Virtuous, virtual, but not visceral: (dis)embodied viewing in military-themed videogames

Berents, Helen; Keogh, Brendan

doi:10.1080/21624887.2018.1432531

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The empirical context through which this article examines this sacrificial logic is that of the games used to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. The study of recreational games in critical security studies and international relations has proliferated over the last decade (Berents and Keogh, 2018;Brown, 2017;Ciută, 2016;Jarvis and Robinson, 2021;Robinson, 2015Robinson, , 2016Salter, 2011). More recently, scholars have begun to examine the military applications of gaming (Hirst, 2020(Hirst, , 2021(Hirst, , 2022Öberg, 2020;Robinson, 2019), an area of study that had broadly lain dormant since the publication of the second edition of James Der Derian's book Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network in 2009.…”

Section: Pharmacotic Wargamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Hirst,

George

2024

Security Dialogue

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This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus.

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Section: Pharmacotic Wargamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Hirst,

George

2024

Security Dialogue

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“…In essence, videogames produced within these relationships carry actors’ values, often reinforcing gendered, racialized, and colonial/imperial norms (De Zamaróczy, 2017). Through coded-in rules, selective subject construction, and information circulation, videogames can naturalize and legitimize uses of force, sanitize public perceptions of warfare, and elicit consent for militarization (Berents and Keogh, 2018; Mantello, 2012; Payne, 2014; Power, 2007; Robinson, 2019).…”

Section: Weaponized Ai Popular Culture and Game Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurmountable enemies or easy targets? Military-themed videogame ‘translations’ of weaponized artificial intelligence

Qiao-Franco,

Franco

2024

Security Dialogue

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International relations scholarship has long emphasized that popular culture can impact public understandings and political realities. In this article, we explore these potentials in the context of military-themed videogames and their portrayals of weaponized artificial intelligence (AI). Within paradoxical videogame representations of AI weapons both as ‘insurmountable enemies’ that pose existential threats to humankind in narratives and as ‘easy targets’ that human protagonists routinely overcome in gameplay, we identify distortions of human–machine interaction that contradict real-world scenarios. These distortions revolve around videogames affording players enhanced human agency to dominate AI weapons to offer enjoyable gameplay, contradicting the same weapons being intended to diminish human agency on real-world battlefields. By leveraging the Actor-Network Theory concept of ‘translation’, we explain how these distorted portrayals of AI weapons are produced by entanglements between heterogeneous human and non-human actors that aim to make videogames mass-marketable and profitable. In so doing, we echo game studies research that calls for greater attention to the commercial and ludic dimensions of videogames so that international relations scholarship can better account for pop culture’s bounded abilities to impact public understandings and political realities.

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“…Moments of machine interference that influence player behavior show how both human and machine agencies are present, to varying degrees. 59 The beyond-human infrared and digital visions that these video games represent constantly maintain the vision, but in moments of machine interference beyond the frame of the video game's world, "the game object reminds 56 Conversationally, distributed agency through machine vision imaginaries is also evident in the creation of these video games. The developers of Cyberpunk 2077 explain how they deliberately tried to replicate data visualization errors such as datamoshing (a blurred or smeared effect that happens when transitioning from a complete image file to the next is unable to read the next file) in order to create "dream-like" transitions and "never-before-seen representations of digital realities in a 3D video game," see O. Świerad, P. Ankermann, K. Krzyścin, The Tech and Art of Cyberspaces in Cyberpunk 2077, "SIGGRAPH '21: Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Proceedings / ACM" 2021, July, doi: 10.1145/3450623.3464662.…”

Section:  W Kręgu Ideimentioning

confidence: 99%

“Too Easy” or “Too Much”? (Re)imagining Protagonistic Enhancement through Machine Vision in Video Games

Solberg

2022

Przegląd Kulturoznawczy

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This article explores how video games that valorize techno-masculine imaginaries of superhuman domination also present humans as depending on computational and non-human agencies to succeed. Through close readings of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward 2007) and Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red 2020), I illustrate the close connection between machine vision and militarized visions of domination and agency. The analyses show how beyond-human vision enhances player characters and players, complicating the human-machine relationship in the process. Video games can build on and feed into anthropocentric and masculinist narratives. This article demonstrates how even when the technology appears to support these fantasies of human control, there are moments when it takes over or otherwise disrupts the god-like interventions of the human. By analyzing failures, glitches, and the consistent machine participation in the assemblage, I unpack explicit cases of machine agency as part of a broader assemblage, revealing a more complex power dynamics than those that are initially presented to the player. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the superhuman machine vision was never exclusively human to begin with. Understanding vision and agency as shared with machines both enables and complicates fantasies of dominance in video games.

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Virtuous, virtual, but not visceral: (dis)embodied viewing in military-themed videogames

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Insurmountable enemies or easy targets? Military-themed videogame ‘translations’ of weaponized artificial intelligence

“Too Easy” or “Too Much”? (Re)imagining Protagonistic Enhancement through Machine Vision in Video Games

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