Visualizing War? Towards a Visual Analysis of Videogames and Social Media

Abstract

Political scientists are increasingly engaged with the importance of the “visual turn,” asking questions about how we understand what we see and the social and political consequences of that seeing. One of the greatest challenges facing researchers is developing methods that can help us understand visual politics. Much of the literature has fallen into the familiar qualitative versus quantitative methodological binary, with a strong bias in favor of the former, and has consequently been unable to realize the advantages of mixed-methods research. We advance the study of visual politics as well as the literature on bridging the quantitative versus qualitative divide by showing that it is possible to generate quantitative data that is rooted in, and amenable to, qualitative research on visual phenomena. Our approach to conducting mixed-methods research is an alternative to the more common strategy of seeing various research methods as an assortment of tools, as it is directed at developing an organic relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy for research on visual politics by discussing our own efforts to create a dataset for quantifying visual signifiers of militarism.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Procedural Rhetoric and the Military-Entertainment Complex: Two Case Studies from the War on Terror

“…As previously demonstrated, in these games ‘there is no space for dialogue or negotiation’, just brute force (p. 460). This ties in with Robinson and Schulzke’s (2016: 997) arguments around ‘militarism’, something that can be seen both in the structural power of the military but also in the ideological bleed-through of military logic and ‘militaristic solutions to political problems’. In Ghost Recon 2 , as in Robinson and Šisler’s Middle Eastern examples, the implication is that there is only one solution to the exceptional threat posed by a well-trained North Korean military.…”

Revisión sistemática de investigaciones sobre videojuegos bélicos (2010-2020)

“…Algunos autores concluyen que los videojuegos bélicos presentan una implicación, conexión emocional y empatía de los jugadores con las víctimas menor que el cine. También señalan que algunos videojuegos fomentan la militarización, apelan a la defensa propia para legitimar los conflictos bélicos internacionales, caricaturizan o desdramatizan la guerra, mostrando a los protagonistas como héroes invulnerables, y limitan la visión crítica de los jugadores (Robinson & Schulzke, 2016). Advierten que estos instrumentos pueden convertirse en plataformas de propaganda ideológica y/o nacionalista y pueden fomentar el reclutamiento militar.…”

“…Análisis socio-crítico, socio-político y ético de juegos bélicos (10) Donald, 2019;García-Moreno, 2017;González & Igartua, 2020;Nardone, 2017;Payne, 2014;Robinson, 2012;Robinson & Schulzke, 2016;Saber & Webber, 2017;Shaw, 2010;Verino, 2019).…”

Understanding militarism after the end of the Cold War: History, international relations, and media studies ask new questions

“…The mediation of war through, for instance, amateur videos posted online challenges traditional state‐centric approaches to understanding the causes, effects, and continuation of war (e.g., Kuntsman & Stein, ). Though questions around audience reception and response are often left unexplored because of the focus on the meaning constructions of the images themselves, recent IR work has included digital anthropology on whether threat narratives have been successful (Gaufman, ); audience ethnography on audience perceptions (O'Loughlin, ); the quantification of visual signifiers and the potential of constructing meaningful generalizations about audience perception and online messaging (Robinson & Schulzke, ); and, a multi‐modal approach to audio‐visual analysis of militarism in video (Jackson, ).…”