Yes, your videogames make a political statement. How could they not?
When your videogame already involves killing people there is no way back.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, published by Ubisoft.

I have rewritten this article about three times. In every iteration I try to go into details as to why a story about weaponized consumerism and opposing forces killing each other in the next Civil War-like event is inherently filled with politics, but the answer is always easier than it seems, and we don’t have to scan deeply to see how The Division 2 works.

If your videogame makes use of weapons to overcome conflicts presented during the gameplay loop you are already saying something political.

Full stop. Own it. We don’t care about it as much as we care about how weird you get when we bring it up. The question doesn’t even have to do with the idea of the general population possessing life-ending devices. I am solely talking about weapons being there.

The thing with weapons in videogames is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. They are destruction devices. They aren’t shot into the blue for the fun of it, and they contextualize the story in very specific ways. Otherwise you wouldn’t need them, right?

If your videogame has weapons it can be because:

Your characters need them to suppress an opposing force.

Your characters need them to defend themselves from an opposing force.

Your characters need them to kill and terrorize.

Read these sentences out loud and try not to think of the political load they carry. In each and every one of them I can see the us vs. them mentality. The invader, the conquerer, the terrorist.

The ways in which this exogroup — the others— is represented has a strong political connotation: how this opposition is portrayed, their motives, their end goals, changes how we perceive good and evil in a videogame.

When your one and only way to solve conflicts with an opposing force is to shoot them… you are telling us the ancient story of how death and killing imposes the political ideals of the those who win wars.
['Isra N. D.']
['Ubisoft', 'Weapons', 'Politics', 'Videogames', 'Guns']