This past Thursday, on the very day we learned of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s capture and death, the popular video game blog Kotaku reported that the story of the dictator’s demise is already being transformed into a video game by Kuma Games, the company that also brought us a gamified version of Osama bin Laden’s capture and death. Kotaku reports that the game will be ready to play as early as this Tuesday.
Media theorist Alexander Galloway has suggested that forms of configuration such as those found in video games “express processes in [broader] culture that are large, unknown, dangerous, and painful.” If Galloway is right, then Kuma Games’ immediate impulse to create a video game about Qaddafi’s capture may be more than just a marketing ploy (though it is that as well). The desire to translate events like Qaddafi’s and bin Laden’s deaths into video games is also part of what we might call algorithmic sorting: the cultural attempt to simplify complex historical and social issues into patterns that we can recognize and make sense of. Typically, this is accomplished by vastly reducing the variables and historical contexts involved and effectively transforming lived events into games with predictable rules, defeatable “bad guys,” and the hopeful celebration of an “epic win.”
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