The Cycle of Misrepresentation

According to Johan Höglund, first-person shooters, more specifically military shooters, is one of the most popular genres nowadays. In his article Electronic Empire: Orientalism Revisited in the Military Shooter, Höglund argues that videogames have become so sophisticated that the representation of the game space is more realist than ever before. How realistic are these environments though? I am sure that technologically, the recreation of the actual space is flawless, what is in question here is the way it is represented. 

Based on the discourse of Orientalism by Edward Said, Höglund argues that the reality of the orient has been misrepresented for centuries, and attention must be paid to video games. Edward Said defines Orientalism as the misrepresentation of the orient - a dissemination of the western hegemonic ideology. Said argues that his experience of being an Arab is far from being what has been represented in books, paintings, movies, and in western media. Said describes it as the 'western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient'. Höglund believes that the military shooter is one form of popular culture that carries the Orientalism discourse because it insists on representing cultural differences, structured by both political and military powers. In this sense, Höglund argues that games are one of the most rapid methods of ideological dissemination in popular culture. ‘Anyone interested in how race, ethnicity, gender and national identity are constructed in the West, and how these constructions also enter non-Western discourse, needs to pay attention to all forms of electronic entertainment and perhaps to computer and console games in particular’. Höglund introduces then Neo-Orientalism, the 'concept that can be described as a discourse that in military electronic entertainment is characterized most importantly by the construction of the Middle East as a frontier zone where a perpetual war between US interests and Islamic terrorism is enacted'. In most military games, the virtual Middle East space is constructed by ‘quasi-historical elements’, and the Arabs are framed as terrorists and extremists Islamic – the enemies. The Close Combat First to Fight is an example:

The dissemination of hegemonic ideologies through the misrepresentation of culture in video games is seen as an essential tool for profit maximization: capitalist process in which standardization is a must. The consumer-gamers, as we’ve all agreed on Friday's lecture, are labelled as white unemployed middle class men: stereotype reinforced constantly by western Media. This representation, however, is far from being a real representation of who gamers really are, similarly to Orientalism. However, in this case, the misrepresentation of the gamer identity exists not for political, or military reasons, but economic. The misrepresentation of gamers is a product of the standardization process of capitalism, and because this stereotype is what determines the representation of everything else in games, the whole process of representation in game culture is corrupt. It is an endless cycle of misrepresentation, unfair to many and very profitable to some. 

My frustration got me thinking of ways in which one could contribute to the construction of a more equalitarian game culture/society. I could not come up with anything useful. But if corporations are making money through the construction of fake identities, why not recreating the identity of gamers through the representation of not only one individual, but of a multicultural community? But then who cares that much to invest so much time in changing norms and sets of behaviors that have been around for hundreds of years just for the sake of representing people in a decent way? No one.