That's like saying atheism is a religion.
I refer to my
previous post. If that does not suffice, let me elaborate further. But in order to do so, we'd first need to refine our political vocabulary, since the term 'politics' seems to be thrown around much too loosely. In political science, the word 'politics' means in fact three different things:
1. Polity: The institutional structures and values that characterize a political system
Games are not part of the institutional framework of a political system. Nevertheless you're free to deliberate on the
perceived values that a certain game
may hold. For example, if you discuss sexist/violent/militaristic/etc... aspects of a certain game, you're actually addressing its
polity. But that's not necessarily something that's inherent in a game product, rather something that's interpreted by the individual user. Hence why that's something very subjective as it depends on individual views and values. So when people say they are tired of politics in video games, they are actually referring to the
polity dimension of 'politics'.
2. Policy: The output, content or decisions resulting from a political system
As far as I'm aware, politicians and political institutions produce laws and not games. But policies can affect games and developers through political regulations, like tax laws, market restrictions, parental ratings and censorship laws. Since policy outputs regulate the framework in which games are produced and presented, it's most important to discuss them, since they affect the gaming industry as a whole. Unfortunately, since policies are a rather formal an dry affair, and require a good understanding of political outputs and general regulations, they are more often than not ignored.
3. Politics: The processes and party cleavages through which decisions are formed
Ironically, games, as a form of entertainment, are least affected by this dimension, since they are hardly relevant for the political decision-making process. The gaming industry as a whole can be subject to a certain policy output thats going through the institutional process, but that's not what's being discussed here. There is a recent trend to attribute certain games to political affiliations (like what's happening to Kingdom Come) but that's something that should be considered highly critical. First of all, you'd need to prove that a certain product directly reflects the political affiliation of the producer and secondly you'd need to show a causal link between the media content that people consume and their political affiliation. Moreover, most games are produced by hundreds of people all sharing different political affiliations, which makes the whole aspect even sillier.
Conclusion:
Coming from a political science perspective, it's simply
wrong to imply that "all games are political".
One would first need to define in what specific way they are political, since games are vastly different from each other. Finally, while war
by itself certainly is a political topic, one cannot induce the same for a war-game. First of all, war and war-games are not the same thing. But more importantly, in order to be considered political, a game would need to make a specific
polity or policy statement. Now it would be silly to assume that all games with a war theme would do such a thing, or do you truly think that games like Hyrule Warriors, Contra, XCOM, Metal Slug, etc... would do such a thing.
Of course you are free to interpret a polity aspect into each and every game, but that's something that depends entirely on you and is not something that can be objectively quantified. In other words, don't expect other people to agree with you, if you're hellbent on analyzing the political content of a specific game.
