Description
During the past five years, military-owned or sponsored eSports teams have increasingly begun to stream on online platforms, such as Twitch, which enable them to establish direct connections with young gamers, i.e., potential prospects, outside of traditional public recruiting spaces. However, this shift in recruitment strategy, especially by Twitch's most active military, the US Army, backfired. The international gaming community and Twitch audience members began contradicting the narrative used in the story-telling by the US Army. Undermining the political efforts within the process of formation of self-representation in the context of new recruitment practices and making them unstable and contestable via virtual counter-recruitment practices and even virtual guerrilla actions. As the virtual resistance practices that arose in response to shifts in military recruitment remain largely unaddressed by the critical military scholarship discussing militarization 2.0, this paper, in turn, considers digital resistance practices employed in response to the U.S. Army Esports virtual recruitment on streaming platforms between 2018 and 2020 by drawing conceptually on the International Relations micropolitical perspectives, performativity and visual narrative analysis (which emphasise the role of emotions, space, time, visuality, and narratives). The analysis of the key layers of communication is used to analyse the formation of self-representation of the military and critical gaming audience, within which the official military discourse is rendered contestable. In this way, the paper shows images play a key role in political story-telling also within virtual counter-recruitment resistance practices and illustrates the benefits of such an approach for critical military studies.
