Just war? War games, war crimes, and game design

Military shooters have explored both historical and modern settings and remain one of the most popular game genres. While the violence of these games has been explored in multiple studies, the study of how war and the rules of war are represented is underexplored. The Red Cross has argued that as virtual war games are becoming closer to reality, the rules of war should be included. This article explores the argument put forward by the Red Cross and its reception by games media organizations, in order to consider how the concept of “just war” is represented within games. This article will focus on concerns over games adherence to the criteria of jus in bello (the right conduct in war) and will also consider the challenges that developers face in the creation of entertainment products in the face of publisher and press concerns

Brutal games: Call of Duty and the cultural narrative of World War II

Published"This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Cinema Journal following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available through the University of Texas Press."World War II is the conflict that features most in first-person shooter (FPS) video games, but despite the rapid growth of this sector of the entertainment industry, the way in which the war is recalibrated in this format has been at best ignored, at worst dismissed. Concentrating particularly on Call of Duty: World at War (Activision, 2008), this article establishes how the FPS distills war into its most basic components—space and weaponry—and considers the possibility that the FPS exposes aspects of warfare that have been obscured in representations of World War II in other media

Military-Themed Video Games and the Cultivation of Related Beliefs and Attitudes in Young Adult Males

Military themed games have been broadly critiqued as ideological vehicles that support western military institutions and militaristic attitudes. At the heart of these critiques is a concern for the potential influence these games may have on their audience, yet little empirical evidence exists to either support or refute that concern. Using cultivation theory as a general framework, this study investigates whether associations between playing military themed video games and military-related thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes can be found in an online, national survey of 410 young adult men. Consistent with cultivation theory’s predictions, significant associations between the use of military themed video games and second-order cultivation effects were found, including militaristic attitudes, Islamophobia, and the perceived likelihood of a terrorist attack. Moreover, military themed games were a stronger predictor of such effects than general measures of gameplay, which predicted a participant’s propensity to enlist in the military. However, this study failed to find evidence of first-order effects, nor did it find that trait transportability or the perceived realism of military games were meaningful moderators of second-order effects, as predicted by cognitive models of cultivation theory. These results highlight the potential problematic relationship between military games and their players, but cast some concerns as to the fitness of cultivation theory as the ideal framework to fully explore this relationship

Global gamers, transnational play, imaginary battlefield: encountering the gameplay experience in the war-themed first-person-shooter,Call of Duty

During the post-9/11 era we have witnessed the rise of war-themed digital games, which are increasingly produced and distributed on a massive global scale. This new form of 'militainment' re-formulates ‘the military-entertainment complex’ industrial model, and by repeatedly simulating historical/present/fictional war events and adopting militaristic stories, creates an adrenaline-pumping interactive gaming experience that the global gamers find very difficult to resist. Before 2011 the most iconic war-themed first-person-shooter (FPS) digital game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, achieved a new milestone of more than 20 million copies sold globally. After the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Facebook COD group became one of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook communities in 2010. At the time of writing this thesis, this network community had already attracted more than 10 million fans worldwide. Besides the well-known Call of Duty series, other FPS titles like Medal of Honor, Fallout, and Battlefield series are all fed into the global gamers’ growing appetite for this so-called ‘shoot’em’all’ genre. Within academia, scholars from different research disciplines also realized the importance of gaming and have been trying to approach this conflict-based digital game culture from various angles. The war-themed genre FPS is frequently challenged by people’s negative impression towards its unpleasant essence and content; questioning its embedded political ideologies, the violent sequences involved in the gameplay and its socio-cultural influences/effects to individual and community etc. However, the wide range of critical debates in this field has reflected the growing interest of scholars in the complex political relationship between military and entertainment sectors and industries, and the embedded P.R. network that is running behind the games’ industrial structure and cultural production (see Wark 1996, Herz 1997, Derian 2001, Stockwell and Muir 2003, Lenoir and Lowood 2005, Leonard 2007, Turse 2008, Ottosen 2009). Despite widespread academic interests in the subject, few researchers have paid attention to the gamers who are the ones truly engaged themselves to this genre. If we look at the research within game studies today, less analysis is primarily focused on this unique shooter-gamer culture. In this regard, this research adopts qualitative research methods to explore the gamers’ feelings, attitudes, and their experiences in the war-themed FPS genre. In terms of the research methods used, an online questionnaire was launched to collect responses from 433 gamers across different countries, and 11 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a community of COD gamers were also conducted in Taiwan between 2010 and 2011. The data which has emerged from the two research methods reveals gamers’ perceptions about war games’ time narrative and realism. Based on the interviews, the research analyses East Asian gamers’ construction of meanings in this ‘western genre’ and provides some theoretical reflections about their transnational FPS gameplay experience

Answering the Call of Duty : the popular geopolitics of military-themed videogames

PhD ThesisThis research is based on a detailed empirical case study of the popular videogame series Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Drawing primarily on the field of popular geopolitics, the analysis reveals how imaginations of global politics are represented, consumed and enacted through the virtual worlds of the Modern Warfare series. In noting the fixation within popular geopolitics on representation and discourse, however, I argue that popular geopolitics needs to attend to the complex relationships between text, audience, and production, what I define as popular geopolitics 3.0. This approach directly responds to calls to examine the connections between popular geopolitics and everyday life, whilst maintaining an understanding of the importance of analysing the visual and discursive ways in which dominant geopolitical imaginaries are constructed and articulated. The thesis proceeds in three sections. First, by focusing on the videogames themselves I demonstrate the ways the virtual landscapes mirror and reflect contemporary geopolitics and the geographies of military violence. The research thesis reveals the techniques and specificities of the Modern Warfare series, in articulating geopolitical discourses. Second, the thesis adopts a ‘player-based’ approach which explores the often prosaic ways in which these geopolitical and militaristic virtual worlds are interacted with, understood, and experienced. I draw on in-depth qualitative data, including interviews and video ethnography, and show how cultural and (geo) political attitudes, subjectivities, and identities are shaped through the act of playing Modern Warfare. Third, the thesis explores the practices of production and marketing which influence the ‘final’ geopolitical scripting and meaning. Using documentary sources, I trace the processes of production exposing the wider political economic structures, alongside the everyday social and material relations, which govern and structure the geopolitical narratives told. Allied with this, the marketing, advertisement and promotion of the series are investigated. This reveals the practices which are manifest ‘beyond the screen’, and which shape the geopolitical meaning of the game world. iii Overall, the thesis provides an important conceptual and methodological contribution to the understanding of the cultural production, circulation and consumption of geopolitical sensibilities. Moreover, in dismissing the populist cliché ‘it’s just a game’, the thesis demonstrates the indivisible relationship between military-themed videogames and geopolitical discourse and practice

Organisation und Gestaltung von Lernprozessen in Computerspielen - eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der deutschen E-Sport-Szene

Computerspiele wurden in den Bildungswissenschaften bisher vor allem unter zwei Blickwinkeln betrachtet: Der Fragestellung danach, ob und wie digitale Spielwelten erfolgreich in Lehr-Lernsituationen eingesetzt werden können, und Untersuchungen dazu, welche Fähigkeiten durch die Beschäftigung mit ihnen bei den Spielenden gefördert werden können. Bisher noch nicht betrachtet worden ist hingegen, wie Lernprozesse im Kontext von Computerspielen eigentlich organisiert und gestaltet sind. An genau dieser Forschungslücke setzt die vorliegende Arbeit an und untersucht, wie die Nutzer/innen von digitalen Spielwelten das Wissen und die Fähigkeiten erwerben, die zum erfolgreichen Verbleib dort erforderlich sind. Die Untersuchung erfolgt beispielhaft anhand einer besonderen Gruppen von Computerspielern/innen: den Mitgliedern der E-Sport-Szene. Die Akteure/innen zeichnen sich durch eine Konzentration auf das wettbewerbsmäßige Spielen und ein Selbstverständnis als Sportler/innen aus. Sie eignen sich aufgrund ihrer intensiven und bewussten Beschäftigung mit Computerspielen besonders für die Untersuchung von Lernprozessen, da davon auszugehen ist, dass diese bei ihnen in besonders signifikanter und konzentrierter Form analysiert werden können. Der explorative Untersuchungsansatz kombiniert quantitative und qualitative Methoden in der Form einer Online-Befragung und von Leitfaden-Interviews. Mit diesem Methodenmix werden sowohl empirisch gesicherte Erkenntnisse über die E-Sport-Szene selbst, ein bisher noch weitestgehend unerforschtes Feld, als auch zu den Einstellungen zu Lernpotenzialen von Computerspielen sowie anhand intensiver Erhebungen zur Trainingsgestaltung zu den verschiedenen Lernformen erhoben. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen wird ein Modell zur Systematisierung von Lernformen nicht nur im Kontext von E-Sport, sondern für Computerspiele im Allgemeinen entwickelt. Die Ergebnisse werden vor dem Hintergrund der Expertiseforschung, des Ansatzes der Funktionskreise von Computerspielen nach Jürgen Fritz sowie ausgewählter Lerntheorien (Lernen am Modell und Communities of Practice) diskutiert. Es zeigt sich, dass Lernprozesse im Kontext von Computerspielen durch ihre hochgradige Selbstorganisation und Sozialität gekennzeichnet sind