Computers have a way of training the people who use them. As a writer, I’ve been drilled to execute keyboard shortcuts like Control+Shift+V without stopping to question why some engineer decided it should take a three-button combination to paste unformatted text into a document. People who send emails for a living, work point-of-sale systems, or operate space stations are likewise forced to adapt to their respective machines. To be a so-called skilled worker today means to be well trained by a computer. This holds true even for those who design computer software—ostensible masters of the machine, every programmer stands on the shoulders of giant corporations, wielding digital tools forged by their forebears and heeding the rules of managers long since dead.
This rote process of developing muscle memory also applies to our leisurely pursuits, especially to the video gaming industry, which raked in $240 billion in 2024. Games train players in arcane rules and precise button combinations; to master these rules is to advance the narrative of the game, something like transforming sheet music into a live performance. Game narrative may be as simple and satisfying as “Mario on his go-kart beat Yoshi to the finish line after dropping a banana peel in his path,” or complex and novelistic as in the alternate-reality Europe of Disco Elysium, reviewed in The Baffler no. 81. Enjoyment comes from participation, a melding of the player’s actions with the creators’ vision. Like a skilled worker, a skilled gamer has been trained by a computer. But to what end?
Concerned parents have been asking this question since the waning days of Tipper Gore and the 1993 congressional hearings on the ultraviolent classics Doom and Mortal Kombat. But the scolds of the 1990s are now hooked on Candy Crush, Words With Friends, and every boomer’s favorite multiplayer game, Facebook. And with the ascent of Gen Xers and millennials into higher office and upper management, people raised on video games now run the world. Memorably, the world’s richest man, Nazi-saluting oligarch Elon Musk, admitted last year to paying people to game for him to ensure his digital avatars maintained a high level and ranking in competitive play. This plebeian diversion, outsourced to actual plebeians, didn’t seem to help his personality.
Consider, too, Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarch, forty-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. According to Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck’s 2020 biography Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power, the teenage MBS was frequently scolded by his geriatric father and family minders for spending too many hours playing video games, including his favorite, Age of Empires. That popular strategy game, now in its fourth installment, casts players as godlike overlords building and commanding an army against opposing forces in a perpetual Hobbesian melee. Subsequent accounts have suggested the game taught MBS something about being a world leader—after all, it is billed as a “strategy” title. But it would be more accurate to classify Age of Empires as an exercise in simple tactics and rote computer training, for the gameplay rewards players’ speed and facility with the mouse and keyboard, like a gussied-up version of Hungry Hungry Hippos. The strategy amounts to mining resources and producing units faster than one’s opponents, overwhelming their defenses, and deleting them from existence. The battlefield is seen from a bird’s-eye view, its visceral horrors too minuscule to register as such. Virtual minions never question their superiors’ judgment, succumb to PTSD, or attempt a palace coup. When they fall, crushed by a war elephant or impaled by a ballista bolt, there are no funerals to attend nor bereavement pensions to pay. By the standards of Age of Empires—if not in real life, where his iron-handed reputation precedes him—the Saudi crown prince is a wise, generous, and benevolent ruler.
If this addictive game series drilled anything into the young prince’s head, it’s that people are resources to be commanded and sacrificed for the gain and glory of the overlord. In the original game, victory could be achieved through military conquest; by building and defending a world wonder for two thousand in-game years (in real time, sixteen minutes and forty seconds); or by attaining a high score as measured by the number of enemies killed or converted, buildings razed, cultural sites controlled, and gold obtained. One can imagine why the game might appeal to the heir of an oil dynasty with an unlimited construction budget and territorial ownership of irreplaceable religious sites. It may also lend some insight as to why, once in power, MBS oversaw the ill-fated construction of fantastical “giga-projects” like the $4.5 trillion boondoggle known as The Line, a mirrored five-hundred-meter sci-fi city for nine million people to be built in the middle of the desert by modern slaves. That kind of thing is exactly how one wins the game.
Kushner Deal
Not content with the passive role of mere player, MBS has now anointed himself as a game master. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, or PIF, affords MBS a vast source of investment capital ostensibly intended to advance the interests of the state. In September, the PIF embarked on the largest private equity takeover in history: a $55 billion purchase of Electronic Arts, the game developer and publisher based in Redwood City, California. EA is best known for its annualized sports titles, including the Madden football series and the FC soccer series; its tacticool first-person shooter series, Battlefield; and its cozy life simulator, The Sims. The company also owns the well-regarded role-playing games in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series and holds a lucrative license to adapt the Star Wars franchise into video games.
Why were the Saudis keen to pay a premium to buy their way into the American gaming industry?
Jared Kushner, forty-five, another former gamer, midwifed the deal with a consortium of the PIF, Kushner’s own Alliance Partners, and the tech investment firm Silver Lake, advised by Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan, and Kirkland & Ellis. But it’s the PIF that will take the overwhelming share of the new, Riyadh-oriented EA, with its impressive collection of intellectual property and the mindshare of its seven hundred million players. “As someone who grew up playing their games—and now enjoys them with his kids—I couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead,” Kushner, whose firm previously received a $2 billion investment from the PIF, said in the deal announcement. That makes one person who’s excited, at least; the deal inspired widespread trepidation and loathing among the games industry’s rank and file, who dread both the erosion of creative freedom that comes with such dubious financing and the layoffs that often follow changes in ownership. As the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, Kushner’s interest was twofold: to guarantee regulatory approval for the controversial sell-off of an American entertainment company to authoritarian foreign interests and to carry on the family tradition of profiting from shady side deals that draw on the Saudis’ vast oil wealth.
The first questions about the deal came from the investment world. Curiously, the PIF proposed to overpay for EA by approximately 25 percent. This gratuity came at a time when game companies were collapsing, publishers were abandoning development studios, and studios were laying off workers by the thousands. EA, too, was struggling: its stock price tanked last year due to poor sales of the latest Dragon Age and FC games. The company canceled titles and laid off hundreds—and its outlook looks even more grim after the PIF deal, which adds billions to the company’s debt burden.
Why were the Saudis keen to pay a premium to buy their way into the American gaming industry? EA was not Saudi Arabia’s first such venture into the medium. While few noticed, in 2023 the PIF became the single largest outside shareholder of Nintendo, the family-friendly Japanese gaming giant. Two years prior, the PIF also invested $1.4 billion into the U.S. behemoth Activision Blizzard. Critics noted the investments were of a piece with the country’s “sportswashing” strategy to improve its global image. In 2023, the Saudis angled to effectively buy out professional golf by merging its upstart LIV Golf League with the venerable PGA Tour—a deal that hasn’t been finalized, despite Trump’s blessing. And last year, the PIF attempted to force its way into the American TV and movie business with a Kushner-abetted bid for Warner Bros. by Paramount, controlled by Trump ally Larry Ellison. All of these ventures aim to help people forget that the Saudi government, enriched over decades through its relationship with American power, had agents who were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks; that it uses American weapons to butcher Yemeni civilians; that its glittering malls and towers are built using modern slavery; and that, according to UN and CIA reports, MBS ordered the murder of Saudi-born, U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. This expansive soft power strategy, aided by the corrupt Trump family, represents the “Saudification” of America, as Khashoggi’s former Washington Post editor Karen Attiah put it in a November essay for the Guardian. The sale of EA is really about the decline of democracy in the United States and its replacement with a transnational oligarchy that can overwhelm any regulatory oversight with the power of sheer corruption. These new overlords have no regard for quaint concerns such as social equality, artistic integrity, and freedom of speech.
Accordingly, Trump’s opponents in the U.S. government have expressed concerns about the EA deal. In October, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, ranking Democrat on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, sent interrogatory letters to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and to EA’s CEO, Andrew Wilson. Blumenthal had previously raised questions about loopholes in the Foreign Agent Registration Act that the PIF exploited in past deals, which could deprive federal investigators of an avenue to examine Saudi influence-buying through the corporate front of EA. To Bessent, they noted that through EA’s game software—some of which contains “anti-cheat” programs that operate much like malware—the company has access to vast quantities of private data on individuals. “The unrestricted access to this information by a repressive, authoritarian government poses significant potential risks of surveillance of Americans, covert Saudi propaganda, and selective retaliation and censorship of persons disfavored by the Saudi government,” the Democrats wrote to Bessent, who chairs the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a relevant regulatory body. As CFIUS chair, Bessent could use his influence to have Trump nix the deal. The Trump family’s involvement all but guarantees he’ll neglect due diligence.
The senators’ most pressing questions, however, were reserved for Wilson. An Australian college dropout and surf fanatic, the fifty-one-year-old Wilson stands to net a cool $100 million by selling an American enterprise to the Saudis. Blumenthal and Warren asked Wilson how EA would respond to demands from the Saudi government for customer information and how players could have confidence that they won’t be the targets of “Saudi covert propaganda or other influence” when they play EA games. “The PIF would be well positioned to dictate or veto what stories are told to Americans through the popular medium of video games, controlling narratives about U.S. history and culture,” the senators warned.
Indeed, the Saudi government is not shy about its propagandistic aims, hoping to take full advantage of the human training potential of video games. Few other forms of entertainment captivate audiences for hundreds or thousands of hours at a stretch—in EA’s case, players devoted a collective thirteen billion hours to its games in 2024 alone. That’s a lot of time to absorb messages. An undated, twelve-page “National Gaming and Esports Strategy” document on the Saudi 2030 website, created in partnership with the Ministries of Investment, Culture, and Media, says one goal of the state’s leap into the industry is to “foster production of games promoting Saudi and Arabic culture”—as defined by the monarchy, of course. That same monarchy executed a record number of people last year—at least 356, according to Human Rights Watch, which notes that the country’s Shia Muslim minority faces systematic discrimination and violence. Amnesty International says attempting to speak freely or to defend human rights in Saudi Arabia is a recipe for intimidation, imprisonment, or exile. Protests are illegal.
The precise shape of Saudi content control remains speculative. Will Saudi ownership continue to permit the creation in The Sims of families with gay parents and transgender teen characters with chest binders, as introduced in a 2023 update to the series’ fourth installment? It would be quite a surprise—although the PIF investment in Nintendo hasn’t stopped Princess Peach from driving in Mario Kart. Still, the EA buyout will mark the Saudis’ most ambitious entry into the gaming business, and the corrosive traditionalism of Saudi ownership may manifest at the conceptual level, deepening EA’s commitment to macho shooters and sports titles over more subtle, peaceful, gender-inclusive, and nonviolent games. The prospects are likely diminished for creative titles such as last year’s critically acclaimed EA action game Split Fiction, which cast two young women writers as platonic pals in a cooperative struggle against a machine that consumes and regurgitates ideas as a hostile simulated reality. A little on the nose, maybe.
Tencent Ties
Saudi Arabia certainly wasn’t the first country to grasp the propaganda potential of games—that would be the United States, which launched the free-to-play recruitment ad America’s Army in 2002. Even absent government financing, games have tended toward the militaristic and chauvinist, in the image of American empire. One of the first games I played was 1988’s Contra, a Japanese production that distilled Reagan-era pop culture into its essential form: a gringo with a machine gun in the jungle. The Gamergate saga of 2014 and 2015, which many see as paving the way for MAGA’s weekly culture war campaigns, showed how a reactionary segment of gamers was willing to employ harassment and threats to ensure their hobby remained free of what they’d now call “woke” influence.
Few other forms of entertainment captivate audiences for hundreds or thousands of hours at a stretch—in the case of Electronic Arts, players devoted a collective thirteen billion hours to its games in 2024 alone.
Today, game developers concerned about freedom of expression point to Chinese investment, and publishers’ desire for access to the lucrative Chinese market, as a bigger problem in their day-to-day work. Demonstrating a convergence of interests, the PIF praised the first AAA title (i.e., high-budget production) released by a government-sanctioned Chinese studio, 2024’s Black Myth: Wukong, a chaste take on the folktale-turned-Ming-dynasty-novel Journey to the West. Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, vice chairman of PIF’s gaming arm under MBS, calls Wukong a model for Saudi game development and one of the best games ever. Other reviewers called it boring. Wukong’s developer, Game Science, tipped its hand politically when it instructed streamers to avoid “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse” while promoting the game to other potential players. Non-Chinese studios also feel the pressure of official censorship. By way of example, one AAA developer told me how they discouraged a colleague from including a veiled dig at Chinese President Xi Jinping in a game, explaining that “the consequences for the company, the game, and our employees could be quite serious, but the consequences for the people he wanted to troll would be insignificant.” Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party–linked investment firm Tencent is one of the biggest players in the global games industry. Studios large and small, successful and struggling, can see Tencent swoop in to raise its investment stake or execute a full acquisition. “They are absolutely using their influence to control what goes into games and which games get made,” the developer said.
The censoriousness of Tencent’s influence never seems to fall where it ought. Tencent funded the 2023 shooter Atomic Heart, which cast players as a KGB agent in a prosperous, retro-futuristic Soviet Union. The Gazprom-connected GEM Capital also bankrolled the game’s developer, Mundfish. Although the developers denied connections to Vladimir Putin’s regime, the Russian military’s official clothing brand, Army of Russia, conducted an advertising campaign with the game’s characters. Ukrainians pleaded for gamers not to buy Atomic Heart lest they fund the Russian invasion. Ukraine’s gaming industry does not lack for problematic episodes, however. A voice actor who worked on the locally developed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. survival shooter joined the neo-Nazi-linked Azov Brigade, which was so taken with the game they launched a fundraiser pitched at fans tied to the sequel, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl.
Gamers themselves bear some responsibility for the dire state of the industry. The consumer preference for graphically lustrous, fully voice-acted, and motion-captured life simulators has ignited a skyward cost spiral in game budgets. This year’s much-anticipated AAA release, Grand Theft Auto VI, has an estimated budget between $1 billion and $2 billion, the largest yet. Even an “indie” title like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, published by a small French studio and chosen as last year’s Game of the Year, had a reported budget of almost $10 million and required contributions from hundreds of contract workers who subsidized the title’s relatively low purchase price of $49.99. Some of the most popular and lavishly made games, like Fortnite, are free to play—suggesting, per the old internet adage, that the players are not the customers but the product. Fortnite makes its billions through what are called “microtransactions,” selling character costumes, victory dances, and an in-game currency called “V-Bucks,” as well as through corporate advertising partnerships. In any case, with production costs skyrocketing, it gets harder to make mass-market games without funding from the world’s most evil corporations—and now states. Thus does the twenty-first century’s digital pastime become as morally indefensible as, say, golf.
Microsoft’s Heavy Hand
If Americans can’t blame foreigners for ruining video games with gratuitous propaganda, neither can they deflect blame for the destructive and relentless trend toward industry consolidation. The Windows developer and Office software monopolist Microsoft got into the cutthroat gaming console business in 2001 with the launch of Xbox. To supply the games that made the Xbox an attractive purchase, Microsoft set about acquiring development studios, including, since 2021, Rockville, Maryland’s Bethesda Softworks, maker of the free-roaming fantasy Elder Scrolls series, and the Santa Monica, California-based Activision Blizzard, producer of household-name titles including Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush Saga. Those acquisitions triggered an antitrust complaint by then–Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan at the urging of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. An unfavorable ruling by the formerly liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals killed the FTC review last year. It’s a shame, because Microsoft’s unscrupulous practices taint everything the company touches, including my favorite escapist entertainment.
Among the many studios hoovered up by Microsoft over the years was Obsidian Entertainment, a niche studio based in Irvine, California, with a loyal fan base for their role-playing games. Obsidian may be best known for the 2010 cult classic Fallout: New Vegas, a surrealistic, postapocalyptic trek through an irradiated alternate-future Nevada overseen by an enigmatic bicentenarian mogul who never leaves his casino on the Strip. But my Obsidian darling is 2015’s Pillars of Eternity, a grim fantasy meditation on the crimes of colonization, the construction of religion, and the nature of the soul. Crowdfunded by fans, Pillars offered an old-fashioned point-and-click experience with a top-down perspective and many impenetrable character statistics to mull over. Now, with Microsoft footing the bill, Obsidian has repurposed the Pillars setting for a more marketable first-person action title, Avowed, which came out last February to mediocre reviews.
If Americans can’t blame foreigners for ruining video games with propaganda, neither can they deflect blame for the relentless trend toward industry consolidation.
While I appreciated that Avowed maintained the critique of colonialism present in its source material, the Pillars setting lost some magic in the translation to an action format. This points to a bigger problem: under Microsoft, Obsidian has been press-ganged into churning out games at an unsustainable pace, all mid-budget fodder for the controversial Game Pass service. With Game Pass, Microsoft seeks to do to games what Netflix did to home theater by replacing player ownership with a subscription rental service, while demanding that studios hit profit targets as high as 30 percent. Microsoft hasn’t yet killed the excellent writing and design that make Obsidian titles special, but it has clearly forced a team with renowned skill and vision into a box too small to fit their talent.
What’s worse, Microsoft ownership makes Obsidian games taboo among a segment of players that’s most likely to appreciate their mature themes and political sophistication. That’s because Obsidian games are, like all Xbox titles, subject to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions blacklist of companies that contribute to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Microsoft earned its place on the BDS list by providing cloud computing services to the Israeli military’s electronic surveillance system targeting the West Bank and Gaza, as reported by the Guardian and +972 Magazine. The BDS Movement calls Microsoft “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide,” and specifically highlights the company’s “gaming products” as targets for the boycott.
No doubt most gamers aren’t even aware of the BDS boycott. The nature of the dwindling, industry-captured games media is that such real-world issues rarely get covered amid the tide of promotional previews. But one of Obsidian’s most recent titles, The Outer Worlds 2, released last October, represents both the sublime heights and the depressing limits of the possibilities of political expression in games. To be clear, political expression is not something most games concern themselves with. Call of Duty, a patriotic infantry simulator, represents the industry-standard Weltanschauung. If it’s even possible to make games that on some level deprogram people as they hop across platforms while shooting at enemies, most developers don’t bother to ask. But The Outer Worlds and its sequel, for all their flaws and missteps, at least invite players to think about what’s gone wrong on this planet of ours. That’s cause for celebration, or, at least, an honest review.
Dominant Space Corps
The first Outer Worlds game, released in 2019, offered a charming anti-corporate satire inside a dystopian sci-fi shooter. In tone, it’s similar to Bong Joon Ho’s recent film Mickey 17, a dark comedy about cloned expendable workers in a space colony, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. Like that movie, critics regarded The Outer Worlds as a disappointment from reliable talent, faulting its limited scope, its less acerbic character writing, and its somewhat clunky gameplay as a step backward from Fallout: New Vegas. The game’s creative masterminds are legends of the field: Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who collaborated to create the original Fallout in 1997. Twenty-two years after that release, The Outer Worlds maintained a similar sensibility, encouraging laughter in the most dire settings. The game opens with the player crash landing on a backwater planet dominated by a company town where workers process cute alien critters into overpriced tins of salted meat product. The town’s residents are enduring a plague that management refuses to acknowledge or accommodate. Almost every person the player meets is visibly ill, but nonetheless obliged to stay on the job, so devastating are the consequences of missing work and so costly is medical care. Coming as it did a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic, the game’s timing was both eerie and cathartic.
Rare is the game that allows players to double-cross the bosses and side with a crunchy socialist commune or a militant anarchist insurgency.
It would be a mistake to call The Outer Worlds woke, because players are free to assume the role of bloodthirsty corporate raiders if it suits them. But rare is the game that also allows players to double-cross the bosses and side with the characters running a crunchy green socialist commune or a militant anarchist insurgency, as one can in The Outer Worlds. By contrast, most top-selling games cast players as merciless agents of neoliberal state power, as in the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series; or as historical champions of feudal values, as in the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series; or as futuristic fascists presented with some degree of irony, as with the Helldivers series or Warhammer 40,000’s ubiquitous Space Marines.
In terms of gameplay and production values, The Outer Worlds 2 is a terrific improvement over its predecessor, smoothing out the clumsiness of its combat and adding more complex, fully imagined side quests to the game’s dazzlingly weird alien environments. The atmospherics are impeccable. Dozens of original songs that fill the in-game radio stations do much of the work of world-building. These catchy jingles tout the benefits of alcohol, tobacco, and processed snack foods—all “parasite free,” though not in the sense one might assume. Any parasites in the product come free of charge!
Regrettably, however, the sequel pulls some punches that landed hard in the first title. There are no anarchists or eco-socialists to side with in The Outer Worlds 2. The dominant space corporations have merged into a profit-hungry monopolist, Auntie’s Choice, whose namesake is also its comically pitiless CEO. In a far-flung colony system, Auntie’s Choice finds itself pitted in a struggle for dominance against the Order, a scientistic theocracy something like Star Trek’s Starfleet gone wrong, and the Protectorate, a quasi-Stalinist dictatorship that quells dissent with summary executions and chemical lobotomies euphemized as “mental refreshment.” In The Outer Worlds 2, everyone is brainwashed—including, by implication, the player character, who serves a militaristic and dysfunctional band of space cops known as the Earth Directorate.
While the first game left some room for hope among its warring factions, the second is bleakly cynical. Indeed, the overriding message seems to be that you’re screwed no matter what goals you aspire to or what ideology you hold. In one side quest, you can choose to aid a band of striking workers seeking a reprieve from their twenty-hour workdays. Doing so, however, results in a win for management, which discovers that the workers are more productive after a rest. The striking workers, too, are portrayed as simpletons under the sway of an outside agitator. In place of the first game’s righteous rebels, the sequel offers up a jaded portrayal of labor organizing—a curious choice at a time when the games industry is undergoing a hard-fought wave of unionization, including at a Microsoft sister studio, ZeniMax Media, where hundreds of workers organized under the Communications Workers of America in May of 2025. One poster on the Socialist Gaming subreddit called The Outer Worlds 2 a “centrist simulator.” I don’t think that’s quite fair, but it is very Gen X in its sensibilities, putting a pox on all houses. The first Outer Worlds was already under development when Microsoft acquired Obsidian, so, notably, the sequel is the first game in the series produced entirely under the stifling hand of the corporate parent. In February, Obsidian executives told Bloomberg Businessweek that there would be no new Outer Worlds games, apparently because the sequel did not hit Microsoft sales targets.
In a November podcast interview, The Outer Worlds 2’s director, Brandon Adler, downplayed the game’s political themes, suggesting that any perceived anti-capitalist sentiment was all in players’ heads. “We’re not going out of our way and saying, ‘Let’s do a critique of capitalism,’” he said, adding that Microsoft “never once said, ‘you can’t say that.’ [But] we didn’t take any direct shots at them. So maybe that’s why things were fine.”
That about sums up the state of free speech in the entertainment business these days—the director of a social satire is compelled to deny the existence of an implicit critique and to maintain a strict silence on the war crimes abetted by their monied patrons. The Saudification was already here.