We beat the cops in GTA: Po(ludic)al activism in the age of video games

Abstract

This article explores how individuals reflect on their digital experiences of actualizing fantasies to make sense of their everyday actions, particularly in the context of video gaming. Our study takes a qualitative approach to understanding the context of materializing consumer fantasies, as initially experienced and actualized in video games, and how these fantasies are transformed into material reality, through an investigation of an illustrative case of mass street protests, the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey. The findings suggest that digital virtual experiences in video games have obvious manifestations in the material world, as consumers travel on the borders of reality, moving back and forth into the liminoid terrain of the digital virtual, and provide a deeper understanding of how the blurred boundaries between the virtual and material are established in practice.

The Revolution will not be Gamified: Video Game Activism and Playful Resistance across the Sinosphere

“…Koenitz (2014) and Sezen and Sezen (2016) have each investigated how Turkey's protest games such as Occupy Istanbul (2013) appropriate game structures, logics, discourses, and popularity to showcase forms of civic participation within the safety of the virtual domain, but in ways that might draw players into the actual activist frontlines. Drawing on previous work by Emre et al (2014), Demirbag-Kaplan and Kaplan-Oz (2018) have suggested that a new grammar of playful resistance that is identifiable across both the Tahrir Square and Hong Kong protests is founded in a ubiquitous recognition and understanding of the game-like qualities of social and political unrest. Extending upon Demirbag-Kaplan and Kaplan-Oz with attention to the scholarship of videogame protests in the northeast Asian context, this paper makes the case that Hong Kong's videogame activism inherits strategies and tactics that have appeared elsewhere in Taiwan and Mainland China.…”