Ideology and the virtual city: Social critique and conformity in video game power fantasies

This article analyses three video games based in modern urban settings, Saints Row IV, Grand Theft Auto V and No More Heroes, to consider how they convey different ideological responses to modern consumer societies in their structural and narrative elements. Using Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts, I consider how expectations surrounding work, leisure, property and relationships create antagonisms that individuals must reconcile with life experience. I then show how the three games exemplify different forms of ideology, in the shape of ‘power fantasies’ that manifest these antagonisms and attempt to resolve them. Throughout the article, I reference social theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Herbert Marcuse to define the ‘neo-liberal’ cultural background from which these ideologies emerge, and outline their features. Such perspectives help evaluate the games as cultural products of today’s neo-liberalized social order, which, I argue, struggle to interrogate systemic issues, but nonetheless contain hints of deeper social critique.