Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games

by Huntemann; Nina B.

• ISBN13: 9780415996600
• ISBN10: 0415996600
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2009-08-06
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Joystick Soldiers is the first anthology to examine the reciprocal relationship between militarism and video games. War has been an integral theme of the games industry since the invention of the first video game, Spacewar! in 1962.While war video games began as entertainment, military organizations soon saw their potential as combat simulation and recruitment tools. A profitable and popular relationship was established between the video game industry and the military, and continues today with video game franchises like America's Army , which was developed by the U.S.Army as a public relations and recruitment tool.This collection features all new essays that explore how modern warfare has been represented in and influenced by video games. The contributors explore the history and political economy of video games and the "military-entertainment complex;" present textual analyses of military-themed video games such as Metal Gear Solid ; and offer reception studies of gamers, fandom, and political activism within online gaming.This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between war and media, and it sheds surprising light on the connections between virtual battlefields and the international conflicts unfolding around the globe.

Author Biography

Nina B. Huntemann is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. She produced and directed the documentary film Game Over: Gender, Race, and Violence in Video Games, distributed by the Media Education Foundation. Matthew Thomas Payne is a Media Studies doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. He has served as a coordinating editor for FlowTV (www.flowtv.org), a critical forum for television and new media culture, and is a co-editor of the anthology Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convegence (Routledge, forthcoming).

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables	p. ix
Foreword	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Historicizing the Joystick Soldier	p. 19
Living Room Wars: Remediation, Boardgames, and the Early History of Video Wargaming	p. 21
Target Acquired: America's Army and the Video Games Industry	p. 39
Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: The Soft Power of Military Games	p. 53
Interview with James F. Dunnigan	p. 67
Representing War	p. 73
Behind the Barrel: Reading the Video Game Gun	p. 75
Wargames as a New Frontier: Securing American Empire in Virtual Space	p. 91
Future Combat, Combating Futures: Temporalities of War Video Games and the Performance of Proleptic Histories	p. 106
Interview with Rachel Hardwick	p. 122
Producing Pedagogical War	p. 129
Mobilizing Affect: The Politics of Performative Realism in Military New Media	p. 131
A Battle in Every Classroom: Gaming and the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College	p. 146
A Battle for Hearts and Minds: The Design Politics of ELECT BiLAT	p. 160
Interview with Colonel Casey Wardynski	p. 178
Playing War	p. 189
"No Better Way to 'Experience' World War EI": Authenticity and Ideology in the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor Player Communities	p. 191
"F*ckYou, NoobTube!": Learning the Art of Ludic LAN War	p. 206
Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in Military-Themed Video Games	p. 223
Resisting War	p. 237
Playing Against the Grain: Machinima and Military Gaming	p. 239
"Turn the Game Console off Right Now!": War, Subjectivity, and Control in Metal Gear Solid 2	p. 252
Dead-in-Iraq: The Spatial Politics of Digital Game Art Activism and the In-Game Protest	p. 272
Gameography	p. 287
List of Contributors	p. 294
Index	p. 298
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