Fascism and video games

Two comments by somebody named Karl Grant at JMG´s blog Ecosophia, concerning a recent Swedish video game... 

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Also something real odd happened in pop culture these last couple of weeks. Arrowhead Game Studios, a small Swedish video game developer, released a game called Helldivers 2 which promptly blew up in popularity. The game sold over 1 million copies in just three days; soon the servers handling the game’s multiplayer functionality were overloaded. The game’s popularity has been spreading like wildfire ever since. The premise of the game is that your character-a helmeted, masked and therefore faceless soldier- is part of an elite paratrooper unit, the Helldivers, and is pretty much fighting a for a science fiction version of George W. Bush’s government.

And I mean that quite literally. You are invading the planets of a insect alien species to take their oil and spread “freedom and democracy” to their people. You are also attacking a rogue colony of cyborgs, named Cyberstan of all things, because their leaders are developing weapons of mass destruction. You got a senator named John W. Killjoy who talks about seizing WMDs from aggressive aliens and preventing them from being “too advanced” along with a general named Cowel Pollin.

The thing is Bush has been out of office for the last 16 years. About half the people playing this game were still in elementary school when he left office and the other, older, half includes a lot of veterans of the War on Terror. You wouldn’t think an science fiction send up of his presidency were you play a soldier fighting for a sci-fi George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be the most popular video game in the world right now but it is.

Any thoughts on why that might be?

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I understand that but the fans of the game are not treating it as a mockery. Quite the opposite, they are openly and unironically embracing this science fiction version of George W. Bush’s America which the creators of the game dubbed Super Earth. So much so that a lot of Democratic aligned media is having a major freak out about it. For example, NBC just put this article out today:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/helldivers-2-fascism-satire-debate-rcna140653

And that is what I find interesting, and a little odd here, is that a bunch of young men are openly embracing a science fiction repackaging of the Bush Admin and the mainstream media is treating the game as a cultural threat which seems to be increasing the game’s popularity. This is not a healing feedback loop; this is an escalating culture war feedback loop.

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Here is the NBC article, in case the link in the quote doesn´t work:  

A video game has reinvigorated a long-running debate on fascism and satire