Brussels, Belgium. A new think tank MCC Brussels called out the EU Parliament for turning children’s video games into a medium for promoting its propaganda. Earlier this month, the EU Parliament quietly passed a resolution titled, ‘on esports and video games’. 

Professor Frank Furedi Executive Director of MCC Brussels said, “Reading between the lines of this resolution it becomes evident that the motivation behind it has little to do with the entertainment value of gaming but with the imperative of finding new channels of communication for the advocacy of EU values. Advocates of this resolution hope to harness the popularity of gaming to project the EU’s soft power. Paragraph 16 ‘Stresses that video games and esports have great potential to further promote European history, identity, heritage, values and diversity through immersive experiences; believes that they also have the potential to contribute to the EU’s soft power.”

Professor Furedi said, “As far as the EU Parliament is concerned, inserting its propaganda and values into the gaming community is particularly important because it offers unique access to the young. The main target of this resolution is young people. It notes that ‘video games and esports are widely accessible and can be used to increase inclusivity and diversity in learning environments such as in the classroom and throughout life’. That’s another way of saying that young people who are turned off by boring lectures about the EU’s technocratic rhetoric are far more likely to be influenced by propaganda masquerading as an exciting video game.”

“Indoctrinating young people with EU’s emphasis and interpretation of diversity and inclusion would require that game developers embrace its political agenda. At a time when video games are under scrutiny this is a very worrying development for the industry as it may be pressured for political purposes.”

“The resolution wants the video game industry to produce games that will influence young people to embrace its green agenda. It ‘underlines that video games and esports have a dual role to play in the green transition, both as an industry that must work to become more environmentally friendly, and as a medium for raising awareness of climate and environmental issues among video game players’. The wording of the resolution, with its emphasis on duty highlights that what is at stake is a political cause rather than simply entertainment.”

Professor Furedi concluded, “There is little that is original about the EU’s parliament’s attempt to hijack gaming to serve its political ends. As is so often the case it seeks to slavishly copy the practices adopted by culture warriors in the United States. In the United States, the gaming industry has come under strong pressure to eliminate the idealisation of masculine behaviour and instead adopt LGBTQ+ heroes. As far as woke campaigners are concerned, video games provide an ideal medium for indoctrinating young gamers with their propaganda. They hope that fun-loving gamers will seamlessly adopt their propaganda.”

 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0388_EN.html