Much of the utopian myth-making surrounding virtual worlds throughout the decades of technological progression since the concept first took hold of the collective imagination in the late 20th century has involved their potential to move past the inequalities and social boundaries of the real world, to create a more equitable society though the machine which can inform our real world. The real applications of this technology have, unfortunately, often stood in stark opposition to these ideals, and as virtual experiences, and specifically video games, have risen to the status of arguably the predominant form of entertainment commodity throughout the world, the medium has seen countless examples of harmful societal structures and biases being reproduced and upheld – within both systems which underpin the creation of large-scale games and the very code of the virtual worlds themselves. However, these extensions of our real-world mechanisms of oppression and exploitation have not gone unexamined or uncriticized – and through the use of the same technologies and tools which allow for this inequality to fester, both the real-world economic and virtual encoded dimensions of inequality perpetuated through digital worlds are explored, respectively, in Sondra Perry’s It’s in the Game ‘17 and Grayson Earle’s Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?

In It’s in the Game ‘17, Sondra Perry explores the unethical and uncompensated use of digital likenesses in Electronic Arts’ NCAA Basketball game series, a striking example of how the injustices and inequalities of the real world – in this case, the stunningly brazen exploitation of college basketball players – can be extended and reinforced into the digital. The NCAA’s infamous history of condemning players to essentially athletic indentured servitude, barring them from any material rewards from the staggering amount of labor they put into the sport with only a miniscule chance of progressing far enough to actually make money – is taken to its natural conclusion by EA’s video game series based on the league, where the developers recreate these players as virtual bodies able to be exploited and used to the developers’ and players’ whims, while the players themselves are completely stripped from any agency or even compensation for the digital expropriation of their identities. 

In this supposedly consequence-free virtual world, players non-consensually manipulate and inhabit the bodies of mostly Black-and-brown young people, their identities, lives, and talents are simplified and condensed into raw data and statistics – to be used as tools, not beings, dehumanized into nothing but their athletic functions – just as the game’s eponymous governing body, and the schools who have built billion-dollar empires around their sports franchises, have continued to perpetuate in the real world. All the while, the real world players, whose labor and value has been deemed unworthy of any compensation or reward – such as It’s in the Game’s focus, former collegiate basketball player and brother of the director Sandy Perry – can only watch as their bodies are appropriated and their labor is even further alienated from themselves, without any agency over themselves within the world of the NCAA Basketball video games – and once again, with no money to show for it. In some sense, this contradiction is an extrapolation of the supposed lack of consequences within virtual worlds and games into economic reality, with human beings forced to watch themselves be manipulated for others’ desires without any real recourse, mostly because of the free labor scam of the collegiate basketball industry –  but in part because it’s just a game, an excuse which has provided cover for countless acts perpetrated upon others in many online virtual spaces which would be utterly unacceptable in real life. 

As Rindon Johnson questions in her interview with Willa Köerner, On Navigating the Tension Between Physical and Digital Realms: “A passing thought has become a physical movement in virtual space, and has perhaps been enacted on someone in a way that makes them feel physically violated. How do we deal with that?” In It’s in the Game, Sondra Perry shows this tension can exist beyond the boundaries of virtual space and into the economic realities which create them; the new-media manifestation of dehumanization in the digital facsimile goes hand-in-hand with the far more familiar forms endemic to our relationships to labor and capital. While the NCAA Basketball series may have ended in 2010, after the concept of a video game featuring athletes who were entirely unpaid for their appearance in the massively popular franchise simply became untenable from a PR perspective for EA and the NCAA, the implications of real human beings being used for profit within the virtual space without consent is one which has become even more uncomfortably pressing with massive leaps in graphics processing and 3D digitization alongside the pervasiveness of online media monetization over the past decade.

At the same time, however, It’s in the Game shows these same digital tools used for reproduction and exploitation of bodies and identities, in a sense stripping people of their humanity itself – can also be used to take back aspects of community and culture. Just as her brother’s likeness was taken without consent or compensation, Sondra Perry uses 3D capture technology to create and appropriate the digital facsimiles of historic artifacts ripped from their point of origin and placed on display in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The British Museum, taking the power and agency over these forms for herself.

Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?, instead of focusing on digital worlds’ potential for direct exploitation, centers around the extrapolation of societal biases and repressive structures which exist both externally as policy and internally as part of our collective societal consciousness into the digital world in the closest possible equivalent to the way they function in our real world –  ingrained into the code of the game itself (in this case, Grand Theft Auto V), baked into the rules which govern this virtual space. Even in a game marketed on total player freedom, explicitly in terms of breaking laws and social mores in a space divorced entirely from the real consequences of those actions – the police, who can easily be manipulated into brutalizing civillains, will refuse to attack each other to the point where this rule overrides any change made to the game’s code. 

The power and impunity with which police can exact violence is allowed, and even taken for granted – except towards each other, a digital version of the unspoken “blue wall of silence” which permeates law enforcement in the real United States, a seemingly unbreakable code inextricably linked to the repressive activities of police, ensuring that – just as in the game – they always remain a unified front, even when breaking down the social relationships and communities of others with no consequence. Even in the simulated world of GTA, this societal hierarchy is maintained without question, and perhaps even reified, turning a corrupt social contract between police officers into a law of reality itself. 

As Grayson Earle shows throughout the piece, this process of normalization is somewhat cyclical. Grand Theft Auto V’s developers bake police solidarity into the most basic structures of the game while never questioning this idea, never making it explicit within the text of the narrative – and when this seeming aberration is questioned, even the game’s most dedicated community of people who examine GTA V’s code itself take this concept entirely for granted as simply an intrinsic quirk of the game’s systems, subconsciously perpetuating the unity of police officers even in the face of obvious abuse or corruption by their peers as simply a fact of life – something to be ignored and accepted if thought about at all.

 By baking this police solidarity so unbreakable into the code, GTA V perhaps serves to further cement the right-wing narrative of police as an identity, even a race. As Ryan Kuo describes in his conversation with Wendy Chun surrounding Race as Technology: “In the past, race was very much a sorting technology. In the eighteenth century, it was a way to argue that you can read innate characters based on physical traces.” The various designations and routine actions of GTA V’s various non-player characters bake traits such as occupation into the very DNA of these digital beings, each category of character existing with immutable characteristics used as sorting technologies – subconsciously, if unintentionally, turning these occupational identities into racial categories. And, in the case of police officers, serving to reinforce our own media-driven societal concept of police as an identity to be respected, and not a societal system which needs to or even can be rethought.

While It’s in the Game ‘17 and Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? are linked thematically by their exploration of real-world injustice carried into the realm of the virtual, the two pieces obviously vary quite starkly in presentation, tone, and subject matter. Perry’s piece takes a much more serious approach than Earle’s, appropriate to the far more tangible stakes involved in its subject, while Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? is far more playful in its tone and construction, leaning far more heavily into the virtual world and its mechanics being an inherent part of the work itself. 

Though, it is ultimately the uncanny discomfort which both pieces elicit which connects them most – a sense that worlds created for escapism and entertainment may not be as far apart from the one we inhabit as we may like to believe, whether it be through a reminder of the inherent inequality of the culture industry which produces these worlds and the commodities which intersect with them, or through the concretization of harmful cultural norms and practices within the code, the very laws of nature which govern these worlds. The use and exploitation of virtual bodies, no matter how insignificant the issue may seem in the current day, is something that must be constantly questioned and interrogated, and more equitable systems to govern these virtual bodies must be constructed – or else, as these pieces show, the promise of a better world within the computer, one which is able to move past the collective alienation of a world controlled by capital, will remain nothing more than a fantasy.

Bibliography:

Perry, Sondra, director. It’s in the Game ’17. Sondra Perry, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo / The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2017, https://sondraperry.com/IT-S-IN-THE-GAME-17-at-ICA-Philadelphia.

Earle, Grayson, director. Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? YouTube, Media Art Exploration / Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbXiVb1Uv8c.

Köerner, Willa, and Rindon Johnson. “On Navigating the Tension between Physical and Digital Realms.” On Navigating the Tension between Physical and Digital Realms, The Creative Independent, 14 May 2020, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/artist-rindon-johnson-on-navigating-the-tension-between-physical-and-digital-realms.

Chun, Wendy, and Ryan Kuo. “Ryan Kuo Discusses Race as Technology with Media Scholar Wendy Chun.” ARTnews.com, Art in America, 6 June 2022, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ryan-kuo-race-technology-wendy-chun-63653.