The claim that video games are superior to other media rests on a simple idea: that they allow us to momentarily become someone else. A late 1970s Atari ad famously tempted the prospective player to "be a flying ace, a race car champion, a tennis star, and a space pioneer all in one afternoon." Although the means for achieving that have obviously changed dramatically since then, the promise of games as a medium remains largely the same. Ultimately, this promise holds regardless of technological developments in graphics or interface, or even access to "augmented" or "virtual" reality (or any other factors we tend to associate with the highly coveted ideal of "immersion"). Instead, it’s rooted in the very nature of the medium: here you can allegedly do the kind of things you could otherwise only observe at best. You can be the person you'd otherwise only watch or hear or read about. In this sense, it matters little whether the objects one moves around are abstract pixelated shapes or legions of hyper-realistically rendered characters—or indeed pieces of cardboard.

However, what for some speaks to the unique appeal of games as art or entertainment appears suspicious to many on the Left or, more broadly, anyone invested in a project of systemic social change. The key concern is that by allowing us to immerse ourselves in a fictional world, games divert our attention from the real one; offering an illusion of agency, they channel our craving for collective action into an ultimately unproductive fantasy. This is the argument offered by critics such as Matt Christman, who has argued that they should be placed next to “cigarettes and red meat” rather than something like literature or music. In offering a kind of surrogate agency, an ersatz version of taking actual action in the real world, games encourage unhealthy behavior: social isolation, self-alienation, and politically distracting fantasies. While what passes for a "progressive" critique of games is often limited to questions about roles they should or should not allow us to play, for Christman it is games' seemingly inherent focus on this superficial form of agency that is itself the problem.

From this standpoint, two of videogames' famous obsessions—with violence and freedom—can be seen as complementary rather than contradictory. Ostensibly, a focus on the players' freedom to explore fictional worlds and create their own stories might seem like an answer to the casually violent nature of many mainstream games, and the almost militaristic mood that all too often pervades them. But if such freedom is ultimately just a way to reinforce in players the illusion of agency, then it only does what violence can often do better. The semblance of choice and the semblance of power may both very well tie into the same general fantasy: be a flying ace, a tennis star, or a space pioneer; be a hero of your own story, a king of your own realm, or even a god of your own world. Or if you're not into any of that, we could always just let you kill a guy. 

Games' fixation on agency presents an aesthetic and formal challenge to their ambitions as a potential artform. To put it bluntly, it is hard to say anything specific if you want everything to be up to your audience. When, over a decade ago, the film critic Roger Ebert observed that "art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices", and mockingly concluded that video games simply cannot be art at all ("if next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?"), his comments were largely dismissed by games journalists as rooted in ignorance and high-brow gatekeeping. However, Ebert's arrogant tone and lack of experience with games aside, there is something to be said about the underlying foundation of his doubts: the feeling that the kind of freedom or control provided by games may be inherently inimical to the very idea of art; a creeping intuition that a focus on player agency might be fundamentally incompatible with an attempt at actual meaning. After all, there must be a reason why various technological advancements aimed at increasing the players' sense of freedom and agency—such as the advent of large-scale procedural generation, and the resulting proliferation of massive "open worlds"—hardly ushered in an era of artistically innovative games. Inevitably impressive from a technological standpoint, modern virtual worlds increasingly appear as either empty, filled with generic busywork, or obsessively revolving around the player themselves.

Certainly, games cannot escape action and agency as formal issues: insofar as they have to provide their players with a series of choices or challenges, they also have to find a space within their own internal logic where it makes sense for certain matters to be up to someone else. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that games have to unreflexively focus on increasing our sense of agency; instead, they may choose to actively explore it as a subject. In fact, their formal constraints mean they may be uniquely well-placed to do so. By intentionally taking away the player's control at a specific moment, drawing attention to the arbitrary nature of the interface, emphasising the limits of player agency, and otherwise complicating what it means to "act" in a game, games can shed new light on a series of fundamental themes of modernism: how do intentions translate into events in the world? Who, in any given context, is capable of acting upon these intentions? How is collective action negotiated? Or even: what does it mean to perform an action in the first place?  

These days many video games explore these and similar themes: from various strategies and simulations that focus on the nature of collective action (such as Frostpunk, with its interest in class agency, or the recent Workers and Resources, with its exploration of the dynamics of social coordination and negotiation under the Soviet economic model) to narrative-focused games that highlight the relationship between the intentions of an individual and the material results of their actions (with Disco Elysium, the excellent and explicitly Marxist role-playing game, as perhaps the foremost recent example). One can agree or disagree with the claims these games make, but they do make these claims, and they do so using means that are specific to their medium.

To Hell…

One interesting recent example of such a game is Helldivers 2, a cooperative third-person shooter from Arrowhead Studios. Released in February 2024, it was quickly dubbed an unofficial video game adaptation of Starship Troopers, contributing directly to a renewed wave of interest in Paul Verhoeven's 1997 movie, a biting satire on fascism and its repressed presence in prosperous post-war Western democracies. Similarities are obvious from the get-go: in the game, players see the world through the eyes of one of the eponymous "helldivers", sci-fi Nazi shocktroopers of sorts, as they undertake a galaxy-spanning, perpetual military campaign against the enemies of humanity—in this case legions of alien bugs and robots (and, after a post-release update, hyper-intelligent space squids). While said enemies are presented as subhuman—grotesque, violent, driven by animal instincts or pure sadism rather than any ideology or rationale—the player defends not just any particular territory or population, but a "way of life" that glorifies power, physical prowess, and willingness for self-sacrifice. The game borrows from the movie openly in its visual and sound design to the point where Casper Van Dien, the actor who played the protagonist Rico in Starship Troopers, has suggested the possibility of an official crossover.

If anything, Helldivers 2 offers an even more explicit, overt satire on fascism and imperialism than Starship Troopers: players defend "Superearth" and its system of "Managed Democracy"; some of the enemies are clearly styled after the Red Army; various planets are "liberated" for purposes such as oil extraction; all this is communicated through a series of slogans and propaganda broadcasts even more on-the-nose than Starship Troopers' news bloopers. Following its original release, Verhoeven's film was famously mistaken by many for a genuine fascist utopia. It seems like there should be little chance of this ever happening to its game counterpart (but obviously it happened almost instantly).

In more practical terms, playing Helldivers 2 means undertaking a series of short, procedurally generated combat missions that require players to cooperate in groups of up to four at a time. With a team, one kills enemies and achieves a variety of tactical "objectives" on the ground, while between missions one upgrades their stormtroopers. Throughout all of this, the game follows Starship Troopers in emphasizing the expendability of individual lives under a fascist regime, and the disconnect between the point of view of a boots-on-the ground soldier and that of the military industry. For instance, whenever your character dies, they're automatically replaced by a brand new identical one, immediately sent down from orbit.

This surface-level commentary provides the game with a narrative background, but, by itself, it is certainly neither original nor particularly profound. Were it to stop here, it would amount to little more than a superficial homage to Starship Troopers, stuck on top of an enjoyable, but ultimately generic piece of entertainment. However, upon playing Helldivers 2, one quickly realizes that, for all its indebtedness to Verhoeven's movie, it is ultimately interested in deploying its form as a game in order to make a number of original claims. It doesn't necessarily succeed in everything it sets out to achieve, but it certainly insists on the specificity and importance of its own medium; when, in the last line of its opening cinematic, it encourages you to “become a Helldiver”, it is more than an overplayed trope.

Just like the protagonists of Starship Troopers, the eponymous "helldivers" are neither coerced nor manipulated into following orders. They are not victims of circumstance, they're not trying to subvert the system from within, they're not motivated by personal trauma (as they do not have any backstory at all), and they do not convert, at any point, to a more progressive ideology. Instead, they are driven entirely by a desire for power and loot. As a whole, Helldivers 2 leans into this power fantasy. Starting with the tutorial, and then every step of the way after that, the players are constantly praised for their actions. While it is at times undoubtedly ironic, the praise is consistently backed up with rewards: a progression of weapons, assets, options, and cosmetic items with which to customize the look of your helldiver. This basic dopamine-boosting feedback loop is, in a way, very standard, and certainly expected within a certain genre of games: you kill enemies, so you can grow in power, so you can kill more enemies. The point, however, is not the loop itself, but the fact that it is explicitly shared by the player and their in-game avatar. The game draws an emphatic parallel between their basic motivations: the pursuit of loot and upgrades, the chase for new toys and greater agency that keeps the player engaged, is at the same time presented as a core element of the in-game fascist doctrine of conquest and plunder. You’re supposed to get more powerful in order to be of greater service to Superearth and humanity. You're supposed to focus on all the toys, instead of the broader picture.

The result, at least for a while, can be quite interesting. Of course you're not killing anyone, and you're not conquering anything. You're just playing pretend stormtroopers in a fictional sci-fi world, in a game whose creators are most probably self-identified urban progressives. You're not guilty of anything, much less actual fascism. But still, that thing that you feel, that drives you to keep playing? This, rather than fear or ideological zealotry, is what drives your personalized space Nazi too. Your immediate motivations are the same, and equally divorced from the wider political picture.

Unfortunately, Helldivers 2 is unable to follow through on this provocative idea, and for a very simple reason. Being a cooperative multiplayer game, it invites its players not just to embark together on "missions", which constitute the core of the game, but also to collectively strive for broader strategic goals: the "Major Orders" require a large number of players to coordinate their actions, in order to push the overarching narrative forward and grant everyone access to new gameplay-affecting perks and bonuses. From a certain perspective this seems like an obvious choice that complements the theme and drives the player engagement. But it also means that the players have quickly created a “community” around the game, coordinating their in-game actions through various channels, chronicling the history of their military campaigns, creating fan art and even a podcast. Irony has been lost somewhere along the way; at some point Helldivers 2 invited its players to imagine war as something you can do with friends—it's "putting the friend back in the friendly fire", as one critic approvingly put it—or, worse, as a grassroots movement. But this image of war as a “fun” group activity inevitably contradicts what the game is trying to say about the ideological-affective aspects of fascism, and the power fantasy it offers: the communal mechanics provide players with exactly the kind of agency their characters were not supposed to have, at least according to the in-game logic. Unlike in Starship Troopers, where the rhetoric of patriotic collectivism and civic duty remained purely a recruitment tool for the imperial government, here it actually has a purchase on reality—if only for gameplay reasons. 

… and Back

Helldivers 2 is a good example of a game that tries to make an original point about actions and motives, but ends up contradicting itself—seemingly out of a desire to play to our need for (ersatz) agency. But can the contradiction really be blamed on some vice inherent to games as a medium?

It is hard to believe the developers wanted their prospective audience to start thinking about war and imperialism in terms of a grassroots, communal effort. It is what actually happened, but at the same time it never seemed fully intentional, at least not in the way the games' basic meaning clearly is. The contradiction emerges out of the fact that a part of the game doesn't seem to make sense; the communal aspect of it, the various elements of Helldivers 2 as a massive-multiplayer experience, are simply unnecessary, and even jarring, from the standpoint of meaning; from such standpoint, one could easily reimagine it as a single-player game, or one that would only allow local multiplayer. And the reason for this is quite obvious: the developers sought to make a certain point, but they also wanted to make their game into a reliable source of continuous profit by turning it into a "live service." It's undoubtedly fun to play video games with friends, it's fun to belong to a community; it's an easy way to sell—and keep selling—a piece of entertainment.

In other words, what wins out in the end is not some original sin of games as a medium, but quite simply the market. The fundamental failure of Helldivers 2 is  artistic, but by no means inevitable: at the end of the day, it is just a case of an interesting idea being overridden by a desire to attract an audience, and to maximize profit. This is not to say that games' intimate link to the problematic of action and agency plays no role at all; it is what makes them stand out in the entertainment market—it is what the market seeks to monetize. But it's also what makes them interesting from the standpoint of interpretation and criticism. Or, to put it the other way around, what makes games interesting as art ultimately makes it hard for them to become art at all. It's certainly true that as an artform they have been in their infancy for a surprisingly long time—no doubt, a period prolonged at least partially by the exceptional pressure exerted on them from the very beginning by the dynamics of market demand. But this is ultimately a claim about the culture industry—not games, or agency, or cigarettes and red meat.

Pawel Kaczmarski teaches modern and contemporary literature at the University of Wrocław.