I feel like this has been at the back of my mind for more than ten years, at the very least since the George Floyd killing, if not since the Occupy protests or even as far back as 9/11. But first-person shooters about realistic conflicts... well, I don't know if we can do them anymore.
The concept of "copaganda" - media such as movies, TV shows, and video games, "consulted" by major police departments or former major figures of said departments, and invariably promoting a pro-police standpoint - has only really occurred to me since the 2010s. I've definitely thought about it for longer, though. Every Sunday evening, after getting home from the evening services at church, Dad would switch on the TV and put on COPS. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, they'd declare in their Hard Hitting Action News voice. But every episode pretty much went the same way: we'd listen to a Real Police Officer monologue in their car about how hard the job is, how dangerous the job is, before they'd inevitably get drawn into some situation that'd require them to put on the loud sirens, jump out of the car, and yell at someone. Dad would always point out, when someone got cuffed, "This is why you don't break the law. This is why you don't act stupid. This is why you obey the cops."
Police officers have frankly terrified me since I was six years old because of that show. Sure, maybe I was too young to catch on to the unspoken reality that half of the perpetrators on the show were of the non-white persuasion. And sure, the editors and producers of COPS were probably very careful not to use any footage that involved officers shooting at anybody (though, this was before the widespread adoption of Taser-brand electric barb weapons). But being around a police officer in real life, even as part of a school event, I tended not to want to sit anywhere near them.
In video games and movies, the police are nearly always portrayed as heroes. If they aren't, there's typically a Good Cop or two who find out about this and Take Them Down. If it's a video game, that Good Cop is you, no matter how much of a renegade you are. In video games like, say, Police Quest or its spin-off brand SWAT, the game mechanics and sometimes even core game progression in itself depends on you living the Good Cop life. A Good Cop calls for compliance. A Good Cop does not shoot innocents. A Good Cop subdues perpetrators non-lethally, or otherwise convinces them to lay down arms without a fight. A Good Cop always checks all four tires of his vehicle before boarding. A Good Cop... you get it.
The question's stuck with me of late, how well any of these police games really depict the harsh, violent reality of American police work. Does the game adequately discourage players from going against regulation? Are there peaceful options? Can a Video Game Cop actually be a decent citizen? In which situations that the game depicts as Normal would a real-world police officer actually be violating protocol, and do we gloss over it?
And every time I've asked these things of myself, my answer has always been, "I am not the person to investigate these things, because I am a coward."
Yet, now, in 2025, there is Nostalgia for the Cop Games of old. SWAT 4, Irrational Games' ultimate police tactical-entry simulation, is old enough to join the academy itself, but publisher Sierra is nothing more than a rights-holding label under the horrible publishing hydra of Activision-Blizzard-King-Microsoft, and developer Irrational all but collapsed nearly twelve years ago in the wake of Bioshock Infinite costing them far too much to finish. (Sure, they never technically folded, but "laid off almost everybody and changed their name" damned well counts as closing to me.)
Which leaves the window wide open for newcomers to fill the spot. Some contenders to the throne include Superboss Games with Intruder, a competitive stealth-action multiplayer game from 2019 that, from their design brief, sounds like it takes more after Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's "spies VS mercs" mode. But players in this case (on both sides) have access to all the room-clearing techniques and tools that virtual SWAT teams would, such as optical wands and an array of hand signals. It's clear to me that the love for SWAT 4 is there for all of it, mechanically, but it is a PVP-focused game, with most real-world affiliations scrubbed off. It's not The LAPD Versus [insert real criminal organization here], it's Guards Versus Intruders.
On the other hand, we have VOID Interactive's Ready or Not, a game that aims to be perhaps too real. At present writing, the game has just recently launched for consoles, and in the process, had to censor some more contentious things, so naturally, all of the Steam reviews are about that right now, but there are myriad other things that have drawn ire, including a mission set in the middle of a school shooting. I can't speak to how sensitively this is handled, as I haven't been willing to spend the $50 USD on it in the face of other things I've heard about the dev team - things I don't remember well enough to write here, but the game is presently, resolutely Not on my Steam wishlist, and I clearly had some reason for that. It must be a "vibes" thing. I tend to trust my gut on those.
The reason I even bring it up today is in the wake of the best way to kill your enthusiasm for any given computer game: accidentally reading the Steam Discussions. I was looking at the demo for a differently-themed realistic FPS, MicroProse's Dagger Directive, a more military-oriented, outdoor-focused simulation shooter in the vein of Novalogic's 1998 Delta Force. In their demo, you are given a handful of missions where you assemble your loadout with a very X-COM-esque storage matrix, insert into the rolling hills of Wherever, and snipe at pixels from 200+ meters, just like the old days. I found my time with the demo to be reasonable enough, and thought, why not see what other people think about it?
This was, of course, a giant mistake.
Among the few threads present in Steam Discussions was an ongoing flame war regarding the identity of one of the in-game factions, described by multiple participants as "Y'all Qaeda"; I'll admit to finding the label at least slightly chuckle-worthy. Some players legitimately had enough issue with an opposing force depicted as right-winged domestic terrorists that they would cause a stink in the forum over it, perhaps under some impression that screaming loudly enough about it would force the devs at Arcane Alpacas to rewrite all of their mission briefings to remove them. Or, as the thread-starter demanded, replace them with some people who "have a reason to shoot at Americans," going on to suggest multiple Middle Eastern countries. Because of course, some people's viewpoints of the world have not changed since the George H.W. Bush years.
Really, if we - as in, the Video Game as a Medium, collectively - are going to continue making games about fighting wars as a military, or about enforcing The Law, I feel like we're either going to have to start taking a G.I. Joe or Ace Combat approach to it and start using fictional countries and authorities, or give some serious thought about whether we want to glorify the real-world authorities even indirectly. It bothers me how many right-wing nut jobs have done their damnedest to occupy and pollute the medium, how many games that -- damn it all, are otherwise quite fun -- directly lead to profits for organizations who exist to press boots upon the throats of people too poor or too brown to even be counted as "human" to them.
I mean, forgive me for raving on in front of my pin-board, but practically everybody big is in on it. The United States military, the police departments of every major city in the country, the private militaries and defense contractors who license their brands and technology to game developers, and of course, companies like Microsoft who develop and serve technology to governments who are actively using it to commit genocide. What does one silly little fifty-dollar game do for them? It convinces people that This Is How It All Happens. It pushes people towards joining the army or the police, and in turn, strengthens the complexes even further.
I don't know. Much as I wouldn't mind seeing Call of Duty's billion-seller status tank to hell in the pursuit of a better life for all, maybe I'm not the kind of person who can convince people. I know our army sucks and takes up way too much money. I know our police forces suck and take up even more way too much money, on top of constantly committing violence on our own citizens. What I don't have is a reasonable call to action, a point to tie it all together. Boycotting Microsoft and the Xbox brand (and every sub-brand they own) is a start, but it isn't the only step to stopping the genocide, to defunding the police, to wrenching America out of the hands of the oligarchs.
Perhaps this is why I am not a born leader.
Anyway, there's a divot in the sand that might be just about big enough to fit my head into. Perhaps I'll just go give that a try.