Mafiosi in Video Games As Low-Intensity Myths for Cosmopolitan Consumption

This research is based on online and in-person semi-structured interviews of young video games players (VPGs) living in Italy and in Australia. The considered sample is made up by 40 participants (20 for each country) who played video games portraying members or enforcers of the Mafia as main characters. Participants have been recruited through hybrid snowballing process, which relied on digital spaces and on offline and online networking. Participants were asked to describe how they imagine organised crime networks and to relate their ideas to the sources they were based on.

VPGs rarely mention video games as a valid source of information to think of organised crime in real life. Australian participants rely on TV series, cinema, and documentaries. Italian participants mentioned news and personal experience as an important source of information. Both Australian and Italian participants referred to consistent links between representations in video games and other media. Participants underlined how fictional cultural products shaped the global image of Italians and the Mafia. Though, they also considered themselves able to identify ethnic stereotypes and to understand stereotypes’ narrative functionality.

Drawing on these interviews, I argue that the Italian Mafia can be framed as a low-intensity myth, as for the definition of Ortoleva (2019). I discuss how gaming industries have relied on old and new stereotypes about Italians and organised crime so as to create an oversimplified version of the Mafia. This is a mix of misrepresentation of Southern Italy, “a paradise inhabited by devils, positive stereotypes about the North, defined as the “Tuscan fetish” (Pugliese, 2007), and North American pop culture. Finally, I argue that the interviews data confirm the importance of aesthetic-cultural features of Mafia representation in a way that can be understood through Cicchelli and Octobre’s (2018) research on cosmopolitan youth consumption.