First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Border

Abstract

Digital networked media actively participate in the nation-state’s and tech entrepreneurs’ efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands. These media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering popular reference points for the new technology being developed (e.g. Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable. This article analyzes one such reference point within the first-person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). Like other border-themed video games, The Cartel borrows on colonial tropes and ideologies by creating playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through its virtual modes of representation and interaction, the game encodes the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. While its digital aesthetics animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the first-person shooter reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare, an ideological orientation to the border underground that channels the players’ purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. Analyzing the narrative and procedural work of this ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures structure and shape specific forms of racial and colonial violence.

Navigating Physical and Digital Environments: Latin American Video Game Studies in Practice

“…Debates have ensued, for instance, over the extent to which games replicate the logics of coloniality and racial violence that characterise the lived experience of many (e.g., Llamas‐Rodriguez, 2021), or, conversely, how their ‘procedural rhetoric’, to use Ian Bogost's influential term, might generate subversive senses of affinity in the player, for instance with cross‐border migrants between Mexico and the United States (Cleger, 2015). This kind of discussion is consonant with a broader trend in what Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Martin (2016) term ‘regional game studies’: an exploration of how games mediate between (often unequal) global and local contexts while endeavouring to avoid replicating simplistic postcolonial centre‐periphery models of power and influence.…”