The Racist Ethos of Desktop Tower Defense

I was first introduced to the online game Desktop Tower Defense in November of 2006. Like many other game players, I was pulled in by its simplicity, accessibility, and addictive game play. However, as I put more time into DTD, I began to realize that it was not as innocuous as it had seemed at first. To the contrary, it was teeming with racist imagery and subtexts, a sort of flash-based Birth of a Nation for the Web 2.0 era.

Desktop Tower Defense and the Dehumanization of the “Other”

The goal of Desktop Tower Defense is to defend the playing area, depicted as a quotidian workspace, from successive lines of “creeps”- the in-game enemy or “other”. The creeps march forward unthinkingly like yoked animals or slaves being whipped by an invisible overseer. They possess no intelligence or tactical finesse; their only strength is in numbers and their seemingly limitless fecundity.

This mental imagery is very similar to that employed by revisionist historians of World War II, especially former German generals, who sought to rehabilitate Germany’s image by casting the German army as having fought off Communist hordes. The Soviet Red Army was portrayed as unsophisticated and unskilled, only able to win battles by sheer weight of numbers. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth; especially by the end of the war, the Red Army’s operational art was highly refined and is still studied in military academies today.

This type of portrayal is not unique to this particular war. Nations or peoples are often depicted by the white West as rapacious, uncultured “others” who lack skill and intelligence but possess great numbers. The Mongols, the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Achaemenid Persians are but a handful of those who have been depicted in this manner. Desktop Tower Defense makes a blatant appeal to our fear of the fecund “other” by tying into this current of historiographical racism. What appears to be a jovial exercise is in reality the game player tapping into thousands of years of inherited fear and hatred.

We need look no farther for proof of this than the success of other types of media which have promoted this theme. The apologist memoirs of German generals were very popular after World War II, and recently, the film 300 found great success by offering its mostly white, Western audiences a graphic display of violence against nonwhite people. Desktop Tower Defense’s appeal rests on appealing to the same barely sublimated urges to use violence against “other” groups which we fear. DTD even goes so far as to depict so-called “spawnlet” creeps, which are smaller creeps produced by the death of a larger creep. It is not hard to imagine the larger creep as a mother carrying her small child when she is cut down by gunfire. The game then forces us to murder her small child in order to keep playing. The message is clear- the “other” must all be exterminated, and we are quite right to feel pleasure from the act of doing so. The morality of DTD not only celebrates My Lai and No Gun Ri, but provides the player with a monetary reward for carrying out such massacres.

Desktop Tower Defense and the Defense of Economic Lebensraum

Earlier, we touched on some similarities between the Desktop Tower Defense ethos and Nazi ideology. One area in particular where this is very strong is related to the concept of lebensraum, or “breathing room”. In the postwar period, former Nazis vigorously promoted the idea that they had been virtuous defenders of Western defenders against the uncivilized Communist masses of the east. During the war, one of their goals was to establish “breathing room” for German civilization within the Soviet Union. In both instances, the extravagantly fecund “other” from the east is seen as a mortal threat to Western civilization by dint of his mere existence. Violence is exalted as a method of blunting the threat of this fecundity.

It is no accident that DTD portrays the battlefield as an office desk. In the last few decades, racial minorities have made great economic strides in the United States and in Western countries in general. The formerly unquestioned economic supremacy of the Western white elite has been increasingly challenged by what is seen as the nonwhite “other”.

In Desktop Tower Defense, it is the work environment which the player is tasked with defending against unskilled, but inexorable incursions by the nonwhite creeps. Much of the game’s popularity stems from this thematic melding of Nazi propaganda and white economic and social concerns in the post-Civil Rights era. This creates in the mind of the player an elixir of racism and violence, produced by the use of violence to defend white economic lebensraum.