In 2013, the “Cultures Monde” program examines the political and ideological power of video games. On the microphone by Christophe Payet, consultant Olivier Mauco and two political video game creators: Gonzalo Frasca and Navid Khonsari, former production manager at Rockstar Games. This edition is titled From Sims to GTA: The Ideology Behind Entertainment and was first aired on December 26, 2013. If video games create new worlds, if they allow us to escape our condition, to project ourselves into others, you don’t have to be naive either: video games often convey an ideology, a vision of the world.

Creators use the ideological power of video games to create overtly politically engaged games

If, since the late 1990s, video games have been blamed for everything wrong, isolating young people from society and, above all, making them violent (although numerous studies have proven the opposite), it must be recognized that video games have an impact on the world.

Games like Grand Theft Auto, for example, when decried as immoral, implicitly offer a harsh critique of the modern world while reaping huge profits from it: GTA 5, for example, has Rockstar games since then in excess of 7.5 billion Dollar spawned its release in 2013. Far from these big blockbusters, some developers and game developers have harnessed the ideological power of video games to create games that engage in overt politics.

• By Christopher Payet
• With Olivier Mauco (Game Media consultant and designer), Gonzalo Frasca (Game designer of political games) and Navid Khonsari (Producer and designer of Iranian-Canadian video games)
• Directed by Alexandre Fougeron
• Cultures Monde – Video Games: From Sims to GTA: The Ideology of Entertainment (1st Air: 26/12/2013)
• Web edition: Radio France documentation
• Archive Ina-Radio France

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“I(ux) is something else: the video game between real and virtual”.