Games & Politics
18 video games, in 6 categories, are playable in an interactive exhibition organized by the Goethe-Institut in cooperation with The Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhek .
The international tour will open in a new city nearly every month through 2019 -with a stop in Tehran, Iran in Fall of 2018. (Tour schedule below)
Making Opinions: Computer Games as Commentary on Actual Political Events
Plummeting backward through time, in The Cat and the Coup players turn into the pets of politics and experience world history from a four-legged perspective. As a cat, they solve various puzzles that gradually, in a tale told in reverse order, document first the death of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, then his house arrest and prison sentence, then the coup, and finally his time as Prime Minister. The Iranian prime minister, whose role remains contentious to this day, came to power in 1951 and was deposed in 1953 in a coup orchestrated by the US and British intelligence services.His life story forms the basis for the ‘documentary game’ The Cat and the Coup. The documentary game genre continues to be a serious challenge to game developers. It is difficult to combine an interactive experience based on self-efficacy with unalterable historical facts. The developers of The Cat and the Coup found an unusual solution to this dilemma by deciding to let the players act in Mossadegh’s life story only as his pets and animal companions. The game begins with Mossadegh’s death in 1967, and guides the players, provided they solve the puzzles correctly, back to the beginning of his time in office which was dominated by a contentious proposal, contrary to Anglo-American interests, to nationalize Iranian oil fields. Mossadegh’s term in office was marked by instability from the beginning, which the game articulates visually by introducing a recurring motif of swaying and tilting imagery. And it is the cat, of all things, that causes the swaying and sabotages the negotiations. For example, it causes the chair of Prime Minister Mossadegh to collapse time and time again during his talks with US President Truman until Mossadegh finally plunges further back in time, through a door and an impressive Persian miniature-inspired graphic. It is reminiscent of an elaborate style of wooden in-lay work, adorned with finely wrought floral and Arabic ornaments. This style is collaged together with visual fragments such as a Superman-caricature sporting a lizard’s head and a US flag that emphasizes Mossadegh's UK and US connections. The individual segments of the game are suffused with a poetic and mysterious aura and are partly surreal in character, notably in the fact that most of the British and US game figures have animal heads while Mossadegh appears as a normal human being.
Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad, the developers, were not concerned with creating a game that tells its story from a neutral perspective—besides, what could such a perspective look like?—or foregrounds the players’ self-efficacy, but one “that is unlike the others. The goal of the game is to make players—especially US players—ask themselves more questions about Iran.”1 It was only two years after The Cat and the Coup was published, and precisely 60 years after the coup against Mossadegh, that the CIA publicly acknowledged its leading involvement in these events.2 In an essay published two years prior to the game’s launch, Slavoj Žižek compared the current political situation in Iran to that of a cat walking across an abyss but that would plummet to the ground only if it looked down and realized how far below it was.3 The game The Cat and the Coup express this special feeling of plummeting, of plummeting backward through time.
1 Quoted in Fischer, Jan. “The Cat and the Coup.” Retrieved from http://www.thecatandthecoup. com/GEE10_TheCat.pdf on 18.08.2016.
2 cf. Stark, Florian. “CIA bekennt sich zu Militärputsch 1953 im Iran.” Retrieved from http://www.welt. de/geschichte/article119180782/ CIA-bekennt-sich-zu-Militaerputsch- 1953-im-Iran.html on 18.08.2016.
3 Žižek, Slavoj. “Unser aller Freiheit.” Retrieved from http://www. faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ iran-unser-aller-freiheit-1811344.html on 19.08.2016.
The interactive elements of games can definitely generate more empathy because you are forced to take the role of someone else and to more or less go through that person's experience."
Nina Keil
Journalist,
Game Developer,
Author Gender & Games
from: https://youtu.be/yZoZKrVDagg
Video games can be seen as pure entertainment, as political statements, or even as art. The interactive exhibition “Global Games: Games and Politics” presents sixteen significant politically-ambitious video games from the past twelve years. The games cover a wide range of political topics, including precarious labor conditions, war, gender issues and surveillance. All visitors are encouraged to try out these games and examine how they each present their political potential.
For more information, visit https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/w...
Tour Schedule
Boston/MIT
New York, Columbia University
Manilla
Nancy, France
Singapore
Jakarta
Novosibirk, Russia
Bangkok
Istanbul
Makhanda, South Africa f25 June - 5 July 2020.
Bangkok
Istanbul
Makhanda, South Africa f25 June - 5 July 2020.
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Curator Stephan Schwingeler initially selected The Cat and the Coup for Globale Games, a long-term exhibit starting in 2015 at ZKM. We are honored and grateful as Dr. Schwingeler has since included our video game in New Gameplay at Nam June Paik Art Center (2017) and for GameZone at the Stuttgart Animation Festival where he curated the section of Meaningful Games with an explicitly political message.
German Language Walk-Through for GLOBALE
