and popular culture, I argue that this line can at times appear blurry. Echoing the
epistemological contentions by Hayden White (1990 [1987]), it is important to take
narratives, including fictitious ones, seriously as a form of understanding of history.
Robert Rosenstone (1995) has similarly argued that popular feature films leave a residue
of knowledge in audiences’ understandings of the past. Likewise, cultural memory
studies (Erll 2011; Rigney 2016; Reading 2016 [2015]) take popular culture very
seriously in the formation of understandings of the past. Thus, it is important to consider
different cultural forms due to their potential predispositions on how people see the
world and others (Dyer 2002 [1993]). It is thus helpful to apply Herman and Chomsky’s
model to an analysis of mass entertainment in order to identify the factors that
reproduce hegemony in, for example, video games.
The propaganda model encourages attention to frames of production that predispose
or filter these products along ideological fault lines. As Nicholas Garnham argues,
so long as Marxist analysis concentrates on the ideological content of mass
media, it will be difficult to develop coherent political strategies for resisting
the underlying development in the cultural sphere in general which rests firmly
and increasingly upon the logic of generalized commodity production (1979:
145).
It is useful to consider the production of games as part of a large-scale commercial
culture industry within a capitalist economic system with colonialist roots (Fron et al.
2007; Kerr 2017; Mukherjee 2017) if we are to fully grasp Garnham’s ‘underlying
development’ of, in this case, cultural memory. Thus, when applied as a lens to analyze
games, the propaganda model contributes to existing scholarship on the politics of video
games, the relation between production and form, and, echoing Garnham’s statement
above, uncovering the materialist processes that produce hegemony.
The Political Economy of the Video Games Industry and Games Analysis
In this section, I qualify why Herman and Chomsky’s model is relevant to the games
industry and the analysis of games. Similar to their claim that ownership of news media
is largely concentrated among few vertically-integrated companies (Herman/Chomsky
2002 [1988]: 14), so too does the games industry consist of a few major companies that
by and large have remained static over the last thirty years (Kerr 2017). This
consolidation of cultural and economic power has resulted in fewer titles with ever-
bigger production budgets amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars excluding
marketing costs (Nieborg 2011). One consequence of these large financial investments
is that the games industry relies more and more on retaining their consumers within
their digital eco-systems (Joseph 2018). As a result, homogenous game designs that
encourage constant and repeated activity with behavioristic rewards have become a
mainstay in these products (Nieborg 2016; Stenros and Kultima 2018; Sotamaa/Karppi
2010)—something MGSV also is culpable of. Meanwhile, these expensive projects are
made possible by the labor of predominantly young and often apparently naïve software
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workers in precarious employments (Kerr 2017) who are driven by an easily exploited
passion that game companies use for major surplus profits (Woodcock 2016). These
companies concurrently make use of global production networks in countries with lower
wages and worse working conditions that allows them to exploit cheap, outsourced
labor for maximum profit towards the global power centers (Thomsen 2018). Emanating
from this context of production, the perspectives and ideologies included in these
products conform to the acceptable consensus for entertainment where female
characters are sexualized for assumed straight audiences (Lynch et al. 2016), and their
racialization favors white Eurocentric hierarchies (Srauy 2019 [2017]; Higgin 2009a;
Williams et al. 2009). As studies have shown, US white heterosexual men in their 20s
and 30s dominate the characters available in games (Shaw 2015a; Williams et al. 2009;
Gray 2014), while the conveyed ideologies and possibilities for action are very much in
line with imperialist logics (Mir/Owens 2013; Lammes 2010; Mukherjee 2017; Ford
2016). Thus, the propaganda model and its attention to the ideological implications of
modes of production, help us in understanding why mass cultural games are the way
they are. In order to illustrate the significance of the political economy of video games
on mnemonic hegemony, I now proceed to apply the filters of ownership, sourcing, flak,
and anti-communism and fear to MGSV. I do not include the filter of advertising in my
analysis, since MGSV does not explicitly rely on advertising revenues as its business
model.
Ownership
Herman and Chomsky (2002 [1988]: 3) define the filter of ownership as the size,
concentrated ownership, ownerwealth, and profit orientation of dominant mass-media
firms. They argue that fewer, but larger actors own more and more of mass media, while
their revenue and amassing profits take precedence over all other aspects. The result,
Herman and Chomsky argue, is that ownership filters out perspectives or considerations
that challenge or threaten the position of the owners or the function of the mass media
as a business.
Applying the ownership-filter to the production of MGSV one can highlight the
internal power hierarchy of Konami as a company and how its business culture
influences not only the game’s memory politics but also its workers. Konami Holdings
Corporation is the company that owns and funds the development of the Metal Gear
series since its inception in 1989, with the subsidiary Konami Digital Entertainment as
responsible for digital game development and publishing. Since the increase of game
development budgets, Konami has consolidated its businesses to fewer, but more
expensive projects, until a change of executives allocated resources to less risky
financial investments with higher returns in mobile and arcade platforms. This was
evident back in 2010 when Konami’s low-investment mobile games proved to be
financial successes. It resulted in a restructuring of the company to focus on projects
with lower costs and higher profit-margins (Pearson 2015). Thus, MGSV proved to be
the final blockbuster budget project greenlit by Konami, until upper management cut the
development short and rushed the project’s release in September 2015 following its
multiple delays. This rush also resulted in a public controversy between the director
Hideo Kojima and Konami, where the former was legally barred from speaking to
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
284
anyone outside the company, while his name was erased from the marketing of the
game (Parkin 2015).
The exact production costs of MGSV are unknown, but according to the Japanese
financial newspaper Nikkei (2017b), the total amount was ~80 million USD already six
months prior to release; a high, but not uncommon, amount for mainstream blockbuster
projects. MGSV ended up shipping six million copies in the financial quarter of its
release that resulted in 771.8 million USD in revenue and 210.8 million in profit for
Konami Digital Entertainment (Pearson 2016). The biggest markets for MGSV proved
to be US and European consumers (Grubb 2015; PAL Charts 2015), while the home
market of Japan only had seven percent of total sales (Romano 2015). This means that
MGSV has likely been tailored and developed with the intention to sell in territories
where digital game consumer markets and circulation networks have already been
established to the degree that a hundred million dollars project is sustainable for
Konami. Given the conditions of the ownership filter, it is likely that MGSV’s memory
politics were made appealing, uncontroversial, and comfortable for such markets to
consume.
Some months prior to MGSV’s release, Nikkei also published a report on Konami’s
labor practices and how employees were harassed and bullied by upper management
(Pearson 2015). Not only did the public gain insight into how Hideo Kojima was treated
with the erasure and silencing of his contribution to the project, but the report uncovered
stories of how underperforming employees had to clean up garbage at Konami’s fitness
clubs; computers were disconnected from the Internet to have workers focus on their
task at hand; e-mail addresses were random strings and letters that were randomly
reshuffled every month to prevent people outside the company to contact or ‘poach’
their labor; and lunch breaks were monitored and their total minutes revealed internally
to co-workers in order to increase peer-to-peer surveillance. These were just some of the
revelations that the Nikkei report unearthed, displaying the company’s exploitative and
oppressive working conditions.
Two years later in 2017, Nikkei once again reported that Konami was using its
influence to obstruct former workers at the company from e.g. getting health insurances;
Konami also “files complaints to gaming companies who take on its former employees”
(Nitta/Tani 2017b; Nitta/Tani 2017a). Other examples include warning other gaming
and media companies against hiring ex-workers; closing business due to pressure from
Konami; not being allowed to put Konami experience on their CVs with legal threats;
monitoring the social media activities by employees and punishing them accordingly if
they step out of line. Despite warnings of how these labor practices might hurt the
success and future of the company, Konami has shown record operating profits in 2018
(Valentine 2018), thus confirming what many already knew: Profits and healthy labor
practices often do not go hand in hand.
In MGSV itself, one ‘mechanical aspect’ (Aarseth/Calleja 2015) of particular interest
to this article is the ability to capture and extract enemy soldiers and prisoners for
players’ own employment. The game motivates players to do so based on the skills that
the characters in question possess—proficiency in combat, intelligence, base
development, and a host of other factors related to functioning of the player’s home-
base. The mechanic of capturing and enslaving soldiers for the players character’s ludic
benefit is something that Mukherjee touches upon in his article on slavery and video
Emil Lundedal Hammar
285
games “where the protagonist is a free man and has the agency to change the destiny of
those who are enslaved” (Mukherjee 2016: 245). Leigh Alexander (2015) aptly
observed the parallels between this ‘free man’ managing his enslaved subjects and the
managerial position afforded to players and the labor conditions at Konami. As such,
the ownership filter here highlights abhorrent labor practices that in turn result in a
game where player actions mirror comparable forms of exploitation.
Thus, ownership and the function of business are the foundation for not only the
development of MGSV but also the virtual game world the workers produced. The
owners of Konami have a vested interest in making products that yield high profit, so
they produce playable memory politics that are in line with the preconceived beliefs of
their consumers, as I also illustrate later. Furthermore, the structure of Konami and the
way they treat their employees show how internal labor practices affect the product at
the end where the game system of capturing and managing workers reflect comparable
labor conditions.
Sourcing
Herman and Chomsky define the sourcing filter as how news media acquire information
to produce articles and news segments to sell to audiences (2002 [1988]: 18–19). In US
contexts, government and corporate leadership make up the predominant sources of
information for journalists. This means that news media reporting needs to correlate
with what their sources claim—contesting or opposing them could result in a loss of
access to the information that news media needs in order to do their reporting.
Therefore, they are more likely to reproduce what these sources state—i.e. an elite
consensus—rather than critically engage with the information. While sourcing in news
media is significantly different in video games, I propose that sourcing also constitutes a
viable tool to understand the limited perspectives and beliefs of the developers at
Kojima Productions. For example, in MGSV, the developers used sources for the
landscape of Afghanistan and Angola, the historical information about the Cold War
struggles in these places, the material culture of the setting, and so forth. Thus, while
Herman and Chomsky refer to government sources in journalistic reporting, I move the
concept to refer to the perspectives and inspirational sources that inform the
development of MGSV’s memory politics.
One instance of sourcing that filters out dissent, is its reliance on Hollywood narrative
conventions that align with US interests. The game director Kojima has previously
stated that he wants to shift that focus away from Hollywood (Parkin 2014). Yet MGSV
clearly follows the genres and cultural associations established in Hollywood cinema.
From Kiefer Sutherland—famous for his role as Jack Bauer in the US military
propaganda show 24 (Cochran/Surnow 2001–2010; 2014)—as the voice actor for the
game’s protagonist, to the hiring of Harry Gregson-Williams (composer of several pro-
military films such as The Rock (dir. Michael Bay, 1996) and Spy Game (dir. Tony
Scott, 2001), to the use of hour-long ‘cutscenes’, to the reliance on Hollywood camera
aesthetics, to its military fetishization (Stahl 2009) with the game’s detailed emphasis
on the weapons, US military lingo, and military vehicles, MGSV and the entire series
are known for mimicking US popculture. Moreover, its virtual Afghan landscape mostly
consists of rocks, sand, stony hills, guard posts, military bases, and a couple of clay
houses. Here, Murray aptly writes, “the formal aesthetic sensibility of the game […]
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
286
mirrors the Afghan landscape of the American cultural imaginary” (Murray 2017: 166–
167). In fact, Hideo Kojima revealed in an interview that parts of the depicted
Afghanistan was inspired by the landscapes of Jordan (Metal Gear Wiki 2018), thereby
echoing the “‘Orientialist’ mode of representation” (Šisler 2008: 207), where Middle
Eastern and Arabic countries are flattened in meaning and nuance.
MGSV’s sourcing also highlights its gender dynamics. A series already known for its
use of female characters as sexualized for a male gaze (GamesRadar 2015), the only
female character in MGSV is a mute sniper called ‘Quiet’ who dresses in a bikini, ripped
stockings, and a thong. Kojima excused the visual design by claiming that he wanted to
challenge fans when they dress up (‘cosplay’) as Quiet (Thomsen 2015). However, the
game highly emphasizes her as a sexual object with camera zoom-ins on her cleavage
during cutscenes, stripping animations during helicopter rides, and a gratuitous shower-
scene shown in first-person perspective for assumed straight male consumers. This
sexual objectification is exacerbated with violent misogyny in one scene where Quiet is
electrically tortured and sexually assaulted while the camera lingers on her cleavage.
Thereby, as Gandolfi and Sciannamblo write, MGSV’s gender politics forms “a war
imagery characterized by (a) the exploitation of women and (b) an employment of
female body as a tool to fulfill the visual pleasure of the male gaze” (2019 [2018]: 331).
Quiet, the only female character in the game’s narrative, is unable to speak, is strongly
objectified for heterosexual male gazes, and has to undergo sexualized violence.
Although a thorough gender analysis of MGSV is beyond the scope of this article, from
my reading it is clear that the misogynist dynamics in the game relate to the gender
politics at Konami and the patriarchal aspect of Japanese society with its conservative
and oppressive gender structures. The Western games industry has had decades of
structural sexism that marginalizes and oppresses people who do not identify as cis-men
(Ochsner 2019 [2017]; Fron et al. 2007), and this structural force is intensified in Japan
by its patriarchal contexts (Fujihara 2014; Okabe 2018) with one instance of a female
employee at another Japanese game developer attempting suicide due to sexual
harassment (Ashcraft 2012). As such, the sourcing for how women are represented in
MGSV rely on hegemonic views of the history of women in warfare and media, as well
as a misogynistic games culture, industry, and dominant patriarchal segments of
Japanese society.
Finally, the sourcing filter also relates to how the notion of the subaltern are
effectively voiceless in the manufacture of consent. It is precisely those who can never
be articulated that are excluded from constructions of cultural memory such as in
MGSV. As I show later, the peoples of Afghanistan and Angola are hardly, if ever,
represented in MGSV’s virtual playground. It could reasonably be assumed that the
developers simply did not include or consider what Angolan or Afghan peoples of today
think about the imperial proxy wars in the 1980’s and so implicitly were made voiceless
or non-existent. Their subalternity also extends to counter-hegemonic perspectives such
as decolonization and anti-imperialist ideology, which are also precluded for players.
This is made explicit in an audiotape in the end of the game where one character
informs Venom Snake that
[t]he civil war will keep burning on whether we accept this job or not. Another
East–West proxy war, with the communist MPLA on one side and the
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capitalist-funded CFA on the other. An endless seesaw of blood and violence
played out in the hands of the superpowers. […] For us to survive, we need to
expand our organization, and get strong enough that no one can threaten us. So,
our only option is to fight, and grow, and fight, and grow (Otness 2016).
The game’s narrative thereby forces players to circumvent an anti-imperialist play, by
positioning the Angolan Civil War as a perpetual struggle without any real sides.
Mukherjee, following Edward Said, identifies such foreclosures of anti-imperial
imagination, where “both the geopolitical and the identity maps are ‘adjusted’ by the
colonial hegemonic system” (Mukherjee 2018: 515). It is not possible for MGSV to
grapple with the complexities and contradictions of imperialism in Angola or
Afghanistan, and therefore it has to resolve its tensions by reverting back to its
mnemonic hegemony. Once the game’s narrative ends, players in MGSV are therefore
left without any resolution to the war for independence in Angola or Afghanistan—any
alternative histories and avenues of anti-imperialism are foreclosed by the tyranny of
realism (Shaw 2015b). In that sense, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model can be
further complicated with reference to how groups and counter-hegemonic ideologies are
left out and rendered voiceless via the process of sourcing. In MGSV, it appears that the
peoples of Angola and Afghanistan are effectively without centrality or agency, and
counter-hegemonic commemorative play (Hammar 2017) is not possible.
Flak
Herman and Chomsky define the filter of flak as the individual or organized negative
responses to a media statement or program (2002 [1988]: 26). This occurs when a news
media outlet experiences heavy criticism for publishing controversial news stories. The
‘flak’ refers here to the attack and discrediting of the outlet or individual journalist in
question, which often forces the outlet to withdraw such reporting. In response, news
media must build up barricades, spend resources on legal defense, and protect
advertising that might get withdrawn because of it. Flak therefore serves to demotivate
or force news outlets to refrain from reporting on stories that might entail controversy,
especially from actors with power and wealth at their disposal.
This is evident in the games industry where game publishers want to avert flak as
much as possible. The optimal objective for companies is to rely on hegemonic
depictions in order to sell their game, but simultaneously appear as neutral and
unassuming as possible in engaging with cultural zeitgeists (Campbell 2018). This
becomes palpable in the marketing of blockbuster games, where developers, executives,
and PR downplay or completely absolve the inherent politics of their games, while the
imagery and narrative in the promotional material clearly highlight these politics
(Pfister 2018). Inversely, flak also happens when social criticisms related to gender,
sexuality, or race mobilize reactionary consumers to harass developers and critics,
especially if the initial critics are women and minorities (Massanari 2017; M. Salter
2017; A. Salter/Blodgett 2012). Here, game companies try to avoid the ire of these
reactionary consumers by ignoring the ongoing harassment campaigns, while continuing
to center white American male protagonists and marginalizing white women and people
of color in their products. Game companies thereby avoid flak by adhering to the
established status quo with what appears to be the acceptable form of ideology—i.e. US
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
288
politics with white heterosexual men as the driving force, while other perspectives and
identities are left in the margins and made subaltern.
This adherence to the status quo and avoidance of flak is seen in the landscape of
MGSV. Its version of Afghanistan is empty and devoid of civilians—they are effectively
subaltern. As Pötzsch (2017 [2015]) highlights in his research on the representation of
conflict in war games, civilians in war games are usually ‘selectively filtered’ out. This
way, the genre can “systematically structure player experiences in a way that glorifies
warfare and soldiery and that suppresses unpleasant, yet salient features and
consequences of military and other violent conduct” (157). Afghanistan and Angola are
in a sense a place outside of reality, where players can adopt the role of the invader who
enters the life-less war zone to accrue wealth and personnel in a ‘Just War’ (Donald
2019 [2017]). Flak filtering enables MGSV to convey the view of military conflict as
clean, honorable, and just, with the subaltern being both silent, passive, and ultimately
absent. There is no loss of innocent life and little consideration of the peoples of
Afghanistan. Instead, its virtual playground only represents Soviet-backed Afghan
soldiers and Mujahedeen, and never US military operatives, thereby reproducing the
hegemonic innocence of US imperialism. As Mukherjee writes, “the images of the
orient are always being manufactured and only represent things that colonial
imperialism wishes to show and see” (2018: 515). Indeed, Venom Snake only faces
Soviet soldiers or private military forces without national affiliations, thereby making it
possible to avoid controversy for Konami. One could easily imagine the flak that they
would have received if the game allowed players to assassinate CIA operatives or to
assist the Angolan people rise up against the foreign invaders. While the game does
address the imperial interests of foreign forces in Angola via small audio-clips, this
commentary is unfortunately relegated to optional cassette tapes that players might
accidentally pick up in the virtual landscape and listen to at their own discretion. As
such, the game makes the topic of imperialism optional, if not accidental. Like the
aforementioned phenomenon of game publishers both relying on cultural imagery to
promote their product and denying the politics of such imagery, this allows Konami to
have their ‘Cold War proxy war cake and eat it too’, so to speak. As Murray argues,
[t]hus, the game’s evocation of colonial powers is not reflected upon by the
game’s narrative or its mechanics […]—they are simply a comfortable
narrative contextualization to construct opposition for the US player-character
(2017: 162).
In the game’s depiction of Afghanistan, Murray’s point is seen when there is no sign of
technological progress or civilization beyond military installations, thereby reproducing
the depiction of colonized countries as uncivilized and conflicts only struggles over land
without people or infrastructure (2017: 150). In a sense, Murray argues, “[…]
Afghanistan is configured as in need of intervention” (2017: 167). Players have to travel
via helicopter from their offshore military base to the deserted Afghan landscape to
eliminate opposition, procure resources and personnel, and conquer territory. As such,
the game invites players to ‘intervene’ in the sense that these activities are unlabored
and worthless until players arrive to procure and activate their use-value (researching
Emil Lundedal Hammar
289
equipment, staffing at the base, buying new weapons, etc.) without consideration to
what such ‘extractivism’ entails for the local population.
This extractivism is also seen in the case of Angola (which the game’s narrative refers
to as ‘Africa’, thereby continuing the colonial tradition of reducing countries and
borders created by colonial powers to an entire continent as seen in hegemonic
discourses in other media (Wainaina 2019 [2005])). The Angolan geographical
landscapes in MGSV vary between jungle, swamp, plains, and mud with the occasional
military bases, guard posts, mines, and an oilfield, echoing the Western stereotypical
depiction of sub-Saharan African countries as conflict-ridden nature only populated by
military forces and resources to be appropriated (Bonsu 2009; Himmelman 2012). Yet
while the game explicitly depicts the colonial powers, such as South Africa and the
Soviet Union battling over Angola, this proxy war is seen as a senseless war between
equally opposing sides—i.e. players are not encouraged to reflect upon the victims of
proxy wars, the effects of colonialism on the population, national sovereignty, and so
forth. Instead, the use of these colonial settings serves as a form of ‘window dressing’ to
‘spice’ up the imagined players’ activities. As Murray argues, “as a playable space, it
lends itself even more to the ‘dreamwork of imperialism’” (2017: 138, her emphasis).
Thus, space in MGSV follows Edward Said’s classic definition of imperialism as
“thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that
is lived on and owned by others” (Said 1994 [1993]: 7). Yet these ‘others’ in MGSV are
never really present—i.e. they are effectively subaltern, as established earlier.
Flak, it seems, entails that MGSV’s colonial politics are made comfortable and
inoffensive for players to play with. There is sparse critical commentary on Cold War
imperial interests, the virtual spaces are selectively sanitized from the horrors of war
and instead created as spaces for plundering, and finally the people of Afghanistan and
Angola are reduced to colonial stereotypes, if not entirely erased. It speaks to the
contemporary hegemonic discourse on colonial history that this game’s simulation of
proxy wars are considered inoffensive and playful by consumers and media alike, and
that anything subversive or indeed counter-hegemonic would likely face flak.
To be fair, MGSV also depicts Angolan child soldiers, yet they also serve as a part of
the (Western) visual imagination of sub-Saharan Africa with children holding US- and
Soviet-exported rifles. The dynamics between colonizer and the colonized is
exacerbated when players have to rescue a group of enslaved Angolan child soldiers
from a local diamond mine, and escort them to a landing zone for helicopter extraction.
Afterwards, the children are ‘liberated’ in the sense that they now live on the offshore
military base where they will learn “to read and write, do basic jobs”, thereby giving
them “a chance at a real life” as Venom Snake puts it during a cutscene. Subsequently,
the player-character is able to capture other Angolan child soldiers and send them to the
player’s homebase. While it is unusual for a game with this relatively high budget to
include ‘African’ child soldiers—something which is perceived as controversial by
mainstream Western entertainment companies and audiences—the game does not
comment or elaborate on their politics. The children simply exist in the game as a
superficial nod to the topic of ‘African’ child soldiers—they hardly ever have a unique
name or receive any form of individual characterization with little to no dialogue. It is
simply not possible for players to free them or release them, but instead the choice is
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
290
either to let them continue being child soldiers or imprison them on a remote base to,
mechanically, function as value for better player abilities.
This mechanical reduction of child soldiers, similar to the mechanical function of
slaves in Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry (Hammar 2017; Mukherjee 2016), also speaks
to the technological filtering where realist simulations in video games simply are too
complex to produce and therefore confer limitations on game developers. In order to be
competitive and meet state-of-the-art production values in the games industry,
thousands of workhours are required to develop animations, textures, rigging, lighting,
voice acting, motion capture, script writing, bug-testing, and many other aspects of
contemporary mainstream video game development. As such, the technological filtering
of video games entail that realist simulations are both costly and difficult to produce,
thus excluding non-essential narrative expositions, such as the complexities of child-
soldiers. We see this in MGSV where narrative expositions are relegated to simple
voice-clips between different characters that can be acquired in the game world as the
aforementioned cassette tapes and played as simple audio files for players, something
that is relatively cheap to put in a game. This is a cost-saving measure that cuts back
expenses and reduces the labor complexities of storytelling in video games, and it
thereby filters certain viewpoints that are deemed unimportant by the developers or that
can only be reproduced according to the algorithmic nature of video games. As such, it
can be reasonably assumed that technological impositions matter in the manufacture of
consent as well, insofar as the medium affects our ability to interpret and configure
(Shaw 2017). Here, I am referring to the technological conditions of media that shape
the manufacture of consent to a degree that perhaps Herman and Chomsky did not
account for. Contemporary popular video games are simply very difficult, and therefore
costly, to produce. Moreover, we can reasonably assume that the algorithmic nature of
video games imply that their meaning-making has to conform to this algorithmic
condition, as Alexander Galloway (2006) for example argues on the simulation of
history in video games: All meaning is subjected to the logic of code, e.g. “the
transcoding of history into specific mathematical models” (Galloway 2006: 103). The
intrusion of technological constraints and affordances do ‘filter’ what perspectives are
possible, both on a practical level (political economy of game production) and an
ontological level (algorithmic nature of video games).
Anti-Communism and Fear
Herman and Chomsky define the filter called ‘anti-communism and fear’ (2002 [1988]:
29) as an othering of dissenting opinions that are framed as intolerable and
unreflectively regarded as a threat. Given the ‘Red Scare’ in the US during the Cold
War (Haynes 1995), they refer to the silencing tactic of being labeled a ‘communist’, an
unacceptable position considered beyond the pale in US contexts. The filter of anti-
communism and fear thus refers to positions and labels that are considered a priori
reprehensible by the established hegemonic discourse. The filter is mostly employed as
a rhetorical device to exclude counter-hegemonic perspectives from even being
entertained or engaged with. Basically, Herman and Chomsky’s filter refers to a
fundamental form of radical othering of someone with the objective to delegitimize their
perspectives.
Emil Lundedal Hammar
291
In MGSV, the anti-communism and fear filter is seen in the main villain ‘Skullface’.
He is a disfigured main antagonist who wishes to eradicate the English language
because of US cultural imperialism (cf. Phillipson 1992). His plan is made possible with
the fantasy element of parasitic spores that make people lose their language. Skullface
also intends to arm all nation states with nuclear weapons to allow for MAD (Mutually
Assured Destruction) and nuclear deterrence between all nations. His plans are
ultimately foiled by Venom Snake, who then executes Skullface. In a way, his
motivation echoes the anti-imperialist movements and positions in the 1970’s against
the US cultural imperialism via products and culture such as Disney (Mosco 2009
[1996]: 91–92; Dorfman/Mattelart 1975). In this way, Skullface arguably represents a
position that would otherwise be viewed favorable by those opposing cultural
imperialism via language. Yet by framing anti-imperialist ideologies, such as the
linguistic ramifications of cultural imperialism, as being beyond the pale and associated
with disfigurement, MGSV very much filters out such positions.
Similarly, MGSV also evokes the disease-ridden exotification associated with the
colonized people of the Global South (cf. Fanon 1963 [1961]; Said 1979 [1978];
Stronach 2006). We see this when enemy soldiers turn into mindless husks who are then
controlled by MGSV’s antagonists. This same virulent control of colonized people
mirrors the way the zombie genre has been used as ‘a surface upon which humanity
reflects anxieties’ (Boyer 2014). The ‘subaltern zombie’ of the ‘exotic and dangerous
Africa’ is a symptom of colonial consumers’ anxiety about the colonized lands
reminiscent of the colonial imagination of the African continent as wild and disease-
ridden (Kiple/Kiple 1980).4 In one segment of MGSV, bedridden Angolan children are
medically experimented on in a decrepit, dirty make-shift hospital ward, which
highlights this cultural imagery of ‘Africa’ as a plague-ridden space that needs
intervention from the white savior, Venom Snake. The infected children and soldiers are
both without a voice and without agency, thus they are the ultimate subaltern who
literally cannot speak.
As such, the filter of anti-communism and fear highlights on the one hand how anti-
imperialist ideologies are represented as beyond the pale via the disfigured villain
Skullface, while the spaces of especially Angola are reminiscent of white colonial
imaginations of sub-Saharan Africa as disease-ridden and inhospitable. Therefore,
MGSV propagates an already existing image that shores up a cultural consensus among
Western players regarding anti-Western ideologies and the lands and peoples of Angola
(‘Africa’) and Afghanistan.
Conclusion
MGSV stands out as a game that simulates colonial imaginations of the proxy wars in
1980’s Afghanistan and Angola. Players are able to traverse these spaces without
consequence for local populations and with hegemonic imagery that reduce these spaces
to entirely militarized spaces where enemy soldiers can be captured and enslaved. It
follows US mnemonic hegemony as evidenced in the portrayal of Angola as a disease-
ridden, hostile environment; in how its populations are turned into mute monsters
unable to articulate their struggles; in how these countries solely exist for players to
4 A similar image of ‘Africa’ is also seen in the aforementioned case Resident Evil 5 that invoked similar
dynamics of race and colonialism (Harrer/Pichlmair 2015; Geyser/Tshabalala 2011).
Manufacturing Consent in Video Games
292
extract resources from; in how children are uncivilized soldiers meant to be saved by
foreign interventions; in how both Afghanistan and Angola can be invaded and left
without any consequences to their spaces and inhabitants. Despite being made in Japan,
MGSV reiterates hegemonic ideas that one typically finds in European and North
American imaginations, including patriarchal notions of womanhood seen in the
character Quiet. It is therefore edifying to notice a non-Western collective of individuals
producing a game that reiterates the Western mnemonic hegemony. Via my application
of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, I have shown that the ownership filter
brought attention to the profit-maximizing and exploitation of workers at Konami. The
sourcing filter drew out the game’s Hollywood influences, patriarchal gender norms,
and exclusion of subaltern perspectives. The flak filter showed the erasure of counter-
hegemonic ideas and the reinforcement of US mnemonic hegemony in order to avoid
controversy. Finally, the filter related to anti-communism and fear showed how the
game antagonizes anti-imperialist and subaltern approaches to the memory of the
Angolan and Afghan Civil Wars. Finally, I have indicated venues of interest to an
improved propaganda model, such as technological filters and notions of the subaltern.
In turn, my article potentially serves as a case study to explain how relations of
production frame form. War games, and arguably video games more broadly, are part of
and reproduce a hegemonic system that reinforces Western consensus on cultural
memory related to 21st century colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism, and
ultimately, can be traced back to the political economy of video games.
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Biographical Note
Emil Lundedal Hammar is a PhD candidate in Game and Memory Studies at the
Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway under the
supervision of Dr. Holger Pötzsch. He holds a cand.it in Games Analysis from the IT
University of Copenhagen and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen.
In 2016 he won first prize with a personal essay on the relation between being a citizen
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of a former slave nation of Denmark and playing contemporary digital games dealing
with the 18th-century Caribbean slave system in the essay contest ‘Digital Lives’
organized by the Norwegian cultural organization Fritt Ord. He currently coordinates
the international ENCODE research network at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and
is part of the WAR/GAME research group. Together with Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Emil
also co-edited a special issue on postcolonial perspectives in game studies for the Open
Library of Humanities. His research interests include game studies, memory studies,
critical race theory, the political economy of communication, critical and materialist
approaches to media, and postcolonialism.
Acknowledgements
Emil Lundedal Hammar would like to thank the reviewers and editors for excellent
feedback and guidance.
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