Military Shooter Video Games and the Ontopolitics of Derivative Wars and Arms Culture

• Date: 01 March 2017
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12184

Military Shooter Video Games

and the Ontopolitics of Derivative Wars

and Arms Culture

By PETER MANTELLO

ABSTRACT. The “military shooter” (MS) video game is the latest in a

long line of video games that immerse the player in a fantasy world.

Although the MS video game was once regarded as excessively violent,

it has now become socially acceptable, as the virtues of military life

have become incorporated in popular culture. That transition has taken

place in part because the military has begun to work closely with the

producers of MS video games, such as the “Call of Duty” series, to

imagine and prepare for future military threats, both on virtual

battlefields and on actual terrain. The increasing use of highly paid

corporate mercenaries in actual war zones has also influenced game

play by introducing players to the potential for large financial rewards

by becoming experts in virtual combat. Thus, MS video games

incorporate players not only into the technological domain of modern

warfare but also into the economic domain of fighting war for profit. In

the post 9/11 era, warfare has increasingly become a strategy of risk

management, in which the battlefield is less a physical space than a

semiotic landscape of conflicting loyalties and financial incentives. The

MS shooter game is conditioning the soldiers of the future to fight in

this shadowy world that lies between the virtual and the real. All of

these changes have political ramifications. In the long run, constant

exposure to these games is creating a subculture that is not only

immersed in an armament culture but also increasingly allied with

current patterns of geopolitical domination and subordination.

Introduction

In a television advertisement from a recruitment series for the U.S. Air

Force, a team of Special Forces soldiers wired with techno-gadgetry

*Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 2 (March, 2017).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12184

V

C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

move in tactical formation across a vaguely Central Asian desert. As the

squad leader reports into his helmet microphone, “This is Titan One

Four—no signs of life,” a drone passes overhead, its all-seeing camera

eye streaming real-time video of an imminent threat via satellite back to

a central command post in America. “Titan One Four, hold your posi-

tion,” orders a command post analyst monitoring the situation from a

multi-screen war room. He then pushes a button that switches the

drone’s camera to thermal mode, simultaneously zooming into the

landscape, revealing through an enhanced magnification the outlines

of three adversaries preparing to ambush the unsuspecting squad.

“Unmanned aircraft has identified enemy sniper,” warns the analyst.

These images and the location of the enemy’s current position are then

relayed back to thesquad leader’s small wrist monitor, who then signals

his squad to take evasive flanking action. In the final shot, the action

cuts from this fictional simulation to the actual cockpit of a Predator

drone pilot in Nevada. “We got it from here,” the console jockey

responds, foreshadowing his upcoming remote controlled engagement

with the hostiles. Over the image, a screen text appears: “It’s Not Sci-

ence Fiction, It’s WhatWe Do Everyday.”

The subtext of this particular advertisement (and others in the series)

harkens back to the techno-evangelical mantra that helped spawn the

military industrial complex—an anthem of superiority and preemptive

salvation made possible through the militarization of science. What is

different in this reincarnation is the blatant adoption of an increasingly

fashionable, mixed-reality aesthetic borrowed from the popular world

of the first-person shooter videogame—a screen-mediated gaze that

marries the virtual and the material, computer-generated worlds and

their real-world counterparts; a layering of on-screen menus, thermal

imaging devices, and global positioning instruments over actual physi-

cal environments. While a quick reading of this slick recruiting message

might imply an inevitable fallibility of human judgment until it is physi-

cally wired into the brain of the war machine, a deeper analysis points

to the thinning membrane between battle space and game space, the

actual physical battlefield and its virtual gaming counterpart, the logic

of preemption and full-spectrum dominance. Today, political leaders,

military planners, defense contractors, corporative advertising execu-

tives, and videogame designers are busy building inter-subjective

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology484

relationships around the virtual battlefield in pursuit of military solu-

tions, corporate profits, and political legitimacy.

Once dubbed the enfant terrible of the video game industry on

account of its excessively violent graphics and game play, the “military

shooter” (MS) game has now risen to mainstream respectability, garner-

ing near-patriot status, by aligning itself to the same institutional forces

that construct carefully sanitized and righteous versions of the actual

battlefield. For several decades now, increasingly porous boundaries

between military planners and the videogame industry have led to a

formidable partner culture founded on the goal of perfecting the art of

virtual war in two arenas—both the imaginary world and its real-world

counterpart (Lenoir and Lowood 2003; Stahl 2010; Caldwall and Lenoir

2016; Payne 2016).

On the one hand, Washington think tanks, the U.S. military, Penta-

gon, CIA, and DARPA have solicited the creative talents of top video

game creators in an advisory capacity for conjuring up threats that have

yet to materialize (Shaban 2013; Susca 2014; Parkin 2014). A good

example is David Anthony, the game creator of both Call of Duty:Black

Ops 11 and Advanced Warfare, who stated in an interview for the

Guardian newspaper: “My job is to advise outside-the-box thinking on

the nature of future threats, and propose proactive solutions to mitigate

against them” (Parkin 2014). Moreover, war planners and weapon

makers are actively harnessing the immersive quality and tactical accu-

racy of “military shooter” (MS) video games to train soldiers in the com-

plex and shifting realities of asymmetric warfare and in the operation of

advanced remote weaponry in games (Full Spectrum Warrior, Pandem-

ic 2002), treat post-traumatic stress disorder (Close Combat Virtual

Afghanistan, Creative Industries 2010), as well as oversee the produc-

tion of their own MS games for recruitment purposes in the age of

unpopular wars (America’s Army, U.S. Army 2001–2016).

On the other hand, video game industry giants depend on the martial

expertise and battlefield experiences of actual veterans as consultants

to give their synthetic world authenticity and realism. This cross-

fertilization of human resources, ideas, and strategies from these once

distinct worlds signals the growing ability of the virtual battlefield to re-

shape civilian and military understandings of future war. As Leonard

(2004: 3) argues, “there is a marked failure to recognize videogames as

Military Shooter Video Games 485