Exploring the use of video games as propaganda
Late last year, Santiago Arnaiz, a recent journalism school graduate, received a grant from The PCIJ Story Project to work on a story on how video games have been used to drum up support for the Philippine war on drugs. Arnaiz had then just joined BusinessWorld Online as a multimedia producer. He knew that in order to tell the story well, he needed to show readers how the games looked and how they were played.
Arnaiz found a collaborator in Gretchen Malalad, a freelancer who had worked as a TV news reporter for about a decade. Malalad is no ordinary TV journalist: She had won gold medals while on the Philippine karate team; she was also a first-class airwoman of the Philippine Air Force who had been featured on reality TV. Arnaiz did the research and interviews; Malalad filmed and edited the video that would accompany the text.
Since the middle of 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has claimed thousands of casualties. It is a war fought on various fronts. While the Philippine police were gunning down drug suspects on the streets of the capital, the government was also deploying its propaganda arsenal to justify its iron-fisted anti-drug campaign. On social media, pro-government bloggers and an army of pro-Duterte Facebook supporters defended the police operations. Today, even after human rights groups and journalists exposed what they said were the wanton police killings of poor suspects, the drug war is popular among Filipinos.
The video games in support of the anti-drug campaign were released starting August 2016, when the Philippine police were riding high on the popularity of Ronald Dela Rosa, the brawny and bald-headed police chief. At that time, the police created a Dela Rosa mascot, which toured the country, and began displaying life-sized cardboard images of their muscular chief in public spaces.
Images of the dancing Dela Rosa mascot went viral and helped project the police chief, and the police themselves, as archetypes of the Filipino macho: tough but lovable and funny.
Arnaiz and Malalad explored how the police exploited Dela Rosa’s popularity in video games that showed his avatar gleefully gunning down drug suspects or running them over with a truck. Those videos, they found, have been downloaded millions of times. They interviewed the game developer and the police community relations chief he worked with. They watched as teenagers played the games, happily taking on the role of Dela Rosa slaying drug dealers with an assault rifle or a missile launcher.
Arnaiz and Malalad also interviewed students in Caloocan City who enjoyed playing a game called “Tsip Bato.” Caloocan has seen scores of drug killings, including of teenagers accused of being drug couriers. The students said they loved the game, but on deeper reflection, they also felt there was there was something wrong it. “In reality, this game isn’t what we see every day,” one of them said. “It isn’t what you hear or see on the news.”
Arnaiz and Malalad published their report on BusinessWorld Online. The full story can be found here.
