Description
Videogames are frequently dismissed as childish toys with little obvious implications for real world politics - but the truth is quite different. Videogames have grown to be the largest purchased entertainment sector in the world, with military games representing a significant proportion of such sales. The existing scholarship on videogames, largely ignored by IR scholars, suggests that they have highly persuasive effects with important implications for US foreign policy. This article argues that videogames currently pose considerable challenges to US foreign policy by undermining soft power and public diplomacy. As cultural products, games are themselves a form of communication which informs popular understanding of the US in overseas populations. Yet while public diplomacy and soft power are attempting to portray a view of the US as multi-lateral and committed to trade, aid and diplomacy, military videogames present an image of unilateralism and militarism. First, in promoting highly militarised solutions to complex social problems, videogames reaffirm a commonly held view of American desire for militarily enforced hegemony. Second, recent controversies around games have caused a number of diplomatic incidents which are highly counter-productive to America’s aims of promoting its objectives through public diplomacy and soft power.
