“Who is playing?” I asked him.

“Israel and Lebanon” he said.

“Like some sort of video game Olympics?”

“No no no,” and he smiled, “that wouldn’t be a ‘The Great Secret.’” The team of “counterterrorists” threw a couple grenades and started firing, peering around corners and strafing.  

“Then who is playing as Israel and Lebanon?”

“IDF,” Halil pitched his screen to the rushing counterterrorist team, “and Hezbollah,” he tilted in the direction of the virtual AK fire. “This is my ‘Middle East Peace Plan.’” He said the phrase derisively, putting on his best American accent.

Witcher 3, for example, features an exceptionally sharp moment of reflection on race, prejudice and power. As your protagonist Geralt explores the fictional province of Novigrad, you learn that witch hunters from a cult called the Eternal Fire are persecuting mages and driving them underground. Geralt helps them to escape, but when he returns later in the game, he learns that the Eternal Fire has begun to burn non-humans at the stake in place of mages, leaving their charred remains outside the city’s gates.

As Geralt narrates, “Hatred and prejudice will never be eradicated. And witch hunts will never be about witches. To have a scapegoat—that’s the key. Humans always fear the alien, the odd. Once the mages had left Novigrad, folk turned their anger against the other races and as they have for ages, branded their neighbors their greatest foes.”

Geralt’s observation sounds like a nod to the 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” authored by Pulitzer-winning scholar Richard Hofstadetr. Analyzing the rightwing Goldwater movement of the 1960’s, Hofstadter remarked on “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority,” arguing that governmental and religious organizations eternally invent villains—gays, immigrants, feminists, Muslims (counterparts to the metaphorical mages and elves)—to maintain a climate of paranoia that they capitalize on for political leverage and control of the populace.

So how is it that a game fully aware of how ethnic and religious prejudices are inventions used to control us can produce such myopic and prejudiced arguments? Why are the metaphors lost on players? Because it positions the protagonist and thus the player as a "neutral observer,” a perspective that falsifies the dynamics of oppression.