The Division developer, Massive Entertainment, have explained why they can’t be ‘openly political’ in their games. The company’s chief operating officer Alf Condelius spoke about why it was dangerous to stick their own label on the series. At the Sweden Game Conference in Skovde, Condelius was quizzed on this aspect of the franchise. He revealed that it was up to players themselves to interpret what messages The Division offers them.
“It’s a balance because we cannot be openly political in our games,” he explained via gamesindustry.biz. “So for example in The Division, it’s a dystopian future and there’s a lot of interpretations that it’s something that we see the current society moving towards, but it’s not – it’s a fantasy.
“It’s a universe and a world that we created for people to explore how to be a good person in a slowly decaying world. But people like to put politics into that, and we back away from those interpretations as much as we can because we don’t want to take a stance in current politics.”
Condelius also added his two cents on whether video games can be true art forms if they offer political messages. He stated that the two don’t need to be separate from each other, but that developers had to be careful about the messages they want to convey.
“It has to be subtle for a lot of people to be attracted to it, it has to be undefined for many people to put their own definition to it,” he said. “It has to be vague in some aspects while it’s in a very well defined world, for people to be able to interact with it for a very long time. [If] we want people to play the game for hours and hours, then we cannot be very defined in what everything means. That would be boring. That would be like watching one of the educational movies from high school.”
