Description
Military-themed games have been an object of interest to numerous scholars in politics and international relations over the last two decades. Much of this research has fit under the umbrella of the so-called ‘Military-Entertainment Complex’, which might be understood as a symbiosis of militarised themes and Entertainment, in which the entertainment industry collaborates with the defence industry and/or state agencies to produce narratives that construct a sense of global insecurity, which may be resolved by military intervention (Höglund and Willander, 2017; Wark, 2005). This framework, despite its popularity, neglects to account for the iterative, unpredictable character of the gaming medium, and the opportunities that this affords to subvert the ‘meaning’ of the media from within: Games are not fixed at the point of being a ‘boxed product’, but rather, are experienced differently based on how players interact with them and each other.
This paper looks at examples of resistance and opposition to the military entertainment complex coming from within the games themselves: problematizing the linear understanding of how games and military narratives are produced by this ‘complex’. I discuss examples from Military-produced games, recruiting forums, and eSports events, displaying the benefits of Assemblage as a tool to understand the relations between games and the world, with reference to my own research on U.S. Military Recruitment, Simulation, and welfare programs.
