Credit (or Blame!) Video Games for Edward Snowden’s Activism

Glenn Greenwald’s
new book, No Place to Hide, detailing his meetings
with Edward Snowden and what he has subsequently learned about the
National Security Agency (NSA), is now on sale and racking up
reviews and interviews. There is still much to learn about what the
NSA is up to. In an
interview with GQ, Greenwald is promising one major
last story providing a “big missing piece.” The interview is
getting more attention for his critical comments about Hillary
Clinton, calling the likely presidential candidate “banal,
corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion” and a “fucking hawk”
and “like a neocon.”

But much earlier in the interview, Michael Paterniti talks to
Greenwald about one of the inspirations for Snowden’s decision to
collect all this secret information and disseminate it. Snowden
apparently was inspired by protagonists in video games:

You mention in your book that Snowden’s moral universe
was first informed by video games.
In Hong Kong, Snowden told me that at the heart of most video games
is an ordinary individual who sees some serious injustice, right?
Like some person who’s been kidnapped and you’ve got to rescue
them, or some evil force that has obtained this weapon and you’ve
got to deactivate it or kill them or whatever. And it’s all about
figuring out ways to empower yourself as an ordinary person, to
take on powerful forces in a way that allows you to undermine them
in pursuit of some public good. Even if it’s really risky or
dangerous. That moral narrative at the heart of video games was
part of his preadolescence and formed part of his moral
understanding of the world and one’s obligation as an
individual.

It’s fun to imagine Snowden having to slay a series of
role-playing game bosses and getting NSA PowerPoint slides as
rewards.  It’s also interesting to think that critics who
invoke
moral panics about the negative content in video games probably
don’t even think (or know (or care)) about how the biggest chunk of
video game storytelling is about the player being the hero, not
some prostitute-punching lowlife.

Then again, obsession with princesses aside, video game
storytelling typically makes authority the bad guy to make sure the
stakes are nice and high for the hero. There’s an army between the
hero and his goal, and often it’s the corrupt guys in charge who
are the ones capable of putting such an army together. Clinton, who
apparently doesn’t understand how America’s whistleblower laws work
and must just be pretending that Snowden is not a wanted man in the
United States,
thinks its “odd” that Snowden fled the country, has said very
little one way or the other about her position on NSA surveillance.
It doesn’t seem likely that she shares the belief that Snowden is
acting out the hero’s journey from a video game. Though, given she
has also been known to
trash video games and wants to regulate them, her attitude
toward him might not change anyway.