Have You Played the War on Terror?

Abstract

The media paradigm by which we understand war is increasingly the video game. These changes are not only reflected in the real-time television war, but also an increased collusion between military and commercial uses of video games. The essay charts the border-crossing of video games between military and civilian spheres alongside attendant discourses of war. Of particular interest are the ways that war has been coded as an object of consumer play and how official productions aimed at training and recruitment have cast video games as players themselves in the War on Terror. The essay argues that this crossover has initialized a “third sphere” of militarized civic space where the citizen is supplanted by the figure of the virtual citizen-soldier.