The Meta-synthesis of Political and War Digital Games Studies

Abstract

After September 11th incident, most of digital game developers commenced developing a variety of games with war theme. These games were inducing U.S. diplomatic and western attitudes toward players. Most of these games are about war and they include attractive designs and interactive features to immerse players; however, these games are transmitting political and ideological attitudes. The sales amount and audience of these games increased gradually in global scale which led to popularity among gamers in the past two decades. This paper is a qualitative analysis with meta-synthesis research method. In this method, after searching, we select 22 related papers among dimestic and international qualitative research in political and war digital games field. The criteria of classification in our research is based on opinion holders that the findings are coded in each class. Theoretical framework of this paper includes Cultural Imperialism and Orientalism approaches. The results of this research confirm that digital games, specifically action and first-person shooting genres with war theme are like enormous powerful media and diplomatic tools in the hands of game companies which are utilized to transmit their political messages to domestic and international players (audience), in order to orient their political, ideological and cultural attitudes, reproduce race, ethnic and religious stereotypes, and perpetuate inverse representation of East.

Keywords

• digital games
• political and war games
• cultural imperialism
• orientalism