Game Over? Not for Bashar

Unlike his fictional counterpart in The Autumn of the Patriarch, whose bloody end is ringed by dark memories and fear, Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s former ruler and fugitive, now spends long hours playing video games from his luxury flat in the heart of the Russian capital.

Yet this routine is not new. Drawing on interviews with officers and people with connections to the presidential palace, an investigation published this year by the American magazine The Atlantic described Syria’s deposed president, in his final years before the fall, as a ruler cut off from reality and obsessed with sex and video games. The more recent reports — in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth and Germany’s Die Zeit — merely confirm the persistence of this old addiction.

Assad’s relationship with video games, then, was more than a hobby to while away the hours in exile. It began long before his downfall, and during his years in power became a habit pursued across internet platforms and mobile phones alike. As Syria was disappearing into the worst chapter of its history, Assad became a “professional gamer”, his interests ranging from action and adventure titles such as FIFA, Uncharted and The Last of Us, to Candy Crush Saga, with its sugary rewards and cheerful music, and Battlefield, with its simulations of combat. It was to all intents and purposes closer to a psychological refuge: compensation for his shrinking political and military stature as his regime lost control over large parts of Syria, before finally losing power altogether.

For an ordinary person, video games may be a means of relaxation. It may even become an addiction. For a ruler watching his state collapse, his country’s economy disintegrate, and his survival dependent on foreign powers, addiction carries a different meaning: withdrawal from the rules of the real world and retreat into a system that can be controlled. On a computer screen, such a system offers compensation for the historical consequences of personal and collective impotence and decay.

Addiction to games can be read as the expression of a broader state of mind. Games are political because they are systems governed by rules: rules determining who may act, who owns the resources, who is punished, who is protected, and which forms of violence are deemed legitimate. Many military games contain weapons, uniforms, tactical language and heroic sacrifice. Yet they often exclude grief, trauma, refugees, children, corruption, torture, destroyed infrastructure, moral judgment and the long-term political consequences of war. They turn war into a clean space: identify the enemy, fire, advance, repeat.

The besieged despot, playing his video games in his palace, confuses loyalty, conspiracy and fantasy. The controls on the screen converse with the orders issued to the intelligence services, the army and the propaganda apparatus, and come to resemble control over reality and even of history itself. In Damascus, gaming was the pastime of a ruler who still possessed authority, however crumbling. In Moscow, it has become the daily habit of a man stripped of the sovereignty he once exercised. Having been an escape from responsibility, it is now a substitute for the lost paradise of absolute power once enjoyed by one of the bloodiest tyrants of this century.

In his book Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality, the American media scholar Edward Castronova argues that games are among the central metaphors of our age. They are power redesigned as play, and play redesigned as power.

In Bashar al-Assad’s case, there is a sharp psychological contrast between the two phases. While he was in power, games offered him the luxury of denial, distracting him from the deteriorating reality of his rule. In exile, they have supplied an alternative to fill the void left by the actual loss of power. 

Other rulers in the Middle East have grasped the seriousness of entertainment as an industry and poured vast sums into it. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey dominate the region’s digital-gaming market. Riyadh has invested billions of dollars in the sector, and as a result has become a major player in the global market. Abu Dhabi has entered the field with enthusiasm, while Turkey possesses the region’s broadest digital-gaming ecosystem.

These states have become serious players in the entertainment industry, of which digital games are a highly profitable part. As for the “professional gamer” Bashar al-Assad, he treated an entire country as if it were a video game — until he himself became a pampered “political refugee” pursued by the curse of history.