Military Videogames

Robinson, Nick

doi:10.1080/03071847.2019.1659607

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The launch of America’s Army in 2002 heralded a new era of recruitment games designed specifically to appeal to young gamers to boost dwindling recruitment numbers. Allowing players to participate in training regimes and presenting an appealing version of military life, this first-person shooter game exceeded all expectations, recording 15 million registered players by 2019 (Robinson, 2019: 11). Free to download and playable on console, desktop, and handheld devices, 41 versions of the game have been released to date.…”

Section: Wargames As Drug: Attracting Warfightersmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…The study of recreational games in critical security studies and international relations has proliferated over the last decade (Berents and Keogh, 2018;Brown, 2017;Ciută, 2016;Jarvis and Robinson, 2021;Robinson, 2015Robinson, , 2016Salter, 2011). More recently, scholars have begun to examine the military applications of gaming (Hirst, 2020(Hirst, , 2021(Hirst, , 2022Öberg, 2020;Robinson, 2019), an area of study that had broadly lain dormant since the publication of the second edition of James Der Derian's book Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network in 2009. Outside the field, important work has similarly traced the relationship between the military and entertainment spheres (Lenoir, 2000;Stahl, 2010).…”

Section: Pharmacotic Wargamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of its creators claimed that the game is 'the most cost-effective thing that the Army has ever done in recruiting', while a survey conducted by the advertising agency Leo Burnett concluded that '30% of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game, and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined' (Edery and Mollick, 2009: 141). Scholars within and beyond international relations have similarly argued it has become the military's most valuable recruitment tool (Robinson, 2019;Salter, 2011;Schulzke, 2013). As one military wargames instructor explained, I played with toy soldiers and GI Joe and that was my gaming.…”

Section: Wargames As Drug: Attracting Warfightersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As scholars have noted, America’s Army seeks to humanize and sanitize the Army and cultivate a public image conducive to boosting recruitment (Allen, 2009, 2011; Lewis, 2009; Robinson, 2019; Schulzke, 2013). As Allen (2009) explains,the Army predictably seeks to frame the experience in a highly scripted manner that communicates a positive message to participants (especially teenagers) about the career opportunities available in the Army.…”

Section: Wargames As Drug: Attracting Warfightersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Hirst,

George

2024

Security Dialogue

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This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus.

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Section: Wargames As Drug: Attracting Warfightersmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Pharmacotic Wargamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wargames As Drug: Attracting Warfightersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wargames As Drug: Attracting Warfightersmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Hirst,

George

2024

Security Dialogue

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“…For instance, amalgamations of scanners, personnel, and security metrics render various everyday items as ‘threats’ when they enter aviation security contexts (Salter, 2019; Schouten, 2014). Such processes reflect geopolitical considerations (Robinson, 2019) and the commercial contexts in which objects become entangled (Bos, 2018; Godfrey, 2021; Payne, 2012). Likewise, we explore how networked human and non-human actors recontextualize AI weapons in videogame contexts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurmountable enemies or easy targets? Military-themed videogame ‘translations’ of weaponized artificial intelligence

Qiao-Franco,

Franco

2024

Security Dialogue

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International relations scholarship has long emphasized that popular culture can impact public understandings and political realities. In this article, we explore these potentials in the context of military-themed videogames and their portrayals of weaponized artificial intelligence (AI). Within paradoxical videogame representations of AI weapons both as ‘insurmountable enemies’ that pose existential threats to humankind in narratives and as ‘easy targets’ that human protagonists routinely overcome in gameplay, we identify distortions of human–machine interaction that contradict real-world scenarios. These distortions revolve around videogames affording players enhanced human agency to dominate AI weapons to offer enjoyable gameplay, contradicting the same weapons being intended to diminish human agency on real-world battlefields. By leveraging the Actor-Network Theory concept of ‘translation’, we explain how these distorted portrayals of AI weapons are produced by entanglements between heterogeneous human and non-human actors that aim to make videogames mass-marketable and profitable. In so doing, we echo game studies research that calls for greater attention to the commercial and ludic dimensions of videogames so that international relations scholarship can better account for pop culture’s bounded abilities to impact public understandings and political realities.

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