ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three videogames about collective identity and security. In Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles, players captain a squad of soldiers defending their homeland from foreign invaders; in Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please they are a passport inspector in a fictional 1980s Eastern Bloc state; in Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris’ Redshirt they must escape an endangered space station by using social media to make powerful friends. These games use comedy and caricature to pose an important question: on what terms is it possible – and to what ends is it permissible – to reduce people to data? In teasing out their answers to this question, the chapter offers a new perspective on the question of games and narrative, arguing that game designers’ attempts to reconcile storytelling with simulation need to be located in the wider context of a cultural shift away from stories and towards information. These games explore the consequences of that shift, foregrounding the injustices that inflexible bureaucratic protocols give rise to, but also suggesting how the notionally freer and more flexible forms of profiling that occur on social media help to develop mechanisms of control and exploitation more intimately tailored to the individual subject.
