Videogames and politics do not at first glance have much to do with each other. Games, after all, are about the creative joy of exploration, speed or destruction. It’s one thing to analyse Pac-Man as a neo-Marxist parable of late 20th-century capitalism – an argument that works not by attempting to reconstruct the supposed intentions of the work’s creator, but by reading the game in its historical and cultural context. But to suggest that many videogames have certain political themes, and political standpoints, built in to them is another matter entirely.

Well, it’s a rare cultural artefact that is not informed, willingly or not, by the political context in which it was created. Take The Sims, for example. Rapidly becoming an extraordinarily successful multi-tentacled franchise, it is the soap-opera version of Pokemon, and a thoroughly shameless advert for the American way. Buy a Sim a large mirror and she will be happier, by virtue of being able to gaze at her reflection. Buy him a new oven, and he’ll become more popular after giving dinner parties. Help your Sim climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. This is a game in which the brutal rules of free-market capitalism are everything. More money makes a Sim happier; social dissidents are not allowed. You want to drop out of the rat-race, wear charity-shop tweed suits and spend your days playing chess in the park? Sorry. Such gameplay possibilities are ruled out by the political assumptions buried deep in the game’s structure.

Will Wright’s earlier magister opus, SimCity, had a pre-coded bias towards efficient public-transport systems. You couldn’t build a city that looked like the real Los Angeles or London because it would grind to a halt. Furthermore, as an American scholar of urban planning pointed out, the game’s structure implies that mayors are useless figureheads and that considerations of race are irrelevant to designing cities. It has taken until the recent third iteration of the Civilization series, meanwhile, to acknowledge that literature, music and other forms of culture play a role in the development of society; the first two games in the series were mere brute accounting systems of force and industry.

It was inevitable, in fact, that as soon as videogames began attempting to simulate social realities, no matter how sketchily, they were going to have to make political choices and build their gameworlds on those opinionated foundations. Pac-Man’s abstract, symbolic nature means it can function as an allegory while remaining afloat and untethered above the universe of ordinary worries. But the greater complexity and iconicism of modern games means that nearly every reference to real-world social structures has a particular political valency.

One alarming recent example is Dropship. Among the targets of the player’s campaigns are, first, an Osama Bin-Laden type terrorist leader, with desert training camps that must be wiped out, and then a Columbian drug dealer, whose facilities are similarly to be pitilessly eliminated. While the first might seem slightly tasteless in the light of the war in Afghanistan, it is the second that appears really damagingly questionable. A simple arithmetic of shoot and destroy serves only to bolster the assumption that a “war on drugs” makes any social sense in the first place. The fact that such vastly expensive military action, is likely only to drive the street price of drugs up, rather than eliminating the proven demand, and so simply cause more drug-related theft and other crime in the free cities served by the game’s fictional “United Peace Force”, is wholly foreign to the game’s moral universe. It’s a shooting game; we need targets. Any old target will do.

The problem of choosing an enemy is one shared, of course, with American films. Once the cold war ended, Hollywood went on an arbitrary shopping spree for villains of the right ethnicity. They tried renegade ex-Soviets, insane Australian media magnates, deceitful Chinese, even Frenchmen. These days, though, you can’t go wrong with someone of vaguely Arab origin. Symbolising as he does to Hollywood the twin evils of the Gulf War and of religious fundamentalism - please try not to mention the fact that America itself is probably the largest hotbed of religious zealotry on the planet - the Arab-stroke-Muslim looks like being the bogeyman of choice for the foreseeable future. Dropship’s featured terrorist leader, in a piece of trivial misdirection, glories in the very un-Muslim name Marco Ramm, but the player might well wonder what he is doing operating from bases in Libya. Dropship’s vaguely imagined “near future” is an incoherent mess.

Now, such objections to videogame politics look as though they might require a critic also to admit that people who play shoot-’em-ups will inevitably buy a gun and murder all their schoolfriends. After all, how can subtle political themes be influential while balls-out ultraviolence isn’t? Well, there is a difference. Grand Theft Auto 3’s unapologetic moral nihilism, set in a reasonably naturalistic realm, points up the clear distinction between our virtual actions and the political assumptions that enable them. Just as the soldier does not choose his orders, but does his best in the context of a mission designed by generals safe at their desks, so the gameplayer has no choice but to indulge in the kind of behaviour that the game system is designed to encourage. Even if we wanted to live a law-abiding life in Liberty City, we couldn’t. Similarly, we follow orders in Dropship and unleash missiles in the Columbian drug baron’s territory. Fine; but it’s the idiots in Washington who make the policy that we should be worrying about.

Arguably the politics buried at a game’s base are more likely to have an undesirable effect on the worldview of suggestible consumers such as children precisely because they are so well-hidden. Certainly if, as many scholars are beginning to argue, videogames have educational potential – witness the common use of SimCity in American high schools (with wise caveats, one hopes, from the teachers) – then it must be conceded that they also have the potential to educate people in the wrong way.

As gameplayers, we can leave such questions to the social scientists. For us, the question can be rephrased in aesthetic terms. Certainly a game can be thoroughly enjoyable while being stupid on the political level. But we should aspire higher. Don’t we want our videogames to be more intelligent, as well as more fun?