The politics of consuming war: video games, the military-entertainment complex and the spectacle of violence

Godfrey, Richard

doi:10.1080/0267257x.2021.1995025

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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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%

“…As prior interdisciplinary research establishes, the production and consumption of videogames brings together various human and non-human actors (Ash and Gallacher, 2011; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2013; Giddings, 2009; Godfrey, 2021). In our case, these actors range from consumers, developers, marketing press releases, YouTube gameplay videos, and game code to the real-world weaponized-AI systems that inspire many videogames.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Game studies scholarship enables researchers to reflect on the production and consumption systems that contextualize videogames, particularly in international relations contexts. Seminal work on the 'military-entertainment complex' has well documented the long history between the entertainment industry, arms manufacturers, and the US military in videogame production (Der Derian, 2009;Godfrey, 2021;Power, 2007;Robinson, 2012). In essence, videogames produced within these relationships carry actors' values, often reinforcing gendered, racialized, and colonial/ imperial norms (De Zamaróczy, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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