A few months ago, controversy stirred around one of the core maintainers of Hyprland, the Linux window manager, facing backlash for their political stances. It has been extensively covered by a slew of "techtubers" and bloggers, and I am not interested in re-hashing the events here. However, the discussion bubbled up an all-too-familiar sentiment: "Why did they have to bring politics into it?" "It" here refers to whatever the topic of discussion is. This phrase, to me, reveals the continued misunderstanding of what is or isn’t "political".
A typical topic the phrase is used against is video games. Often, people bemoan video games for being "political" when the themes or content of a specific game are perceived as such, but let's take a step back and look at the category more widely.
Reasonable societies agree that young people, especially minors, should be shielded from experiencing content with "adult themes" - drug use, violence, sex - because they are typically impressionable and lack the life experience to contextualize such themes. Thus, governments, whose core goal should be to uphold the best interest of society, form regulatory rating agencies to help label, categorize, and restrict the sale of media with adult themes to the appropriate audiences.
Media companies are thus aware that producing art (or "content") with heavy themes in it will restrict the audience they are able to reach. So they made a political calculation when they choose to fund projects that may avoid "mature" content. Video game creators navigate the political landscape of their desired target market and audience before a game's story is even written, and they make a political choice, even if subconsciously, every time they make decisions as to the game’s direction.
One could dive much deeper into the politics, or even philosophy, that determines what themes are deemed unfit for children, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
This is, obviously, one aspect of a highly simplified example, but you could go through this analysis for literally everything. This is the point I wish to stress. Politics is simply the systems and structures societies create to organize, actualize, and exercise ideology.
These ideologies can be further broken down into philosophies, codes of ethics, etc. But there is no human-touched creation that lacks the influence of political thought or action. This understanding then raises the question: "If everything is political, why do people complain about things 'becoming political'?" To me, the answer lies in how people experience ideology itself.
We are all born into and shaped by the most pervasive ideologies of our current times. We exist immersed in the theories, "common sense", and cultural aspects that make our society function. At one point or another, all of these aspects were explicitly ideological - ideas about how society should be. They became "reality", as Lacanian Psychoanalysis would posit, through various historical movements and events. However, most of us simply experience this "reality" and do not in our day-to-day have to contend with or acknowledge the ideological aspects that maintain it. In this way, our "reality" and our "status quo" are very similar.
Journalist Mark Fisher points out in Capitalist Realism that the ultimate success of an ideology is to reach this "naturalized" point, where we no longer even perceive the ideology that is functioning in the background. Quoting from philosopher Alenka Zupancic, Fisher warns that we should "be most alert to the functioning of ideology" when that ideology "presents itself as empirical fact (or biological, economic...) necessity (and that we tend to perceive as non-ideological)." This "naturalized" state of ideology is what leads someone to bemoan something "becoming political".
Let's re-examine video games and try to uncover the ideologies that might play a role in the space. Journalist Anita Sarkeesian became the centerpiece of the "gamergate" controversy around 2012 for her critiques of the video game space as heavily reliant on misogynistic tropes. "Gamergaters", as her critics came to be known, claimed to be defending gamer culture and battling against "political correctness" and "feminist ideology", while promoting "ethics in video games journalism".
Gamergaters perceived these movements (feminism, social justice) as uniquely political. They believed Sarkeesian and her ilk to desire to insert these politics into gaming despite the fact, as we have discussed already, that video games had already and were always politically charged before Sarkeesian ever came around.
The problem for the gamergater was that Sarkeesian was poking and prodding at the edges of their gamer "reality". In the Lacanian understanding, she was trying to get at the "Real". She was pointing out uncomfortable things about the naturalized ideology that pervades the video game space.
It is easy to say this 13 years later, but "#Gamergate" was not truly about ethics in video game journalism or defending against some outside threat to the video game community. Gamergate is an extreme example of the knee-jerk "get politics out of my favorite thing" reaction. The reason we can perceive Sarkeesian's critiques as ideologically motivated, is because the ideology that she professed challenges the naturalized ideology that was already prevalent in the gaming community. Straight, cis men gamers were used to being the default audience - which youtuber Shaun covers well in this timestamped section of his video on Stellar Blade. They did not have to ever choose to be straight men in their games, the idea that they would have to if Sarkeesian got her way, burst the bubble of their naturalized ideology.
In this way ideology is like body odor; we all emit it at one point or another, but we all get a little uncomfortable when ours is pointed out to us. It may be helpful to remind ourselves that as much as it is “True” for our society that video games are a male hobby, so too was the divine right of kings “True” for a peasant in 1600.
The true point I want to get across is that it is misguided to bemoan something "getting political". It is way more intellectually rigorous and interesting to analyze and break down the ideologies that are pervasive and lie unseen in everything we see and experience, and this can be applied no matter where you land on the political spectrum. Think of it as healthy skepticism, and try to uncover what "realities" and "empirical facts" obfuscate the "Real".
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