Liang Chenglin
Most netizens are afraid that there is such an experience: the keywords just found in the search engine have become the products pushed by the e-commerce platform in the blink of an eye; the topic of small talk with people suddenly becomes an advertisement in the mobile browser. This kind of "thoughtful" service is often "extremely frightening", which is why online privacy and data collection have become a high-profile issue in recent years.
The focus on this issue is multifaceted. In September 2020, a Netflix documentary called "Surveillance Capitalism: The Social Dilemma" sparked a heated discussion online. The film focuses primarily on the interests of the capitalists, revealing the catastrophe that social media platforms lack ethical oversight and moral introspection are causing. A large number of insiders who have worked for these platforms explain how various well-known websites collect user data without scruples and use algorithms to guide audiences to continuously focus on certain topics, stimulating people to help the platform produce content.
Reflection on capital orientation is only one aspect of the social response, and when social media occupies more and more of people's time and becomes an important place for many people to understand information, express opinions and communicate, concerns about information accuracy, dissent tolerance, etc., are also wrapped up in the problem of "surveillance capitalism", forming a sense of political anxiety. As a result, authoritarian tendencies in the online world, as highly vigilant objects, have become a controversial topic that has been repeatedly characterized and deduced recently.
In October 2016, game developer Osmotic Studios launched a dystopian game called Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You, and in February 2018, it released a sequel, Orwell: Ignorance is Strength. By describing how a surveillance system called Orwell works, the two games attempt to show the enormous risks lurking in digital life, which also gives us an excellent perspective on how gamemakers understand and characterize the political crises of the online age.
Characterizing Social Control: Surveillance Programs in a Free State
The game takes place in a fictional country called "The Nation". Concerned about the volatile situation in its neighbours and domestic security, the government decided to implement a top-secret surveillance program called Orwell. The intelligence services recruited a group of overseas candidates as investigators, under the guidance of intelligence staff, to monitor the files of their own citizens who were not allowed to be viewed by government insiders, hack into people's electronic devices, and check whether they were suspected of being anti-social or terrorists. As an investigator, the player can personally operate the Orwell system, using various public or secret information channels to penetrate into the private life of the so-called "dangerous people".
The first game begins with the Freedom Square bombing. Authorities looked back at the surveillance footage and suspected Cassandra, a young woman who had just been implicated in a criminal case for assaulting police, most likely the installer of the explosive device. Investigators were immediately instructed to collect information about her family, social networks and social media accounts to determine whether she was involved in the bombing. However, as the search deepens, it is not difficult for players to see that the basis for the authorities to determine the suspect is quite suspicious. Emotional dissenting remarks on social networks, online friends, or the political leanings of a community can be documented and used as a sign of social danger. This series of social and speech suspicious points allows investigators to be empowered to monitor various network traces of specific individuals, even private chats and phone recordings.
By the second game, the authority thrust behind this search mission in the gray realm has become even more naked. On the same timeline, Laban Walter, editor-in-chief of the independent media Voices, gained a large following for criticizing the mainstream media. As a result of his repeated attacks on the authoritative newspaper National Watch Eye, orwell's top brass decided to include his family as the subject of the investigation and tried to discredit Walter's public image. Government officials no longer merely imply that investigators make a presumption of guilt to the person under investigation, as in the previous game, but directly ask the investigator to find any evidence of violation of the law in order to issue an arrest warrant against the person under investigation.
The National Beholder is The Nation's most authoritative news site in the game
Portraying the power regime's means of social control as political violence with blurred borders and difficulty containing them is a more common setting for dystopian games. Similar games, such as "Bystander", released in 2016, have set the protagonist of the game as a building manager who helps the authorities monitor city tenants, extending the power downward indefinitely, forming a horror politics scene. However, compared with this totalitarian imagination, Orwell's presentation of state power is obviously more complex and closer to the operating logic of contemporary media power.
In the game, investigators can learn about the propaganda trends of the mainstream media through the news update of the National Observer Eye, an authoritative newspaper that will report extensively on border conflicts and terrorist attacks, and will also give players the headlines of The Nation's continued decline in crime rates. As an illustration of the game's background, they subtly explain why the Orwell system's invasion of personal privacy did not encounter mass public protests.
In policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, published in 1978, Stuart Hall and his Birmingham school peers argued that the traditional liberal state was under threat of authoritarian control. In Britain, a small robbery caused a massive moral and legal panic due to media coverage, and society seemed to have suddenly lost order, and the people for a time became worried and hostile to various forms of movement and minorities, and called for stricter law enforcement and social governance policies.
However, in Hall's view, crime has become the core focus of society, not because of the collapse of social morality, nor does it necessarily mean chaos in the social order. Instead, it was first and foremost a media event, the thrust of which came directly from the deliberate influence of the British authorities on news coverage. At that time, due to the decline of the welfare state, the "consent" of the masses to the capitalist regime began to loosen, and political movements appeared frequently; at the same time, the government lacked control over the capitalist side and encountered the constraints of the commercial media in the dominance of the press. As the social crisis deepens, in order to regain hegemony in a critical political situation, the authorities need to find ways to win back social control. Using media events to cause social panic has become a great way to kill two birds with one stone. The focus of the police, the court system, and the mainstream media on crime has led to a slightly turbulent society to suddenly find a vent for negative emotions. The result is predictable: fear of the marginalized groups of society that may commit violence, the public acquiesced to the government's relatively strict social discipline, and the British government gained greater control over the news media through this panic-ridden gathering of public opinion.
Coincidentally, in Philip Schlesinger's 1991 book Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities, the authors argue that major incidents classified as terrorism often become important thrusts of media regulation. In such incidents, the British authorities were able to legally control the political leanings and content of media coverage. It directly helped the authorities to take control of the interpretation of terrorism, interpreting rational and purposeful hijackings as illogical terrorist attacks. This explanation, in turn, justifies the Government's tightening of press regulations.
Putting the social situation of The Nation in the game into the above context, the game makers focus on the problem of social control presented by such liberal countries in the face of social crisis. In Orwell, The Nation is in an unstable region, neighboring Parges is in a long period of civil unrest, and The Nation is needed to send troops to keep the region safe. Therefore, although The Nation is relatively developed, its domestic contradictions are not lacking in sharpness. Parges has a large influx of refugees, veterans have difficulty finding employment, and the intellectual class in their country is dissatisfied with the government ... It is in this situation that the Orwell system, in conjunction with the public opinion of the mainstream media, has become a killer of social control. Through the perspective of system investigators, the game takes into account the views and emotions of different social groups, including intelligence agencies, dissident communities and ordinary netizens, and these game information also projects the game maker's personal understanding of the contemporary social crisis.
Depicting the ecology of the web: complex individuals, vague states
1. The inner tension of dissident groups
Despite being a dystopian game, Orwell doesn't portray the characters too flat and good and evil. Especially in the case of dissidents, the group portraits are portrayed with great differences. The producers do not blindly highlight the justice of the resisters, but focus on describing the interaction between the social environment and different characters. The Nation's social crisis and authoritarian control have had different effects on these citizens with vastly different identities, and because of this, they exercise their reflexivity and behave differently in response to social crises.
In the first game, government intelligence focuses on a loose network of societies called "Thoughts" in an attempt to search for the real culprits of the bombings. As investigators examine these individuals, players will find that this politically biased group, while sharing dissatisfaction with the social environment, has very different behavioral concepts. The founder of "Ideas," Abraham Goldfils, had great misgivings about the authorities' media governance and was keen to organize youth discussions on media ethics. But in the face of government offers, he was open to participating in the ethical planning of the Orwell system, and only quit the project when it was found that investigators could not perform their tasks neutrally. Among "Thought", Harrison has repeatedly published articles on "Thought" blogs, but in the face of financial pressure, he has become a contributor to the authoritative newspaper "National Observation Eye" and tried to hide his former punk identity in order to keep his job. Veteran Nina, because of her employment difficulties, mental illness, and paranoid ideas of violent resistance, always believed that radical behavior was the best way to raise objections and draw attention to political issues, so she detonated a bomb in Freedom Square.
In the second film, the dissident image is even more gloomy. As a Parges refugee, The Voices of all editor-in-chief Laban Walter has always believed that The Nation's deliberate design caused Parges' national disasters and personal misfortunes, so much so that his family and fans could not accept his obsession with conspiracy theories.
Laban Walter, editor-in-chief of the game Voices, wrote that "war on the state apparatus"
Standing in different social positions and with different background qualifications, dissident groups are not simply resisters who are simply summoned by a sense of social mission. There are also differences in the maturity of their respective political ideas. For example, Goldfils, as a long-time critical intellectual, was more patient in the face of the policies of the authorities and believed in the possibility of reform within the system; in contrast, other dissidents actually lacked a stable political position. Harrison's political gestures seem radical, but he easily bows to reality when frustrated. Nina and Walter's radical behavior has more to do with their resistance to The Nation, but the value behind it is minimal. This group portrait portrayal full of internal tension also makes the logic of government media governance easier to understand in the game.
In the Internet era with frequent information exchanges, the dynamic response of different groups to social conditions is more likely to be discovered, attention and even recognized because of convenient communication conditions, which has a greater social impact. In the face of extreme dissent and even action, in addition to estimating the likelihood of their spread, power holders may also be "forced" to consider stricter social controls. It can be said that complex and unpredictable social risks are the reason why orwell's system appears in the game. Without elaborating on the complexities of dissidents, but simply viewing them as rebels of political oppression, there is a risk that the delicate relationship between government and the people will be difficult to characterize relatively adequately, making the game's accusations against the state apparatus too light.
2. The image of the almighty government
Unfortunately, Orwell does not seem to have devoted the same effort to portraying the state apparatus as it did to dissidents, making the relationship between the game's negative opinion against the authorities and its social control methods ultimately not effectively understood.
In the second film, The Voices of the People's Organizer Laban Walter is obsessed with conspiracy theories, believing that The Nation intervened in Parges' politics and caused the local war, and deliberately created the Freedom Square bombing and killed his wife as revenge for the Voices. A long period of mental paranoia led him to indignantly declare a "war" against The Nation government.
At first, from an investigator's point of view, Laban Walter's accusations against the government were a series of coincidences. His school in Parges was accidentally bombed, and his wife, despite being monitored, was inadvertently implicated in the blast. However, as the investigation progressed, the gamemakers paradoxically implemented Walter's conspiracy theory: the government systematically provoked Walter to indirectly interfere in Parges' elections by means of his editor-in-chief; as for the public opinion movements, as well as the gossip that Walter received, they were under the control of the head of the Orwell system.
Here, the game's image of The Nation government is too all-powerful to appear too realistic. Although the game is set in the internet age of information, it does not depart from the clichés of dystopian games. The state apparatus still maintains complete control over the rapidly changing movements of public opinion and the reactions of the people. To a large extent, this projects the producer's loss and concern about the power structure in contemporary media. Online empowerment is real, but the stronger sense of life is that the Internet has brought only a seemingly greater degree of freedom, and people have paid the price of a loss of personal privacy and increased social control. Faced with the huge disparity in technology and power, producers clearly do not believe that the media can become a place for people to express their ideas and advocate their rights. Lacking such confidence, Orwell also lacks the recognition and empathy for the position of the power side, failing to identify the fact that the authorities' media power continues to expand, and the logic of media governance that does not hesitate to invade personal privacy is, in part, precisely because it lacks control over the complex network of public opinion and its practical impact.
When the understanding of reality shifts, the game's second game's portrayal of the state apparatus suddenly becomes totalitarian. The Orwell system no longer relies on the judgment of investigators to operate, and the intelligence department's instructors directly intervene in the investigation, not only asking players to find out Walter's possible "black material" and combat the prestige of "voices", but also encouraging players to hack into Walter's family's instant messaging software account and search for evidence of illegal arrest.
Influencer, a new mechanism in orwell's second game: the use of the water army's public opinion offensive to combat dissent
Of course, it should be pointed out that this totalitarian imagination is not completely untargeted. In combing through political violence, Schlesinger quotes Max Weber and Anthony Giddens as pointing to totalitarian tendencies in liberal states: no nation-state can avoid moral totalitarianism when the authorities perceive the political situation as urgent and the populace acquiesces. The paradox is that the power to judge the tension of a social situation through strong media control is often in the hands of the authorities.
3. Investigator Model: What is Possible for Ethical Planning?
Faced with this real-world concern, Orwell's core gameplay investigator model is intended to explore a way out. In the case of social control, whether there is a way of governance that can avoid real criminal incidents, but also protect individual rights and interests and avoid power infiltration.
Because mentors from within the government do not have direct access to the private information of The Nation citizens, investigators can only conduct investigations around specific events and populations, but can provide decisive advice in determining whether the respondents are threatening.
However, the game also implies between the lines that this ethical plan cannot really solve the intrusion of political violence into the individual. Both Orwells have multiple endings, and as investigators provide information to intelligence based on their personal political leanings, preferences, and understanding of events, the story is directed to different ends. Whether dissidents exposed orwell's surveillance program, or whether the Orwell system controlled the social crisis, relied heavily on the moral choices of investigators.
At the same time, power structures play a more decisive role. Most of the orders given by the instructor to the investigator either force or intentionally lead the investigator to convict the suspect. In the first game, even if the player fails to search for conclusive evidence, Cassandra and Nina, members of the "Thought" involved in the explosion, are arrested. In contrast, the end of the game is more meaningful. Even if the members of the "Thought" succeeded in revealing to the public the dangers of the Orwell system, forcing the authorities to cancel the plan, the plan would still proceed in secret. An investigator recognized by The Nation as a citizen is recorded as a dangerous element. Due to the inertia of the ideological state apparatus in the struggle for hegemony, the officially controlled Orwell system could not be used as a neutral medium technology.
Orwell's political anxiety
Eventually, Orwell's narrative fell into its own predicament. The game's portrayal of The Nation authorities reveals the pessimism of the producers towards the online medium. In the face of those in power and technological superiority, it seems impossible to avoid social control with authoritarian tendencies. Because of this, the interaction between the authoritative media, the general public and dissident groups in Orwell is presented with great simplicity. The information revealed by the authorities through authoritative media is always able to manipulate people's emotions and provoke dissident groups in a timely manner to serve the predetermined plan.
Here, gamemakers are not unaware of the complexity of the political force field. The problem, however, is that they are more sympathetic to a pessimistic picture of the future: in the current state of power structures in the "one-sided" online world, the resistance of the vulnerable may always exist, but if the stronger side can always win the recognition and acquiesce, power will continue to expand. Orwell's game representation is precisely the "self-actualization" of this view. On the one hand, in the game, the image of the netizen is reduced to a completely ideologically dominated and emotional group; dissidents become loners who lack popular recognition. On the other hand, the producers' excessive attention to online dystopians has also squeezed the space for the expression of social reality outside the Internet: people may rarely express themselves through social media, but they are not "rabble-rousers" who lack a certain judgment on the current state of society; the cold-eyed and dispassionate views in the online world may not be really dissenting, and these moderate views may be the mainstream of a higher voice in daily life. In other words, even if the combination of technology and power is as tight as Orwell shows, we must realize that the online world is only the tip of today's political landscape. The online world, which is covered by all kinds of news, various hot searches and commercial advertisements, is ultimately difficult to replace people's real life, real social feelings, and solid views on which they are built.
However, the "seeing" and "not seeing" in Orwell's representation do reveal a real political anxiety. As a contemporary who lacks the technical ability to enter the online world as a "user", the space for political wrestling is rapidly shrinking. At a time when people's attention is frequently pulled by headlines and emotional views, the possibility of standing firmly in a set of ideas and forming a solid series of views around it may be on the verge of being lost. At a time when most people increasingly rely on the Internet to learn about information, build awareness, communicate, and even sustain their lives, the power structure of the online world is being perceived as an overwhelming "reality" that replaces the tension between the state and the individual.
Orwell's ending speaks of this "reality" and then envisions a hopeless showdown: a dystopian world in which people must wage a thorough struggle against power— even though it will not solve our dilemma. Perhaps, we must carefully distance ourselves from such "reality", see that there are still many possible societies behind the pessimistic network picture, understand the logic of politics in a more complex way, and push society in the ideal direction through temptation and wrestling, rather than the runaway state of violence.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang