Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
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Shooters to the Left of Us, Shooters to the Right:First Person Arcade Shooter Video Games, the Violence Debate, and the Legacy of Militarism / Karen J. Hall
Abstract: Adult concerns about video games erupted in the 1990s when parents and politicians came forward with claims that Doom, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct and games like them were partially responsible for the rash of school shootings in predominantly white, middle class communities. The author of this chapter argues that arcade games serve the national interest by entertaining consumer-citizens and creating a consumer-based demand for military technology. However, when adolescent shooters disrupt the status quo, it is the games rather than militarist social and economic structures that are criticized by the news media, politicians, and parents. The author of this chapter argues that overstating the effects of shooter video games as causes of violence encourages critics and parents to evade gaining an understanding of the complex cultural force exerted by the games. Embedded as they are in global militarist economic structures of consumption and production that accelerate the arms race and constrict the agency of individual players, the games are highly problematic sites of entertainment, but they do not literally train players to take up arms as some critics claim. First person shooter arcade games invite a high degree of deindividuation amongst players, reformulate the functions of play, and re-map the geographies and social networks in which play takes place -- and are produced by and work to support a highly militarist imperial culture. Such a highly evolved cultural force demands more than a rating system or bans to address its impact. By examining the myriad influences and ramifications of the first person shooter, Hall furthers the understanding of such beyond the reductive rhetoric of the politically and technologically conservative and situates first-person shooters as an organic outgrowth of advanced capitalist military culture.
<1> Adult concerns about video games erupted in the 1990s when parents and politicians came forward with claims that Doom, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct and games like them were partially responsible for the rash of school shootings in predominantly white, middle class communities. Bill Clinton and numerous other politicians and media critics voiced their concerns that video games were making U.S. American youth violent and teaching them to kill. Former Army psychologist, David Grossman, described it this way: "'Go to an arcade and play a game called Time Crisis. You feel some degree of recoil from the gun, you're aiming at human beings, and if you hit the target, it drops, and you develop the skill and the will to kill'" (Kent 2D). Grossman argues that a steady diet of shooting games can turn a novice into a superb marksman: "'Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old boy (involved in the school shooting) in Paducah, Ky., had to the best of our knowledge never fired a pistol in his life. He steals a .22-caliber pistol from a neighbor's house, fires a few practice shots, brings this gun into school and opens fire. Now, he fires eight shots. How many hits does he get? Eight shots, eight hits on eight different targets -- five head shots, the other three upper torso'" (Kent 2D).
<2> When all is quiet on the home front, arcade games conveniently serve the national interest by entertaining consumer-citizens and creating a necessary consumer-based demand for military technology. When the domestic life of the hegemonic power base is momentarily disrupted by adolescent shooters, it is the games rather than militarist social and economic structures that come under fire by media, politicians, and parents. The games are, indeed, highly problematic sites of entertainment. They are embedded in global militarist economic structures of consumption and production that accelerate the arms race and constrict the agency of individual players, but they do not literally train players to take up arms as some critics claim.
<3> To overstate the effects of these games as causes of violence is to miss the complex dynamics of their cultural force. First person shooter arcade games invite a high degree of deindividuation amongst players. They reformulate the functions of play and remap the geographies and social networks in which play takes place, and they are produced by and work to support a highly militarist imperial culture. However, even if Michael Carneal could have learned to fire a gun accurately from playing arcade games, games by themselves cannot create the social, moral, and ethical climate from which he opened fire on his classmates. The primary cultural force of shooter video games is expressed on the symbolic level of the imperial consumer-citizen’s daily life, not on the literal.
Deindividuation and the Pleasures of Losing the Self
<4> In the arcade versions of shooter games, players stand before a color video screen of varying dimensions and fire a game device shaped like a pistol, machine gun, or rifle at enemies and objects that appear on the screen. When players depress the trigger of the gun, a light sensor is activated. A sector on the game’s screen receives the input from the light device and responds as programming dictates. The sector on the video screen may alter to register the impact of a bullet and make glass shatter, an on-screen character fall, or a bullet hole appear on an object’s surface. If there is no programming connected to the sector of the game screen hit, then nothing will happen on the play screen except the loss of a unit of ammunition in the scoring area.
<5> Because there are so few categories of information necessary to players of shooter games, elaborate rules or symbolic systems are unnecessary. Icons appear at the edges of the game screen to inform players of the amount of ammunition remaining, the time elapsed during the game level, the game score, and a measure for either the avatar's health or number of lives remaining. Although the locations and specific look of each of these items varies, the conventions of game play and the symbols used in play are similar enough that players readily recognize them and register the necessary information. The similar base engines that the games operate on make skills and understanding highly transferable from one game to the next regardless of what the surface level narratives of the games are designed to deliver. So, for example, it matters very little to players whether they are shooting at android mutants in Sega’s LA Machine Guns, terrorist agents in Namco’s Time Crisis, or zombies and killer frogs in Sega’s House of the Dead 2. The rules and game logic remain consistent; only the graphic capabilities and look and feel of the input device, and its responsiveness, change.
<6> Shooter video games that incorporate a light gun combine a highly physical game experience with a strong inducement toward deindividuation. Their mode of address invites players into the realm of spectacle and offers them a seductive, though small, amount of control over the diegetic world presented on the screen. Crossing into the field of spectacle heightens the physical effects of combat spectacle and disrupts the conventional patterns of player identification. The lack of an on-screen avatar/hero, combined with the intense concentration required by the games, make it so that both the mode of address and the style of play encourage players to experience pleasure in the loss of self [1]. The loss of self as the site of disciplined subjectivity through game play is contradicted, however, by the invocation of a militarized national identity that the game narratives and visuals implicitly and explicitly reference. Thus, although gamers may experience a release from socially constructed subjectivity, they are at the same time disciplined by a militarized form of deindividuation.
<7> Today’s shooter games are modern descendants of Space Invaders. The rules are the same--kill everyone--and the player alignment and identification is similar as well. In Space Invaders, players were represented by a small white space ship at the bottom of the game screen and their object was to save the world from aliens by destroying the never-ending waves of alien ships. In Time Crisis, one of today’s more popular shooter games, players are positioned as members of an elite paramilitary team fighting an endless stream of terrorists. Dramatic advances in game technology and capabilities have not changed the basic, foundational conventions and structures of the early games. However, now, there is not even an anonymous ship with which to identify, instead the avatar has been collapsed into the self.
<8> Players experience video game worlds through their relationship to an avatar. If the avatar is trapped in a room, players are likely to think, "I am trapped." Whether moving Mario up the levels of Donkey Kong or positioning a fighter in Mortal Kombat, the object of most video games requires that players use buttons to position the hero in the appropriate game location and direct his or her field of vision and range of action; for the duration of game play, hero and player are fused as one and what one sees, the other sees.
<9> The lack of on-screen representation of the player as hero makes first person shooter games unique among the various genres of video games [2]. In the typical shooter game, players only see a representation of the game hero during the opening narrative sequence and in the narrative sequences that appear after levels of a game have been cleared. Whereas quest and adventure games rely on the presence of a hero to such an extent that the heroes develop personalities distinct enough for game companies to release them in toy and film form, as in Tomb Raider's Lara Croft, shooter games subvert character development. First person shooter players do not translate an on-screen iconic representation as themselves: "You perform in it. It performs for you. It performs you. So the enigmas for the performer are of the order of 'where am I?' rather than 'who am I?'" (Skirrow 130). The question “Who am I?,” if asked, is never answered in this game format. I am an unnamed, unseen, threatened, and embattled hero, sure to die and yet courageous in my attempt. Any self-reflective impulse is blotted out by the frenzy of the combat spectacle. At the same time, players do identify as the hero. They gain a simulated experience of what combat feels like and thus to some degree, learn through their affective responses in their bodies rather than through symbolic transference with an on-screen representation to connect with individuals involved in combat.
<10> The loss of an iconic game self is further compounded by the distance and deindividuation induced by the style of play video games invite. Terri Toles and Randy Schroeder argue that the distance opened between video game players and the symbolic violence of their actions creates anonymity, a diffusion of responsibility, and thus a deindividuated state within players. Shooter games invite players to experience pleasure in the simulation of combat spectacle. Far away from the material and historical realities of combat, "there is no longer any 'direct' contact with an actual war--with pain, death, bloodshed, or any sort of 'history that hurts' (Jameson 102). 'Reality' is drawn into and subsumed by cycles of simulacra, where it finally dissipates and loses its ontological status altogether" (Schroeder 148). Lacking a narrative referent and lost in simulacra, shooter games give players license to lose themselves in spectacles of violence. Violence of this sort appears to exist only at the level of surface; freed from depth, connection to materiality, and stable symbolic meaning, spectacles of violence promise to generate power and pleasure unencumbered by responsibility and lasting effects [3].
<11> The pleasure gained by the evasion of ideology through deindividuation and the loss of self does not come without a price. The games operate through a seductive enforcement of obedience. In other video game formats, players have a stake in the navigation of space as it effects the quality of their game. The presence of player agency in most game genres distinguishes players from film spectators: "While similar 'shock' cuts can be used in the cinema, in video games it is the player who decides when to cut to the next scene, and so there is an element of responsibility, control and decision-making that one does not find in the cinema" (Wolf 16). But the potential for agency that some video games open is closed by first person shooter games that use a light gun. Players cannot spend time exploring areas, sweeping them for weapons, enemies, or friendlies. The agency of shooter video games players is so severely constrained that their options consist of kill, be killed, or stand still and let the clock end the game, i.e. be killed by time rather than enemies. "What appears to be aggression during video game play is actually obedience" (Toles 68), as players must allow the game to propel them through the diegetic world and dictate their behaviors in it. This required obedience functions to free players of personal responsibility and to enhance the game’s abilities to create a deindividuated state within players.
<12> Shooter video games offer players the pleasures of a simulated combat spectacle adrenaline rush. Freed from responsibility and histories that hurt, shooter video game players capture the attention of parents, politicians, and the media because “the signs of the subordinate out of control terrify the forces of order” for anything out of control is a potential threat (Fiske 69). However, players pay for their release by accepting constraints on their agency. They curb their aggressive impulses and obey the orders of the game. Attention and concern should be paid to the militarized obedience training gamers receive rather than the limited pleasures of release they experience.
Remapping Geographies and Reconfiguring the Functions of Play
<13> Far greater than the potential threat posed by video game players is the social reality posed when the militarization of entertainment pleasures effects players’ relationship to their own bodies, to each other, and to the rituals and functions of play. The technology that makes combat spectacle as entertainment possible has the capability not only to effect subjectivity as I discussed in the section above but also to reformulate play and remap the geography of playspaces.
<14> Cultural critics adept at experiencing the pleasures of technology often wax enthusiastic about the democratic space created in arcades. Especially in large urban centers, the arcades are a public space where social and racial classes mix, where, as one critic put it, business people in suits stand beside unemployed teens participating jointly in "democratizing interneighborhood social mobility" (Sudnow 166) [4]. Sharon Zukin sounds a warning against such over-zealous proclamations of the creation of democratic space, reminding readers that electronic media destroys the social distance that makes experience distinctive. Players can walk into an arcade in any city around the world and feel at home. They can scan the room and find their favorite, familiar games. The cultural traditions, social formations, local entertainment, and economic structures that make locations distinctive are pressed toward extinction by the encroachment of Western technology-dependent popular culture. And unlike the techno music scene, or even the video games that require players to dance to club music, shooter video games leave little room for unique moves or custom sampling. Regardless of their historical situation or geographical location, players stand in the same preprogrammed spectacle and in the same postures practicing the same physical skills in arcades around the world [5].
<15> The illusion of democracy in this homogenous space pushes further from most players' perception the distinctive power differentials necessary to create the technological and financial capital necessary to create and support the gaming culture. Technology and economics, not an ideology of democracy, mediate the aspects of play; they determine how long a turn will last, when and how individuals will be spectators or participants, and when and how they will interact with the other players around them. Technology and economics also mediate who players envision as the enemy; who will develop programming, and who will make the hardware to generate game worlds; who will have the leisure time to drop tokens into the machines and who will collect those tokens. In much the same manner that the games create the illusion of release within a reality of obedience, the arcade environment offers up surface qualities of democracy and egalitarianism while the military technology industry that produces the games depends on economic, social, and political stratifications to exist.
<16> One method of maintaining social stratification is to isolate individuals within consumer culture. Although the games are similar to the war games played by many children, players are now brought together not with human playmates by the geography of neighborhoods and family, but with simulated beings by the logistics of technology and capital. The de facto segregation created by neighborhood and family groupings may be broken in arcades, but players do not problem-solve during play or work together to create an imaginary play world. Instead, they perform for one another while they play with machines. For example, when players are knocked down and "killed," rather than object to fellow playmates, "You did not kill me! I can too still play!," they simply drop tokens into machines and continue with no further need for negotiations. The machines are the focal point of play because they are the opponent and the driving force of the play. Players develop their relationship with technology, practicing their competitive skills with game machines that always win. While the social and leisure activities of arcade players extend beyond machine time, when players’ tokens literally are in play, their activity does not stimulate verbal communication or cooperative interaction with other human playmates and a major element of the function of play is lost [6].
<17> In addition to determining who players play with, video games renegotiate the relationship between play and the body. The games can only simulate running and shooting. Bodies respond and muscles may ache, but the ache will be caused by the tension of sustaining a posture, not from running through backyards or city streets. Though video games elicit physical effects in the body, such as muscle tension and increased heart rates, they do not engage and integrate the body into play as most other forms of play such as sports or rough and tumble war play do. When players are shot, they feel no pain, and when they are killed, they experience only a minor inconvenience; their life and power are restored at the drop of two tokens.
<18> The Time Crisis games break the connection between players and their bodies even further by allowing players to "duck" while standing upright; removing one's foot from the action peddle simulates an on-screen crouch position regardless of how players move their actual bodies. Numerous veteran memoirs and stories from Vietnam relate how watching the war films of the 1940s and 1950s taught a generation of boys to stand upright as they charged into battle; live fire immediately taught the lucky ones the difference between Hollywood heroism and the necessary postures for actual combat. While it is unlikely that video game combat entertainment will produce a generation of “Universal Soldiers” styled after the likes of those created by Dean Devlin, Christopher Leitch, and Richard Rothstein for the 1992 and 1999 action films of the same name, who charge into battle without feeling, the games do acculturate players to stand and deliver without flinching, ducking or wincing even when mortally wounded [7]. Players repeat a ritual of inflicting death and damage while disengaged from playmates and from their own bodies. Rather than teaching players to test their bodies and their relationships with playmates, this new technology-dependent form of play encourages players’ material world capabilities and relationships to atrophy [8].
<19> The environment in arcades also works to disrupt players’ relationships to the material world. The arcade contains such a cacophony of sounds and stimuli that players must exert energy, consciously or unconsciously, to block out their environment and focus on the action before them. Learning to adapt successfully to the arcade environment requires a degree of deafness and numbness as the sounds of other players and games and the sensation of pain or fatigue from one’s own body can cause a break in concentration and timing that could lead to error and failure. I found that it was a common response among players that when I asked them if any part of their body hurt after playing, they would stop and look blankly for a moment before they answered. I interpreted this delay as the players' mental scanning time necessary to pay attention to their bodies before answering. Players are focused on the game and staying alive, not on how their bodies might feel. In the environment of simulated combat entertainment as in many other extreme entertainments, the body becomes a conflicted terrain in which consumers must block or ignore their perceptions of pain in order to attain a high enough level of stimulus input to satisfy the desire for excitement and surprise [9].
<20> The cultural trend toward extreme entertainments causes its own acceleration as consumers learn to endure and block increased levels of pain and extraneous input only to be left desiring even more extreme forms of entertainment that will break the threshold of their ever advancing tolerance levels. New shooter games offer larger screens, bigger guns, more rounds of ammunition and more enemies. Offering players less would not challenge their perceptual and physical limits and thus would be boring. With each generation of games, players acquire higher levels of response along with the necessary increased levels of selective filtering and physical numbing. U.S. consumers are continually encouraged to push the limits of play spaces. Commercials depict athletes sky diving on bicycles, runners dashing up ancient monuments, and men playing polo matches in suburban all terrain vehicles rather than atop ponies. Imperial play seems to necessitate both the reckless abandonment of the physical body and a relationship to materiality that invades, rather than integrates with, history and nature. Video games are a prime example and a popular site of this contemporary trend.
The Media Violence Debate and the Call to Ban
<21> Outright criticism of shooter video games dramatically increased during the rash of high school rampage shootings [10]. Parents and politicians blamed the games for instilling violent and antisocial behaviors in young players. A study of rampage killings over the last fifty years in the U.S., however, showed that rampage killers had a known interest in violent video games in only six of one hundred cases (Fessenden). If video games remain popular within youth culture and the number of young people engaging in rampage killing also continues, this percentage could increase; however, currently in 94% of cases, many of which took place during the era of video game popularity, rampage killers were not game enthusiasts. This is not to say that there is no relationship between predominantly suburban white male youth rampage shooters and video game violence, but the relationship is not a simple one of cause and effect. Parents blame the game industry, the game industry blames consumers, and politicians posture about getting tough on the effect of media violence on our children, and all the while players continue to pump quarters into machines and rounds of ammunition into animated enemies. Clearly this mode of entertainment gives us reason for concern. However, banning the games without addressing the issues of the context they exist in will not effect the desired reduction of violence in the culture.
<22> Calls to ban video games began shortly after the games began to appear in public venues. Numerous municipalities in the U.S. began to discuss limitations against and outright bans of arcade centers in 1981 and 1982 [11]. Researchers have also led or aided movements against the games. In the early 1980s the National Coalition on Television Violence conducted a survey and found that 89% of arcade games had a violent theme, featuring "a player who practiced a weapons skill such as shooting a gun, rocket, laser, or the like" (Sullivan 70). Surgeon General C. Everett Koop attacked video games for creating "aberrations in childhood behavior" (Kinder 118) and numerous critics have compared video games to an addictive substance inducing a technodruggedness in which simulation produces stimulation.
<23> Regulation is a seductive entry point to the media violence debate, but neither bans nor blame will address the problematic aspects of the video game industry. Too many in favor of regulating or banning game violence rely on studies that construct video games as the causal agent and violence as their effect [12]. These studies and the arguments against media violence that they support tend to treat issues of cultural violence in a vacuum, ignoring the complex interplay of social, economic and cultural influences also at work in constructing subjects’ interpretations of the meanings of violence. They treat the perpetrators of violence as isolated, individual agents and deny the individual subject’s relationship to structural violence. Being a subject of a militarist empire effects how one interprets violence.
<24> While I would never argue that imperial subjects should be excused for the violence they perpetrate, having the president of the United States call for the nation to teach its children to use words and not violence to communicate after the Columbine shootings while he simultaneously called for air strikes on Iraq has a decided impact on the way subjects interpret structural and symbolic violence. The messages U.S. culture produces concerning what forms of violence count and what forms of violence really are not violence at all makes keeping score very difficult: if bombing a country does not count as a form of violence, how can playing a video game be dangerous enough to require protective legislation? Debates concerning regulation and media violence do not provide consumers with helpful frameworks to answer this question or the many others that the issue calls forth. Rather than address current levels of militarism and the symbolic manner in which the games play these out, consumers are lead to believe that censoring the symbolic will help decrease violence in the culture. Meanwhile the frenzy of the military arms and technology race quickens its pace and expands its reach.
<25> Given their prominent position in youth culture, one likely outcome of the movement to regulate video games is to heighten their social currency as signs of rebellion and resistance to adult ideology and domination. The debate assigns the status of taboo to video games and thus can add to the pleasure of playing. In the case of shooter video games, this makes for an ironic contradiction. If the games symbolically position players in the posture of the deindividuated, irresponsible imperial warrior as I argue they do, then while on the one hand this posture becomes taboo, and a signifier of youth rebellion and resistance of adult ideology; outside the arcade, such a position is valorized and fully included in the dominant hegemonic power structure. The violence debate obscures productive discussion of how playing the role of a soldier might be appropriate and how it might be destructive. Neither the political left nor the right gain by closing off debate, and certainly video game players and youth have a great deal to lose in the oversimplified wrangling over their modes of entertainment.
<26> The culmination thus far of the movement toward regulation has been the voluntary creation of a rating system. The industry’s rating system is even less effective than the film industry’s, however, as admittance to games in an arcade is monitored far less than admittance to theaters. The rating system is more a surface level display of concern and responsiveness than a social deterrent to violence [13]. A more accurate indication of the game industry’s readiness to accept responsibility for their role in current trends of social violence can be seen in the comments of the industry spokesperson who claimed that "consumers are driving a lot of this violence” and that consumer sales would continue to push game violence to be more photo-realistic and that “politicians need to accept that" (Huffstutter). Simply blaming consumers for demanding the current levels of representational violence does not expand our understandings of the issue or what to do about it. The terms of the media violence debate need to be shifted: “it is not the sheer fact of the presence of violence that is the issue: it is its purpose and meanings, both within individual media items and the wider circuits and currents of feelings and ideas that accompany it, that have to be examined” (Barker 4).
<27> The computer game industry is heavily entangled with the military arms industry. The companies producing the technology and games for today’s arcades lack any real motivation to deescalate the levels of violence in their games or in the culture at large. Violence or the perceived threat of violence drives consumer-citizen demands for increased security, and demands for increased security drives arms sales. Joined by a bond of violence, the game world and the military world coexist too happily for those who benefit economically to wish to change things.
Entangled in a Web: Computer Games and Military Technology
<28> Video games inhibit players’ awareness of their position in the technological and economic web spanning our current global context. Both the machines and the environments they are placed in put historical and material context under erasure. Not only do the games disrupt players’ experiences of and connection to reality, but the arcade itself jettisons players out of the material world and into a contained, dislocated play zone. Players are surrounded by machines and fellow players, and a cacophony of shouts, music and game soundtracks. Rarely are there windows or clocks or any structural, symbolic or material links to the specificities of the players’ geographic or temporal location. Often arcades are located in shopping malls where they exist as dislocated worlds within dislocated worlds, where consumption is the defining logic and reality and reference to material sites of production, to labor, and to the impacts the cycle of production, consumption, and destruction are aggressively erased. All of these factors combine to assert to players that although what happens in this environment may feel real, it need not be taken seriously as it is in no way connected to what is real.
<29> When the media represents video games as if they create disaffected youth and rampage shooters, players can readily assure themselves that they are not among the technologically duped or addicted, that they have a firm grasp on distinguishing play world from real world. What this self-assurance fails to take into account, however, is how this environment and complex of constructed and simulated experiences renegotiates players’ relationships to reality and simulation. They may never literally become the perpetrators of violence, but their perceptions of what is violent, what constitutes power, and what power’s relationship to materiality can and should be, is assuredly disrupted and reformulated. The separation of the play world and the real world is a positive aspect of play with equally positive developmental outcomes for the individual, society, and culture [14]. Shooter video games, however, create the illusion of a separate world while firmly locating players in the heart of the military industrial complex.
<30> While an employee at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958, William A. Higinbotham, the engineer who designed the timing devices for the Manhattan Project atomic bomb, created a two-player tennis game using an analogue computer and an oscilloscope. The curiosity was meant to be an entertaining exhibit for visitors to the laboratory. Though he did not apply for a patent and would only be remembered and recognized by a select few game aficionados, Higinbotham had designed the first computer game.
<31> The game industry was born during an historical era when President Eisenhower was warning the country that the influence of the military industrial complex would corrupt civil liberties, usurp democratic procedures, damage the economy by forcing an addiction to military technology and weapons, and hold university research and free inquiry captive to federal contracts shaped too narrowly to defined security needs (Mayers 92). Eventually, Eisenhower warned, a scientific-technological elite would persuade citizens to substitute their own knowledge and expertise for that of elected officials. Nestled in the shadow of the defense industry and fully reliant on the computer technology industry, the video game industry has proven to be one venue where many of these predictions came to fruition.
<32> The U.S. military was heavily involved in the development of computer technology from the earliest days of the space program, largely in the form of research grants and funding to academic institutions [15]. In 1961, the Hingham Institute sponsored the Study Group on Space Warfare, which published a paper on the theory of computer toys, indicating that researchers took quite seriously and considered quite consciously the relationship between weapons and toys and the consequent relationship between the military and consumer market. The paper declared that computer toys should demonstrate the capabilities of the computer, be interesting and different than other games, and involve players in a pleasant and active game experience. The following year, the institute developed Spacewar and demonstrated the game at MIT's annual open house in May 1962. Many people learned how to program the game on mainframe computers and the source code was made readily available for those who could not create it themselves, allowing Spacewar to spread like "a benign virus, an unstoppable meme, eating up time all over the world on government, military and scientific mainframes" (Poole 17). Institutions wisely, though unofficially, allowed Spacewar programmers and players to consume costly and precious server hours. The games and the entertainment industry they spawned would provide a forum for the naturalization and incorporation of military technology in everyday life. Integrating computer technology into entertainment helped fuel consumers’ economic and social support for the arms industry. Thus, passive sanctioning of Spacewar during the early days of computer technology proved to be an investment well worth the making.
<33> As military and entertainment uses of computer technology grew in tandem, one industry often dreamed what the other had already begun to make possible. The original Atari buildings were situated in Silicon Valley near a Lockheed Martin missile installation, prompting one game critic to wonder if Lockheed Martin was a test site for Atari's imagination or the other way round (Sudnow 90). These connections have intensified since the 1990s downsizing in some sectors of the U.S. military. When the defense industry realized that it could lose its most lucrative customer, the U.S. military, it began to sell its technology to the games industry, earning immediate profits on the sale of information and forging partnerships with prospective companies. Corporations that once relied almost exclusively on military contracts are scrambling for other markets and the $7.1 billion amusement-equipment market could help many bounce back from defense cutbacks [16].
<34> One such company, Quantum 3-D, estimates that fifty percent of their business is with the military and the other fifty percent with the arcade and games industry. Quantum 3-D produces simulation programming that is used to train military personnel and to entertain consumers. In another direct partnership between the entertainment and military industry, Martin Marietta purchased Sega Corporation. After the purchase, Sega released both an Indy sports car game and a tank battle game, both of which were derived from Marietta's technology. Partnerships like these allow for the flow of technology to work in both directions: military technology is stimulating developments in the game industry and modifications made to the technology to make it more suitable for the amusement-equipment market are being adapted back to the military market. As one executive in the games industry put it: "For millions of kids -- and for those who are kids at heart -- the much-heralded peace dividend holds the promise of more fun. Technologies once reserved for fighter pilots and tank commanders are being adapted for video games that can be played at arcades or on home computers…. We're taking a lot of military technology into our entertainment centers. Why not? As taxpayers, we've been paying for it for years" (Clark C1). Few gamers realize that they may be entertaining themselves with the very same base engine software that the military uses to train its personnel in target range practice. And many might respond to this information by saying, “Cool!”
<35> One major reason why we should not happily accept the integration of military technology into our entertainment world is because doing so trains consumers to take on a militarized, aggressive stance; disrupts connections to self, body, sensation, and history; and, through economic coincidences and manipulations, stimulates political consensus among consumer-citizens for U.S. political and military policy. Games and toys instill a "harmonizing affect" in adults and children, providing players with moments of coping in a world full of awesome forces (Fleming 195). They represent for the typical consumer a nostalgic ideology-free, depoliticized zone that is also supposed to extend around children. The implications of this harmonizing affect in everyday lived relations are many and include putting a friendly, hospitable face on the military, manufacturing consent and complicity amongst consumers for military programs, missions, and weapons, and mystifying the material relationships between consumers, institutions, and economies of violence.
<36> The games also serve quite literally as recruiting tools for the military. For a number of years now, players who own a registered copy of the popular home computer game, Doom II, could download a free copy of Marine Doom, a United States Marine Corps modification of the game. Cybernetic Productions, the company responsible for programming the game modifications, also integrate this version of the game into workshops “for corporate team-building purposes” (Cybernetic Productions). More recently, more than one million people have downloaded and more than 300,000 people have registered to play the on-line version of the free game provided by the U.S. Army, "America's Army" made available in July 2002 (McClurkin). And in time for the 2002 holiday buying season, SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals has been released for the Sony Playstation. The game’s official website prominently displays a link to the official Navy Seals website which equally as prominently displays a link for individuals interested in enlisting in the Seals. Games provided for free by U.S. military branches or that prominently link their advertising to military promotions and recruiting make a bolder and far more explicit connection between game play and militarism. Although they present players with the opportunity to see and make important connections, more often they melt into the wider context of computer games, entertainment sources not meant to be taken seriously or connected to real world issues.
<37> Games and toys help make U.S. militarism appear benign, and as critic Michael Rogin argues, "the less one experiences alternatives to power, the more one needs to see it as benign" (520). Consumers hunger for benign versions of spectacles of power that can offer a sense of security and trust in a state that seems increasingly distant, unresponsive and disconnected to public concerns. Shooter video games position players in the role of paramilitary heroes, inviting consumers to embody the force and power of the militarized state. Power is thus harmonized not only by the effect of play but also by the intimacy created between state and citizen. Players can pretend that they are one of the righteous good guys, saving the world from terrorists, and thus satiate their hunger for an intimate benign representation of power.
Attack of the Killer Imperial Subject
<38> If video games are the narrative machines Peter Buse claims they are, the narratives they most readily produce help fuel patterns of global consumption and imperial arrogance that create power imbalances between the global north and south as well as the consequent exchange of violence in both directions. The repeated rehearsal of exerting domination and experiencing death within controlled and renewable parameters creates a false sense of power and invincibility in consumers that contributes to U.S. imperial arrogance. In game after game, consumers train their emotions and sensory perceptions to a world where might not only makes right but it is fun, energizing, and creates no irreparable consequences. More money forestalls the inevitable end the game is rushing toward. Linking a financial transaction to warrior-style invincibility fuels the ideology that infinite growth and development are the prerogatives of citizens of the free world. Amassing disproportionate wealth in such a system of beliefs is more than logical -- it is necessary to personal and national security and integrity.
<39> At the outset of the global military actions dubbed “the war on terrorism,” President George W. Bush reminded U.S. Americans that they were all soldiers [17]. Players of shooter video games were ideally equipped to identify with this pronouncement. The games create a distance between players and a history that hurts, which allows them to experience violence cleanly, while also painlessly facilitating their acceptance of the role of perpetrators who bare no moral, ethical, or economic culpability for the actions carried out by their nation. Players are accustomed to viewing and participating in violence without disrupting their moral and ethical visions of their personal or national identity. Participating in simulated violence does not effect players’ moral landscapes, and this acclimation to the representation of violence supports the stable maintenance of moral righteousness within consumer-citizens.
<40> Symbolic representations of violence are an expression of violence within a culture, not the cause of violence. Therefore, limiting or banning video game violence will not protect players from violence. Parents, politicians and players alike first need to take account of their positions in the global web of power before they can become active social agents working to deescalate violence in the world. Debate and discussion should be focused on the social and economic contexts in which violence is conducted, not on the level of cause and effect. Cultural critics have a responsibility to encourage critique, debate, and play with video games that is embodied, contextualized, and engaged in the issues of history, power, and violence at all their complex levels.
Notes
[1] For a discussion of video game play and the loss of self, see Fiske. [^]
[2] First person shooter games that make use of controls rather than a light gun commonly represent the player/hero at the bottom center of the screen where the image of the player's gun appears. This phallic intrusion into the game world is necessary in order to orient and aim the player's weapon. In these games as in the light gun versions, the player only sees a representation of the hero during demo mode. Identification is slightly more complicated, however, as the player spends his or her time staring at the tip of the weapon and identifying with this object. [^]
[3] A great deal of cultural criticism concerning the relationships between violence, spectacle, and the media has been generated around the issues of the Persian Gulf War. See Jeffords for an excellent introduction to this area of study. [^]
[4] Much of the scholarly work of video games with the exception of sociological and psychological explorations of the effects of violence on players has been conducted by game enthusiasts who paint a largely enthusiastic portrait of the role games and game technology have in culture; see for example, Poole and Herz. I would argue that this is the case because these critics fail to locate their individual bodies and pleasure within a social grid that clearly articulates the power differentials created by empire. Doing so need not destroy the pleasure potential of video games, but surely it should recontextualize it. [^]
[5] As an example, Cynthia Enloe’s essay, "Beyond 'Rambo,'” demonstrates meaning is not monolithic. When Filipino guerrilla fighters watched Rambo before the revolution that toppled Marcos, they made very different meanings out of the character and his relationship to structural power than most U.S. audiences did. I am concerned in this essay with the functions and meanings of play within structures of power of empire where a plethora of texts and representations work to locate players on the side of an “us” that is dominated by white supremacist, militarized, imperial ideology, against a “them” that is socially, racially, culturally and economically Other. [^]
[6] See Price, Ellis, Egli and Fox for discussion of social patterns of interaction in arcades. [^]
[7] An interesting development in Konami's Police 911 is not only that the player's body movements actually generate movement on the game screen, but when the player is shot, the video displays a police officer's body crumpled on the ground and the game's animated voice shouts, "Officer down!" In addition to these innovations, the icons denoting a player's available lives take the shape of police officer silhouettes. Each time the player is killed, a life icon falls over and remains down. It will be interesting to see if the body sensitivity and greater focus on the player's death will become a trend in shooter games of the future and to analyze the impact this may have on player deindividuation. [^]
[8] Peter Buse claims only somewhat sarcastically that game play causes all the muscles to atrophy except those in the retina and wrist. This combination of atrophy and development provoke him to express the concern that "the development of a youth male culture around video and computer games may not constitute an erosion of the masculine, but it at least signals a reconfiguration of gender around technology" (174). That his perception of a link between technologically induced physical change and alterations in social patterns would so rapidly induce gender panic suggests the power of the influence video games can have on the social realm. [^]
[9] The most literal example of this phenomenon in the arcade environment took the form of a “game” in which players held two metal game posts and watched as a measuring device indicated the flow of electricity being conducted from one post to the other through the players’ bodies. An alternative version of this game had players seated in a mock electric chair while holding the metal posts. The purpose of the game was to endure the pain of the highest level of electric voltage. [^]
[10] This phenomenon has not been confined to U.S. culture. After a school shooting in Germany that caused the deaths of sixteen people, the German government also called for giving regulators the right to ban violent computer games. See Desmond Butler, “Germany Seeks to Ban Violent Computer Games,” New York Times 9 May 2002, late ed.: A7. [^]
[11] Ferdinand Marcos banned video games in the Philippines in 1981, and they were banned in Indonesia in 1982 as well. In both of these cases, the games were viewed as the products of Western influence disrupting traditional culture. While the Philippine and Indonesian governments were quick to ban the games themselves, they never disrupted the influx of enormous amounts of U.S. military aid that caused a more direct and lasting disruption of traditional culture. These nations are ideal test cases for what happens when a symptom of militarization is treated and not the cause; namely, violence continues and escalates in the presence of U.S. sponsored militarization even in the absence of video games. [^]
[12] See Gauntlett for a detailed overview of why these studies are problematic. [^]
[13] With the additional drawback that many adult consumers do not even understand the system. See Woodall. [^]
[14] See Huizinga and Carlsson-Paige. [^]
[15] I have drawn on Haddon, Price, Poole, and Sullivan in my recounting of the history of the development of video games and technology. [^]
[16] For media coverage of the relationship between these two industries, see Clark, Platoni and Mintz. [^]
[17] Labeling the array of international and domestic arrests, attacks and curtailments of civil liberties a war serves to redefine the very meaning of “war” and move it further from the jurisdictions of the UN and the World Court. International codes of war established in the Geneva Convention were meant to contain the parameters of war and curtail the unrestricted use of force by nations. Current U.S. military and foreign policy, including attempts to secure immunity in international human rights violations cases, undermines the mechanisms put in place to protect civilian populations around the world from unrestricted, total war in manners similar to the way that the violence of so called terrorists undermines the boundaries and standards of civil society. U.S. actions are even more hazardous to global populations due to the fact that the U.S. has the power and ability to rewrite definitions to suit its imperial agenda. [^]
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