Game Security - Part II: Policing

By Andy Johnson

In part I of our investigation into the way real-world security issues are treated in videogames, we made a cursory examination of the supposed number one threat to world security today: terrorism. As we continue to explore the way games communicate messages about the ways to defend our social and personal safety, the next and related topic to look at is that of policing.

If we return to the concept of terrorism again for a moment, we can look at why policing is an important issue in the real world and why it’s significant that we’re taking in that propositional content from games about it. In the public mindset, terrorism is often seen as a chief in the pantheon of enemies to states. As citizens, our protection from threats by the state consists of policing. The safety net of having a police force – a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things – is one of our principle benefits in “agreeing” to live under the authority of a state’s government. Often, a state is defined as an entity in a territory which has a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force”. The two main arms by which a state potentially operates this monopoly are the police force and the military; consequently, these are among the chief pillars not only of security, but also of what we know today as modern civilisation. Clearly, taking this into account, it’s important that we try to understand how we think about such forces. And again, intentionally or otherwise, games communicate a wide variety of messages to us about this set of linked ideas – force, legitimacy, authority, justice.

//Sticking to protocol
People around the world always seem to have been fascinated by their police guardians. It’s a testament to how significant to popular thought they are that they have such a vast array of nicknames - some complimentary, many rather less so. But whilst perceptions of them have varied from place to place and time to time, they are constantly portrayed in our media: even the briefest analysis of cops in TV series, films and books can show the enormous variety of approaches to the character archetype. We can go from the relatively realistic world occupied by Jimmy McNulty and co in The Wire to the glorious 80s daftness of Axel Foley’s day-glo existence as a Beverley Hills Cop. We can do this by way of Cagney and Lacey, COPS, RoboCop, Miami Vice, even Heartbeat. In their own small way, every one of these portrayals has informed our shared perception of the thin blue line, as part of our common cultural and social consciousness. The fictional nature of many of them does not inhibit their impact. No single depiction is ever likely to be as powerful as the Rodney King case is in Los Angeles or Hillsborough in Sheffield or Liverpool, but nonetheless, we are products of our experiences. The product can be our perceptions and the experiences can easily be cultural, and increasingly are, in an era of accelerated consumption.

And so as violence and force are among the key currencies of many videogame narratives, and among the key concepts we get to wield and make decisions about in games, it’s hardly surprising to find that police and policing have a long history as subjects in the medium. Often these have been film adaptations (RoboCop, The Untouchables) but sometimes there have been police forces and police officers created specifically for the games in which they appear. Police are a different kind of character to other fictional heroes. Ostensibly, they are a link in that chain of authority and justice; they fight crime because it’s their job, and often they bear a sense of duty, a responsibility to “protect and serve”. One of the interesting questions this raises is whether we play games differently because of the fact that we inhabit characters so intimately connected to the people who actually keep us safe in real life. Take Mucky Foot’s 1999 cult game Urban Chaos, for example, in which you play as precocious Union City officer Darci Stern. In your attempts to stop a madman destroying the city at the dawn of the new millennium, you could have Darci arrest or kill the gang members and miscellaneous crooks she encountered around the city. If only a statistics system like the one built into Steam was available in 1999, we might have seen how seriously players took their role as a lawgiver – how many would risk Stern’s health by attacking armed gangsters hand-to-hand, for the satisfaction of an arrest?

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