Military videogames and the future of ideological warfare

Abstract

Military videogames play an important role in violent actors’ communication strategies, and while scholars have attempted to theorize their significance, too much attention is devoted to characterizing games as ideological distortions that must be unmasked to reveal a more authentic view of war. I offer an alternative perspective on these videogames and their political importance. Relying on a conception of ideology as an inescapable constitutive part of politics, rather than ideology as a form of deception, I highlight three salient characteristics of military videogames. First, regardless of what strategic interests they are designed to advance, videogames’ meanings are open to contestation and reconfiguration, making games a site of conflict in themselves. Second, videogames grant insight into violent actors’ goals and self-conceptions. Third, because videogames are designed as closed systems built from mutually reinforcing ontological and epistemological assumptions, they introduce opportunities for normative critique based on testing ideological coherence.

The Russian political elite and power image constructing peculiarities in contemporary video games (on the Metro Exodus materials)

“…Another could suggest the opposite, that games developers, to return to McAllister's (2004) notion of the co-production of meaning, are actually presenting a tongue-in-cheek caricaturing of these positions, that the communicating of military ideology is too simplistic an interpretation and can be routinely undermined, as demonstrated here, through paradoxical procedural functions. What these differing interpretations show, in terms of what procedural rhetoric communicates, is the sort of reconfigured and contested understanding that is a necessary feature of ideology more broadly, and something that future work can explore with regards to challenging ontological assumptions contained within this medium (Schulzke 2017), or how the process of Othering is resisted by those typified in these types of video game (Saber and Webber 2017). Ultimately, depictions of North Korea featured in games produced at the height of the War on Terror present the country as a contradictory and paradoxical unknown, rather than a simplistic portrait of threat or vulnerability.…”

Time to stop playing

“…Games function as part of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (Pötzsch & Hammond, 2016), where their Western military propaganda have run alongside and reinforced racist understandings of peoples in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc., in the wake of 9/11 and the explicit military 'interventions' undertaken by the West (Hammar, 2019). Major commercial game development companies have collaborated with the US military to create simplistic military shooters (Schulzke, 2017) where we have seen the interchanging role of North Korea, China, Russia, the 'Middle East'-or whoever else the 'rules-based international order' has designated as the Official Enemy-serve as the primary enemies to slaughter and overcome through Othering and moral disengagement factors (Hartmann, 2017). Major game companies such as Microsoft and Unity have also directly worked with the US security state to develop training software, AI, augmented reality headsets, and other tech infrastructure (Cox, 2022;Novet, 2021), while some game companies have collaborated with arms manufacturers (Hammar & Woodcock, 2019), and the US military has been using Twitch and esports as recruitment tools (Gault, 2020).…”

Technologies and Videogames: Influences on society

“…Despite the existence of a great variety of social aspects that are influenced by video games, the following areas have been considered and grouped in this study: family, psychology and health, education, culture, entertainment and leisure, politics and international conflicts, economics, and finally as a service [12].…”