The Military-Entertainment Complex 9780674274730

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metaLABprojects The metaLABprojects series provides a platform for emerging currents of experimental scholarship, documenting key moments in the history of networked culture, and promoting critical thinking about the future of institutions of learning. The volumes’ eclectic, improvisatory, idea-driven style advances the proposition that design is not merely ornamental, but a means of inquiry in its own right. Accessibly priced and provocatively designed, the series invites readers to take part in reimagining print-based scholarship for the digital age. www.metalab.harvard.edu

Series Editor Jeffrey T. Schnapp Advisory Board Giuliana Bruno (Harvard VES) Jo Guldi (Brown) Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) Michael Hays (Harvard GSD) Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris) Bethany Nowviskie (U of Virginia) Andrew Piper (McGill) Mark C. Taylor (Columbia) Art Direction Daniele Ledda metaLAB and xycomm (Milan)

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Art and lettering by Jackie Winston, 2015 11

For Cheri and Elizabeth

Tim Lenoir Luke Caldwell The Military Entertainment Complex

metaLABprojects

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Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2018

Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in Canada First printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data Lenoir, Timothy, 1948- author. | Caldwell, Luke, author. The Military-Entertainment Complex / Tim Lenoir, Luke Caldwell. MetaLABprojects. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018. MetaLABprojects | Includes bibliographical references. LCN 2016002081 | ISBN 9780674724983 (alk. paper) LCSH: Computer war games. | Computers war games— Social aspects—United States. | War—Computer simulation— Social aspects—United States. | Military art and science—Computer simulation. | War in mass media. | War on Terrorism, 2001-2009, in mass media. | Video games industry LCC U310.2 .L46 2016 | DDC 338.4/779392–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002081

Graphic Design: xycomm (Milan) Daniele Ledda with Fabrizio Cantoni Filippo Ferrari Alessandro Tonelli

Table of Contents

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Induction: The Military-Entertainment Complex and the Contemporary War Imaginary

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1. From Battlezone to America’s Army: The Defense Department and the Game Industry

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2. Creating Repeat Consumers: Epic Realism and the Birth of the Wargame Franchise

122 133 148

Windows 2.1. The Ludic Affordances of Special Forces 2.2. Franchise Game Business Models 2.3. The RMA in Contemporary Wargaming

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3. Coming to a Screen Near You: The RMA and Affective Entertainment

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4. Press X to Hack: Cyberwar and Videogames

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Window 4.1. The Narrative Affordances of Hackers and Cyberwarfare

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Discharge: Counter-Wargaming in Spec Ops: The Line

244 258 259 260

Endnotes Linkography Acknowledgments Credits

CHAPTER 4 INDUCTION

The MilitaryEntertainment Complex and the Contemporary War Imaginary ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ––––––––

From Collusion to Capitalism Haven’t we seen these images hundreds of times before? A camera pans smoothly as it gazes down the cool iron crosshairs of an assault rifle. Some bad guys are about to be blown away! While every cue signals that you are playing a videogame, you suddenly realize

you wield no controller and are watching a movie: a movie promising the most authentic military experience to date. Featuring real navy SEALs as the main cast and the use of live ammo during filming, this movie feels like the real thing. Except it also feels like a game … or maybe an advertisement? Perhaps it is all of these. What does it say about our cultural moment when movies like the 2012 film Act of Valor evoke videogames, when games seem like Pentagon advertisements for future war scenarios, and when war itself seems like the mission we just completed on our home videogame console? With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons of war, comparisons between war and videogames have multiplied. In this book we trace the tangled nets of the military-entertainment complex to see how the lines became blurred between the realities of war and the interactive game scenarios we play. From the historic mutual interdependencies forged between defense contractors and a fledgling gaming industry to the gaming aesthetic of “epic realism” that now inspires investment in specific tools and technologies of war, the relationships between the military and entertainment industries are complex and nonlinear. Our interest is in discovering how we have arrived at a point where the realities of war are deeply inflected by their representation in popular entertainment.

Cooperation, Co-optation—or Coinciding Interests? A large body of scholarship exists on videogames and the military, and our work draws liberally on it. Early studies of the origins of the military-entertainment complex by J. C. Herz, Tim Lenoir, and Ed Halter focused on exchanges of

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expertise and training platforms between the military and the commercial game industry, and how militaries have developed and marketed game platforms as recruiting and training tools.1 Robin Andersen, Roger Stahl, James Der Derian, and Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter extended this work on the military’s effort to leverage the early videogame industry into a broader and more far-reaching critique of the ways the military-entertainment complex constructs support for militarism and militaristic ideals, effectively short-circuiting civil discourse about the conduct of warfare.2 Through the commissioning of training tools and simulations from game makers in the 1990s, the repurposing of commercial games into military training aids, and then the commercial spin-off of these games as consumer products, the Pentagon stimulated a market for realism and authenticity in wargames.3 Full Spectrum Warrior, developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) as a simulation and training tool for the military and then spun off as a successful commercial game, is one of several examples. The appeal of these games for the commercial gaming audience lay in their realism and authenticity: they were based on military training simulations for actual military engagements with real soldiers and drew on military strategists as consultants. In what has become the dominant narrative in studies of the military-entertainment complex, Stahl, Andersen, Der Derian, Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter have credited games developed by the US military in collaboration with military contractors in the business of simulation and training tools as primarily responsible for disseminating images and narratives that elicit consent for US militarism and military engagement. America’s Army, developed by the US Army with taxpayer money, has been singled out as the leader in disseminating US military ideology and foreign policy to a global

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game culture.4 Because of its depiction of realistic and authentic military hardware and tactics as well as its focus on immersing the player in the army’s core values, America’s Army not only serves as a recruiting tool but also invites Americans to participate in militarism by putting a friendly, hospitable face on the military, manufacturing consent and complicity for programs, missions, and weapons.5 America’s Army and other simulation platforms certainly function well as vectors for official military values and conduct, thus making them invaluable recruiting and training tools.6 As Ian Bogost has argued, America’s Army is best understood as a “procedural narrative” that strictly enforces the US military’s rules of engagement, honor code, and chain of command; it is thus a near-perfect vehicle for imparting the ideology and worldview of the US Army through the rule-based procedures of the game.7 We argue, however, that the most successful commercial franchise wargames have taken a different path, seeking to create “epic” affective experiences minimally attached to reality and to extensively commodify game play rather than deliver a realistic or procedural narrative that instills an ideological commitment. If an ideology is present in popular franchises like Call of Duty or Battlefield, it is better described as a model of consumerism than as a vector for military public relations efforts. Popular wargaming in conjunction with TV and film has created a commodified and franchised vision of war that has become rooted in the popular imagination, shaping how we envision both our military forces conducting the War on Terror beyond American shores and federal agencies waging the war for homeland security at home. Franchise video wargames have evolved significantly from detailed remediations of historical wars to premediations of contemporary and future threat scenarios

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anticipated by the Department of Defense (DoD), while blockbuster films and TV action series have also borrowed liberally from the many themes of the War on Terror. Rather than becoming a mouthpiece for the military or homeland security apparatus, however, the entertainment industry co-opted and transformed these thematics to pad their own bottom lines, securing engaged fan bases and maximizing profits by turning the War on Terror into the visual and emotional thrill ride par excellence. In the years following 9/11, start-ups and media giants alike rushed to exploit this burgeoning market for realism and authenticity across the entertainment spectrum. TV series such as 24, The West Wing, and others featured stories “ripped from the headlines.” Video wargames led this trend in featuring scenarios that collapsed the temporal distance between real-world events and the ability to re-create and play them in “real time,” particularly reenactments of engagements from the First Gulf War or, after 9/11, events from the early War on Terror.8 Stahl has argued that the first to take advantage of this market were game companies that had produced military simulators turned commercial, such as Conflict: Desert Storm I and II and Close Combat: First to Fight. The big commercial game makers were eager to follow suit. Sony filed a trademark in 2003 on the phrase “Shock and Awe” to use in its games but, according to Stahl, dropped the claim a month later to avoid public criticism that the company was turning war into a game.9 Kuma\War brought together all these features in a company founded in 2004 by a group of retired military officers. Claiming to blend gaming with news accounts, the Kuma\War team researched topography, important characters, military intelligence, and the equipment used by the military to re-create key missions in the Iraq War—often just days after they occurred.

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According to Stahl, though public relations concerns made them hesitant at first, the makers of big franchise games eventually entered this market for realistic and near-to-realtime game scenarios opened up by these military training and simulation game spin-offs. The most successful of these was the Call of Duty franchise, which shifted from games restaging World War II battles to fictionalized wars evoking the War on Terror in the fourth volume of the series, in 2007. Among the many features that made Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare a blockbuster title for the emerging field of militainment, Modern Warfare contained a level called “Death from Above,” which featured infrared tracking of ground targets and their elimination by an AC-130 Spectre gunship, celebrated as so realistic that game footage was indistinguishable from actual footage of AC-130 target runs.10 In Stahl’s view, Modern Warfare’s realism and focus on contemporary military engagements in the War on Terror were key factors propelling the game to number one in sales worldwide. Developed by Infinity Ward and produced by Activision, the game was not financially supported by the US military, but the designers employed several military advisers to imbue the game with the realism, values, and ideological framing to support the DoD’s assumptions about the US conduct of war and the heroic nature of the struggle against global terrorism. In its widespread mass appeal, Modern Warfare is emblematic of what Stahl calls an “interactive war paradigm” growing out of the military’s public relations efforts beginning with simulation game spin-offs and recruitment efforts embodied in games like America’s Army. By producing sanitized war experiences to be consumed in an interactive fashion, the military-entertainment complex produces audiences as depoliticized subjects—“citizen soldiers”— and transmits support for American militarization by making the conduct of war seem cool and fun.

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This dominant narrative of the commercial wargame industry’s emergence as a supportive partner of the military in creating a vast platform that circulates pro-military ideologies is paired with a complementary account of the silencing of dissent and the harnessing of popular TV and cinema to the military agenda. The military, the Pentagon, and the White House, particularly during the second Bush administration, have borne the brunt of criticism for their efforts to shape a media environment that not only supports militarism but also verges on propaganda for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the War on Terror generally. The Pentagon and White House program of embedding news reporters with ground troops was among the most successful efforts to manage information and set the agenda for a supportive media environment. Such measures limited journalistic freedom by focusing reporting on the personal experiences of a handful of troops and fragments of action in war zones that, in Andrew Hoskins’s words, “served to compress media coverage into … disconnected snapshots,” animating a form of “infotainment” television that offered “little opportunity for sustained critical media or public discourse on the overall waging of the war and its longer-term consequences.”11 Embedded reporting also placed journalists at the mercy of those providing them access and protection within war zones, which further suppressed critical reporting. Prominent examples of Pentagon-supported TV programming included American Fighter Pilot (CBS), Military Diaries (VH1), and the acclaimed Jerry Bruckheimer– produced six-episode reality series, Profiles from the Front Lines (ABC), which focused on actual Special Operations Forces apprehending possible terrorists in Afghanistan. Made to appear like typical US military forces, these Special Operations personnel were shown gathering intelligence and building

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relationships with locals; when apprehending potential terrorists, they reacted with cultural sensitivity, and, when cornered by angry villagers, they talked rather than shot their way out of situations. Such programming was designed to legitimate the Bush administration’s claims that “Enduring Freedom” was more humanitarian operation than violent occupation. These examples of “militainment”—the merging of reality TV to entertainment media, encouraging viewers to step into the shoes of real soldiers—joined numerous prominent examples of pro-military agendas in regular scripted TV programs, including JAG, The Agency, and Alias. In her treatment of JAG, a TV series about the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Office responsible for investigating, prosecuting, and defending those accused of crimes within the military justice system, Stacy Takacs details the ideological alignment of JAG with the Bush administration and its policies.12 In post-9/11 episodes the show welcomed an active DoD role in its production, including personnel and equipment for episodes about the War on Terror and insider information provided by Donald Rumsfeld and other DoD officials about proposed military tribunals for “enemy combatants” captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere that were not just ripped from the headlines but actively anticipated them. Takacs argues that in JAG episodes literally coproduced by the Pentagon, the Bush administration sought to preemptively shape the public debate about US procedures for “harsh interrogation” at US detention centers such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. JAG presents military authorities as fairly adjudicating charges of abuse “even as we are called upon not to judge the soldiers who do the dirty work of the War on Terrorism in the rest of our names.”13 Examples of films supporting the militarization of the public are legion, tracing a history back to the early days of the film industry in what has been called the Golden Age of War

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Movies of the 1920s and 1930s, when films such as What Price Glory? (1926) and Wings (1927) were produced.14 Top Gun (1986) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) are more recent flagship examples frequently discussed in this context, but for the purposes of framing our study of militainment, Black Hawk Down (2001, BHD) is particularly relevant.15 BHD ostensibly reenacts a 1993 special forces mission in Mogadishu to take out a warlord thwarting UN humanitarian efforts to distribute aid to Somali famine victims. According to Andersen, the film substantially eliminates the historical context for understanding the economic and US foreign policy dimensions of the situation that actually led to the political chaos the film portrays. The film rewrites history as it transforms into victory what had been negatively portrayed in popular news internationally: bloody scenes of mutilated bodies of American soldiers dragged through the streets; a major American defeat in which nineteen US soldiers and more than one thousand Somali militants and civilians were killed. In the film the Somali warlord explains, “There will always be killing. This is how things are in our world.” Violence is thus universalized and decontextualized, and the Somalis are represented as dehumanized enemy hordes throwing themselves at American heroes in rampant disregard for life: the videogame paradigm. Indeed, Ridley Scott’s filming technique is reminiscent of the emerging videogame aesthetic in its use of rapid cuts and over-the-shoulder shots. The filming makes the viewer a participant through hyperrealistic combat sequences in which the Special Forces’ motto “leave no man behind” takes on graphic reality as a commando puts in his backpack the bloody arm of a comrade blown off in battle. Never allowing the viewer to reflect on the context of events, or on the political necessity or the morality of war, the film instead instills patriotism and abstract values of “why we fight,” with an emphasis on the competence, pro-

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fessionalism, and bonds of brotherhood uniting the Special Forces it portrays. As a Delta Force operative insists, the battle is about only one thing: “It’s about the man next to you. That’s it.” Andersen explains why this film, despite its potential to appear to be an antiwar film chronicling an American disaster, received support from the military in terms of high-tech military hardware and Black Hawk gunships flying the army insignia, and in fact was given a special White House screening: when the viewer is immersed alongside Special Forces operatives in almost palpable war scenes, he or she empathizes with the troops, supporting their efforts while being distracted from criticism of the larger goals and implications of military interventionism. In these ways, while maintaining a subtle distance from a top-down conspiracy model, the established literature regarding the military-entertainment complex has largely emphasized the circulation of pro-military ideologies initiated by government public relations efforts, military recruitment, training and contracting programs, and a cooperative, profitseeking if not patriotic media industry. In this volume we develop a different picture of the role of video wargames in the military-entertainment complex. In our view, the militaryentertainment complex is generated by an alignment of multivalent interests, evolving in ways motivated by the shifting economic and bureaucratic imperatives facing the entertainment industry. We are not critiquing the view described above as the dominant narrative of studies of the military-entertainment complex, in which highly popular military-themed wargames are held to have contributed to the massive increase in the militarization of popular culture in the United States. Indeed, we argue for the same thesis. But we emphasize a different set of dynamics, focused on the capitalist entertainment markets of digital media.

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We also do not dissent from the view that the US military contributed to this cultural phenomenon by commissioning games for training and simulation that, when spun off as commercial products, attracted a following in the gaming community and also contributed in some (difficult-to-measure) way to producing a militarized citizenry. We contend, however, that, despite receiving the lion’s share of critical scholarly attention, games spun off from military-funded training and simulation projects have played a relatively small role in this phenomenon; their primary—and we think limited—effect was early on, from roughly 2000 through 2003; and the primary agents in the militarization of our current mediascape have been the commercial media conglomerates, which have constructed an industry of franchise video wargames and popular media for television and the Cineplex. While we remain critical of certain elements of these media forms, it is not our intention to repeat the old mantras that “videogames are corrupting us,” that there are no positive benefits to playing them, or that violent forms of entertainment reprogram fans into rampaging killers. These simplistic rejections of popular media are grounded in moral panics and have poor empirical support. Avoiding these common pitfalls, however, is not reason to avoid undertaking a critical inquiry into how these media help construct a certain type of militarism within the contemporary war imaginary. Our reason for proposing a shift from explicit militaryentertainment coordination to the constraints of digital capitalism is that the now-standard view focuses its account too strongly on the use of games and other media by the military, the Pentagon, various administrations of the White House, Homeland Security, and cooperative media organizations in the dissemination of supportive ideologies. While such collusion has certainly taken place, as Stahl, Andersen,

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Der Derian, and others have shown brilliantly, in our view the emphasis is wrongly placed: sufficient attention has not been paid to the role of media markets and commercial media firms in the careful construction and commodification of the experience of modern warfare in the popular imagination. As we endeavor to show, commercial franchise game companies have constructed their own cinematic version of “real war,” which has had a far greater effect than military- and government-led initiatives in shaping acceptance of and effectively naturalizing what we, following Max Boot, describe as the “new American way of war.” Companies like Activision and Ubisoft have achieved this result at the level of affect through the creation of embodied immersive interactive experiences rather than at the level of intellectual argument and narrative supportive of specific ideological ends. In this study we pursue a direction first elaborated by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter in Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (2003) and Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (2009). These authors urge us to consider that in the age of contemporary capitalism, the epicenter of development lies in media, information, digitization, and software. Videogames, in their view, are perhaps the ideal form of commodity typifying the age of digital capitalism. In the media industries, where the product is an experience for the viewer-listener-player, the need for constant creativity in finding new ways to build and maintain audiences is paramount. Videogames themselves are among the most intensively marketed commodities of digital technology. Unlike older broadcast media, such as television and radio, videogames are consumable experiences not supported by ads, although game marketers are now including a relatively small but increasing number of in-game product placements.

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The Holy Grail for digital game makers has been to create, commodify, and market the virtual experiences that rapidly expand audiences and secure their continued loyalty. Game publishers have been supported in this enterprise by sustained market research, product testing, circulation of promotional marketing materials, lavish expo events such as E3, and the use of well-known actors such as Kiefer Sutherland (the new voice of Snake in Metal Gear Solid) and Kevin Spacey (Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) in promotional trailers as well as the voices of central players as marketing devices. Cross-licensing of content between movie and game companies for the videogame versions of films and film versions of videogames as well as spin-offs of toys are also among the marketing strategies that have sustained the growth of and increased the audiences for videogames. While identifying the creation and commodification of experience as the fundamental challenge for the makers of digital videogames moves in the right direction, both Digital Play and Games of Empire in our view do not go far enough in exploring how the makers of video wargames, particularly large-franchise game publishers, have succeeded in developing algorithms for the production of commercially successful game experiences that rival Coca-Cola in its mass consumer appeal: namely, the virtual experience of modern warfare. In describing the role of video wargames in the militarization of the public, both these volumes adopt the view that the mutual needs of the military in creating costeffective simulation games on the one hand were matched on the other hand by the desire of game industry companies to avoid innovation costs by persuading the military to put its own research and development investment to work not just in war but also in the videogame marketplace. Like the works of Stahl and Der Derian, these volumes argue that the

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synergies between game companies and the military led to the formation of ICT as an incubator for games typified by Full Spectrum Warrior (FSW), which was developed as a simulation and training aid for the military but spun off in a commercial version. Elaborating on the role of games such as FSW, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter argue that routinizing war is important for a globalized capitalist empire, and that implicit in this process is an understanding of war as a project with not only military but also ideological and political dimensions. Maintaining an imperial populace’s will to fight is as important as battlefield dominance. From this point of view, they argue, whatever the success or failure of simulators such as FSW in preparing soldiers for actual war in Afghanistan, their role in habituating civilians to perpetual war may be more important.16 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter caution against seeing a direct linear media effect of simulation wargames that disciplines the minds of civilians playing the game in their living rooms, and they encourage us to look instead to the ways in which such games mesh with the militaristic identities and assumptions embedded within and reiterated by numerous media channels. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter also emphasize that in the complex distributed media environment that has emerged in the last decade, even dissent and contestation are possible in the form of subversive popular modifications, hacktivist interventions, countergames, and tactical games.17 Nonetheless, despite the potential venues for dissent, FSW, Kuma\War, and America’s Army generate subjectivities with a desire for war, prompting uncritical identification with the troops and loyal support for “staying the course” as part of a wider cultural chorus supporting militarization: in effect, a multimedia drumbeat for war.18 We couldn’t agree more: no matter which side of the barricades you are on, a polyphony of media drives

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the American popular imagination toward militarization. In our view, however, the market forces of popular commercial media take precedence as the primary agents over military and government propaganda. In her excellent volume Terrorism TV, Stacy Takacs rightly critiques the idea of a coordinated “military-industrialentertainment complex” whose shared goal is to secure US global domination through the coordination of the nation’s hard- and soft-power assets. In Takacs’s view, media collusion in producing the War on Terror has been far less conscious and coordinated than in previous wars of the twentieth century. Agreeing with Lynn Spigel, she argues that the complexity of contemporary media systems, through the proliferation of distribution channels and the increasing fragmentation and sophistication of viewing audiences, makes it impossible to produce and control a singular and consistent “war on terror text.”19 As an example Takacs observes that though proponents of a conspiratorial military-industrial-entertainment complex have pointed to the programs sponsored by the military in the reality TV militainment format as evidence for their views, examination of the low popular ratings of those shows and their correspondingly brief existence should give them pause. Takacs argues that the apparent media-military collusion in the War on Terror should be viewed instead as emerging from a loose convergence of interests better explained by a Foucauldian discourse analysis targeting the circumstances and pressures producing this convergence. She sees multiple threads of both “security” and “fear” public discourses that have grown disproportionately to the actual occurrence of terrorist activities in or against the United States. These discourses of terrorism and securitization have become structures of cognition with real material effects, including creating new industries and entities with vested interests in

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perpetuating terrorism as a cultural focal point. The Pentagon and Bush administration contributed to these discursive frames, but they were certainly not alone in doing so. We applaud Takacs’s approach to treating the militarization of the popular imaginary as a more fluid and volatile construct, situated in the convergence of multiple interests, rather than as the consciously orchestrated manipulation of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Her argument is worked out with great effect in the analysis of TV. But when Takacs takes up the role of video wargames, she adopts the view we have described as the dominant narrative, especially in Stahl’s treatment of militainment: namely, that commercial videogame producers simply continued and amplified the narratives and strategies of the companies that had produced training and recruitment products for the military. We adopt a different take on the contribution of video wargames to the militarization of the popular imaginary. We see a radical turning point with the maturation of the wargame franchises, best illustrated by the Call of Duty series. Companies such as Electronic Arts, Activision, and Ubisoft have focused on creating spectacular experiences in the gaming medium and commodifying the experience of digital play. The category of wargames has been one of the core areas, accounting for roughly 35 percent of gross revenues in the multibillion-dollar commercial videogames industry. In our view, large-franchise wargames have not been developed in the service of a patriotic mission or to gain financial support from the US military. Very few of the programmers, designers, and graphics and special effects artists working on games have had combat or other military experience, and many of the design groups are not American: the Battlefield franchise was created by Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE), founded in 1992, and remained a product of the Swedish design team until

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DICE was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2006; Ubisoft, based in France and Canada, and Konami, Japanese publisher of the popular game franchise Metal Gear Solid, are some of the leading video wargame studios that come to mind, none of which has participated in developing simulation, recruitment, or training aids for the US military or commercializing and marketing simulation and training tools as commercial games. When the leaders of these companies discuss the creative aims motivating their game projects, they point to the goal of creating immersive digital environments that stimulate the adrenaline rush of cinematic experiences. Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision’s publishing division, describes the allure of the Call of Duty franchise as grounded in “a thrill ride [with] a sense of what we call epic realism. On one hand it looks very realistic but on the other it is exaggerated, it is over the top— bombastic in the way a great action movie is,” but “you get to inhabit the skin of the hero.”20 Hirshberg emphasizes that the “epic realism” of the Call of Duty games aims to deliver mind-blowing moments that immerse players in onscreen action, even if it’s not a faithful re-creation of present-day warfare. Second, the aim is to deliver an “ultimate adrenaline rush” at sixty frames per second.21 In his annual reports for Ubisoft, CEO Yves Guillemot also emphasizes the goal of creating immersive game worlds with cinematic production values—“the desire [is] to offer spectators extraordinary sensations”—by drawing on the skills and attracting talent from the film industry in the areas of special effects, storytelling, and production values. The models Guillemot affirms as central to Ubisoft’s strategy are the digital productions of Dreamworks, Disney, Sony, and Pixar. To integrate the skill necessary for this level of artistry into its game design, Ubisoft acquired Hybride Technologies, a Canadian studio specializing in the creation of digital imagery and special effects for over one thousand ad

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campaigns and movies, including Avatar, Sin City, The 300, and The Hunger Games. Guillemot assured his investors that by following this strategy, “We will aim to create games that are even more connected, attractive, immersive, intense and varied in order to strengthen each one of our brands.”22 Beginning with some early efforts by Valve in the creation of Half-Life and perfected in game environments like the Call of Duty series, franchise game developers have created and commodified an immersive, interactive experience aimed at delivering an adrenaline rush through solving puzzles and challenges with the (virtualized) tools and communication technologies of the modern military. But what is at stake here is not the restaging of the real. Real war does not market well. Call of Duty instead delivers a hyperreal interactive experience, a Disneyfication of the real, targeted more at players’ emotions and sensations than at their intellects. Narrative plays a secondary role in video wargames, mainly to set the frame and name the tasks and challenges to be overcome to successfully navigate the game space. As we observe in Chapter 2, the game narratives in the Call of Duty series are frequently incoherent and do not deliver a consistent ideological message. In place of narrative, game designers create challenges in the form of tasks, opponents to be overcome, obstacles to be scaled or removed, and all this at a pace that swiftly pushes the player toward the next objective at the expense of critical appraisal. Computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects, stunning visuals delivered at sixty frames per second, and atmospheric music all add to the tension and apprehension generated by the game design. This is the “cinematic real,” or at least the game environment version of it. Any attempts to “contextualize” the game play by extensive narrative framing, long explanatory cutscenes, and other storytelling devices are typically critiqued by game players; in practice, gamers just skip through them.

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This is not to say that propaganda and ideological content are not transmitted through games—indeed, we argue that they are—but rather that these concepts themselves betray a cerebral and narratological bias that obscures a far stronger driver of the military-entertainment complex: the mobilization of affect to manage the player experience efficiently toward the cultivation of significant financial returns.

The New American Way of War: The RMA A crucial framework for creating the affective entertainment experiences of the current military-entertainment complex is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The RMA has provided a steady stream of ideas about future military strategy and appropriations that has fueled both hardline congressional debate over military spending and foreign commitments of force as well as popular political discussions. The RMA has also provided a playbook for Hollywood, popular TV, and videogames. Before turning to the representation of the RMA in popular media, we must examine its history, focusing on its core ideas, assumptions, and implementations. Since the widespread integration of computers during the Cold War, military theorists have tried to predict how information technologies will revolutionize future conflicts. This discourse has come to be known as the RMA. Our purpose here is not to get caught up in a comprehensive genealogy of debates about this topic. Rather, we would like to present an overarching summary of how RMA ideas have given rise to what the military historian Max Boot has called “a new American way of war,” grounded in “speed, maneuver, flexibility … precision firepower, special forces, and psychological operations.”23 In essence, we wish to focus on how technological and

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organizational change has moved the US armed forces from a behemoth with overwhelming land and sea power to today’s leaner and more flexible military. Schematically, RMA discourse generally encompasses developments in three different yet interconnected domains: technological change, organizational adaptation, and the perceived future threat landscape. RMA theorists generally ask questions about how new technologies change the organization and operation of the military, and how the technological and organizational changes of potential enemies will change the way future wars are conducted. By anticipating virtual futures, these theorists influence technological investments that aim to exploit or prevent these predictions.24 Accordingly, these statements hook into a vast defense economy and are made with an eye toward the health of a military-industrial complex that must remain strong and innovative to help fuel the strategic dominance of the United States. Tellingly, the RMA rose in the context of significant budget cuts. Following the winding down of the Cold War, Congress imposed budgetary restrictions on the DoD that affected both manpower and procurement. Over the course of the decade from 1991 to 2001, the DoD budget was cut by 24 percent, falling from $382.5 billion (in constant 2001 dollars) to $291.1 billion.25 In terms of combined active military and reserve personnel, the 3,200,000 personnel on the eve of the First Gulf War in 1990 dropped to 2,062,000, or an active force 35 percent smaller in 2001, on the eve of Operation Enduring Freedom.26 Procurement for new systems declined from a high point of $97.7 billion in 1990 to a low of $45 billion in 1996 and 1997, a reduction of 54 percent.27 Citing the necessity of procurement for the RMA, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (1997–2001) was able to restore this budget to $60.3 billion, still only 62 percent of its post–Cold War height.

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Faced with these cutbacks, Cohen and others advanced the RMA as a means for extracting the greatest efficiency from military investments. As budgetary concerns loomed, the successes of Operation Desert Storm and the Kosovo War signaled a new era of strategic warfare oriented by information technology in which US casualties were minimal and victory was decisive. Leveraging the new Global Positioning System (GPS), precision-guided munitions (PGMs) provided the capability to strike enemy positions with accuracy from long ranges. Experimental systems like the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) allowed battlefield management from high in the sky and fed troops on the ground information far forward of their positions. In short, networked information technology allowed for battlefield dominance by providing improved command and control over weaponry at great distances, far superior intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (ISR), and faster, better-coordinated responses to realtime intelligence. In the latter half of the 1990s, theorists such as John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt began suggesting the military itself depart from its centralized, bureaucratic mode of organization and fully embrace the networked management structures and technologies of the information society.28 Admiral William A. Owens, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that US forces needed to become a “system-of-systems,” which would allow networked forms of organization to provide redundancy and flexibility in the face of new challenges.29 Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka branded this theory “network-centric warfare,” emphasizing more localized responses to threats and bottom-up self-organization that is based on information sharing.30 Such suggestions were already in line with many of the budgetary constraints facing the Pen-

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tagon through their emphasis on smaller, more independent squads supported by sophisticated information collection and sharing infrastructures. From 1993 through 2006, DoD analysts looked to past conflicts to study force preparedness. They assumed the United States should maintain the ability to conduct two major regional conflicts on a par with Desert Storm in different parts of the globe as well as manage multiple proxy wars and counterinsurgencies.31 The strategists of the RMA argued that the evolution of the threat landscape in twenty-first-century international politics called for a transformation in the type of warfare US forces should prepare to conduct.32 The US strategy of having forward bases as staging areas from which large-scale land forces with air support could operate was becoming increasingly problematic owing to deterioration in foreign support. In addition, potential adversaries were acquiring “anti-access” (A2) weapons, such as ballistic missiles, making land war difficult to conduct from the typical forward bases of previous wars, as well as “area-denial” (AD) capabilities to limit freedom of action and efficiently repulse large-scale territorial incursions.33 RMA advocates accordingly lobbied for heavy development of tactics and technologies such as Special Operations Forces (SOF), long-range missiles, unmanned aircraft, and stealth platforms for striking targets where physical access was limited. The events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan also signaled significant changes in the nature of US antagonists from statebased actors to asymmetrical, nonconventional adversaries, including regional rogue states and non–state actors. Early successes of the War on Terror, like the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and the storming of Baghdad, were attributed to the power of the RMA and the efforts of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in transform-

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ing the military for the information era. As Rumsfeld claimed in his 2002 Annual Report, these victories “were the direct result of a new style of warfare … The battle for Mazar-i Sharif— which set in motion the collapse of the Taliban regime— demonstrated the potential of highly networked joint operations. By linking AC-130 gunships, Predators, Global Hawks, and JSTARS, Operation Enduring Freedom has demonstrated that high pay-offs result from early network-centric warfare concepts of operations. The Special Operations Forces on the ground, as well as sophisticated overhead reconnaissance systems, served as a network of sensors that provided a picture of the battlefield.”34 Such initial optimism was not limited to the war in Afghanistan; it extended to Iraq as well. As Max Boot notes, compared to the First Gulf War, the taking of Baghdad in 2003 required half the troops, produced fewer than half the casualties, took a little over half as long, and cost only a fourth as much.35 If these wars had stopped at this point, they might have been considered dramatic successes and would have unquestionably enshrined the RMA in the military apparatus. As the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan blossomed and pronouncements of victory became premature, flaws were revealed in this initial strategy. While SOF and flexible armor divisions were effective in toppling governments, they proved less adept at finishing the task. Amid souring public opinion and renewed budget scrutiny, the policies advocated by Rumsfeld and the visionaries of the RMA finally crystallized into the new American way of war, centered around smaller organizational units that use modern information, communications, and robotics technology to mount the kind of agile campaign seen in Afghanistan in 2001–2002. DoD planning documents such as the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review emphasized investment in long-range smart missiles, drone aircraft and other unmanned systems, integrated intelligence-gathering

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and surveillance systems, and systems of defense for communications systems as necessary pieces of the new war-fighting requirements.36 New methods of acquiring, analyzing, and distributing information that could help units make more strategic decisions became increasingly important for cutting through the fog of war to allow assets to respond locally to highly networked and flexible threats. Reflecting on his experience as commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal summarized this transition: In bitter, bloody fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it became clear to me and to many others that to defeat a networked enemy we had to become a network ourselves. We had to figure out a way to retain our traditional capabilities of professionalism, technology, and, when needed, overwhelming force, while achieving levels of knowledge, speed, precision, and unity of effort that only a network could provide.

The idea was to combine analysts who found the enemy (through intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance); drone operators who fixed the target; combat teams who finished the target by capturing or killing him; specialists who exploited the intelligence the raid yielded, such as cell phones, maps, and detainees; and the intelligence analysts who turned this raw information into usable knowledge.37 Such synergistic coordination between specialized teams evokes Owens’s concept of the military as a “system-of-systems,” self-synchronizing and adapting according to changing flows of information.38 Importantly, before being put in charge of US forces in Afghanistan in 2009, McChrystal guided the highly secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC),

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which led to the expansion of RMA Special Operations tactics into the larger command. Though the Global War on Terror provided the final impetus for the institutionalization of many RMA ideas, these changes made inroads in a piecemeal and fragmentary form until President Obama took office in 2008. Under Obama, many programs implemented sparingly by his predecessor— such as cross-border Special Forces raids, drone assassinations, and cyber warfare—became the status quo.39 As standard forces began operating more like Special Forces, the latter also expanded dramatically under RMA guidance. Since the birth of the Global War on Terror, SOF have conducted continuous, worldwide counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations against al-Qaeda and other irregular forces. The number of SOF deployed overseas before the War or Terror was approximately 2,800, and since then this number quadrupled annually until 2012. During the January 2007–July 2008 surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, that number reached around 12,000 and has remained constant since.40 To meet increasing needs in both Afghanistan and Iraq as well as other missions consonant with the War on Terror, the US Special Operation Command (USSOCOM) increased in size from 38,000 in 2001 to 63,000 in 2012, and it saw budgetary increases from $2.3 billion in 2001 to roughly $10.4 billion in 2013.41 Providing ISR capabilities to an increasingly networked and flexible military has also prompted significant and game-changing investments in robotics and Orwellian surveillance systems. The number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) owned by the Pentagon skyrocketed from 167 in 2002 to 7,500 in 2010,42 and UAV investments increased from $284 million in 2000 to $3.3 billion in 2010.43 From 2001 to 2013 the Pentagon is estimated to have spent over $26 billion researching, acquiring, and operating

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drones,44 which have gone from representing 5 percent of all military aircraft in 2005 to constituting nearly 33 percent in 2012.45 Equipped with sophisticated sensors and powerful cameras, these drones provide such overwhelming amounts of information that the military has been forced to develop a new infrastructure to deal with the resulting spike in bandwidth needs. A lone Global Hawk UAV requires bandwidth on the order of five hundred megabits per second, five times more than “the total bandwidth of the entire US military used during the 1991 Gulf War.”46 Longer-term plans for institutionalizing network-centric warfare within the traditional forces would also see significant investments during the War on Terror. For instance, the ambitious Future Combat Systems (FCS) and Objective Force Warrior programs were launched between 2003 and 2009 with contracts awarded to Boeing and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for $200 billion, aimed at creating a “system-of-systems” networking all elements of the US armed services in a battlefield environment to enable unprecedented levels of joint connectivity and “battlespace” awareness. The FCS program, canceled under the austerity measures implemented by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, aimed to equip fifteen of the army’s roughly seventy combat brigades with new robots and hybrid diesel-electric manned vehicles connected by a secure communications network and equipped with high-tech sensors. At the individual troop level, the Objective Force Warrior program attempted to tie soldiers into this network as both consumers and producers of information. Soldiers mounted on infantry carriers would, through their vehicles, have full access to all information on the network. When dismounted, special heads-up displays would seamlessly integrate necessary information on data screens for remote access. Featuring

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sensors at overlapping scales (platoon, company, battalion, and brigade levels), the system would allow tactical leaders to launch UAVs and smart munitions to critical points on the battlefield and peer through the fog of war by collecting massive amounts of information—all without being observed by the enemy. Soldiers and intelligent machines would transmit information upward to those with greater vision of the entire battlefield, making them function effectively as flexible nodes within an expanded network. Though the FCS was never fielded, such technologies will inevitably find their way into future products, such as the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) being researched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and USSOCOM. Expected to incorporate specialized lightweight armor with a robotic exoskeleton and 3-D augmentedreality displays, the soldiers of the future and the wars they will fight are becoming more mechanically mediated and networked than ever before.47 In late February 2014 Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, facing serious budget reductions, recommended shrinking the US Army to its smallest size since 1940. He proposed shedding 120,000 troops over the next few years and reinvesting some of those savings in improved training and technology for the remaining soldiers. Though this suggestion predictably sparked claims that the cuts would cripple the US war-fighting ability, it culminated a decades-long transition, arguing that a smarter, more flexible military, supported by superior information technology, is both fiscally responsible and strategically necessary for future wars.48 Hagel’s recommendation can be seen as the latest skirmish in the ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs.

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Naturalizing the RMA Through the affects generated by game play and the constant exposure to the technologies of the RMA, Call of Duty and other franchise games have naturalized the new American way of war as the only game in town. The RMA has contributed various kinds of content to franchise games. Most successful commercial video wargame franchises have employed the imagined future threat environments and strategic responses to them outlined in DoD reports as the basis for game scenarios. In their effort to build immersive, interactive game play that delivers captivating hyperreal experiences and heartpounding action and special effects to capture a committed fan base, developers like Infinity Ward and publishers like Ubisoft have also drawn on the futuristic technologies designed by DARPA, elite military contractors, and weapons manufacturers as sources of agency and objects of desire for achieving higher and higher levels in a game (that is, ‘leveling up’), gaining personal status and recognition, and ultimately providing essential tools for prevailing in the virtual War on Terror. In the franchise wargames we examine, the options players are given to overcome obstacles and advance in the game invariably reflect the repertoire of technologies central to the RMA. Modern warfare and the tools of the RMA are quickly becoming synonymous. As a near-obsession with terrorism and the War on Terror took hold of the popular imagination after 9/11, the RMA provided the playbook in the increasingly vast and profitable market for commercial videogames as well as popular TV programming and cinema. As Der Derian, Stahl, and others discuss, and as we elaborate in Chapter 1, the beginnings of the military-entertainment complex involved efforts by the US military to adapt commercial videogame technologies to its

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training and simulation projects during the mid- to late 1990s. These projects had an indirect but close connection to the RMA. In the post–Cold War era of anticipated asymmetric warfare involving global insurgencies and counterterrorist operations, constructing the networked battlefield and simulation-training technologies to prepare distributed war-fighting units for seamless transition from training and preparation mode to different complex scenarios and engagement environments became an important element of military planning. The creation of the military SIMNET, in which different levels of forces could train in information-aware networked environments of the future, was one of DARPA’s major contributions to the RMA. In Chapter 1 we explain how SIMNET and new commercial videogame technologies played key roles in these efforts to construct what some DARPA visionaries imagined as a cyber-“battleplex” for training future warriors. In Chapter 2 we trace the gradual integration of these proposals about the future threat landscape, military technologies, and strategic doctrine throughout the history of video wargaming, marking the different paths taken by the military training and simulation games and their commercial spin-offs from their more popular franchise wargame siblings. We argue that the military shooter evolved from a genre primarily concerned with the reenactment of historical wars to one obsessed with the techniques, technologies, and predictions of the RMA. As these franchise games further integrate scenarios grounded in documents like the Defense Quadrennial Reviews, they help manufacture consensus about their anticipated threats and proposed investments and advantages and promote their ratification in future legislative budgets. We demonstrate in Chapter 3 the extent to which militarism has spread deeply into all forms of entertainment, at the same time that depictions of potential threats have also

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become speculative and oriented toward possible futures rather than re-creating or justifying the past. In Premediation, Richard Grusin locates this transition in the shock of 9/11, which he argues imprinted a massive collective trauma on US—indeed, global—consumer media culture. To protect us from such a shock again, the media have become obsessed with predicting various futures so that if one of those futures is realized, we will not be caught unprepared. In his words, “Premediation works to prevent citizens of the global mediasphere from experiencing again the kind of systemic or traumatic shock produced by the events of 9/11 by perpetuating an almost constant, low level of fear or anxiety about another terrorist attack.”49 Whether this fear circulates through the near omnipresence of the figure of the terrorist in post-9/11 media or through consistent reinforcement of terrorism more generally as a significant, ongoing threat, the mass media remind us what is important by exposing us virtually to possible realities too costly to experience in real life. These premediated futures thus coalesce into an affective unconscious that is always anticipating future threats. The imagined ways the amorphous, ever-present terrorist threat will be contained have been shaped by commercial videogames such as Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and Watch_Dogs; TV series such as 24 and Spooks; and films such as Act of Valor and Iron Man. These instances of popular entertainment give a local habitation and a name to lurking threats, simultaneously defining their problems and proposing their possible solutions. Chapter 4 presents a limited case study of the polyvalent discourses involved with this naturalization process through an examination of cybersecurity policy discourse and the representation of cyberwarfare in popular media and videogames. As representatives of the RMA’s power as well as figures of asymmetrical warfare par excellence, hackers provide authors

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with an abundant tool chest for the creation of affectively compelling, modern narratives. Whether they are remotely accessing mobile phones, surveillance systems, or e-mail servers for law enforcement or conducting cyberterrorism by hijacking the US drone fleet, hackers are constructed within popular entertainment as magicians who can access and control any digital system they want. Through an examination of the development of US cyberwarfare capabilities and the DARPA Plan X program, we argue that the power fantasy created by hackers in popular entertainment is mobilized in policy discourse, both implicitly and explicitly, to inspire investment in cyberdefense and attack mitigation platforms even as the military aims to develop offensive cyberwarfare capabilities itself. Rather than reflecting reality, the capacities of the hacker in popular entertainment are inspiring their future research and development. Finally, in our concluding chapter we look briefly beyond the military-entertainment complex to one of the few recent popular wargames that steps out of the formula established by the major wargame franchises: Spec Ops: The Line (2K Games). In its use of affect and narrative to call into question the coupling of violence and entertainment, Spec Ops subverts the franchise shooter experience by reinforcing the emotional weight of the player’s game actions. Compelled by gaming conventions, the player continues to fight his or her way through the game, even though progression brings increasingly negative affective returns. As such, Spec Ops provides a vision of wargames beyond the reach of the military-entertainment complex. In this extended essay, we examine the role of video wargames in the rise of the military-entertainment complex and in particular the role of commercial franchise wargames, popular TV shows, and cinema as key elements in the mili-

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tarization of the popular imagination. We argue that in the post-9/11 era, amid the ever-present threat of potential acts of terrorism and the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty generated by ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, programming and games featuring content related to current and imagined future events in the War on Terror and to homeland security took all forms of popular media by storm. In this environment, despite their efforts to disseminate propaganda and an ideological message supporting the war efforts, the military, the Pentagon, and the White House were unable to control the narrative in the popular media. Indeed, throughout the period, but particularly as the war continued to drag on without end or victory, critical and even negative representations of the US conduct of war appeared with increasing frequency, which reflected the overall declining popularity of the war effort. Despite this inability to enforce the ideology of the US military by controlling the narrative in all forms of media and even amid the appearance of critical films, countergames, and TV shows, popular media serve as vehicles for the militarization of the popular imagination. They do so not by making arguments but by creating powerful affective experiences attached to the weapon systems, tactics, and broader technologies of the new American way of war. The popularity of TV programs, games, and films dealing with the War on Terror and imagined future warfare ensures that whether or not you support the weaponization of drones and the automation of surveillance technologies for identifying potential terrorists, you are predisposed to accept them as simply the way we conduct war today.

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CHAPTER 1

From Battlezone to America’s Army: The Defense Department and the Game Industry –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Since their inception in the early 1960s, computer and video wargames have been deeply intertwined with the military and the defense industry. Steve Russell was a twenty-three-yearold graduate student in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, funded by the Defense Department

and led by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, when he wrote Spacewar in 1961, the first videogame.1 A decade later, in 1972, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, the first commercially successful videogame company. Bushnell was deeply familiar with Spacewar, having played it frequently while a student at the University of Utah; in launching his first successful entrepreneurial venture, he created a Spacewar clone for a stand-alone digital arcade game called Computer Space. Atari’s hits in the nascent interactive games industry, such as Pong, Asteroids, and Missile Command, are legendary. One of the most successful early Atari games was Battlezone, designed by Ed Rotberg in 1980. Battlezone was the first three-dimensional game in a first-person perspective; the player views the game through a “periscope” in a simulated tank interior as he or she moves on a virtual battlefield. An extremely popular arcade attraction, the game also drew DARPA’s interest in 1983 when it launched the US Army Simulation Technology and Training Center (STTC). Battlezone was repurposed as Bradley Trainer, a first-of-its-kind training project in which a large number of manned simulators, emulators, and semi-automated force simulations were integrated into a distributed interactive battlefield simulation. The path to America’s Army: Operations began with earlier work at the Naval Postgraduate School and defense contractors such as Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) on the construction of protocols and network technologies for distributed interactive simulation. Under their combined supervision, the DARPA-funded SIMNET (the military’s distributed SIMulator NETworking project) was born; it made significant advances over previous simulation technology. Simulators developed before the 1980s were stand-alone systems designed for specific task-training purposes, such as docking a space capsule or landing a jet on an aircraft carrier deck. High-end

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simulators typically cost twice as much as the systems they were intended to simulate: for example, in the late 1970s an advanced pilot simulator system cost more than $35 million, a single advanced aircraft $18 million. Air Force Captain Jack A. Thorpe, a research scientist in flight training R&D at Williams Air Force Base, was brought into DARPA to remedy this situation by bringing down the cost of training technologies.2 In September 1978 Thorpe presented the radical idea that aircraft simulators should be used to teach air-combat skills pilots could not learn in peacetime. Thorpe proposed the construction of battle-engagement simulation technology as a twentyfive-year development goal for DARPA.3 Concerned about costs for such a system, Thorpe actively pursued technologies developed outside the DoD, such as videogame technology from the entertainment industries.4 In 1982, upon approval from DARPA, Thorpe hired a team joining military personnel with industrial and computer graphics designers to develop a network of tank simulators suitable for collective training. The US military SIMNET was born. The success of SIMNET over previous simulators resulted from design decisions imported from the burgeoning game industry and repurposed for military use. Pre-SIMNET simulators were so costly because they were typically designed to emulate the vehicles they represented as closely as engineering technology permitted—a flight simulator, for example, aimed to be “an airplane on a stick.” SIMNET’s contrasting design goal was selective functional fidelity rather than full physical fidelity: it called for first learning which functions were needed to meet essential training objectives, and only then specifying the needs for simulator hardware. As a result, many hardware items regarded as irrelevant to operator training were excluded or were represented by drawings or photographs in the simulator. Furthermore, the vehicle

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simulator was viewed as a tool for the training of crews as a military unit, thus emphasizing collective rather than individual training. The design goal was to make the crews and units, not the device, the center of the simulation, which allowed for the construction of devices that were both low-cost and streamlined to impart essential knowledge.5 Combining these concepts with newly available technology for visual displays and less costly networking architecture, SIMNET integrated local and long-distance networks of interactive simulators for maneuvering armored vehicle combat elements (M1 tanks and M2/3 fighting vehicles), combatsupport elements (including artillery effects and close air support with both rotary and fixed-wing aircraft), and all the necessary command-and-control, administrative, and logistics elements.6 The terrains for battle engagements were simulations of actual places, fifty square kilometers initially, but eventually expanded by an order of magnitude in depth and width. Battles were fought in real time, and assigned crew members operated each simulated element—vehicle, command post, administrative and logistics center, and so forth. Evaluation was aided by a scoring system that recorded combat events such as movements, firings, hits, and outcomes, but actions during simulated engagements were completely under the control of the fighting personnel. Training occurred as a function of the intrinsic feedback and lessons learned from the relevant battle-engagement experiences. Development proceeded in steps, first to demonstrate platoon-level networking, then to company and battalion levels, and later to higher levels. Prototyping and early experiments with SIMNET were carried out from 1987 through 1989, and the system was made operational in January 1990. The army bought the first several hundred units for the Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT) system; an application of the SIMNET concept, the CCTT

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was the first building block of a system that would eventually contain several thousand units at a total cost of $850 million.7 (Fig. 1.1)

The Battle of 73 Easting

1.1  Jack Thorpe’s draft of his early vision of the military SIMNET.

The value of the SIMNET as a training system for preparing units for battle became apparent almost immediately, during the first major conflict following its development: Operation Desert Storm. Hailed as the most significant victory of the war, the Battle of 73 Easting took place on February 26, 1991, just three days into the ground war, between the SIMNET-trained U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and a much larger Iraqi armed force (armed elements of the 50th Brigade of the Iraqi 12th Armored Division). The battle was named for its location: 73 Easting is the north-south grid line on military maps of the Iraqi Desert. The battle took place in a swirling sandstorm and lasted from about 3:30 pm until dusk fell at 5:15 pm. The U.S. 2nd Calvary consisted of M1A1 Abrams battle tanks and M3 Bradley fighting vehicles. During

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the action, the cavalry troops destroyed fifty T-72/T-62 battle tanks, more than thirty-five other armored fighting vehicles, and forty-five trucks. More than six hundred Iraqi soldiers of the 12th Armored Division and Tawakalna Republican Guard Armored Division were killed or wounded, and at least that number were captured. After the battle, General Frederick Franks, the VII Corps commander, praised the action of the 2nd Cavalry as a classic instance of the cavalry mission to find, fix, and fight the enemy.8 A few days after the battle the military decided to capitalize on the Battle of 73 Easting to bolster future SIMNET training. For the 73 Easting simulation, most of Jack Thorpe’s original SIMNET team combined with the staff of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) Simulation Center under the leadership of Lieutenant Neale Cosby as prime technical contractor. Additional expertise was furnished by the army’s Engineer Topographical Laboratories. Previous simulations had focused primarily on rote behaviors related to hardware control and mission conduct; they did not capture the emotional and affective aspects of combat well. The IDA had an opportunity to go beyond this limitation with 73 Easting, and it conducted in-depth debriefings with 150 survivors to capture this emotional dimension.9 The goal of the project was to get time line– based individual experiences in response to the dynamic unfolding of the events—soldiers’ fears and emotions as well as actions—and to render the events as a fully 3-D simulated reality any future cadet could enter and relive. Data gathering for the simulation began one month after the battle itself. The team assembled battle site surveys and interviews with participants. Troopers from the 2nd Cavalry accompanied the DARPA team members to reconstruct the action moment by moment, vehicle by vehicle. They walked over the battlefield amid the twisted wreckage of Iraqi tanks,

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recalling the action as best they could. A few soldiers supplied diaries to supplement this data; some were able to consult personal tape recordings from the battle. Tracks in the sand and wires from missiles shot gave the simulators precise traces of movement. A black box in each tank, programmed to track three satellites, confirmed its exact position on the ground. Headquarters recorded radio-voice communications from the field. Sequenced overhead photos from satellite cameras gave the big view, and a digital map of the terrain was captured by lasers and radar.10 The Battle of 73 Easting confirmed Jack Thorpe’s original vision for the SIMNET: networked simulation technology using history to prepare for the future. The simulation provided a link with history and served as a dynamic interactive training vehicle for the future. As a computer simulation with programmable variables, the scenario could be replayed with different endings. With detailed models of the battle in hand, the next step was to couple it with Project Odin, a mobile wargame simulation engine and electronic environment housed in a moving van–sized truck powered by a generator trailer. Created in preparation for Desert Storm by Neale Cosby and the IDA staff, Odin was intended for use in the field, its knowledge base supplied by upto-date intelligence. Anticipating the army’s Future Combat Systems project, formally funded from 2003 to 2008, Odin allowed officers to see the battlefield in three dimensions and enable them to zoom in to any location to review the arrangement of forces. By adopting various perspectives of the opponent, one might infer the counterpart’s intent and more easily gain mastery of the battlefield. Odin was designed not to destroy targets, but to assist in visualizing the battle about to be entered or, ideally, already joined. SIMNET technology was at the core of Odin.

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Like other SIMNET simulation units, Odin combined a digital terrain database of any part of the world, intelligence feeds of friendly and enemy orders of battle (through another DARPA program called Fulcrum), an order-of-battle generator, a wargaming engine with semi-automated forces using artificial intelligence (AI) components, and an extremely flexible visual display (the “flying carpet”). (Fig. 1.2) Once the 73 Easting project was completed, Project Odin provided a perfect platform for an interactive, predictive simulation. With the simulation database plugged into Odin, it was possible not only to rerun the historical simulation, but also to change the equipment used by the enemy to test tactics for other scenarios. For example, it was hypothesized that during the battle, infrared vision systems enabling navigation in the sandstorm gave the 2nd Cavalry enormous advantage in com-

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1.2  A scene from the simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting.

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parison to the standard optical sights used by the Iraqis. The simulation allowed the addition of infrared to the Iraqi equipment in order to gauge its effect on the battle’s outcome. In addition, multiple Odin simulators could be hooked up to the network, all running the 73 Easting database. Soldiers in the simulators and commanders at workstations could access files in the simulation and add new tactics. Because continued improvements in processors and graphics cards were predicted to become available in the near future, it was imagined that the size of simulation units could be reduced and actually embedded into M1 tank units, attack helicopters, or F-16s themselves, which would allow real soldiers to train for an impending mission right up to the hour of the engagement.

From DARPA to Your Local Area Network During the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, policy discussions focused on reorienting defense research spending so that research not only served national defense but also ultimately benefited the commercial sector. The early military-entertainment complex is one of the effects of this shift. The end of the Cold War brought an emphasis on a fiscally efficient military built on sound business practices: military procurement interfaced seamlessly with industrial manufacturing processes. The Federal Acquisitions Streamlining Act of 1994 directed a move away from the DoD’s historical reliance on contracting with dedicated segments of the US technology and industrial base. In Secretary of Defense William Perry’s mandated hierarchy of procurement acquisition, commercially available off-the-shelf alternatives would be considered first for military use, whereas the choice of a service-unique development program had lowest priority.

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This shift in policy radically transformed the fields of computer simulation and training. Throughout the thirty-year history of these fields, developments in computer graphics, networking, and AI had always been driven by demands of military and aerospace contractors because of the importance of simulation technology to military training. The perceived importance of simulation to the outcome of the Gulf War provided stimulus for increasing DARPA-supported research and development efforts in regard to SIMNET to the tune of $2.5 billion. To name just two of the projects funded: CCTT, a networked simulation system for training army mechanized infantry and armor units that was composed of various simulators that replicated combat vehicles, tactical vehicles, and weapons systems interacting in real time with each other and semi-autonomous opposing forces; and Synthetic Theater of War (STOW), a program to construct synthetic environments for numerous defense functions and integrate virtual simulation (troops in simulators fighting on a synthetic battlefield), constructive simulation (wargames), and live maneuvers.11 The Army’s Simulation Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM) was founded to manage and direct the DoD’s simulation efforts in the newly streamlined, flexibly managed military of the 1990s. In this role STRICOM played a pivotal role in developments that have led to the current synergy of military simulations and the entertainment industry, the emerging military-entertainment complex. The shift in procurement policy led to a loosening—even erasure—of the boundaries between military contractors and the commercial sector. As a result, many important technologies in the area of networking, simulation, virtual reality, and AI moved from behind the walls of military secrecy into the commercial sector; and, even more important, technology began to flow freely from the commercial sector, particularly the

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game industry, into the military. An early example of the former dynamic is Real3D of Orlando, Florida, a relatively shortlived company formed in 1995 and dissolved in 1999. Real3D, spun off from Lockheed Martin’s real-time 3-D graphics technology developed for Apollo lunar landings, found commercial success partnering with Sega of Japan, an arcade systems manufacturer. Real3D’s senior software engineer from 1995 to 1999, Steven Woodcock, had been lead software and technical engineer for Martin Marietta’s National Test Bed, where he was responsible for all weapons code development, testing, integration, and documentation for ARGUS (Advanced RealTime Gaming Universal Simulation), an interactive command and control simulation focused on missile defense.12 After shifting to the game industry, Woodcock worked for Sega and Sony, applying knowledge of 3-D modeling and AI gained from his military network simulations work. Just as personnel, ideas, and technologies flowed from military simulation efforts to the entertainment industries, the opposite exchange, from the game industry to the military, can be glimpsed through Spectrum HoloByte’s Falcon 4.0 and id Software’s Doom. Falcon 4.0, one of the first off-the-shelf commercial flight simulation videogames adapted to military training, was a network-based game with the look and feel of a real F-16. The game’s six-hundred-page manual suggests the complexity of the game and indicates why the military found it attractive for its own training purposes.13 As the producer Gilman Louie explained, Falcon 4.0 was a detailed simulation re-creating the experience of an F-16 pilot operating over a modern battlefield. The simulation had a highly accurate flight model and avionics suite with real-world flight parameters and graphics generated from actual aerial photographs and map data. Weapon modeling and deployment were equally realistic, except for omitting a few classified details. The simulation was

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so meticulous, in fact, that reviewers of the game report consulting a real-world “Dash 1” manual for the F-16 during game play. Its extreme realism led Peter Bonanni, an experienced F-16 Fighter pilot and instructor of the Virginia Air National Guard, to work with Spectrum HoloByte to modify Falcon 4.0 for training F-16 pilots. The massively popular videogame Doom, meanwhile, made its way into Marine Corps training. In 1996 Marine Corps Commandant General Charles C. Krulak became convinced the new generation of PC games could be adapted to train marines in decision making and tactical operations when live training time, opportunities, and funding were limited. Krulak issued a directive to the Marine Combat Development Command to assume responsibility for developing, exploiting, and approving PC wargames.14 In response, experts from the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office began experimenting with a shareware copy of the commercial game Doom, produced by id Software in 1993. In addition to being a game industry pioneer of the first-person shooter genre, Doom was celebrated for popularizing 3-D graphics and networked multiplayer game play. Id also introduced an industry-transforming revolution in software distribution by releasing on the Internet the first level of the game as shareware. Gamers attracted by this first level could then purchase the full version from id. So many fans were modifying the shareware copies in various ways that id decided to release the Doom level editor as open source in 1994. General Krulak’s marines acquired the shareware version and level editor and adapted the game as a fire team simulation; some of the input for the Marine version came from Internet Doom gamers employing the same shareware software tools to build new levels.15 Instead of fantasy weapons to face down monsters in a labyrinthine castle, realistic images of sites, weapons, and soldier action

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characters were scanned into digital files. The game was also modified from its original version to include fighting trenches, bunkers, tactical wire, “the fog of war,” and friendly fire. Marine Doom trainees used virtual marineissue assault rifles to shoot it out with enemy combat troops in diverse terrains and building configurations. (Figs. 1.3, 1.4)

1.3  A screenshot from Doom. 1.4  A screenshot from Marine Doom.

Marine Doom and Falcon 4.0 as well as the careers of people like Woodcock and Bonanni are merely four examples of how the early militaryentertainment complex benefited both military simulation efforts and the videogame industry through the two-way flow of people and technology. Among similar accounts of spin-off groups involved with major defense contractors that subsequently launched commercial simulation and videogame companies, MÄK added a new dimension to the emerging military-entertainment complex: the simultaneous release of a commercial videogame and a military training simulation.16 MÄK (“mock”) Technologies (Cambridge, Massachusetts) was founded in 1990 by two MIT engineering graduates, Warren Katz and John Morrison. Both were original members of BBN’s SIMNET team from 1987 to 1990, when they worked on network interconnectivity for distrib-

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uted simulations. MÄK’s corporate goal was to provide cutting-edge R&D services to the DoD in distributed interactive simulation (DIS) and networked virtual reality (VR) systems, and to convert the results of this research into commercial pro-ducts for entertainment and industrial markets. MÄK’s first commercial product, the VR-Link developer’s toolkit, became the most widely used commercial DIS interface in the world within a short time of its release. This application programmer’s toolkit allows networking of distributed simulations and VR systems in real time via low-bandwidth network connections. VR-Link is designed for easy integration with existing and new simulations, VR systems, and games. Thanks to such products, MÄK’s revenue skyrocketed, and it was acquired by the massive defense contractor firm Vision Technologies. Additionally, the company’s software was licensed for use by several entertainment firms, such as Total Entertainment Network and Zombie Virtual Reality Entertainment, to serve as the launching pad for real-time, 3-D, multi-user videogames. One such game, Spearhead, a multi-user tank simulation game released in mid-1998, was written by MÄK and published by Interactive Magic. Spearhead could be played over the Internet and incorporated networking technology similar to that used in the military simulations the MÄK cofounders first worked on with SIMNET. Military technology, which once trickled down to civilian use, now often lags behind what is available in games, theme park rides, and movie special effects. Dr. Michael Macedonia, the chief scientist and technical director of the Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), predicted this development in a Computer article published in 2000: “By aggressively maneuvering to seize and expand their market share, the entertainment industry’s biggest players are shaping a 21st century in which consumer

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demand for entertainment—not grand science projects or military research—will drive computing innovation.”17 Though many key developments in the area of networked games, AI, and graphics during the mid-1990s were products of military simulation efforts, we will argue in the next chapter that more recent progress in these areas has been heavily weighted toward the game industry.

The Institute for Creative Technology During the 1990s, crossovers from military simulations and the entertainment industries were unplanned and opportunistic. Following the initiative of General Krulak to encourage the adoption and modification of commercial videogames for military training, several top officials in the military simulation command sought to establish more formal collaborative relations with the videogame and entertainment industries. In December 1996, prompted by Professor Michael Zyda, a computer scientist and AI specialist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, the National Academy of Sciences hosted a modeling and simulation workshop to investigate the possibility of organized cooperation between the entertainment industries and the military.18 Zyda was joined in this effort by representatives from MÄK and Spectrum HoloByte, along with academic and industry leaders from the fields of computer graphics and virtual reality. Zyda’s report and follow-up proposal stimulated the army in August 1999 to give a $45 million, five-year grant to the University of Southern California to create a research center, the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), to support collaboration and to leverage entertainment technology for military simulation, training, and operations. A stellar group of film studios, writers, and

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videogame designers was brought together, with the promise that any technological advances they developed would benefit both military and commercial entertainment industries. Although Hollywood and the Pentagon might have differed markedly in culture, they were beginning to overlap in technology: wargames were becoming big entertainment. Putting more polygons on the screen for less cost was certainly one of the military’s objectives at the ICT and in similar alliances, but other dimensions of simulated worlds were even more important for its agenda. Movies, theme park rides, and increasingly even videogames in the late 1990s were being driven by stories creating tension and emotion. Military simulations had become extremely good at modeling hardware components of military systems, but even after the 73 Easting simulation, the physical and emotional tension of battle was harder to capture. With the goal of replicating these types of conditions in VR environments and PC-based wargames, the ICT assembled scientists and engineers with deep roots in modeling and simulation. Before the institute’s launch, several key ICT members worked on constructing semi-automated forces and multiple distributed agents for virtual environments to use as training programs. Others built models of emotion for use in synthetic training environments. Still others constructed intelligent agent technology to incorporate into military simulation systems. At the ICT opening ceremonies, Executive Director Richard Lindheim outlined several projects, among them constructing “the holodeck”: an immersive virtual environment with interactive synthetic agents (“synthespians”), a stage for simulation- and game-based learning exercises. Like Project Odin, the holodeck would allow teams of soldiers to be virtually embedded in any environment. DARPA awarded the ICT a contract to develop situational

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awareness components of the Future Combat Systems program that would make future soldiers elements of a completely networked battlefield. By 2008 the ICT team, led by its creative director, James Korris, planned to engineer a mobile system capable of supporting the experience of virtual reality anytime, anywhere. Soldiers would have helmets with GPS and 360-degree situational awareness, as well as voiceactivated, drop-down screens to access information without putting down their weapons. Embedded in transparent glasses, the display would appear as a seventeen-inch screen. The screen would display maps and real-time video provided by a forward-positioned scout team, unmanned aerial vehicles, and ground sensors. In addition to research on VR environments, members of the ICT worked on games projects designed to create immersive, interactive, real-time military training simulations to teach decision-making and leadership skills. The original plan was to release two games, Combat System XII and C-Force, by the end of 2002. As the games were completed, they were given the more marketable titles of Full Spectrum Command and Full Spectrum Warrior. The games, to be available commercially as well as for military training, were intended to have the same holding power and repeat value as mainstream entertainment software. The first game, Full Spectrum Command, was a PC-based company-command simulator. As the commander of a US Army light infantry company, the student interpreted the assigned mission, organized his force, planned strategically, and coordinated the actions of about 120 men under his command. Full Spectrum Warrior (FSW), a second, more successful production, emerged from an ICT collaboration among the US Army, the videogame company Pandemic Studios, and Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony providing the game’s

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special effects. FSW placed the player in the role of a squad leader, coordinating about a dozen men to complete a series of combat missions in urban environments. Both military and commercial versions included state-of-the-art technologies in artificial intelligence and physics modeling of military equipment, and the military version of the game included an extensive pedagogical “after-action review” evaluation module. The game was commercially marketed and distributed by the large game publishing company THQ. Although the graphics and sound of the commercial release were superior, the game-play mechanics were largely identical in the two versions. A widely available key code unlocked the military version for all to play, which caused significant criticism and public outcry. Such criticism, however, did not significantly detract from the game’s success: it received “Best Original Game” and “Best Simulation Game” awards at the 2003 E3 Game Critics Awards. The commercial version released on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 sold 690,000 copies in the United States and 1.03 million copies worldwide, which made it one of the top-ten-selling games of 2004. As a successful commercial product of a collaboration among the military and the game and film industries, FSW has been critiqued as promoting the militarization of the American mind. Though the military version of the game taught soldiers how to make good decisions, the commercial version enrolled its nonmilitary audience in supporting the military by turning that experience into interactive entertainment for the virtual citizen-soldier. Roger Stahl has pointed to the game as illustrating the growing profitable institutional collusion between the military and commercial game makers, whereas Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter have argued that FSW and other games developed by the ICT actively work to support the Pentagon’s vision of future conflict

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as asymmetric warfare carried out against insurgents in the broken cities of the Third World.19 Considering that FSW is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country (“Zekistan”) and the objective is to overthrow the current dictator, a former mujahideen leader, and his Taliban and Iraqi loyalists—obviously thinly veiled stand-ins for persons and events in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the collusive interests of the game makers and military arguably go further than simply promoting militarism. Since, as Stahl points out, THQ undertook a survey in 2003 to test whether a videogame on themes of the War on Terror would be popular and, finding that it would, decided to release the commercial version of FSW following the US Invasion of Iraq in April 2003, a more sinister interpretation would be to view the FSW project as part of a propaganda effort in support of the War on Terror.

Game Mods and Participant Wargamer Designers At the same time that entities like the ICT formalized mergers and crossovers in the military and the entertainment industry, the previously distinct roles of videogame makers and videogame players also became increasingly complex and commingled. After id Software released the Doom level editor in 1994, a number of videogame companies followed suit, as these editors allowed users to modify various game-related parameters. With the takeoff of the Internet, this phenomenon, called “modding,” began to assume massive dimensions. Many mods were extremely professional and great game additions. Realizing the importance of this phenomenon for building a fan base for games as well as the potential value of incorporating such mods into the commercial game itself, id Software’s John Carmack released Final Doom in 1996 with a com-

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pilation of user-built mods, and he allowed the mod builders to share in the proceeds from sales.20 Because users were inspired to create additional content for Doom, the lifespan of the game was extended far beyond what it would have been otherwise. At the same time, users were creating commercially valuable game experiences that directly appealed to the audience the company was trying to cultivate without having to research and develop it themselves. The next phase of the mod movement, and, indeed, some would maintain its high-water mark, began in 1996 with id Software’s release of Quake, which was written in Quake-C, a computer language designed by Carmack for Quake as a subset of the popular language C. Not only was Quake the first true 3-D game, but Quake-C enabled an unprecedented degree of creative community engagement. Immediately Quake mods began to spring up, and a vibrant Internet community devoted to creating mods for all aspects of Quake, including its AI components, emerged. Players who were not highly trained computer programmers were able to acquire guidance in how not only to build their own levels and fill them with monsters, but also to specify how the monsters would act in some situations. If players didn’t like the standard-issue game monsters, they could build their own—and they did. Extensive websites, such as www.planetquake.com, www.actionnation.com, www. botspot.com, and later the Modsquad’s www.planetunreal.com, began to provide interviews with mod creators on how they constructed their patches, along with open forums and tutorials for would-be game AI builders to create new scripts and modify their games with readily accessible tools. Among the legions of mod builders worldwide, a number achieved legendary status for having changed the way games work. One of the most famous mod careers of this generation is that of Ben Morris, who as a teenager in 1994

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built the most widely used level editor for Doom, called the Doom Construction Kit.21 Morris’s utility was celebrated in the modding community as a resource for crafting complete conversions of games to generate an entirely different look and feel from the original. When Quake was released in 1996, Morris set to work on building a level editor called Worldcraft that he made publicly available as a free download that December. Marc Laidlaw described the wonders of Worldcraft in his regular feature “Street Cred” for Wired: “So you want to be a god? Nothing to it. If you already have a fairly powerful PC and a registered copy of Quake (id Software’s cutting-edge 3D game), all you need is the powerful level-design shareware Worldcraft. This week, using Worldcraft, I made a brand-new world. Not a huge one—but it’s all mine … Starting with a handful of simple forms (blocks, wedges, and spikes, with more forms slated for future versions of Worldcraft), you add and subtract shapes to build just about any imaginable structure. Fill your map with secrets, infest it with monsters, and you’re ready to upload a finished map to the Worldcraft web site and invite your friends to share your nightmare.”22 Morris was important not only for creating tools that empowered gamers to participate in modifying commercially available titles but equally for modifying those games beyond recognition into entirely new games with a different look and feel, a new game aesthetic. Shortly after releasing Worldcraft, Morris was offered a position at a new start-up game company called Valve Software as part of the design team for a game called Half-Life. At Valve, Morris participated in creating games that introduced unprecedented levels of immersion and affective experience. Valve would also pioneer in ways to commodify game play as well as to create incentive structures for encouraging and commodifying the construction of game mods.

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Valve was founded by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two legendary software engineers who spent a decade working on the Windows platform at Microsoft and cashed in their stock options to join the first class of Microsoft millionaires.23 Newell and Harrington were avid gamers who wanted to turn their skills to building games. Uncertain about embarking on this path, they visited id Software’s John Carmack, who licensed them the Quake engine code and encouraged them to launch their own careers. With the Quake game engine in hand, Newell and Harrington invited Ben Morris to join them in using Worldcraft to create their first game, HalfLife. Authored by Marc Laidlaw, the story and setting of HalfLife were an homage to Doom and Quake and bore similarities to those of Capcom’s Resident Evil, published in 1996. (Fig. 1.5) Half-Life was a milestone in game design, reviewed as the closest thing to a revolutionary step in the shooter genre.24 Like Doom and Quake, Half-Life is a first-person shooter (FPS) that requires the player to perform combat tasks and solve puzzles to advance. But unlike other games from the late

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1.5  A screenshot from Half-Life.

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1990s, Half-Life uses scripted sequences to advance major plot points. Most FPSs of the time featured cutscene intermissions and text-based mission briefings, whereas Half-Life’s story is told entirely by means of in-game sequences, which keeps the player in control of the first-person viewpoint throughout. The player sees through the eyes of the protagonist, Gordon, for the entire length of the game. Half-Life has no levels per se; instead, it divides the game into chapters, whose titles flash on the screen as the player moves through the game. Progress through the world is continuous, except for breaks for loading. The game mechanics, along with the most advanced graphics and audio of the late 1990s, gave gamers a deep sense of immersion and emotional connection to the characters. As Newell pointed out in a 2011 interview, “Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with videogames because of the phenomenological possibilities of the field, and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries.”25 Half-Life appeared in 1998 and was the most successful single-person FPS game to that date; it received more than fifty “Game of the Year” awards from various organizations. Half-Life 2, published in 2004, took the design of the immersive first-person experience in a videogame even further. One reviewer called the sequel the best FPS ever made: “Unlike in most action games, you’re not playing the hero character. The hero character is playing you. His dearth of dialogue [is] not a failing of narrative, but rather a deliberately hollowed conduit through which the player threads their own persona into Half-Life 2’s hostile world[.] Gordon is a container for the player’s experiences, reactions, and internalised responses.”26

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In addition to pioneering game mechanics and immersive narrative style, of perhaps even greater significance for the game industry’s development was Valve’s strategy of creating organized structures for cultivating the active involvement of the game’s fan base and extensive mod community into the business model for commercial game development. Valve’s steps in this regard emerged from the development of probably the most spectacular game mod to date, CounterStrike, a Half-Life mod developed by a group led by Minh “Gooseman” Le, then a computer science student at Simon Fraser University.27 Before launching the Counter-Strike project, Minh Le was already renowned in the modding community for having built a Quake mod called Navy SEALs. After completing that project, Le decided to work with Half-Life when it was released in early 1998. Like id, Valve released a software development kit for Half-Life a few months after the initial game’s publication, and Le was well positioned to take advantage of it. In his senior year of college Le designed the first version of CounterStrike and assembled a team of mappers, modelers, and editors to collaborate in its construction. The development team eventually grew to twelve people dispersed worldwide, meaning that most of the team had never met face-to-face before game launch. Counter-Strike transformed Half-Life’s sci-fi adventure with physics experiments on dimensional teleportation technology at a facility in Black Mesa gone awry into a teamoriented multiplayer military mod pitting a counterterrorist team against bomb-wielding terrorists. While enormously successful with players, the game departed from the immersive narratives and worlds for which Half-Life received such acclaim. In their place, the Counter-Strike team developed an arena-styled platform for a massive, networked FPS. The first beta version of Counter-Strike went online in June 1999;

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by late 1999 it had become the most popular online game to that date; upwards of 65,000 people were logged on at any one time. As the popularity of Counter-Strike grew, Newell approached Le to release Counter-Strike as a stand-alone commercial game. By embracing a symbiotic relationship with the mod community and providing Counter-Strike as a freely downloadable addition to their game, Valve both extended the marketability of Half-Life and transformed Counter-Strike into a commodity in its own right; a retail version was packaged with Half-Life as well as several other popular mods. By 2000 Counter-Strike was included as one of the tournament games in the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), and the CPL Pentium 4 Processor Summer 2002 Event held in Dallas featured Counter-Strike as the main tournament game—prizes totaled $100,000.28  (Fig. 1.6) 1.6  A screenshot from CounterStrike.

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America’s Army As we have discussed, from 1995 onward the military was interested in leveraging the commercial sector for advanced technologies from the entertainment industries for its training and simulation efforts, a goal that was formalized in the establishment of the Institute for Creative Technologies in 1999. It was clear that games and interactive entertainment had become the main drivers for networked virtual environments, so to keep up with developments in modeling and simulation, the DoD needed to examine networked entertainment for ideas, technologies, and capabilities. In this environment the military was quick to jump on the early open-source movement in games, intending, as in the case of Marine Doom, to modify existing games to fit the requirements of training tools. As one of the most advanced industries in the newly forming cybereconomy, the game industry was leveraging participatory modding communities for some of its hottest developments. The examples of id and Valve demonstrate the enormous implications these developments had for the industry in taking the online multiplayer FPS genre to new levels and recruiting players as creators of game content. Taking a cue from Counter-Strike and other successful mods, the US Army, controversially, decided to produce its own videogame, America’s Army (AA), to help familiarize the public with US Army procedures and values. Designed with taxpayer money by the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute of the Naval Postgraduate School, the game was distributed free on the Internet and was explicitly intended as a recruiting and public relations device. Exploiting the popularity of arena-style shooters like CounterStrike, AA featured brilliant graphics and used the most advanced commercial game engine (the Unreal game engine)

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available at a cost of around $8 million. AA followed shooter conventions and emphasized team-based multiplayer combat scenarios. It was wildly successful, and the military had to add supplementary servers to handle the demand for the game, a reported 400,000 downloads the first day. As of late August 2002, the site continued to average 1.2 million hits per second. Within its first two months in service, AA had exceeded 2.5 million downloads, yielding 716,000 unique player accounts, of which 432,000 players had successfully completed the five missions that basic training comprised. Over the years more than 13 million players have registered for accounts and have spent more than 260 million hours exploring the virtual army.29 Gamespot, a leading game reviewer, not only gave the game a 9.8 rating when it first appeared but also regarded the business model behind the new game as itself deserving an award.30 The idea to build AA originated in 1999 with Colonel Casey Wardynski, chief economist of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) and a West Point economics professor. In a presentation given at the MOVES Institute in August 2003, at the launch of America’s Army: Special Forces, the army’s second franchise installment, Wardynski explained the overall objectives and design goals behind building the game. The US Army was having difficulty meeting its recruitment goals, and Wardynski was concerned that the tried-andtrue methods of advertising for talent—spending $5 million per year to sponsor a NASCAR team, for instance—weren’t the ones needed to fill the ranks of the twenty-first-century army. Wardynski quoted motivation from an army study: “Aptitudes related to information handling and information culture values are seen as vital to the effectiveness of the hightech, network-centric Army of the future, and young American gamers are seen as especially proficient in these capabili-

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ties. More importantly, when young Americans enter the Army, they increasingly will find that key information will be conveyed via computer video displays akin to the graphical interfaces found in games.”31 Teens and young adults were the target audience, especially males aged eighteen to twenty-five with the aptitude and native computer skills to join the ranks of the network-centric objective force warriors the army was planning to field. Wardynski wanted to produce a computer game that introduced young people to army life to encourage them to consider the army as a career option. Within a game, the army would be able to demonstrate the interplay between soldiering and ethical values such as duty, integrity, honor, loyalty, selfless service, courage, and respect for others. Adoption of these values would form necessary prerequisites for player progression and continued game experiences.  (Fig. 1.7) Along with inculcating these values, the game design would emphasize realism. As the principal game designer, Michael Zyda, explained, the specs for the game required that it convey an experience as tightly regulated as that in the real military and provide an honest representation of the service,

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1.7  Boot camp training in America’s Army.

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especially regarding ethics, codes of conduct, and professional expectations, and including accurate depictions of hierarchy, missions, weapons, equipment, uniforms, settings, discipline, tactics, and procedures. In short, the goal was a game a platoon sergeant could play without wincing. This objective necessitated a different style of game design and game play from other popular commercial FPSs and role-playing games. To convey these values, AA requires players to complete basic training levels before accessing any core missions of the game. Learning basic fighting tactics, use of army weapons, and the rules of engagement (ROE), as well as basic computer skills in controlling the avatar, was required before progressing beyond cyber boot camp to more exciting challenges. Also, to unlock certain roles and maps, the player is required to attend advanced training to qualify for positions such as marksman, airborne, medic, and Special Forces. Special Forces training contains the most rigorous and difficult preparations, emulating the challenges of real-life Special Forces training. Rather than advancing by killing opponents or completing missions, typical of many shooter games, players advance in America’s Army by gaining points in an “honor” system that emphasizes the merit-based system of promotion in the army. AA’s developers explained that these early levels intend to teach the player to think army-style: “In basic training, for example, you can opt to become a combat lifesaver. Doing so reflects duty and selfless service, so you get points and expanded opportunities for going through training. Out on mission, your buddy collapses in front of you. You can attend him, which earns points for loyalty and honor, or keep running, which scrubs points. If you do stop, you become a target yourself, which takes courage, and if you’re hit, your health will suffer … Doing your duty and saving both your lives wins the most points. Just like in combat.”32 The military character and

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the top-down gameplay of AA are most apparent in the ROE. Unlike that in Counter-Strike, “friendly fire” in AA is always active: when a player in any way hurts a team member or a civilian, he is punished by having ROE points directly deducted from accumulated honor points. Severe ROE violations can lead to a player’s removal from the server he’s playing on. Directly aiming and shooting at a fellow US soldier at the beginning of a round can lead to more ROE points than the death of a teammate by a badly thrown grenade. Depending on the server settings (default is minus five hundred points), a player will be sent to a virtual cell in the Ft. Leavenworth military prison when playing too recklessly or in a manner out of character with army expectations.33 Rather than following Counter-Strike’s lead, Zyda and his team created a scoring system that deemphasized killing the enemy and rewarded acting as a team and completing objectives. According to Zyda, though hardcore gamers did not immediately embrace the system, many players found they were able to achieve higher scores without necessarily using violence.34 Ultimately, this system created a more balanced game experience while simultaneously improving the army’s marketing message and helped mitigate criticisms that the army was training teens as killers. The development team also added the ability to show whether a player was an active member of the US Army. When a verified soldier played the game (and there were many of them), an army star appeared next to his name, allowing members of the community to know when they were interacting with actual soldiers, which strengthened camaraderie between military and civilian players. An additional goal Zyda and Wardynski shared was instrumenting the game to collect data useful for assessing a game player’s aptitude, leadership abilities, and psychological profile. Wardynski and the AA design team implemented an

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extensive and elaborate data-tracking system, which gathered information on how much time a player spent online (top players averaged four hours a day), how many kills he made per session and per hour, which battlefields he was best at, and so on. These extensive player data were collected in a database called Andromeda, which allowed players to create a “persistent” online alter ego that steadily progressed through the virtual ranks by taking additional training or going on specialized missions, generating valuable data along the way.35 The variety of qualification tests required to select roles and advance in the game, and the performance data generated by game play, were used by a psychologist at the Army Research Institute of Behavioral Science in Alexandria, Virginia, to model a data-collection protocol for the game that mirrored the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, a placement test new recruits take to determine appropriate military jobs. Wardynski envisioned that when visiting an army recruitment office, a potential recruit could have his gaming record matched to his real-world identity to facilitate career placement within the army. The dramatic success of America’s Army was an important culmination of investments in the military SIMNET from the late 1980s to the new millennium. As the Battle of 73 Easting and Project Odin opened the future military to networked simulations not only as theaters for reconstructing and evaluating past engagements but as valuable training systems for preparing for future war, AA offered great promise for the synthesis of these systems into a widely accessible platform. In a talk entitled “Perspectives on Distributed Simulation, Persistent Worlds, Command, and Control,” Jack Thorpe, the father of SIMNET, addressed the revolutionary potential of AA for the future of military training. Instead of beginning with the military, however, Thorpe began in science fiction

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with Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game. Ender, a young military cadet in the future, saves the world from annihilation by playing a war simulation that, in actuality, is a real battle taking place worlds away. In Ender’s world, game simulations become not only the training grounds for future warriors but also possible command and control systems for the conduct of real war themselves. Thorpe saw in America’s Army the same potential offered by Ender’s Battle School and envisioned a future military Battleplex providing a lifelong learning environment for combat decision leaders guided by proactive pedagogy and combat simulators—something like a sports complex and arcade for US command leaders and our allies.36 Besides showing the effort required to obtain mastery in virtual environments, Ender’s Game teaches us that the game is the reality. Thorpe reminded his audience that ubiquitous computing with sensors embedded throughout the environment is just over the horizon. Computers will be involved in everything we do, so “games” will potentially be everywhere. In this future ubiquitous computing environment, according to Thorpe, “it might feel like you and I are playing a game, [but] we might actually be executing something, controlling something, solving a real-world problem … We can use modeling and simulation to better understand what we want to do, given that they are advanced information technologies; and then, once we build a simulation (or game), we have not only the prototype for actually building a real system, we have the system itself. We knew this was coming. America’s Army demonstrates how we go about it. That’s why it’s so important.”37 At the moment, America’s Army replicates how one starts as a recruit, works through basic training, and gets to advanced instruction in whatever military skill one chooses. But army personnel could adapt it to their needs by designing

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an operation and using AA to perform training and rehearsal for executing the operation. AA had already taken the first step by modeling recruiting and several military specialties. The second step toward realizing this goal was also already partly realized by allowing real soldiers to log in to the game and participate with civilian players or military recruits in training, the result being that we can experiment with different operation scenarios and get data from real, experienced soldiers. Drawing these themes of ubiquitous computing together with the merger of the virtual and the real, Thorpe speculated: “If there is no difference between the virtual and the live, and if the instructive and the real are all the same, then eventually we are going to be able to execute and these things are all going to be at the same place.” He gave an example of a future imaginary scenario involving drones, Special Forces, and insurgents cooperating with a US unit on the ground. Thorpe pointed out that the military was very close to having surveillance technology that could take the aerial images from drone flyovers and render them in near to real time into 3-D game environments. All this, he observed, “allows us to think about putting out a game that’s played worldwide and allows people to solve some particular problem that up to now only very specialized groups could solve … Targets are named publicly online by elements of a population, not all of which are at war with you … [The game allows you to] address the will of the people, change the will of the people, and look at the key mechanisms needed for success.”38 Though Thorpe’s vision of opening the conduct of military operations to full civilian engagement would undoubtedly be met with hesitation and skepticism, such an integrated system would mark the culmination of decades of military-entertainment development. From the early SIMNET to America’s Army to the participatory efforts of FPS mod-

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ders, the gaps between civilian and military, consumer and producer, virtual and actual are steadily eroding. Collaborations between the military and entertainment industries have shaped these interfaces into potent tools for interactive experience and the conduct of war. What Ender and America’s Army teach us: if you can game it, you can win.

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CHAPTER 2

Creating Repeat Consumers: Epic Realism and the Birth of the Wargame Franchise –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

“Call of Duty has come to represent a pretty unique blend of epic realism … We … strike just the right balance between feeling authentic, but not feeling like a military simulation. [Call of Duty] games feel like a Hollywood blockbuster action movie … We just want to take people on a thrill ride and give them the ultimate adrenaline rush in gaming.” – Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg

Since the turn of the millennium, the militaryentertainment complex has become undeniably popular. Not only has it attracted large loyal audiences, it has also contributed to an aesthetic merging the visual spectacle of cinematic storytelling with the interactivity of videogames. Whereas our previous chapter traced the interconnections between the early games industry and military-funded simulation and recruiting platforms, we focus here on how this relationship has changed significantly with the rise of successful military shooter franchises. Previous analyses of the military-entertainment complex, such as Roger Stahl’s powerful account, have located the growing popularity of wargaming in an aesthetic of realism growing out of military public relations efforts. Stahl claims that “Operation Desert Storm in 1991 taught game makers a lesson about the consumer demand created by a well-orchestrated television war … Recognizing the strong demand for realism, game producers began doing business with the Pentagon and military contractors to commercially release training simulators, most of which appeared in the mid-1990s.”1 In tracing the effects of these increasingly popular games, Stahl shows how games like Call of Duty, Kuma\War, and America’s Army aim for realism—sometimes to the point that they are mistaken for real war footage—and draw inspiration and guidance from the real military. In this chapter we propose a different story that we feel better describes the contemporary militaryentertainment complex. Instead of looking at how popular wargames and military simulators are grounded in similar ideological and institutional networks, investigating precisely how and why wargames and simulators are different sets us on the path to a more nuanced critique. We argue here that the contemporary militaryentertainment complex is influenced far more by the efforts of

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franchise wargame developers to make games that are dramatically unrealistic seem realistic than by their proximity to military contractors or DoD public relations efforts. What becomes important with the rise of wargame franchises is the construction of an aesthetic—an affective framework for experience—that targets and exploits embodiment more than cognition to immerse the player in the game world. Far from concerning themselves with communicating propagandistic values or skills that are unique to the military, wargame developers focus their most significant efforts on constructing the gaming experience—that is, how players feel when immersed in their game. The resulting aesthetic emerges as a solution to economic, ludic, and technical constraints unique to the state of contemporary game development as well as established genre conventions and market research. We argue that the military-entertainment complex from roughly 2006 onward entered a new, “popular” phase, becoming a nexus of coinciding interests between game companies and the military instead of a coordinated collaboration. Rather than being primarily grounded in militaristic ideologies, the most widely consumed wargames of today are shaped far more by their efforts to make something as boring, traumatic, and universally condemned as war into a source of repeatable entertainment experiences. Realistic game mechanics and scenarios are often at odds with rich, entertaining, and immersive game worlds. War is not intrinsically fun. It requires significant reworking to create the exciting experiences gamers expect and support. Beyond training or recruiting soldiers, the most important elements of today’s military-entertainment complex construct an epic aesthetic that is fast-paced, emotive, and exciting, but minimally realistic. These popular games opportunistically draw from military discourses only insofar as

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they evoke a sense of authenticity and provide commercially appealing resources for game mechanics and narratives. These games diverge from such military sources in any instance where realism conflicts with a game experience that will inspire repeat franchise consumption. We ended the last chapter with America’s Army, the most obvious example of mass media gaming intersecting with the expressed interests of the military. As a recruitment tool, AA was highly effective and has been, for its relative cost, a great PR tool for the army. Not only did the game reach outward to communicate specifically military values to an engaged public; it also provided utility as a training tool for both the military and other areas of government such as the Secret Service and FEMA. Collapsing education and entertainment produced substantial returns, allowing groups to practice team coordination, strategy, and even train for particular weapons systems within low-risk, affordable, and engaging environments. While AA and its many spin-offs were based on the popular Unreal game engine and were developed largely in-house as military properties, a competing military simulation platform grew out of relative obscurity to secure significant market share. Buoyed by its freshman release, Operation Flashpoint (later renamed ARMA, after a publishing dispute) (Codemasters, 2001), Bohemia Interactive Studio took cues from id Software and Valve and embraced its players’ creative efforts, spawning a lively modding community around their game. Seeing the ease with which vehicles, scenarios, weapons, equipment, and environments could be customized, military contractors such as BBN were quick to take note. Whereas the AA development model required expert engagement from the level of the game engine upward, the interventions required for customization of preexisting games were significantly less

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onerous.2 In 2004 BBN partnered with Total Immersion Software under a DARPA grant to release DARWARS Ambush! This was a mod of Operation Flashpoint that transformed the game into a training simulation for detecting and responding to improvised explosive devices. Proponents celebrated the effort as a revolution in military training, saying that “Ambush! is as close to real-life as you can get without being in the battlefield.”3 Seeing this demand, Bohemia Interactive began working with the US Marine Corps and the Australian military to produce a simulation platform based on its commercial games to make customization of missions and scenarios more flexible and accessible to nonexperts. The result was Virtual Battlespace (VBS), now in its third iteration and the official simulation platform of the US Army. VBS integrates widely into DoD systems, allowing rapid generation of simulation assets from geospatial databases to enable troops to run simulations in virtual environments nearly identical to future deployment areas. This pursuit of realism extends to game avatars that mimic the actual proficiencies of their real-life counterparts: if a soldier gains weight, his avatar appears plumper and moves more slowly; if he earns subpar scores for weapon proficiency, his avatar’s aim worsens. Collapsing the difference between real life and simulation provides additional peer pressure for soldiers to bring up their game literally and virtually.4 In the game space, weapons have significant recoil, bullets drop with gravity and drift with wind, vehicles run out of fuel, maps span massive and detailed terrains, and combat takes place at great distances against ill-defined foes instead of the close-quarter combat so common to popular first-person shooters (FPSs). Simulators like ARMA and VBS bring the physicality of combat to the forefront, encouraging soldiers and players to learn the procedural side of combat often at the expense of its emotional and spectacular qualities. (Fig. 2.1)

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Simulators versus Wargames It’s necessary to address a significant point of similarity between public-facing military simulators like AA and ARMA and popular wargames before pointing to their important differences. As many commentators have noted, a common tendency with most military shooters is that they almost universally downplay the lasting effect of violence on all characters.5 Instead of experiencing scenes of carnage with rivers of blood soaking the streets or the wounded crying out for help—realistic war scenes—players face foes who generally fight to the death courageously and refuse to give up until they are shot repeatedly. Dead bodies crumple to the floor, speckled with blood, where they lie for moments until they simply disappear as their machinic memory is reassigned to produce more important experiences. Violence has a short memory in most games, inspiring players to have the same.

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2.1 In Virtual Battlespace 2, targets are often engaged at greater than two hundred meters, which produces combat scenarios that are very different from those in popular wargames.

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For both genres, it makes sense—practically, economically, and artistically—to minimize the lasting effects of violence rather than dwell on them. If training and recruiting media emphasized the trauma and gore of conflict, they probably wouldn’t fulfill their function of teaching players combat procedures and teamwork or enticing them into service. For popular wargames, a focus on brutality and trauma also would indict the primordial coupling of violence and positive affect that undergirds many fundamental shooter game mechanics. A truly realistic representation of war, as a result, runs up against a series of ludic and business constraints that positively structure the exercise of state violence in nearly all the most successful franchises. This is not to say that the traumas of war are completely unrepresented in the wargame and simulation genres, but, rather, that they are framed as situations that demand a heroic (and violent) response rather than as situations that call the exercise of that violence into question. From the standard propaganda perspective, one could locate this sanitized representation of war in Pentagon public relations efforts to differentiate acceptable forms of violence from the evils of adversaries—practices that the military has undoubtedly engaged in throughout history. But this perspective gives the military too much credit and overlooks all the ways that popular narratives, game mechanics, and other representations are dramatically out of sync with US military culture and doctrine. Looking instead from the perspective of the multivalent constraints (economic, ludic, and technological) facing commercial game developers, sanitized war experiences are endemic to wargames because they fit more readily with players’ desires, make games more fun, and make them appealing to broader demographics, which results in greater sales. Developers and publishers are highly strategic with game representations and mechanics because if games cease to be

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fun or alienate potential customers, sales die and franchises wither. Ludic, economic, and business constraints provide a resonance chamber for the positive depiction of military violence because sales often depend on producing a positive, heroic experience for a broad consumer base. Though the sanitization of violence runs across both genres, the differences between simulators and popular wargames are crucial for understanding how the contemporary military-entertainment complex functions. As we noted earlier, simulators aim to re-create the operational and physical aspects of combat authentically, placing great importance on the military chain of command and the rules of engagement in addition to featuring high-fidelity models that look and function like their real-life counterparts. Popular wargames, however, take significant license in deviating from realistic representation when they find opportunities for heightening affect. As franchises have matured, these deviations are more the rule than the exception. Importantly, the market success of simulators and franchise games is far from equivalent. If we look at the circulation of such simulators in comparison to popular titles from the Call of Duty (COD) franchise, the simulators that adhere to a strict interpretation of realism are more niche products than widely consumed properties. America’s Army, a free-to-play game, has enjoyed a high level of success—more than 13 million players have registered over its eleven years running—but COD 4 (at $50 or more for the game plus additional monthly fees for multiplayer and supplementary content) alone sold over 13 million copies from 2007 to 2009.6 Collectively, COD’s Modern Warfare and Black Ops series sold approximately 108.7 million copies from 2007 to mid-2015. Although we don’t dismiss the relative followings of simulators like ARMA and America’s Army, in what follows we assume that popular

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wargames shape expectations about warfare in ways that simulations cannot, simply through their greater circulation and popularity. That players are willing to buy into these popular franchises at an increasing rate says a lot about how well they target the desires of their audiences. We argue that the selective realism of popular wargames has helped turn these properties into hugely profitable franchises. It is precisely because of how successful and how much fun these games are that the assumptions they make about warfare become essential to examine—not just their gamification of state violence but also their glorification of the high technology of the Revolution in Military Affairs, making the new American way of war appear desirable, effective, and natural while eschewing the many problems and contradictions that accompany it. Instead of following the standard narrative that focuses on explicit coordination between the military and entertainment industries, we believe the military-entertainment complex of today is better characterized as an opportunistic nexus of coinciding interests between mass entertainment industries and the military. This nexus revolves around the commercial exploitation of military experiences that produce strong affects and assumptions far more than the communication of specific forms of knowledge, strategies, or traditional forms of propaganda. Rather than directly benefiting from these games in the form of increased enrollment, the military finds many of its operating assumptions about the RMA confirmed as the only sensible way to engage wars of the future. These games, therefore, give shape to a contemporary war imaginary in which peace becomes far harder to find than the conduct of perpetual war.

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Affect in Game Design: Branding the American War Imaginary Our discussion of video wargames and treatments of the RMA, for all these reasons, does not focus on the primacy of ideological narratives that communicate particular messages. Rather, we foreground techniques in these media for producing and modulating affect, a project that displaces the primacy of ideologically motivated narrative in favor of the creation of “epically real” fantasy war-fighting experiences in militarythemed narratives. As we have intimated, there is an important difference in the construction and orientation of powerful simulation games, such as America’s Army and the ARMA series, and the extremely popular commercial wargames we are calling franchise games, such as Call of Duty. As Ian Bogost and David Nieborg have shown by carefully dissecting the actions allowed and restrictions on play coded into America’s Army, the simulation is the paradigm example of a procedural narrative aimed to recruit and simultaneously inculcate the values and ideology of the US military.7 AA makes procedural arguments to players about the process of being a soldier and conducts a sales pitch for actually joining up. Instead of replicating the real, the commercial games we are focusing on here aim at the production and commodification of affect channeled into the creation of “epically real” game experiences heavily dependent on representations of sophisticated military technologies but only loosely connected to contemporary realworld military actions and rules of engagement. Although they are not designed to promote specific ideological positions supportive of the US military, the games we examine certainly do have powerful ideological effects. They are just not dependent on explicit ideological intentions codified in them. The production and modulation of affect central

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to franchise wargames constitute a powerful force in shaping the contemporary American war imaginary and, as articulated by Brian Massumi in discussing the relation between affect and ideology, indirectly generate “ideological effects by non-ideological means.”8 To see how affective design for creating high-voltage excitement in franchise wargames silently contributes to an ideological formation supportive of militarism, we look briefly to the business of making games. The mid-1990s saw the rise of the massively networked and increasingly global corporation, along with the penetration of digital technology into all modes of production and consumption and financial transactions, followed by the network-enabled social media of the early 2000s. This potent combination created new opportunities and placed new demands on the marketing of consumer products. In this new “digital capitalism” the production and modulation of affect became central to capitalist enterprise, and nowhere was this more important than in the videogame industry. In the early 2000s marketing firms moved to affective marketing strategies and emotional branding as the key to the future of brand profitability. The nascent field of neuroeconomics and the work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio were demonstrating that reason and emotion are inextricably intertwined rather than opposed, and that rational choices are driven by emotion. Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe in Paris, parent company of the global marketing firm Saatchi & Saatchi, put it this way: “Consumers who make decisions based purely on facts represent a very small minority of the world’s population … The vast majority … consumes and shops with their mind and their heart, or if you prefer, their emotions. They look for a rational reason: what the product does and why it is the superior choice. And they take an emotional decision: I like it, I prefer it, I feel good

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about it … Before understanding, you feel. And making people feel good about a brand, getting positive emotion, is key.”9 In an interview with Alan Webber for Fast Company, Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out the new principles of emotional branding crucial to future marketing.10 Roberts said that it was time to break from treating customers like collections of statistics and data profiles. Instead, successful brands of the future would maintain closer relationships with consumers, keeping in touch with them, thereby creating an emotional connection between consumers and the brand and its products. Among the principles that became Saatchi & Saatchi mantras were bringing customers closer to the processes of new-product development and feedback (“Involve them in everything”) and a celebration of loyalty by delivering consistent brand experiences that keep customers not only liking a brand but even actively loving it.11 According to Roberts, the future of marketing goes beyond the concept of the brand to what he calls “Lovemarks.” Whereas trademarks and brands are owned by manufacturers, producers, and businesses, Lovemarks are owned by the people who have an emotional attachment to them. Such an investment, in Roberts’s words, “inspires loyalty that goes Beyond Reason … Lovemarks are the charismatic brands that people love and fiercely protect. For keeps.” They are consumer attachments so strong that when they are taken away, consumers get angry and call for their return. Examples of such charismatic brands with passionate consumer bases include “Amazon, Apple, … Disney, Dyson, eBay, Google, Harley Davidson,” and so on.12 To such a list we feel compelled to add Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, and Tom Clancy. Roberts and his colleagues single out three main attributes that give a brand-marketing program the emotional resonance that makes it a Lovemark: mystery, sensuality, and

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intimacy. Mystery is a key part of creating loyalty beyond reason because mystery opens up emotion. Mystery lies in the stories, metaphors, and iconic characters that tap into dreams, conjure great myths, and instill inspiration. Sensuality is key to creating emotional attachment beyond reason because, Roberts writes, “the senses are the fast track to human emotions.” Taste, sound, smell, and touch (the feel of a BMW’s leather interior or the tightness of its steering and tracking system, the smell of warm cookies or freshly roasted coffee in a Starbucks) are sensations that trigger emotional attachments beyond reason to a brand. Love builds on intimacy, and so do brands that become Lovemarks. Here, among other approaches, Roberts points to the role of emerging social media in creating opportunities for fan groups (e.g., people devoted to Legos or Camrys) to share stories about the products they love.13 Such digitally mediated relationships shrink the distance between fans and producers, increasing the personal investment consumers have in a brand that quickly becomes part of their identity. Roberts cites the computer companies Microsoft and Apple and the game company Nintendo as examples of developers of effective emotional branding strategies in transforming their brands into Lovemarks. Moreover, successful videogame franchises exemplify the strategies of Roberts and other gurus of marketing in the new era of digital capitalism. Nearly every item of the emotional branding approaches discussed here could be found on the product design checklist of franchise game companies such as Ubisoft, Activision, and Electronic Arts—a topic we will return to through the lens of the growing popularity of franchise wargames. In the era of digital capitalism, the creation and modulation of affective flows are central not only to branding and product sales but also to social (re)production and political power. Politics today is increasingly imbricated with mediated

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affect. Rather than articulating ideological positions to be publically and rationally debated, politicians exercise power through ad campaigns, shock events, and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and ever-new others), where assemblages of affect are transmitted through trending memes and viral videos with instant feedback loops of “likes.” Politicians constantly check polls and surveys to invent and support their positions. Victims of natural disasters are saved in direct relation to the affective intensity of public outrage registered in the social mediasphere.14 Massumi has described the modulation of affect as the principal vector of contemporary power circulation: Power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective … The legitimisation of political power, of state power, no longer goes through the reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes through affective channels. For example, an American president can deploy troops overseas because it makes a population feel good about their country or feel secure, not because the leader is able to present well-honed arguments that convince the population that it is a justified use of force … And the mass media are not [just] mediating anymore—they become direct mechanisms of control by their ability to modulate the affective dimension … Affect is now much more important for understanding power, even state power narrowly defined, than concepts like ideology.15

Such a presubjective ground for the exercise of power gives rise to the notion of the machinic unconscious introduced by Félix Guattari and Brian Massumi and elaborated as the technological unconscious by Nigel Thrift, Patricia Clough, Kate Hayles, and Richard Grusin.16 This concept helps us under-

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stand the relation of affect to the constitution of contemporary subjects—for us, militarized subjects who see the new American way of war as natural and inevitable—through corporeal entanglement with media and media technologies. In this technological unconscious, we see a wide range of media ecologies, material practices, and social apparatuses for encoding and enforcing behavior through routines, patterns of movement and gestures, haptic and even neurological repatternings that facilitate specific behaviors, modes of action, and, most important, patterns of consumption and problemsolving skills. In this model, as Thrift, Hayles, and Grusin elaborate, technological media join with unconscious and preconscious cognitive activity to constitute subjects in particular, medium-specific forms. Entangled within the flow of data in technical and social media circuits, “human behavior is increasingly integrated with the technological nonconscious through somatic responses, haptic feedback, and a wide variety of other cognitive activities that are habitual and repetitive and that therefore fall below the threshold of conscious awareness.”17 Videogames and the media technologies that enable them are human-machine assemblages that operate through multilayered, haptic-visual-auditory feedback loops that function as material forces that generate, reshape, and mutate the underpinnings of subjectivity. This technological unconscious is the crucible in which commitment to the new American way of warfare is forged. In producing a game like Call of Duty, a large videogame company creates an intricate and sophisticated machine for generating affect. Rather than constructing explicitly ideological commitment to war, media convergence and similar strategies among game- and filmmakers for commodifying affect make militarism thrive in the American soul through quasi-interactive immersion in media environments that

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attach positive affects to technologies of the RMA. Instead of an explicit program to design games that serve as the popular arm of US military ideology, it is the market pressures of digital enterprise that shape militarism in the American popular imaginary. As we will show, games like Call of Duty attach positive affects to the use of the weaponry and tactics of contemporary warfare and imagined future warfare scenarios to enable player accomplishments, advancement in the game, and satisfying feelings of heroic achievement as the player assumes the imaginary character of, for instance, a Special Forces operative. The design efforts in game mechanics and the use of stunning graphics, sound effects design, and haptic feedback all promote the sensory immersive “epically real” war-fighting experience. The world of Call of Duty is a fantasy world of pure entertainment, but through a variety of effects of intermediation with film, TV, and social media, the fantastical “epically real” bleeds into our construction of the real itself. As game sales surpass other forms of entertainment media, the mantra that “it’s just a game” becomes harder to swallow. Colin Milburn’s examination of how simulations and videogames related to nanotechnology have shaped the contemporary perception of “digital matter” even among the scientific community itself provides instructive illustration of how the fantasy real can premediate the construction of the future.18 Milburn discusses the ways in which game technology has been absorbed into the scientific practice of nanoscientists in their construction of simulations and experiments with nano materials. He names more than twenty-five videogames and game series since Obsidian and Nanotek Warrior appeared in 1996 and 1997 that have proliferated plot lines and concepts from the field of nanotechnology.19 Milburn argues that the

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images of nanotech disseminated in science fiction, film, and videogames have preconditioned the experience of the nanoworld, informing the way that both scientific and popular audiences understand and deliberate nanotechnology.20 The commercial gaming platforms, game engine software, and graphics adapted to laboratory use enable nanoscientists to transcode molecular space into computationally generated experiential virtual worlds. At the same time, Milburn argues, “these systems provide audiences with innumerable opportunities for interacting with programmable matter through fictional, recreational games that reinforce the epistemic features of nanoscience—conditioning in advance the social reception of our molecular future.”21 In a similar vein, we argue that the circulation of images, war-fighting strategies that deploy futuristic weapons systems, and the hyperreal fictionalized war engagements with imagined future enemies that characterize the “epically real” of the popular war imaginary not only instill desire and dispositions in the public to support the military’s future plans but also come to inspire actual military policy for conducting future wars. Perhaps a good example of this is the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. The aim of the project is to investigate the ways in which “emerging antagonists, disruptive technologies, and novel warfighting concepts may animate tomorrow’s conflicts.”22 Video wargames are a principal resource for their investigations. Arguing that videogames now shape the way we view our world, the project uses blockbuster videogames to analyze contemporary war-fighting issues. Among the persons advising on this project is Dave Anthony, the creator of the Call of Duty franchise.23 Anthony is joined by other videogame designers and writers of military fiction in thinking “outside the box” about the future of warfare.

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Particularly helpful for framing our argument about the role of affective design in games and film is Steven Shaviro’s treatment of the rise of “post-cinema” and its influence on the relation between cinematic affect and the technological unconscious in the consumption of film. His discussion of the cinematic body rejects the psychoanalytic and Lacanian framework that shaped film theory through the late 1980s. These theories often analyze cinema as a language, with an emphasis on film as “text,” representation, and structures of signification that pose a radical gap between signifying processes and material ones. Instead, Shaviro proposes a framework in which film images are unmediated and nonsignifying by turning to the radical materialist tradition of Walter Benjamin, Dziga Vertov, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Maurice Blanchot, and Robert Bresson. Cinematic perception, according to Shaviro, is primordial: “It is composed … of the unconscious epiphenomenon of sensory experience … affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit … Film crosses the threshold of a new kind of perception, one that is below or above the human. Concrete, immanent, and prereflective: it is devoid of depth and interiority. The new perception is multiple and anarchic, nonintentional and asubjective; it is no longer subordinated to the requirements of representation and idealization, recognition and designation. It is affirmed before the intervention of concepts, and without the limitations of the fixed human eye.”24 Post-cinema leverages this capacity of film to act as an asignifying, prereflective shock medium through the use of editing techniques that undercut the narrative function of traditional cinematic storytelling. “New Hollywood” producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer and directors such as Tony Scott and Michael Bay use narrative primarily as a scaffolding

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to move from one eye-popping, pulse-throbbing special effect to the next. Spectacle and the production of affect are their main objectives. Classic film editing, which aimed at continuity of story and narrative logic orchestrated through montage, is replaced by frenetic cuts. This style of editing creates the breakneck pace that demographic research and extensive data collection—including, increasingly, even quantitative neuroimaging of affect to determine the precise editing rhythms that will generate a maximum audience response—suggest is necessary for market success.25 Whereas classic film editing was oriented to the production of meanings or ideologies, post-cinema aims to manipulate the spectator’s affective state from moment to moment. For Shaviro, films like Michael Bay’s Transformers series and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s 2009 film Gamer are exemplary of this aesthetic, no longer appearing “invested in meaningful expression, or narrative construction, at all. They don’t even show a concern for accurate continuity.”26 Instead, “the viewer is offered a continual cinematic barrage, with no respite. It is filled with shots from handheld cameras, lurching camera movements, extreme angles, violent jump cuts, cutting so rapid as to induce vertigo, extreme close-ups, a deliberately ugly color palette, video glitches, and so on … The frequent cuts and jolting shifts of angle have less to do with orienting us towards action in space, than with setting off autonomic responses in the viewer.”27 This transition between a regime focused on the production of ideological meaning (narrative) to one oriented by the execution of (affective) commands that compel feeling is crucial for understanding the primacy of the videogame aesthetic for the contemporary military-entertainment complex. Shaviro notes this shift by linking the rise of computer games—particularly the first-person shooter genre—to the post-cinematic aesthetic.

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In this and the following chapter, we continue this inquiry into the exchange between videogame and film aesthetics through the lens of the military-entertainment complex. On the one hand, in building blockbuster games developers have adapted techniques from film producers and special effects artists for constructing epic and exciting game-world experiences. On the other, developments in the games industry in creating immersive digital environments that encourage specific forms of player engagement and affective investment have been transformed by cinema and TV producers to produce the post-cinematic affect. In this chapter we examine the rise of popular franchise wargames and track the development of aesthetic techniques designed to turn virtual war into a source of repeat consumption. Some of these techniques take place at the level of representation, some at the level of computational game mechanics. What results, however, is an aesthetic that leverages contemporary war-fighting techniques and scenarios to create highly affective game environments and draw in a loyal audience, in effect eliciting praise and love from everexpanding demographics. Our interest here in affect, however, should not be taken as an argument for seeing consumers of mass media as mindless drones or docile subjects that uncritically absorb virtual violence. In contrast with more passive forms of media, videogames require greater thought and agency from their consumers, which makes the role of affect even more central to their market success. Strategies for managing how players feel from moment to moment in a game are essential: if the game is too hard or players doesn’t know what to do, they feel frustrated; if there isn’t enough challenge or stimulation, players get bored and feel that they didn’t get their money’s worth; if the game does not make them feel sufficiently good through its systems of feedback and reward, players will stop devoting

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their time and money to it. On the one hand, game makers give players the kind of experiences they want and expect. On the other, player agency is channeled toward certain affective relationships over others that are good for the gaming business. The lasting influence of the contemporary militaryentertainment complex is in these affective relationships as they become generalized beyond the conduct of wargames to the realities of war itself. Our argument advances four main claims that contextualize the rise of popular wargaming within the economic and business transformations of the gaming industry: 1.

2.

3.

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The differences between simulation games and popular wargame franchises indicate how the latter participate within a culture industry that produces a brand of hightech militarism that is potent under the War on Terror; these representations are significantly influenced by business decisions designed to make playing war accessible and appealing to the widest possible demographic, both to increase revenues and to streamline the development process. Popular wargame narratives are designed to stimulate affect more than cognition. More often than not, campaign narratives make little logical sense, instead filling in their gaps with eye candy and spectacle. Rather than making explicit arguments, these franchises rely on carefully crafted incentive structures, epically immersive environments, and over-the-top scenarios to produce adrenaline, euphoria, and other positive affects to secure brand loyalty. RMA discourse influences the scenarios and incentives in many wargames, which naturalize what has become

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4.

known as the “new American way of war”; they feature small Special Forces squads mounting a highly flexible style of warfare, underpinned by sophisticated information technologies. The wargame aesthetic of “epic realism” has deeply influenced affective perspectives on war, and it is setting expectations for both the assessment of problems in Western foreign affairs and their possible solutions.

The Birth of the Wargame Franchise In March 2008 the game publisher Ubisoft invested a significant sum in its future. While its annual earnings report for 2008 shows €48 million in capital expenses for “property, plant and equipment, and intangible assets,” the majority of this amount was spent not on digital or physical assets, or on development studios or the acquisition of talented artists or programmers. Instead, it paid for the indefinite licensing rights to a name: Tom Clancy. Having already spent €13 million on licensing costs for the use of the Clancy moniker in previous years, Ubisoft shelled out an additional €33 million to own it outright, which allowed the company to benefit financially from any derivative works, including books, movies, or videogames, carrying the Clancy name.28 What does it say about economic and cultural forces shaping the games industry that investing €46 million in a brand name is considered good business? Even a quick look at the games industry since 2000 reveals we are in the Age of the Franchise. Of utmost importance, as we have suggested, is the cultivation of affective attachment to brands that consistently produce positive experiences for consumers, so that they have faith not only to purchase the

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next series installment, but also to anticipate (or even preorder) its next release. Suitably branded franchises such as Tom Clancy or Call of Duty have become such significant vectors for consumer expectations that they are widely perceived within the game industry as the only safe investments for AAA games. For example, as Ubisoft hedged its bets on the Tom Clancy brand, Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, told investors in a 2008 earnings call that the publisher would avoid developing game properties unless they had “the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million … franchises” that are still worked on “10 years from now.”29 Franchises themselves are not inherently problematic, but it should be unsurprising that they face business pressures that structure their content in unique ways. Our focus on franchises reflects both a recognition of how fun and entertaining many of these games are and an appreciation of how well they are constructed. This success, however, is also an impetus for analyzing how these games contribute to the construction of the contemporary war imaginary—sometimes in problematic ways—precisely because of their superior circulation. The more people playing a game, the more it will shape what people feel about the realities fictionalized therein. Successful wargame franchises therefore occupy a place of special importance in our analysis as commodities that are painstakingly crafted (for primarily business reasons) to produce a specific affective attachment in those who consume them. They play to popular expectations as well as shape them in the hope that players will enjoy the experience enough to secure their brand loyalty in perpetuity. While the conservatism of this drive toward franchising cannot be underestimated, the phenomenon shines light on

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important changes taking place in the gaming industry since 2000. Software development has always required significant upfront investment. With each new generation of game consoles, production costs for AAA games have doubled or even tripled; as of 2012, such games require sales of at least 2 million copies before they become profitable. With eighthgeneration consoles now pushing the market, that number is sure to increase. And as development costs increase, so follow marketing budgets, as publishers have more money on the line and depend more on scoring a large release. Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 reportedly had a marketing budget of $100 million, which illustrates the stakes involved. With this level of upfront investment, franchise games innovate slowly and cautiously, sticking with tried-and-true formulas to mitigate the risk associated with development.30 One of the key pressures affecting franchise game marketability is the need for balance between the exploitation of niche markets and broad appeal across many demographics. This tension often manifests itself in the distinction between so-called hardcore games requiring significant time investment and skill before players can begin playing and casual games that are relatively simple for most people to pick up. Whereas military simulations like America’s Army or the ARMA series take the hardcore route and pose high barriers to entry, franchise wargames generally take a more casual approach that makes them easy to pick up but difficult to master fully. AAA games face inexorable pressure to appeal to the largest possible demographic, which heavily influences the narratives and game mechanics they mobilize. Because of their politicized, gendered, and violent content, franchise wargames face this pressure more acutely than other gaming genres and must balance not only their game mechanics but also their content accordingly. Game play that is too politicized or

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ideologically biased risks alienating players of opposing political persuasions or cultural backgrounds; this results in wargames’ packing as much ambiguity into their narratives as possible to ensure that the greatest number of players can find something to identify with. One of the core challenges that first-person and tactical shooter games must meet is providing players with reasons to shoot and kill opponents. The solution could be as easy as the presence of aliens or zombies intent on killing the player, but for popular wargames that stake their reputation on military “authenticity” or some other claim to realism, this answer becomes more difficult and less transparent. When a player graduates to killing something human, context, narrative, and affect become exceedingly important to maintaining the premise that shooting virtual enemies is not only justified, but, more importantly, heroic, gratifying, fun. The games scholar Ian Bogost has argued that videogames, by means of “procedural rhetoric,” are able to advance arguments through the computational processes that underpin them. The process of abstracting the function of systems into computational rules allows videogames to use game mechanics to “support or challenge our understanding of the way things in the world do or should work.”31 As models of how international conflict and its resolution function, popular wargames undeniably advance arguments about how the real world works. The computational procedures of franchise wargames, however, may embody arguments that appeal as readily to business pressures and technological limitations as to authorial intention or ideology; and the procedural arguments of most franchise wargames are constructed as affective through their embeddedness within a narrative environment rather than on a solely computational level. From a practical standpoint, the rhetorical power of game mechanics

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becomes evident only when properly contextualized within the work as a whole. Take, for example, a common game mechanic in the FPS genre: in combat, enemies don’t run away, they don’t surrender, and they stand their ground until the player kills them (we’ll call this the “fight to death” mechanic). It is often not enough to wound or maim enemies; in some cases if they are only wounded, they will start shooting again until the player finishes them off. (Fig. 2.2) Obviously, such a mechanic does not mirror the conduct of real conflict, but that framing inevitably amplifies the threats facing the protagonist. Given that both good guys and bad guys are often drawn from real-life demographics, the political implication of this standard game mechanic is that lethal violence is necessary against certain types of people because adversaries will not let up until they’re dead (radical Muslims, Russians, or American survivalists, for example). Gamers can and do find innumerable ways to subvert the intentions of game designers, but there is little escaping the fact that wargames are predicated on killing. Refusal to kill means you will not progress beyond the opening campaign mission or unlock more than the most basic multiplayer content. Killing is how players gain experience points, how they clear a checkpoint so they can progress.32 Failure to do so is met with negative feedback and death. An unwillingness to kill, therefore, constitutes an unwillingness to play. Changing this incentive structure to include wounding or capturing enemies would require significant restructuring of the ways wargames give incentives to and reward their players. This is not to say that such changes are impossible but, rather, to observe that they conflict with the established expectations and desires of players. There is something viscerally cathartic to killing opponents rather than wounding them. Once they are dead, a player can move on. If they are wounded, questions abound.

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2.2 In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 wounded enemies shoot at you with pistols until you finish them off.

Such open-endedness would also create more work for developers: additional assets such as animations for capturing combatants would then be required, along with narratives to explain how these captives are dealt with, which would give them meaning within the broader narrative of the game—all without introducing additional complexity into the game that would detract from its mass appeal. Though this procedural rhetoric helps build consensus that military force is justified by the extreme character of opposing forces, it doesn’t immediately follow that the reasoning behind the rhetoric originates from social or political motives rather than from simple business decisions or development constraints. Processes such as the “fight-to-death” mechanic also don’t hold significant rhetorical value outside the narrative environment that gives them form. As important as the work of Bogost and other game studies scholars is for articulating a methodology for analyzing games that is irreducible to either literary theory or cinema studies, these theorists also shift fo-

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cus too far to the computational domain. Game mechanics, code, hardware, and interface design are worth studying in their own right, but such a narrow focus misses the importance of narrative and representation in investing game mechanics with meaning. On some level, a popular shooter could be just about navigating space or managing an algorithm, but there is a significant difference between, for example, hunting games and military games. They both involve shooting mechanics, but hunting deer provides a substantially different experience from the one afforded by hunting people. In the absence of representational content, game mechanics and computational procedures become flat, obscuring crucial details that show how the procedural rhetoric of franchise wargames functions so effectively at generating loyal consumers. To test this claim, consider how representation creates an environment that turns the fight-to-death mechanic into a workable proposition. As mentioned before, popular shooter games are peculiar in that they make requests of their players that fall far outside real-life social expectations. To lessen the effect of the player’s virtual killing spree, popular wargames rarely require him to shoot anything other than battlehardened or ideologically committed opposition forces intent on his destruction. Anything less would raise questions that make the experience uncomfortable rather than fun.33 If enemies were simple villagers or farmers or unarmed civilians, their fighting to the death would not only make little sense, it would also contradict the fundamental premises animating the genre: that shooting things is fun and that players are heroic for their actions. Again, while there are significant political implications to this choice, particularly in who is chosen to represent the heinous opposition force, one can’t attribute such choices solely to the ideology of military public relations, even though many of these opponents are

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drawn from past and present military threats. These enemies are bad to make players feel good about what they are doing, rather than confronting them with the possibility that raising the crosshairs is not the answer. They are imported from historical and contemporary engagements precisely because of the negative affect already associated with them; this allows the player to intuitively navigate a familiar geopolitical situation and minimizes the necessity for critical thought and reflection. And as players find themselves immersed in the game world, they more readily enjoy the kind of affective experience that game designers put substantial effort into constructing. Outside the boundaries of these ludic constraints, players begin to question the actions they are encouraged to perform by the game, which opens the door for an experience other than the intended fun of visiting a narrativized shooting gallery. A narrow focus on game mechanics therefore misses a crucial piece of the story of how popular wargame franchises construct their value and how they contribute to the contemporary war imaginary. Mechanics, visual representations, and narratives all go hand in hand to construct the player experience. In fact, representations and narratives are absolutely integral to understanding how these games create expectations about the conduct of war.

Remediating Franchise Wargames: World War II Given the importance of selecting compelling opposition forces, it should not be surprising that three of the four most successful wargaming franchises (Medal of Honor, Battlefield, and Call of Duty) all started with an “honorable” war of necessity, complete with starkly drawn antagonists: World War II.

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Few games remediate World War I or Vietnam, but World War II is dramatically overrepresented, for several reasons. The first is the perceived moral simplicity of the war: players do not need long backstories justifying the conflict or explaining key characters. The Germans or Japanese are immediately read as enemies deserving the violence the player’s avatar will wreak, and the narratives of their evil already have significant cultural traction, which spares developers extensive narrative investment. As a Medal of Honor: Airborne reviewer put it, “There’s not much of a story to Airborne. It’s WWII; Nazis need killing and the world needs saving.”34 A second reason is more environmental: the trenches of World War I and the jungles of Vietnam are poor settings for wargames because they make attribution of violence difficult. Few things are as frustrating in a wargame as being slaughtered by an unseen enemy, especially in the service of an objective that lacks the weight of moral necessity. The many fronts and participants of World War II afford a high level of contextual variation that allows a proliferation of game mechanics rather than limitations. Finally, from the perspective of providing players with unique tools to work with, World War II provides a wide range of war technologies to engage with, offering enough variation to keep players interested and motivated to progress in their missions. Thus, at the birth of modern franchise wargaming, we can already see the presence of significant marketing strategies that open the playing of war to mass civilian consumption: putting players in largely uncontroversial and compelling moral settings to justify the violence asked of them, adopting a setting that enables rather than constrains the proliferation of possible game mechanics and representations, and using war technologies not only to provide a sense of authenticity to the game but also to combat monotony and give incentives for continued player engagement.

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If we look at the history of the development of franchise wargames, we can isolate some of the turning points that instilled these major franchises with particular characteristics that both created distinct niches and set the stage for their later convergence. First on the scene was the Medal of Honor series (MOH), started by the filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1999 after the success of his film Saving Private Ryan. MOH established several important precedents that many subsequent franchise wargames followed. The first was its emphasis on historical “authenticity” as a means of conveying an immersive military experience. Instead of aiming for realism on the level of mechanics—a feat difficult for the technology of the time— MOH used narrative context and period-specific technologies to produce a war experience more in line with Hollywoodstyle storytelling than previous military shooters were. Taking its cues from Valve’s success in Half-Life, MOH focused on creating an affectively compelling and immersive narrative experience, complete with a swelling symphonic score, Dolby Surround Sound, and cutscenes that situated player progress within the broader outlines of World War II history. Early games in the franchise were well received, but the third release, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (Electronic Arts, 2002), broke new and influential ground. Allied Assault featured a highly scripted story channeling play into very specific narrative events. Rather than receiving instructions only from informational screens bracketing missions, Allied Assault players were fed objectives from scenarios internal to the mission narrative. Even the gaming instructions were narrativized: players went through a digital boot camp to learn the controls. This event-driven narrative diverged from those of many previous shooters and even previous MOH titles, which provided an open, unrestricted environment for players to explore and accomplish objectives. While such open-world game design

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maximizes player autonomy and encourages independent exploration of set pieces and experimental playing styles, this hands-off approach makes it difficult to ensure that the player will have the narrative experience the game wishes to communicate. Allied Assault marks the beginning of increasingly controlled campaigns to produce a particular affective experience for the player—a level of narrative immersion that comes at the expense of player autonomy. Allied Assault’s massive success pushed future franchise wargame campaigns away from free-for-all playgrounds (commonly referred to as sandboxes) and toward narrowly channeled game experiences and heavily scripted, affectively shocking narratives. Following on the success of Medal of Honor, the Swedish studio DICE entered the popular wargaming scene with its breakout hit, Battlefield 1942. Also published by Electronic Arts, Battlefield took aim at a less well-developed wargaming niche and focused heavily on multiplayer skirmishes.35 Taking cues from MOH, Battlefield 1942 featured sixteen maps inspired by important World War II battles as well as highfidelity models of weapons and vehicles used by the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, and Japan. The game also leveraged a class-based mode of balancing game play, making players select one of five avatar classes, each with particular strengths and weaknesses. For example, antitank roles gave players the ability to attack vehicles effectively, but not regular infantry, whereas scouts were allowed greater surveillance capacities and were equipped for long-range engagements at the expense of close-quarters capabilities. In contrast with other multiplayer games in which death either meant permanent elimination from the round or was mostly meaningless owing to immediate respawning, Battlefield 1942 navigated between these extremes by introducing a ticketing system balancing players’ deaths with their team’s level of success.

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Each player death costs a team tickets, as does losing control over certain spawn points. When a team runs out of tickets, the game concludes, and the team with tickets remaining wins. These strategies of enforcing avatar functional specialization and making players’ actions affect their teams inspired gameplay oriented more toward cooperation than previous popular wargames had been and discouraged individualistic modes of play, such as “running and gunning.” While its multiplayer orientation, punishment of death, and class-based system make Battlefield more hardcore in orientation than other popular wargaming franchises, reviews of Battlefield 1942 applauded its accessibility, calling it “a pickup-and-play action extravaganza, a comic book version of WWII.”36 Like the Medal of Honor games preceding it, Battlefield stood proudly Janus-faced when it came to the question of realism: the game was simultaneously historically evocative, widely accessible, and fun. In contrast with the early Medal of Honor games, in which play was channeled through distinct narrative molds, Battlefield had a multiplayer focus that left narrative behind to frame the boundaries for experience rather than dictating it. Without an overarching narrative to give it meaning, war technologies, game environments, and other paraphernalia become the primary vector for conveying meaning. The initial weaponry, the uniforms, the tanks, the aircraft, and other vessels both imbue Battlefield with a narrative and structure combat according to individual team strengths and weaknesses. To profit from the popularity of the growing World War II war-fighting genre, Activision created the wildly popular Call of Duty franchise to cut between the two poles established by Medal of Honor and Battlefield. To do so, it lured a significant portion of the development team from Medal of Honor: Allied Assault into its camp and put them to work creating

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what was initially labeled the “MOH Killer.” The new game series adopted the many narrative conceits of Allied Assault and initially featured a similar lone-wolf, super-spy-style game play. Following the established wargaming formula, it once again took World War II as its object, aiming to displace the supremacy of MOH. After a year of development and struggles to establish the game’s identity, developers suggested having the player experience the campaign narrative from multiple national perspectives.37 Activision executives as well as the development team were catalyzed by the idea because it opened up a range of possibilities: allowing the player to adopt an American, British, or Russian perspective for different parts of the campaign would free the team from having to tell a cohesive narrative spanning the whole game (which would make the player into an unrealistic super-soldier) and would open the game to greater success in non-US markets. Developments in artificial intelligence also allowed the team to situate the player among other friendly forces throughout the game, avoiding the super-spy dynamic of previous MOH games. Rather than being someone unique who accomplishes a mission alone, the player becomes merely one soldier among many accomplishing a collective objective. The player’s teammates defend him, shout out tips and instructions, and get mowed down under enemy fire. As its franchise namesake evokes, the player is an ordinary soldier placed in extraordinary circumstances: he is just answering the call of duty. The initial Call of Duty was released in 2003 to rave reviews. Whereas MOH: Allied Assault made strides to convey a potent narrative by channeling possible player actions into scripted narrative events at the expense of player autonomy, COD pushed this tactic to its extreme. Since the game placed the player as a combatant among a team, player actions were further restricted because of the programming limitations of

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the AI. While these limitations made the game operate more “on rails,” so to speak, they also enabled a more affective and immersive war experience because, with other players on his side, the player had the ability to combat large enemy forces, not just the sparse forces of previous MOH games. The game also allowed other nonplayer characters (NPCs) to direct the player and contribute to the narrative in dramatic ways that went well beyond simply conveying tactical information or showing the player where to go. Additional developments, such as allowing players to aim down gun sights for improved accuracy and “shellshock” effects that mimicked the disorientation and hearing loss associated with detonating explosives, added significantly to the immersive experience of the game. Though these three main franchises initially converged on a specific historical setting and period-specific war-fighting tactics, they were also distinct in tone and aesthetic. COD and MOH grounded their franchises in compelling narratives and modest multiplayer experiences, whereas Battlefield openly eschewed narrative in favor of creating a sandbox experience. MOH stuck with the World War II formula the longest, departing from it only after sales of its thirteenth title declined in 2010; COD broke from World War II with its fourth major release, in 2007. Since Battlefield was not as reliant on heroic campaign narratives to influence the player experience, its designers could more readily remediate other historical wars such as Vietnam, as well as imagined future ones, in subsequent franchise installments. From the turn of the millennium till late 2005, many game mechanics evolved, adding nonlethal equipment such as smoke grenades as well as rolling out significant improvements in graphics and multiplayer game modes. As the cost of development increased and game companies began targeting consoles in addition to PC markets, games began including mechanics to make them easier and

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more intuitive to play. Call of Duty 2, for example, took cues from Bungie’s successful Halo franchise and implemented an automatically regenerating health system that incrementally repaired damage after a player avoided enemy fire for a certain period. This feature could be seen as a significant step away from realism, but, as one reviewer put it, “It really is no more contrived than hunting down and hoarding health packs. In the context of Call of Duty 2, we’d go so far as to say that it’s an improvement over the traditional health system, as you never find yourself at a tough spot without enough health or medikits … The focus stays squarely on the fight.”38 Similar techniques found their way into later Battlefield and Medal of Honor games as well. While such a move to automatically regenerating health certainly has social implications in downplaying the effect of war on friendly forces that is in line with military public relations efforts, there are significant reasons for implementing these mechanics in response to pressures internal to the game development process that don’t rely on explicit coordination between the gaming industry and the military. Regenerating health not only makes games more accessible to casual players—“you never find yourself at a tough spot without enough health or medikits”—but this feature emerged from a development process that was becoming increasingly organized, like other software industries, according to hierarchical “content pipelines.” This pipeline usually involves senior lead developers who provide overarching standards, guidelines, and tools that are then implemented by cheaper, fungible, junior-level programmers. AAA games have become so complex that they cannot be produced linearly, so studios aim to work simultaneously on as many levels and set pieces within a level as possible. Since junior-level programmers implement but lack a global view of development, lead designers provide standard-

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ized variables that can be assumed invariant across different levels—such as metrics for health, ammo, and other forms of game equipment against which designers can balance game challenges. Whereas older games often used complex qualitative changes to game mechanics over the course of a game, AAA shooters tend to have fairly invariant mechanics. Rather than producing difficulty through qualitative change, franchise wargames often provide quantitative challenges—merely adding more bad guys or making those bad guys absorb more damage before they die. With these standards and this division of labor, junior-level developers can construct their individual set pieces without needing to have a global understanding of where their set pieces fit into the whole. If a scenario ends up being too easy or hard, they can add or subtract the necessary opposition forces to achieve the desired balance. With a game mechanic such as automatically regenerating health, they can therefore safely assume that players will start their segment with full health and not be stuck without the necessary conditions to complete their mission.39 While such alternative forms of explanation shouldn’t insulate the gaming industry from critiques of the social and cultural effects of their game mechanics, fully recognizing the polyvalent forces that shaped early wargame franchises is important for understanding how the contemporary militaryentertainment complex produces “ideological effects by non-ideological means.”40 Early franchise wargames focused largely on the past, seeking to take the player through the noble experiences of the consummate war of necessity: World War II. The growth of wargaming into a popular phenomenon, however, took place after a shift in perspective from remediating past conflicts to looking forward to the near future of warfare, premediating the new threats of global terrorism. It is to this paradigm shift that we now turn.

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Franchise Wargames, Global Terrorism, and the Revolution in Military Affairs As we explored in the Induction, after 2000 the military underwent a dramatic transformation in both the predicted nature of future wars and the tactics and technologies with which they will be fought. Until the 2006 Defense Quadrennial Review, military planning for future wars assumed conflicts would fall largely within the outlines of the major campaigns of the twentieth century. The US military’s force-planning requirements assumed that force readiness meant being prepared to conduct two major land wars similar in force commitments to Desert Storm that would lead to regime changes in different parts of the world, in addition to fighting multiple proxy wars. But with flailing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, renewed budget scrutiny, and growing interventions in the Global War on Terror, the military changed its tune and fully committed to the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, reorganizing forces to have a smaller footprint, greater flexibility, and better capacity to engage with nontraditional, asymmetric threats. Rather than looking backward to the largescale land wars of the past, the military looked forward to the new challenges of the Global War on Terror, making heavy investments in Special Operations Forces (SOF) as well as sophisticated information technology, not only to coordinate highly flexible and independent units but also to multiply and project force at great distance with minimal risk. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but 2006 also begins a significant shift in the content of franchise wargames that roughly parallels this military transformation away from remediation of past wars to premediating the future. The Battlefield franchise was the first to break from the historical paradigm with Battlefield 2 (mid- to late 2005), which featured modern weapons,

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vehicles, and urban environments and turned the genre toward new geopolitical rivals, pitting the United States and the European Union against China and an emerging power bloc called the Middle Eastern Coalition (MEC) in a global race for control over oil reserves. The initial multiplayer maps focused primarily on Chinese territories and areas in the Middle East, whereas subsequent expansions brought war to the American doorstep, as the Chinese made incursions into Alaska and the MEC invaded the Eastern Seaboard, and US military bases and naval assets were attacked in the Middle East. The first expansion, Battlefield 2: Special Forces, also focused heavily on nontraditional infantry forces: players adopted the perspectives of US Navy SEALs, the Russian Spetsnaz, the British Special Air Service (SAS), and other undefined rebel and insurgent forces. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, a spin-off targeting the console market for the first time, broke from the traditional Battlefield multiplayer formula and added a campaign revolving around a fictional conflict between NATO and China. After prolonged engagements, it is discovered that the conflict has been provoked by a secretive terrorist group in control of three ICBMs aimed at Europe, the United States, and China. Unsurprisingly, the player ends up saving the civilized world and putting an end to the conflict. Rather than adopting the overly restrictive game play of COD games, however, Modern Combat tried to maintain the sandbox character of Battlefield multiplayer game modes, allowing players to operate the wide range of vehicles characteristic of the franchise and take first-person control of different team members in real-time combat. The modern setting of Battlefield 2 brought a healthy jump to sales: a reported one million copies sold in its first month and 2.25 million by July 2006. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat pulled in 1.37 million sales as well, marking a signifi-

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cant improvement for the franchise.41 Despite this initial success, it was not until 2007 that the true power of modern military power and the new American way of war was revealed by another title proclaiming its modernity: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. As Battlefield exploited fears of terrorist groups in control of nuclear weapons to affectively intensify its plot, COD4 pushed these fears to the extreme, creating an epic and adrenaline-pumping narrative in which the lives of millions depend on the player’s success. COD4: Modern Warfare features an odd coalition of Middle Eastern zealots and Russian “ultranationalists,” blending Cold War paranoia with widespread concerns about nuclear proliferation and asymmetric warfare brought about by the War on Terror. Developed amid increasing public discontent with the expanding war in Iraq and repeated failures to turn up the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that were its justification, Modern Warfare makes players experience the effects of WMDs firsthand. (Fig. 2.3) In a shocking scripted sequence, the player’s

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2.3  The aftermath of a nuclear strike in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

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The Ludic Affordances of Special Forces Character Development and Meaningful Camaraderie The use of Special Forces teams instead of traditional forces provides a powerful context for character development throughout a campaign. In early Call of Duty campaigns, seeing teammates cut down by enemy fire doesn’t convey any particular feeling of loss (they will be replaced by another bot, with a new name, eventually), but starting with Call of Duty 4 you

play as part of tight-knit squads. You know names and personalities. The people you play with are awesome and professional, making you feel heroic and purposeful alongside them. In addition to combating evil and eliminating the obstacles between you and your objective, you fight to save your brothers-inarms and they fight for you. On the few occasions when someone in your squad dies, it becomes a powerful narrative moment

W2.1.1 In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the dramatic death of Soap (left) is followed by a violent interrogation by the team leader, Captain Price.

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containing special meaning in the game. Unlike deaths in games based on World War II, these losses rarely pass unnoticed and provide crucial plot points for the development of future narratives. For example, in Battlefield 3 you are required to kill one of your teammates to protect a Russian operative who has crucial information about an impending nuclear attack on Paris. This treasonous act forms the central narrative keystone that explains

why missions unfold as flashbacks told under CIA interrogation. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a series character, “Soap,” is killed following an assassination gone wrong, which leads your teammates to suspect you are a traitor. After you receive a beating from the team leader, additional narratives unfurl that explain your background with the assassination target and inspire your redemption in future missions to make up for Soap’s death. Both these cases—

W2.1.2  Killing a teammate in Battlefield 3 in order to protect Dima, a Russian special operative with information on a nuclear threat. The ends justify the means.

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merely two among many—use tight-knit Special Forces teams as a means to sustain character development and use the death of teammates as highly affective triggers that set up future narrative possibilities.

Underdogs Overcoming Immense Opposition The use of Special Forces inverts the distribution of military power: Western militaries seem like underdogs rather than the largest and best-equipped organizations in the world. Playing as part of small, two- to six-person squads, you are confronted, often, with hundreds of

enemies per game level who will do anything to kill you. This underdog status foregrounds the urgency of finding a resolution to the threat through any means possible at the same time that it makes you feel heroic for overcoming such stark odds. This feature inverts the threat scenario of the Global War on Terror, as there are far more numerous military forces than nontraditional insurgents. While the effect of this narrative construction inflates the threat posed by terrorist groups worldwide, it also provides a consistent channel for the management of positive and negative affect. Being part of a team of fifty sent to search for and engage ten

W2.1.3  A navy SEAL team of two is vastly outnumbered by Chechen Taliban enemies in Medal of Honor.

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possible insurgents just is not sufficiently stimulating or fun to keep players on the edge of their seats in anticipation. In addition to not providing the player with enough resistance to make the challenges worthy of sustained engagement, such a scenario would also open the player to critical perspectives on military power that wargame franchises are hesitant to engage lest they call their own premises into question. A small group fighting against overwhelming odds, on the other hand, produces the fast pace, challenge, and positive affective feedback that has produced repeated market success. In this case, developers sacrifice authenticity for the production of adrenaline-pumping challenges that detail your heroism in the face of overwhelming resistance. In reality, US forces regularly outnumber the insurgent forces they are engaging. For example, the famous raid by SEAL Team Six on the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consisted of twentythree highly trained SEALs, a translator, and a dog, and far more waiting in reserve. Intelligence put the occupancy of the compound at “four adult males, five or six adult women, and nearly 20 children,” the majority of whom posed no threat.1 125

Accounting for support forces, seventy-nine well-drilled commandos were involved in a raid targeting four men.2 In the videogame paradigm, these numbers are inverted: four US soldiers are pitted against hundreds of enemies.

Creating the Realistic Super-Soldier The use of Special Forces units also allows developers to reinscribe the “super-soldier” trope within an “authentic” game experience. The super-soldier is a proven vector for the production of positive affects, making gamers feel that they are awesome, special, and uniquely able to accomplish certain objectives. Special Forces are “special” precisely because they are highly trained and far more capable than the foes they are pitted against. From an authenticity standpoint, Special Forces are allowed to customize their appearance and tactical gear, whereas traditional forces are not. The use of SOF therefore opens up far greater representational possibilities for game characters with distinct personalities and appearances;

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it also justifies the use of nonstandard weapons and attachments, such as silenced sniper rifles and automatic weapons with thermal or otherwise high-tech scopes. The standardized appearance, behavior, and tactics of traditional forces are boring, undifferentiated, and uninspiring in comparison. At the level of narrative, the use of Special Forces also gives operators on the ground far greater leeway to determine objectives on the fly in a flexible manner rather than being strictly subordinate to the military chain of command. Whereas the chain of command makes it clear that you as a player are just a pawn moved around by

larger forces, many post–Modern Warfare campaigns produce the illusion of greater autonomy by having game objectives increasingly dictated by teammates on the ground rather than by the disembodied voice of a superior over your radio. Though subsequent games still feature radio contact, many of the most successful wargames pit the local decisionmaking power of Special Forces units against the lumbering bureaucracy of military hierarchy, giving players a greater sense of agency in the conduct of missions. Of course, for the majority of campaigns these orders and instructions are merely displaced

W2.1.4  Weapon customization in Call of Duty: Ghosts allows greater avatar identification and investment.

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from an off-site authority to a leader in your group, so this illusion, if effective at all, is yet another aesthetic tool for the production of immersive and affective game experiences rather than a celebration of player autonomy.

1

Mark Bowden, “The Hunt For ‘Geronimo,’” Vanity Fair, November 2012, http:// www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/ 2012/11/inside-osama-bin-ladenassassination-plot. 2 Steven Lee Myers and Elisabeth Bumiller, “Obama Calls World ‘Safer’ after Pakistan Raid,” New York Times, May 2, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/ world/asia/osama-bin-laden-dead.html.

W2.1.5  Captain Price guides you on a Special Forces raid in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Instead of requiring agency or problem-solving skills, Price tells you exactly what to do. Doing otherwise breaks your cover and leads to difficulties.

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character dies a traumatic and drawn-out death along with 30,000 other Marines and countless civilians in a Middle Eastern country when a radical leader nukes his own city to repel a US invasion. The campaign concludes with an intense firefight in a Russian nuclear facility taken over by extremists in order to self-destruct ballistic missiles already en route to the East Coast of the United States. In addition to leveraging discourse about terrorism and nuclear proliferation to produce a sustained adrenaline rush, Modern Warfare shows the start of a trend that, in RMA fashion, prefers embedding the player in Special Forces units rather than in standard infantry or armored forces. In contrast with the lone-wolf, super-spy narratives of MOH and the “ordinary” soldier narratives of previous COD games, Modern Warfare situates the player as a super-soldier within a team of super-soldiers. Campaign missions are split between a member of the Marine Special Forces (who dies in combat) and members of an elite British SAS commando squad that performs clandestine raids across the Middle East and Russia. Modern weaponry augmented with specialized silencers, scopes, and other accessories, as well as modern drones and other forms of networked air support, give these flexible squads the edge they need to dispatch far more numerous enemy forces. In addition to resituating the franchise shooter campaign to modern Special Forces units and exploiting the fears of the Global War on Terror, Modern Warfare revolutionized the multiplayer experience to include a leveling system that traded players’ investment in the game for increased avatar customization. Previously, most multiplayer wargames provided standardized roles from which players could choose. While Modern Warfare maintained five standard classes for inexperienced players, one of its most profitable mechanics was a leveling

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system that gradually unlocked weapons and perks as players gained experience points, in effect making the game-play experience itself highly commodified. This incentive structure kept customers playing to slowly unlock gear that made them more effective killers. The changes introduced by Modern Warfare were dramatic and revolutionary for subsequent wargames. Collectively, the first three COD games sold approximately 5.5 million copies, whereas Modern Warfare leaped forward and sold 13.5 million alone. COD returned to a World War II scenario the following year with World at War and saw its sales drop by 2.5 million, an indication that the modern warfare context provided something important for wargaming audiences that a historical treatment lacked. Integrating customization into the multiplayer leveling system also placed the tools and technologies of the RMA into focus as an important way to give players incentives and secure their loyalty. Cool guns outfitted with an array of scopes and silencers, each imbued with distinctive characteristics, undoubtedly contributed to a growing sense that success in warfare is a matter for high technology to decide. Stepping off from Modern Warfare’s successes, two sequels continued the narrative to record sales. Modern Warfare 2 (2009; 24.76 million sales) and 3 (2011; 30.4 million sales) moved increasingly toward clandestine special operations with the creation of Task Force 141, an elite multinational counterterrorist unit. In Modern Warfare, the Western world is no longer buffered from the carnage of war, as the player fights his way through a Russian-occupied White House, survives nuclear explosions in Washington, DC, and poison gas attacks in Europe, and fights to retake the heart of Paris as the Eiffel Tower comes plummeting down. (Figs. 2.4, 2.5) There is no safe harbor in the modern warfare of Call of Duty. As anxiety

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2.4  The Russian occupation of the White House following a sneak invasion in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. 2.5  The Eiffel Tower epically crashes to the ground in Modern Warfare 3.

propels the player to answer this heroic calling, he is taught which strategies and tools bring the most success: equipped with the right guns and grenades, he can save what is left of the civilized world. In the meantime, the Battlefield series gradually embraced the narrative conceits so popular in Modern Warfare, such as slick modern weaponry and semi-autonomous, small-group tactics, in subsequent games like Bad Company (2008; 2.76 million sales) and Bad Company 2 (2010; 7.06 million sales). Battlefield 3 (Electronic Arts, 2011; 17.07 million sales) returned to

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the more traditional RMA scenarios and tactics established by the Modern Warfare series, exploiting fears of nuclear terrorism as well as showcasing the power of new war-fighting technologies that enabled tracking and targeting of enemy combatants. Like those of many modern franchise wargames, Battlefield 3’s narrative pits the rigidity of military bureaucracy against the time-sensitive pressures of the War on Terror. The player’s character is part of a small US Marine Special Forces unit tasked with “finding, fixing, and finishing” an Iranian insurgent group that has acquired Russian “suitcase” nukes. To recover these nukes, the player must protect a Russian commando who has information about their whereabouts by killing an innocent teammate. After Paris is annihilated in a first nuclear attack, the player is imprisoned by bureaucrats who don’t believe that New York is next. The player ultimately breaks out of custody and heroically stops the terrorists en route to Times Square. (Fig. 2.6) Acting out of necessity rather than according to the dictates of military bureaucracy ultimately saves millions of lives.

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2.6  Racing after terrorists in possession of a suitcase nuke in Times Square in Battlefield 3.

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2.7  The RMA aesthetic in Battlefield 3.

In addition to featuring a multiplayer leveling and customization system that is similar to that in the Modern Warfare series, Battlefield 3 also foregrounds an aesthetic that thoroughly evokes the RMA. (Fig. 2.7) Loading screens trace the outlines of soldiers and equipment in glowing neon networks; objectives and other information appear throughout the game on the heads-up display (HUD), differentiating teammates and targets within the game environment and providing other useful directions. When the player hovers his sights over enemy combatants, their positions are tagged and tracked, which allows the player to use cover effectively while still keeping track of his enemy’s location. Later games in the MOH franchise also attempt to exploit the new American way of war, first in a historical context and later in the near future. The 2010 franchise reboot, Medal of Honor (Electronic Arts, 2010; 5.82 million sales), was loosely based in Operation Anaconda, one of the first operations in Afghanistan to use large numbers of

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Franchise Game Business Models Content: Just Enough, but Not Too Much Franchise wargames provide just enough content to keep players engaged, but not so much that they aren’t ready to move on by the time of the next annual release. Wargame publishers have a proven formula for achieving these results. Single-player campaigns are generally designed to last six to ten hours; there is possible replay value at different difficulty settings. With few exceptions, however, these campaigns are linear, not significantly influenced by player actions, which limits replay to a form of repetition. Multiplayer games, on the other hand, sustain more significant time investment because they are played against other people rather than against preprogrammed software. Unlike the computer, people are unpredictable, offering an almost infinite content for multiplayer games. Though campaigns often provide important narrative 133

frames for the multiplayer experience, many critics speculate that future wargames may forgo campaigns and resurrect the early Battlefield model of the multiplayer sandbox. There are limits to even the multiplayer experience, however: playing the same eight to ten maps for an entire year between new releases gets old in a matter of months. To provide enough material to keep players interested, publishers release downloadable content (DLC) that players can purchase to access additional multiplayer content. Not only does this avenue form a supplemental source of income for publishers; it also extends the life of the game and its value for players. Just when the game begins feeling old, new DLC appears to breathe new life into the community. A season of DLC usually costs players the equivalent of the original game purchase, but the content is released in smaller, distributed segments: an initial investment of $60 for the game versus four

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DLCs at $15 each. If you fail to pay for this extended content, the number of games available to play drops as you are excluded from groups using this new content. Facing a diminished game experience, you upgrade, sustaining play for a few more months, and the cycle repeats. When the next major release is ready for stores, the life cycle of the game comes to a natural end simply by the halt of further DLC releases, which prompts players to move on to the next release.

Multiplying the Grind The most successful franchise wargames provide so many incentive structures that they are nearly impossible to exhaust. Such incentives occur most significantly in multiplayer modes and involve the construction of role-playing game (RPG)–style leveling systems that require little by way of programming investment but produce significant time expenditures for players. For example, rather than having a single leveling system that gives you access to guns and perks in exchange for experience

W2.2.1  Activision aggressively markets upgrades to its latest franchise installment.

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points (XP), games have started integrating micro-challenges and leveling systems that are more local in character. A global leveling system might give you access to a certain gun, but that gun will offer no customizations or upgrades until you achieve a certain number of kills with it. Each weapon in the game therefore might have its own leveling system, giving you access to customizable attachments, such as silencers, different scopes, or larger ammo magazines. All these different paths for leveling extend completion time for the game significantly.

Some games, such as the Black Ops series, explicitly commodify this process by having one leveling track determined by money you earn during the game for winning, making headshots, or completing other challenges, as well as more general XP. You can then use money to purchase weapons for your character, whereas the more traditional XP increase your overall rank. Call of Duty: Ghosts extends these systems with the introduction of multiplayer squad mode, wherein players construct squads of computer-controlled characters that

W2.2.2  Call of Duty: Ghosts offers countless multiplayer leveling opportunities to keep players from exhausting game content too quickly.

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can be leveled up on their own. Progressing through these layered leveling systems—pejoratively termed “grinding” by players who view such game design as lazy—is time-consuming, repetitive, and driven by the motivation of attaining something greater if you can just get to the next level.

Affective Management The most successful franchise wargames generally trace a fine line between supporting player autonomy and limiting the game

experience to evoke the kind of affective engagement conducive to future sales. Franchise wargames generally provide few avenues for players to engage with their games subversively. Though the Battlefield series released official modding software for its early releases through Battlefield 2, its developer moved away from such policies afterward, citing the growing complexity of its game engine and the difficulties it would place on modders as reasons. This growth in complexity, however, also coincides with increasing development

W2.2.3  A building in Battlefield 3 epically collapses after an earthquake in Iraq, setting the stage for an insurgent takeover of the area.

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costs and the maturation of the Battlefield brand into a successful franchise. With millions of sales at stake, publishers must protect affective associations with their brand: if players don’t know what to expect from a franchise, their future loyalty isn’t assured. Allowing communities to change the gaming experience through mods reduces publisher control over the production of affect, which could translate into future losses. For this reason, none of the major wargame franchises allows modding at this time. Franchise wargames have

also gone to great lengths to manage player affect through positive and negative feedback.1 This is most apparent in single-player campaigns that are peppered with scripted events designed to shock players and produce a strong adrenaline response. Campaigns regularly feature moments when you are about to be pulled into an abyss, only to be saved at the last moment by a teammate, or when you are nearly crushed by falling buildings or incoming tanks. Multiplayer games provide a steady stream of positive affective feedback to reward player actions,

W2.2.4  If you deviate from the expected path in popular wargames, you are usually warned to return or die. This allows developers to ensure you receive the affective experience they intend and narrows development efforts and asset creation to strictly defined areas.

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as shiny special effects commemReconstruction: orate advancement to a new level, or money explodes as the result How much is too much? of gaining headshots. Wargames 1

use these scripted events and forms of feedback to excite and motivate players to continue playing, all the while inspiring them to turn a blind eye to the forms of virtual violence they are enacting on the screen. In so doing, franchise wargames secure the affective terrain that inspires the repeat consumption of virtual warfare that is a source of continual financial returns.

James Ash, “Attention, Videogames and the Retentional Economies of Affective Amplification,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 6 (2012): 3–26; James Ash, “Technologies of Captivation: Videogames and the Attunement of Affect,” Body & Society 19, no. 1 (2013): 27–51.

Tactile variables matched to Tactilein map variables matched W2.2.5 map Players are rewarded fororiginal getting a “Rampage” Modern Warfare 3 to original sevenan graphic variables. After Vasconcellos seven graphic variables. After Vasconcellos with explosion of cash.

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conventional US forces rather than SOF. Players split their time between acting as operatives of SEAL Team Six, conducting successful stealth raids, and being part of traditional forces that are routinely ambushed by overwhelming insurgent forces. (Fig. 2.8) In the game large-scale maneuvers routinely fail, producing heavy casualties, and commando tactics triumph. The game’s sequel, Medal of Honor: Warfighter (Electronic Arts, 2012; 2.76 million sales) follows the same group of SEALs out of a declared warzone and into the Global War on Terror. Now operating under the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the player carries out sabotage operations, performs hostage rescue missions, conducts night raids, and repeatedly operates in conjunction with foreign special forces units in areas as diverse as Pakistan, the Philippines, Bosnia, and Somalia. Largely autonomous from the lumbering military bureaucracy, lean and flexible forces are able to take down a powerful terrorist network by becoming a network themselves. (Fig. 2.9)

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2.8  US Navy SEALs conduct night raids on stealth ATVs in Medal of Honor.

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2.9 In Medal of Honor: Warfighter, US Navy SEALs rescue the hostage Captain Phillips from Somali pirates in a mission directly drawn from contemporary events.

Like their World War II predecessors, these rebranded MOH games repeatedly emphasize their “authenticity.” The franchise evolved from World War II to the War on Terror by glorifying elite Special Forces units. Much is made of so-called Tier 1 Operatives: members of units like Navy SEAL Team Six and the army’s DELTA Force. MOH 2010 paid actual Tier 1 Operatives to consult on the project to lend narrative credibility, but Warfighter went even deeper in its pursuit of authenticity. As its website touts, the story was “written by active U.S. Tier 1 Operators while deployed overseas and [was] inspired by real world threats”; it promised to connect “gameplay missions with a dotted line to real world incursions.”42 Pursuit of such authenticity, however, proved problematic for the seven navy SEALs involved, who received formal letters of reprimand from superiors and were fined a month’s pay for revealing classified information and violating “the unwritten code that SEALs are silent warriors who shun the spotlight.”43 Caught between a military

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culture reliant on secrecy, discipline, and sacrifice, and media dedicated to the production of celebrity, these SEALs exemplify the uneasy balance between the actual military and its circulation as entertainment. Warfighter’s search for authenticity also crossed into troubling territory with merchandising strategies connecting players to real weapons manufacturers. Since wargaming’s popularization circa 2006, in-game weapons increasingly feature branding by actual manufacturers rather than generic model numbers or fictional names. A .50-caliber sniper rifle has become a Barrett M82, an assault rifle a TAR-21 made by Israel Weapon Industries. While such name changes heighten a sense of realism, they also open games to legal action under trademark law. Real weapons manufacturers now license the representation and brand of their weapons to game companies in exchange for fees, revenue sharing, or simply promotion and endorsement. Such licensing agreements also give manufacturers some control over how their guns are represented. Barrett Firearms, for example, disallows the use of their weapons by “enemies of the United States or its citizens,” and requires that 3-D models of their rifles perform to real-world standards.44 Such licensing agreements have been increasingly enforced in AAA wargames since 2006, but Warfighter took this branding to a new extreme: the game maker, controversially, provided links on a blog where players could purchase real-life version of weapons used in the game.45  (Fig. 2.10) Despite repeated use of focus groups and polls that placed military authenticity high in consumer desires, what the Medal of Honor reboot really showed was precisely the opposite. After Warfighter produced significantly underwhelming sales, Electronic Arts shuttered the series in early 2013, issuing a press release that admitted, “Medal of Honor was an obvious miss. The game was solid, but the focus on combat

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2.10  Medal of Honor: Warfighter allows players to customize weaponry using brandname weapons, scopes, silencers, and other modifications widely available for purchase on the Internet. This Heckler & Koch 416 has a total of ninetyfour parts that can be unlocked, such as the Aimpoint Micro T-1 weapon sight.

authenticity did not resonate with consumers.”46 Despite extensive commodification of the gaming experience with state-ofthe-art, realistic weaponry, critics complained the war it represented just didn’t seem modern. As one reviewer put it, “There’s nothing modern about this warfare, with no options for special magic glasses that highlight enemy locations.”47 The whiz-bang gadgetry that players have come to expect from “modern” wargames like COD and Battlefield has left the quest for full authenticity in the dust in favor of thin plausibility, more fun than accurate. In comparison with Medal of Honor’s consulting with dozens of elite advisers, Battlefield 4 reportedly didn’t employ any military experts, instead inviting a local hobbyist who collects military uniforms to play “dress-up.” According to DICE’s founder, Patrick Bach, “If it looks cool it goes into the game.” If additional research is necessary, YouTube is sufficient for their purposes.48 This shift from authenticity to plausibility is perhaps the most important aesthetic contribution of modern wargaming

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to the military-entertainment complex. More accurately, the move from authenticity to plausibility is so affectively compelling that expectations about reality are inevitably reframed. In selling an entertainment experience, a game maker presents war in a highly condensed and distilled form—whatever real world it mirrors not only has had all its boring parts removed, but also is expanded in such extreme ways that reality itself becomes much less interesting. This “reality effect” becomes most evident in games that heavily feature not just tactics and scenarios drawn from the new American way of war and imagined threat scenarios of the Global War on Terror but also high-tech weapons systems, gadgets, and other glamorized futuristic means of warfare. As Peter Singer, an expert on the future of war and a consultant for COD: Black Ops II, describes, these games don’t just mirror the future of warfare but also help produce it: “There is no one definitive future. There are a multitude, an infinity of potential futures that might happen … [and] science fiction creates the expectations that shape that world … These games are incredibly popular, particularly among young teens, but also those already serving in the military. This isn’t a predictor of the future, but one of the things that will help shape people’s expectations about what kind of technology might be available and ‘might be’ quickly becomes ‘should be.’”49 Through the suturing of affectively compelling scenarios to the high technology of the RMA, wargame players are given incentive to view technological warfare solutions as the necessary grounding for future wars.

Wargaming Technologies One franchise that has been influential in its compelling representation of RMA weapons is the Tom Clancy game se-

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2.11 Thermal imaging combined with smoke grenades conveys a distinct advantage to high-tech counterterrorism forces in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2.

ries, initially developed by Red Star Entertainment and now, as noted earlier, owned by Ubisoft. While the Tom Clancy (52.08 million sales) games did not follow the same trajectory as the franchises previously discussed, the Clancy franchise has always foregrounded the technologies of the RMA and the threats posed by global terrorism. In hit series such as Rainbow Six (14.69 million sales) and Ghost Recon (16.28 million sales), special operatives use high-tech tools to counter wide-ranging terrorist plots. Rainbow Six features an elite counterterrorism task force pitted against highly organized and well-financed terrorist masterminds intent on inflicting mass civilian casualties. Rainbow Six fits firmly within the sphere of the RMA in its implementation of advanced imaging technologies as core game mechanics. Players can easily switch among multiple visualization modes, including night, thermal, and sonar vision, to create advantages in different situations such as viewing enemies through darkness, smoke, or walls. (Fig. 2. 11)

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The Ghost Recon series displays an even greater affinity with the RMA within the context of fighting terrorism. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Ubisoft, 2006; 1.9 million sales) was one of the earliest tactical wargames to feature the technologies of the Future Combat Systems (FCS) and Objective Force Warrior (OFW) programs under military development. The player is placed in charge of “Ghost Recon,” a top-secret group of US Army DELTA Force operatives who specialize in accomplishing controversial missions unseen. Missions unfold throughout Mexico City, foreshadowing the urban settings envisioned by US military strategists. Ubisoft’s summary of the game echoes the spirit of network-centric warfare in future US Special Forces operations, fully decked-out with the technologies of the FCS: “In 2013, the U.S. Army will implement the Integrated Warfighter System (IWS), evolving what we know as the modern soldier. IWS combines advanced weapon systems, satellite communication devices and enhanced survivability into one fully integrated combat system … Using a fully integrated combat system with cutting-edge weapons and revolutionary communication systems … , gamers will embody the soldier of the future. Based on actual U.S. Army research, the Ghosts give gamers a realistic view of how war will be fought in the next decade.”50 To achieve this network-centric style of play, Ghost Recon created a communication device called the Cross-Com, which allowed players to receive visual and auditory feeds from drones and other players, projected onto the soldier’s visor.51 The increase in situational awareness these RMA tools afford allows more effective command of the player’s squad and brings domination to the battlefield. Later additions to the Ghost Recon franchise such as Future Soldier push this technophilia even further, with the inclusion of large “Imperial Walker”–style land drones, sensor grenades that can automatically

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2.12 In Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, magnetic vision and sensor grenades allow X-ray vision and tagging and tracking of enemy forces.

tag and track enemies (and differentiate them from civilians), quadcopter surveillance drones, and invisibility suits, to name a few. (Fig. 2.12) Though the Clancy games have achieved a high level of success in comparison to other tactical shooters and, because of the diversity and size of the franchise, have outsold both Battlefield and Medal of Honor, they have also not achieved sales numbers that rival the viral popularity of the latest Battlefield and COD titles. The importance of the Tom Clancy franchise for popular wargaming, however, is in its framing of high technology as a core game mechanic to provide a reprieve from the monotony of what franchise wargames have become. Call of Duty in particular has increasingly relied on high technology and futuristic scenarios to great effect in its last four titles, Black Ops II (2012), Ghosts (2013), Advanced Warfare (2014), and Black Ops III (2015). Black Ops II (28.14 million sales) presents a stark contrast between pre- and post-RMA warfare: in the 1980s the player rides on horseback with the

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mujahedeen in Afghanistan, blowing up tanks with rocket-propelled grenades and combing the desert with AK-47s; in 2025, the player operates high-tech drones, deploys gun scopes that offer X-ray vision, and commandeers enemy robots with a few taps on a combat smartphone. These futuristic weapons and the new capabilities they provide, such as seeing through walls, becoming invisible, or turning enemies’ equipment against them, create new styles of play, injecting new life into a formulaic series. Advanced Warfare has also garnered critical acclaim with the introduction of a combat exoskeleton that opens up a range of additional game mechanics and incentives for players to attain higher levels and customize their avatars’ strengths for their particular styles of play. The high technology of the RMA provides a key vector for the proliferation of game mechanics and allows players to enter a highly modularized customization process through which investment is made in avatars that mirror their players’ desires. (Fig. 2.13)

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2.13 Special operatives ride horses in Afghanistan in the 1980s, whereas forces of the future in Call of Duty: Black Ops II use sophisticated Wingsuits to deploy to enemy territory.

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The RMA in Contemporary Wargaming New Enemies In the modern age, when war between peer nations is uncommon and expensive, epic wars are generally portrayed as the result of a less powerful third party’s instigating the conflict rather than legitimate struggles between states. For example, in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 the United States and Russia go to war because a Russian terrorist group frames the United States for its attack against

thousands of civilians in a Russian airport. In Call of Duty: Black Ops II terrorists place the United States and China on the path to warfare by launching a cyberattack falsely attributed to the United States that crashes Chinese financial markets. Insurgent groups are often portrayed as extensive, highly trained forces on a par with the militaries of major nation-states. Why do terrorist groups have hundreds if not thousands of men ready to attack your Special Forces

W2.3.1  In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, terrorists led by the Russian Vladimir Makarov execute civilians at a Russian airport.

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units? Some games like Black Ops II answer this question by providing insurgent groups with mercenary forces, raising the further question of where these groups get funding to hire such extensive forces willing to fight to the death for causes to which they are indifferent.

New Technologies Narrative scenarios in themselves are not enough to make a game a worthwhile investment. In fact, wargame scenarios are generally formulaic and can be swapped from one game to another with only a few cosmetic changes. A war scene against the Russian army can easily be turned into a terrorist invasion or a battle between mercenaries without much difficulty if the narrative requires. For this reason most wargames allow players to skip through cutscenes: narrative is secondary at best. In contrast with the generic and transposable nature of wargame narratives, war technologies give games character and style; they also provide players means for overcoming the many obstacles introduced by developers. Limiting Tactile map variables matched to original the or perks available to sevenweapons graphic variables. After Vasconcellos 149

players early on in a game not only gives them something to shoot for but also allows their style of play to evolve as they access different capabilities. Though wargame narratives recycle plots with surprising regularity, repeating technologies is a sure path to criticism. If a company simply transposes the same mechanics and technologies into new narrative scenarios, fans ridicule the subsequent product as less than a full game—as a mere map extension of its predecessor. Such criticisms, for example, were leveled at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 when players noted few obvious developments in game mechanics, guns and perks, and the game engine itself.1 By integrating cool new gadgets, guns, and other tools in serial releases, a franchise pushes its audience to learn new styles of play. Technologies keep franchises fresh for their expectant consumers. They are literally game changers.

New Weapons and Force Multipliers The RMA discourse, arguing for the centrality of sophisticated war Tactile map variables matched to original technology to the modern miliseven graphic variables. After Vasconcellos

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tary, has become a central component of the wargaming experience. Such technologies are certainly on display throughout single-player campaigns, but their importance is even more evident in multiplay-

er games modes. Following the success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, many game franchises implemented leveling systems that trade player skill and time investment for increasingly

W2.3.2  High-tech weapons like Odin (top) and new forms of support equipment like the combat exoskeleton (bottom) make wargames seem new because they generate new mechanics and forms of play.

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sophisticated military technology. Beginners initially have access to standardized weapon loadouts (predetermined classes that cannot be customized) and gradually gain access to higher-powered weapons and other equipment as rewards for gaining experience points. Access to these customizable perks gives incentives for players to keep investing in the game and forces them to develop skills with lower-powered weapons before receiving more significant performance enhancements. For example, when you reach the rank of “Captain II” (level 50) in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer mode, you

unlock the ACR 6.8—a powerful assault rifle. When it is first unlocked, however, no scopes or other attachments are available to improve aim or reduce the gun’s powerful recoil. After gaining a certain number of kills with this new weapon, you level up and can attach a “red dot” sight that improves accuracy. When you gain enough kills with the gun to reach weapon level 14, you can attach a high-tech heartbeat sensor. Each weapon has a similar customization process tied to your use and success with it. In addition to weapons, you unlock “perks” and “kill-streak” rewards that give you special abil-

W2.3.3  Weapon leveling challenges for the ACR 6.8 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

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ities. Perks can make your avatar immune to certain forms of detection or make it move faster, and kill-streak rewards are preselected prizes that you earn by killing a certain number of enemies without dying yourself. Kill-streaks reward your success by giving you access to RMA technology such as robotic sentry guns, predator drone strikes, and support helicopter gunships that act as force multipliers. Nearly all these high-tech customized incentives are products of the RMA worldview. In modern franchise wargames, technology is always the greatest path to success.

1

Keith Stuart, “Modern Warfare 3 Reviews: Why Is This the Most Hated Game on the Web?” Guardian, November 10, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/ technology/gamesblog/2011/nov/10/ modern-warfare-3-internet-hatred.

W2.3.4  The AGR kill-streak reward in Call of Duty: Black Ops II gives you an automated ground robot that protects you and gives you additional kills in exchange for gaining 1,000 points without dying.

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Fragging Wargame Narratives As war techniques and technologies have become focal points for the production of game mechanics, and rogue, asymmetrical threats have provided post-2006 wargames with narrative contexts that evoke the difficulties of the Global War on Terror, these game narratives, unpinned from historical referents, have become increasingly bizarre, disjointed, and ambiguous when taken as a whole. The term fragging was coined during the Vietnam war and described circumstances where soldiers attempted to murder their compatriots with fragmentation grenades, often trying to mask these acts as accidents of war. We might say that the wargame narrative has fallen victim to a similar process: where it once fought alongside gaming actions to present a holistic game experience, it has now been blown to bits, distributed and fragmented to a point where it is difficult to analyze its value to the work as a whole. This is not to wax nostalgic for clear narrative with ideological importance but, rather, is a signal of changing emphasis in the gaming industry in typical post-cinematic form. As films like Transformers use narrative to move viewers from one spectacular special effects sequence to another, so games like Call of Duty string together highly scripted affective fragments to produce an adrenaline rush that forms the primary outcome of the game. As one reviewer for COD: Advanced Warfare put it, the game narrative “is all over the place”: “an adrenaline drive, a leaveyour-brain-behind game that, while never giving you time to consider the consequences of your actions, leaves you feeling full, if not rather exhausted”—a statement that could easily apply to any post-2006 franchise wargame.52 The affective excesses and narrative difficulties of these games disrupt the idea that their primary effect is the communication of a mili-

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2.14 In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Captain Price launches a nuclear weapon at Washington, DC, after breaking aboard a Russian submarine, causing an EMP blast that results in rolling blackouts and destroys the International Space Station.

taristic narrative. Instead of making narrative arguments, these games encourage players to adopt their RMA assumptions—assumptions that are codified into the computational procedures that structure game mechanics as well as systems of incentive and reward—through the production and modulation of affective experience.53 Following the success of COD: Modern Warfare, game narratives have become felt more than they are thought. Narratives are designed not out of fidelity to the real or to articulate some kind of militaristic ideology, but, rather, as mere tools to open up diverse mechanics, terrains, and frontiers for future levels. For example, following the Russian invasion of the Eastern Seaboard in COD: Modern Warfare 2, Washington, DC, is about to be overrun. A commando named Price—a man on the player’s team—attempts to remedy the situation by breaking into a Russian nuclear sub to launch a nuclear weapon at Washington, DC, detonating it in the atmosphere to produce a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that somehow allows the

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United States to gain the upper hand. (Fig. 2.14) Why slip something so bizarre into a plot aiming for plausibility? Because it opens up subsequent levels where as the player becomes a marine on the ground in Washington, DC, without any electronic devices such as weapon scopes to help him. Further, it justifies the inclusion of various EMP-based weapon systems in the multiplayer portion of the game. Ultimately, it is a cool and dramatic moment in the campaign that influences subsequent plot developments. In the rush to combat the next wave of bad guys, such incongruous details are the last thing on the player’s mind. Many franchise wargame narratives illogically lead players through similar affective shifts and bombshell twists from one piece to another. With their breakneck pace, these games rarely give a player a chance to catch his breath, look back, and take stock of the narrative as a whole. As post-cinematic constructions, these narratives are designed to make the player remember a few strategic, epic moments and forget that these fragments don’t add up to anything resembling a whole. These narratives are also constructed with maximal ambiguity about their ideological character in an effort to court both those in favor of and those condemning military power. In addition to pillorying military bureaucracy and red tape, many games seem to present significant negative statements about the roles of technology in warfare even as they fetishize it. While Black Ops II celebrates the use of drones by at times giving the player a robotic bodyguard that machine-guns his enemies, the central narrative also involves the wholesale hijacking of the US drone fleet by a terrorist group, which then turns the weapons against Los Angeles. (Fig. 2.15) COD: Ghosts presents a similar unease with military technology by having a coalition of Latin American countries take over a futuristic space weapon from the United States and use it to decimate this country as we know it. These fragmented and ambiguous narratives reveal

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2.15  A machine gun–equipped quadcopter drone in Call of Duty: Black Ops II helps you take back Los Angeles from the hijacked US drone fleet and a coordinated mercenary ground invasion.

how far the military-entertainment complex has come from the centralized ideologies of military public relations and propaganda. If it were driven by an ideological message, the powers in charge of the message would presumably make sure it wasn’t an ambiguous one. These games are meant not to make players reflect but, rather, to anticipate and feel: specifically, feel excited and heroic, looking not where he has been but to the next objective his twitching thumbs will have to conquer. What remains consistent through these ambiguous plots is that the new American way of war is the only way to fight wars, now and in the future. Special Forces organized and supported by advanced information technologies and intelligent machines are the tools used to win wars. We have detailed here some of the many reasons these tropes offer powerful answers to problems of game design, game production, and other unique pressures facing franchise wargames. Rather than being a patriotic mouthpiece for military public relations, the gaming industry co-opts and transforms military

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discourse to meet its own needs. Patriotic sympathies are always subordinate to the growth curve, and the RMA, terrorism, and even World War II are merely successful tools in the game developer’s tool chest. This lack of explicit ideological collaboration, however, does not prevent these games from playing a significant role in producing a collective imaginary about the proper conduct of present war and appropriate preparations for future conflict. Judging on the basis of their dramatic market successes—particularly that of the Call of Duty franchise—their reframing of the realities of war have been significant; we predict they will continue.

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CHAPTER 3

Coming to a Screen Near You: The RMA and Affective Entertainment –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

If there is an area in which close cooperation verging on collusion between the military and the media seems most readily apparent, it would undoubtedly be in film or television. Filmmakers and the Pentagon have long enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship that revolves around access to goods, services, and resources tightly controlled by the military.

COMING TO A SCREEN NEAR YOU

Filmmakers require access to costly military equipment, consultants, and wartime footage, and the military seeks to control and shape its public image through the influential vehicle of popular culture. Since its establishment immediately after World War II, the Pentagon’s Hollywood Liaison Office has directly influenced the depiction of the US military in film and TV by trading access to military assets in exchange for positive and accurate representation. Placed in the position of gatekeeper for materials either impossible or too expensive to acquire otherwise, the Pentagon has routinely forced changes to film scripts and representations to an extent that Jonathan Hurley has argued that it amounts to censorship of unflattering content and active propagandizing of the American population.1 Roger Stahl and Robin Andersen have also noted that the linkage of entertainment industries to military propaganda has been constant and pervasive since early twentieth-century mass media in the United States.2 From the First Persian Gulf War in 1991 through the invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, a new and more insidious phase of “militainment” has emerged. Stahl defines militainment as “state violence translated into an object of pleasurable consumption. Moreover, state violence not of the abstract, distant, or historical variety but rather an impending or current use of force directly relevant to the citizen’s current political life.”3 Extending the arguments of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, Stahl and Andersen argue that, after the media debacle of the Vietnam War, a key concern of the Pentagon, State Department, and successive administrations up through the Bush administrations was to manufacture consent for US military policies by managing public opinion and to curtail the voices of liberal democratic elements by removing the citizen from a deliberative role in state decisions, especially regarding use of the military.

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Elimination of the draft and the move to an all-volunteer army were important steps in this program of removing the citizen from engaged discussion and decision making in questions of war. Equally important to this program was enrolling the media in service of military interests. The Pentagon’s experience with television media in Vietnam proved convincingly that televised war brought civilians too close to the battlefield. In the following decade, the military and the media experimented with different kinds of symbiotic alliances that were diverse in quality but unified in their objective to prevent another large-scale erosion of public support for future wars. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a period of media industry restructuring that resulted in mergers, centralized corporate ownership, and the introduction of intensified profit-making strategies by media conglomerates. As a consequence of downsizing and closing of news divisions, news became more dependent on centralized sources and news-gathering practices, such as government public relations offices, rather than investigative journalism. Andersen provides a brilliant analysis of how marketing techniques aimed at consumer persuasion redefined news journalism in this changing environment of media ownership. In the lead-up to the First Gulf War, advertisers encouraged nesting war reporting within positive, upbeat “programming environments”—media and style converging with commercial message—to avoid negative consumer associations.4 In the process, the representation of war was adapted to commercial consumption rather than having as its goal an informed citizenry. At the center of these new methods of representation were film techniques of the New Hollywood, music videos, and advertising. New Hollywood films diverged from the old by adopting their structure from loosely linked, self-sustaining

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action sequences often built around spectacular stunts and special effects rather than the psychologically motivated cause-and-effect narrative logic of previous decades. Onedimensional stereotypes replace complex character traits and development, and plot lines simply link one action sequence to the next. New Hollywood films such as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor sacrifice narrative depth for spectacle and special effects. Such loosely organized representational techniques aim to produce a specific affect such as agitation or exhilaration rather than a rationally based response such as understanding or interpretation. These techniques were also displayed in early music videos, novelties that enjoyed huge viewership in this period. New-generation ads used the same methods, linking images devoid of internal coherence to attach positive feelings to products. Following such tides, the representation of war in the popular imaginary shifted from being grounded in rational discussion and ethical debate to an affective commodity competing for audience attention through spectacular, thrilling presentation. Andersen argues that in the Gulf War, adoption of representational modes from film, MTV, and advertising filled news media with these emotional, associative, illogical practices of persuasion. Film techniques conveying immediacy, excitement, and charged emotional experiences flooded news coverage, displacing a more familiar documentary style that encouraged objectivity and critical distance: the “New News” left no space for thought, contemplation, or ambivalence about the war. “The act of viewing constituted participation, [making] us feel the experience.”5 Both Stahl and Andersen argue that the military public relations of Operation Desert Storm deployed the dazzling spectacle of a “clean war” through images of laser-guided munitions and the green glow of night-vision goggles, delivered to American living rooms through play-by-play

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24/7 CNN coverage, positioning citizens as complacent voyeurs, suppressing their deliberative function, and marginalizing dissent. The “CNN war” took the form of mass spectacle while simultaneously reframing citizens as war consumers rather than democratic subjects. Stahl and Andersen note that by fastidiously scrubbing images of death, references to death, and the language of death and replacing them with the power and pleasures of high-tech war machinery, precision guided weapons, and Patriot missiles, war coverage was carefully adapted to the affective regime of commercial TV. If reporting of the First Gulf War successfully positioned journalism as an extension of military public relations, by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the apparatus for controlling the narrative from the war zone had become even more deeply entrenched. The system of protected embedded reporting limited access to events not sanctioned by the military. In the absence of independent sources, daily public briefings at the milliondollar Central Command media facility, Pentagon-supplied war footage, and programming by the military official public relations office became the primary sources for the news back home.6 In Militainment, Inc., Stahl argues that the aftermath of 9/11 witnessed a new, more effective form for absorbing citizen identity into the military-entertainment matrix: an “interactive mode” of engaging consumers with militaristic rhetoric appeared. Unlike what Stahl refers to as “spectacular war,” which marginalized dissent by distancing viewers from the military apparatus, the new filmic and game techniques of interactive media in the post-9/11 era invited the citizen to step through the screen and become a virtual player in the action.7 In addition to videogames that were commercial spin-offs of military training and simulation projects, Pentagon and State Department public relations teams cooperated with entertainment studios to produce reality TV shows, made-for-TV mov-

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ies, and blockbuster films designed to recruit a new consumer citizen-soldier. There is no question that the White House, the Pentagon, and the US military have shaped propagandistic images and news reporting of American war efforts in the Middle East, collaborating with news media, television networks, and Hollywood to generate popular support for the ongoing War on Terror. The examples are numerous, but to name just a few: Karl Rove’s meeting just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks with media executives and producers, including Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti, Viacom owner Sumner Redstone, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, executives from several major studios, screenwriters, and directors to update them on the White House’s war aims and enlist their efforts in generating popular support.8 An immediate result was the Showtime docudrama on the Bush administration’s responses to the 9/11 attacks, called DC 9/11: Time of Crisis. Other military-supported films, TV programs, and even news coverage soon followed, such as the rescue of the wounded PFC Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq, filmed and edited like a scene from a Hollywood action movie, and later revealed to be a staged publicity event.9 Though these multiple examples of news and other forms of visual media benefiting from some form of military support have been interpreted as evidence of collusion within a military-industrial-entertainment complex to produce support for militarism, our interest here, once again, is in looking to the ways that analysis of capitalist media markets can provide a better account of the War on Terror in popular culture.10 With Stacy Takacs, we believe a convergence of interests among military, industry, and Hollywood, shaped by market forces of popular culture, has provided a powerful incentive for creating military-themed media programming for US

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audiences, and—indirectly—media content that naturalizes the new American way of war.11 There are strong reasons for attending to market dynamics rather than hunting for conspiracies. First, it is notoriously difficult for any organization, such as the military or an imagined media-industry-government network, to control and deliver a specific ideological message, and there is no guarantee that the intended audience will receive that message. As Takacs points out, fierce competition for consumer attention among the available media outlets such as network channels, cable TV, and the Internet has created fragmented audiences; and as Lynn Spigel argues, such diverse groups are not easily unified by narratives of patriotism.12 Furthermore, even in the noteworthy efforts of Karl Rove to orchestrate Hollywood support for the White House’s War on Terror, major studios and media outlets did not need coercion or even coaxing to render support. Most were already engaged in programming that, properly marketed and distributed, would support the War on Terror or had military-focused films, such as Blackhawk Down, ready for release. Rather than being prompted by the events of 9/11, these media companies already had profitable strategies for exploiting the many facets of the War on Terror before it even existed. The trauma of 9/11, instead, was a cultural accelerant for the multiplication of these strategies because of the dramatic cultural shift it produced and the markets it enlarged. To understand the transformations that have taken place in television and cinema worldwide following the advent of the War on Terror, we have drawn on the extensive Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for titles and descriptions of television shows and individual episodes from 1990 to 2013. To identify programs treating pertinent themes, we compiled a set of search terms representing the War on

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Terror and the Revolution in Military Affairs, including terms for the weapons systems central to the new American way of war, future threat scenarios as laid out in military policy documents, and statements by military leaders. This procedure netted 109 search terms relevant to the War on Terror, which we label RMA. TV episodes treating some subset of the themes in the RMA term set were identified by the search. Figure 3.1 is a visualization of the relative frequencies of the RMA search terms in the complete set of television episodes from 1990 to 2013. The size of each word reflects the frequency of that term in the RMA set of television episodes. (Fig. 3.1)

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3.1  RMA terms used in TV episodes, 1990–2013.

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1. Total episodes worldwide

Year

2. Total US episodes

3. RMA episodes

4. RMA episodes as percentage of total

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

2,450 2,497 2,589 2,863 3,067 3,052 3,390 3,768 3,964 4,254 4,275 4,478 4,438 4,881 5,476 6,239 8,293 9,037 9,699 10,907 11,987 14,355 13,477 13,954

897 887 939 1,030 1,075 1,168 1,352 1,478 1,562 1,812 1,622 1,623 1,734 1,720 1,820 1,900 2,288 2,125 1,863 2,404 2,517 2,756 2,066 1,763

262 224 278 300 355 334 386 456 425 500 550 594 664 675 764 1,055 1,133 1,233 1,319 1,446 1,465 1,613 1,502 1,619

10.70% 9.00% 10.70% 10.50% 11.60% 10.90% 11.40% 12.10% 10.70% 11.80% 12.90% 13.30% 15.00% 13.80% 14.00% 16.90% 13.70% 13.60% 13.60% 13.30% 12.20% 11.20% 11.10% 11.60%

Total

153,390

40,401

19,152

12.50%

Table 3.1  TV episodes, 1990 to 2013.

We break down the data for the representation of war themes in television episodes and specifically the representation of themes related to the rise of the RMA for each year from 1990 to 2013 in Table 3.1. As columns 1, 2, 3, and 5 indicate, there were 153,390 total episodes worldwide, about 40,000 of which were shown in the United States. Of the total number of shows, about 20,000 (or 12.5 percent) treated themes related to the RMA, whereas nearly

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5. RMA episodes in US

6. US RMA episodes as percentage of US episodes

7. US RMA rate compared to worldwide RMA rate

8. US RMA rate compared to non-US RMA rate

105 60 95 118 149 146 185 216 200 262 225 220 293 258 324 433 473 433 401 507 511 479 407 388

11.70% 6.80% 10.10% 11.50% 13.90% 12.50% 13.70% 14.60% 12.80% 14.50% 13.90% 13.60% 16.90% 15.00% 17.80% 22.80% 20.70% 20.40% 21.50% 21.10% 20.30% 17.40% 19.70% 22.00%

109.46% 75.40% 94.22% 109.33% 119.75% 114.22% 120.17% 120.76% 119.42% 123.02% 107.82% 102.19% 112.94% 108.47% 127.60% 134.77% 151.32% 149.34% 158.28% 159.08% 166.12% 154.68% 176.76% 189.68%

115.80% 66.40% 91.20% 115.40% 134.00% 125.30% 138.70% 139.40% 136.70% 148.40% 113.20% 103.50% 123.20% 113.70% 147.90% 159.00% 188.10% 176.10% 183.70% 191.00% 201.50% 177.80% 205.30% 218.00%

6,888

17.00%

136.55%

157.10%

7,000 (or 17 percent) of all TV episodes aired in the United States treated themes of the RMA. While the percentages of TV shows with war-related content are fairly high for all years, the numbers take off dramatically in the United States from around 2003 onward, reaching a high of almost 23 percent of all US TV episodes in 2005 and averaging about 20.4 percent of all TV episodes during the decade from 2003 to 2013 (see Figure 3.2). The figures in the last three columns of Table 3.1 show the rate

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RMA - US episodes as percentage of all US episodes, 1990-2013 0.25

0.2

Share of RMA episodes among all US episode

0.15

0.1

0.05 Linear (Share of RMA episodes among all US episodes)

3.2 RMA-US episodes as a percentage of all US episodes, 1990–2013.

0

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

of increase of RMA-related shows in the United States compared to US shows featuring other content, as well as the comparative rate of increase of RMA shows in the United States to non-US shows with RMA content. The last column, with italicized figures highlighted in gray, is particularly revealing. Here we set the non-US RMA rate increase at 100 as a basis for comparison. The difference in the rate of increase in interest in RMA content in the United States compared to interest in other countries from 2003 to 2013 jumped from nearly 114 percent to 218 percent, almost double. Moreover, during that decade, 20.4 percent of all US TV shows featured RMA content (column 6). Over this decade we can conclude that US audiences were virtually obsessed with content related to the War on Terror and the RMA. Table 3.2 and Figure 3.3 present similar findings for the presence of war-related themes in cinema and particularly the terms of our term set for the RMA. Although US movies with RMA-related content began to decline slightly after 2008, in the wake of both the financial crisis and the precipitous drop

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in popularity of the Surge and the War on Terror, we find that roughly 38 percent of the nearly 8,000 films released in the United States during the period from 1990 to 2013 had content related to the RMA, the peak years being between 2001 and 2008. Like their counterparts in the TV industry, filmmakers have found consumers of war to be their major market. We can see from the data that the War on Terror accelerated production of counterterrorism narratives, but such concerns were also prevalent before 9/11. One genre concerned with counterterrorism at that time was the post–Cold War spy thriller; shows such as La Femme Nikita were in production from 1997 to 2001, and several shows already in production before 9/11 appeared on the scene immediately afterward.

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3.3  RMA terms used in movies, 1990–2013.

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Among these were The Agency (2001–2003), Alias (2001– 2006), and 24 (2001–2010). MI-5 (in Britain, Spooks), a BBC-America release emulating 24 in both plot and style, was launched in 2002 and ran with high ratings for ten seasons. Other, shorter-lived series treating the spy-thriller counterterrorist theme during the early War on Terror were Threat Matrix (2003–2004), The Grid (2004), Homeland Security (2004), and Sleeper Cell (2005–2006).

Year

Table 3.2  Films released in the United States, 1990–2013. Source: IMDb.com.

Total films

RMA films

RMA films as percentage of total

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

171 189 175 195 206 250 264 275 276 298 328 295 313 313 348 339 442 473 468 431 428 458 460 485

76 77 74 91 81 106 100 102 109 107 113 126 135 125 145 138 184 198 179 156 154 143 139 129

44.44% 40.74% 42.29% 46.67% 39.32% 42.40% 37.88% 37.09% 39.49% 35.91% 34.45% 42.71% 43.13% 39.94% 41.67% 40.71% 41.63% 41.86% 38.25% 36.19% 35.98% 31.22% 30.22% 26.60%

Total

7,880

2,987

37.91%

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24 One of the most celebrated series from this genre as well as an influential icon of the War on Terror is 24. The show gives voice to the many predictions of RMA theorists and advances the technologies of the RMA as solutions to the rampant threat of terrorism. RMA prophets predicting the changing threat landscape facing the United States, such as Steven Metz and James Kievit, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt, and Thomas Donnelly, all involved in the Neocon Project for the New American Century, alongside Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, all emphasized that future wars would be conducted not against major superpowers with military forces symmetrical to our own, but, rather, against a faceless, agile enemy made up of stateless terrorist groups. They predicted that such cells, funded in part by drug and human trafficking, would take advantage of rapidly evolving technology to gather weapons and tools to disrupt essential transportation, electricity, and oil networks. With the unchecked growth of nuclear facilities in unstable regions and the Internet’s increasing ability to recruit supporters from communities of high-tech and biotech workers, future-threat scenarios included the possibility of clandestine groups of zealots, patriots, criminals, or even lone wolves making suitcase bombs, chemical weapons, or biological weapons. Such extraordinary times required specially trained, small, and flexible forces backed with the newest high-technology infrastructures of surveillance, cyberwar techniques, and physical resources and techniques for identifying, infiltrating, and destroying terrorist cells. Clearly these times needed 24’s Jack Bauer, field ops director for the fictional Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU) in Los Angeles. The series premiered in November 2001, two months after 9/11. A brief summary of the first season shows how 24

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tapped into the homeland security issues predicted by advocates of the RMA. The pilot opens with Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and CTU assigned to stop an assassination attempt on Senator David Palmer during his presidential bid in the California primary. The Serbian warlord Victor Drazen, former right-hand man of Slobodan Milošević, leads the plot. (In later seasons, terrorist jihadis would typically take on the role of CTU’s adversaries, but this season was already written before 9/11.) Drazen was supposedly killed, along with his wife and daughter, two years earlier, in a covert military action led by Bauer, then a Delta Force operative, and authorized by David Palmer in his role on a US Senate panel. Drazen and his group of mercenaries embark on a personal vendetta against Bauer and Palmer. Seeking revenge, they intend to kill both men, along with Jack’s wife and daughter. Among many plot twists in this opener was the bombing of a 747 passenger plane, which was edited out following 9/11. Other elements in this season that became series signatures are the treacherous operation of moles within CTU and operatives for other government agencies who collaborate with terrorists or competing federal agencies to thwart CTU’s efforts. Rather than being driven primarily by coherent narratives that might inspire debate about the problems of terrorism, however, 24 made several formal innovations designed to produce a specific affective response in viewers: a frenetic experience of tension, anxiety, and intense, fast-paced action. The show’s twenty-four-hour format was promoted in press packets before the show premiered: the plot of each season— preventing the assassination of a president, avoiding nuclear devastation, or stopping the release of nerve gas causing mass deaths—would be resolved in one day: each of its one-hour episodes accounted for one hour within the narrative. Although a race against time is a frequent plot element in TV

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and film, in 24 the rush of time is made visible: the digital ticking time-bomb clock—a repeated image at the end of each segment—is the show’s signature. The show runs multiple plotlines in parallel, each episode presented as though in real time. To heighten the effect of twenty-four-hour real time, the screen is split just before commercial breaks: each plot line unfolds, often as a cliffhanger, in a partial frame, keeping the viewer glued to the screen. (Fig. 3.4) When the show recommences after an ad break, the minutes taken up by the ads are reflected on the digital clock. During ad breaks, the clock and the plot lines keep running: in one notorious commercial break in Season 1, Jack’s wife is raped. As Jacqueline Furby notes, the time conceit in 24 combines with specific features of the plot to create a pressing sense of urgency. “Because of the accelerated speed, multiple threads and information-rich plots crammed into an hour, the intense attention demanded by the complexities and frequent twists and reversals of the plot and layered sub-plots allows for no respite during the program’s duration for escaping from

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3.4  The terrorist plot countdown in 24: Live Another Day: multiple threads are in play.

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time anxiety.”13 The show adopts the post-cinematic aesthetic described by Steven Shaviro, which we identified as crucial to franchise video wargaming. Information-dense plots and rapid scene shifts enhance the sense of urgency.14 Furby observes that the average 24 scene lasts only two minutes, which intensifies the sense of the narrative’s breakneck pace. The crisscrossing of different plot lines is punctuated by information gaps the viewer must fill in; this feature further adds to the anxiety and intense attention demanded of the viewer. Like the interactive videogames we have explored, 24 draws its viewer into the screen and won’t let go. Though such formal elements were originally planned as the show’s hallmarks, it turned out to be another of 24’s dramatic techniques that brought it both fame and notoriety. The series was strongly criticized for its depiction of “the dark side” of the War on Terror. Its first five seasons included sixty-seven scenes of torture—more than any other show on television.15 The show’s use of “extreme” interrogation techniques by Jack and other CTU personnel included administration of drugs, electroshock, water boarding, and even murder. Just a couple of examples among scores will give a sense of how thoroughly scenes of violence, brutality, and especially torture were ripped from the headlines and woven into the fabric of 24. Season 2 opens with the brutal interrogation of Jason Park, an international terrorist working with an extremist organization called Second Wave. Under torture, Park reveals that Second Wave is planning to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles within the next twenty-four hours. President Palmer persuades Jack (in seclusion after his wife’s death) to return, out of loyalty and patriotism, to CTU and stop the terrorists. Jack rejoins the action with an act of incredible brutality. Using old contacts with the group of militiamen he had developed previously as an undercover operative, Jack infil-

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trates the group about to attack CTU. He overcomes their suspicions of his motives by eliminating Marshall Goren, a witness against the group who is in protective custody and about to testify before a grand jury. Jack has Goren brought to CTU for “interrogation,” but as the interview begins, Jack, with no warning, shoots Goren in the chest. He then orders up a hacksaw to cut off the corpse’s head, which he offers to the terrorist group as a sign of his loyalty. This gesture gets Jack into the thick of the plot as an insider, and the season begins. Critics of the show declared Fox TV colluded with the Bush administration to support its war efforts and its litany of curtailed civil liberties: the USA Patriot Act of 2001; warrantless domestic surveillance; extraordinary renditions; harsh detention and interrogation policies; the opening of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility; and efforts to limit judicial review of such matters.16 Indeed, according to Jane Mayer, an investigative journalist for the New Yorker, the similarity of 24’s interrogation techniques to those used in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, along with Jack’s willingness to ignore civil liberties, seem almost referential.17 Yet the show’s creative team did not have a shared agenda of support for the Bush administration’s policies. To be sure, the series co-creator Joel Surnow was an outspoken supporter of Bush policies and a friend of other noted conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh. But only two of the show’s fourteen writers and producers declared themselves conservatives.18 On the other hand, his co-creator, Robert Cochran, believed only narrow, definable circumstances could morally justify torture.19 For his part, Howard Gordon, the chief series writer and author of most torture scenes in the early seasons, described himself as a liberal or moderate but ambivalent about the use of torture. Thus, the show’s creative team represented a broad spectrum of political views. Far from sharing a particular political orientation, let

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alone conspiring to promote a partisan agenda, the 24 team’s goal was simply to create a gripping story, as Gordon insisted: “While we don’t try to represent any kind of real truth—obviously 24 hours in the format makes it impossible—we try to, I think, present an essential truth, or an essential problem. So when Jack Bauer tortures, it’s in a compressed reality … We try to compress these arguments and these issues and dramatize them in obviously very unreal ways, but hopefully in dramatic and compelling ways. And that’s really ultimately our master … making a compelling, ‘adrenalized’ TV show.”20 In a post-9/11 world, where the American public, fueled by incessant Homeland Security alerts, was haunted by fear of further terrorist attacks, the goal of 24 was to tap “into the public’s ‘fear-based wish fulfillment’ of having protectors, such as Bauer, who would do anything necessary to protect society from harm.”21 For 24’s producers, who were constructing a save-theworld scenario that had to be completed in one day, the use of torture was about real-time drama, not politics: the ticking digital clock dictates nearly everything in 24. Key characters occasionally question the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the abrogation of civil rights, but such practices are rationalized by the lack of time to pursue other means: what would you do if you had to extract the necessary information from a terrorist to avert disaster within twenty-four hours? Extreme times demand extreme measures. (Fig. 3.5) The show’s creative team may have intended to entertain, but another dynamic can be discerned in the effect of its ultraviolence: the normalization of such measures in the real world through their pervasive depiction in the imaginary. The fantasy real becomes the model of the real in the War on Terror. Despite protests against enhanced interrogation techniques and the many professionals who have disputed the value of torture in extracting valuable information, crime dramas and

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espionage–science fiction shows feature torture scenes regularly. Though torture was not always successful in extracting information from terrorists on 24, it became an expected feature of nearly every episode in the history of the series. Christian William Erickson discusses a meeting in 2006 between professional interrogators from various military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies with Kiefer Sutherland and 24 producers. The real interrogators claimed that the show’s support of torture as a necessary expedient in the War on Terror was already problematically infiltrating the worldviews of current and next-generation interrogators and asked that the production team eliminate or reconsider the use of torture in their narratives—to no avail.22 As Erickson points out, this slippage of the virtual into the real clearly affected not only agents in the field and those about to be deployed, but also other critical decision makers responsible for shaping the framework for “wars on terror.” For instance, in June 2007 at an international legal conference in Ottawa, Canada, US Supreme Court Justice

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3.5  A torture scene from 24: Live Another Day. Chloe O’Brian is subjected to “harsh interrogation” in a secret CIA facility in London.

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Antonin Scalia invoked Bauer’s use of torture to prevent the detonation of the terrorist nuke in Season 2 to justify his views on the types of interrogation techniques required by and allowed in the Global War on Terror. In response to moral challenges to the use of harsh interrogation techniques, Scalia responded, “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives … Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”23 The series 24 replaces thought with the affective dictates of adrenalized television, providing specific solutions to imagined problems designed neither to stake out moral claims nor to provide practical solutions but, rather, to inspire repeat viewership of a serial drama. While show producers and Sutherland himself are quick to note that torture is merely “a dramatic device,” restricting its possible effects to the fictional 24 universe, these representations can’t help influencing policy through their production of powerful shared realities and points of reference. Like the scenes of torture, the technology featured on 24 also both responds to the demands of the clock and adds to the show’s adrenaline rush. CTU’s key enabling factor is its access to surveillance cameras, GPS systems able to track vehicles and persons across the vast spaces of Los Angeles, and highly skilled personnel, such as Chloe O’Brian (from Season 3 onward), who can access any computer system or smart phone on the grid, grab sensitive information, open up “a secure pipe,” and send data to Jack’s PDA on demand. A key moment that opens the door to Jack’s entrée with the terrorists in Season 2 is when the CTU programmer and analyst Jamey Farrell (Chloe’s predecessor in Seasons 1–2) hacks into the

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California prison records system and creates a profile for Jack just in time to substantiate his cover story. Indeed, Jack’s PDA—a Palm Pilot in early episodes and later on a Motorola i880 device—appears to be a thoroughly magical instrument that can upload and receive large documents, such as building schematics, maps, and other complex data in a heartbeat and even catch a strong signal in basements three levels below ground. Jack also has wireless microtransmitters as earbuds, which allow him to communicate with CTU, most often with Chloe, who guides him like a videogame avatar along corridors and through buildings under satellite surveillance. (Fig. 3.6) In an episode of Season 3 when terrorist commandos are trying to capture Jack in an airport warehouse, he calls for a thermal imaging satellite to be moved into position to identify the number and locations of his attackers. The operation of moving the satellite located somewhere in geosynchronous orbit to Jack’s coordinates takes only eight minutes, another magical command of high technology that even relatively uninformed viewers may question. The acquisition and repositioning of imaging satellites is a go-to surveillance technology and enabling dramatic device in Seasons 3 and 4. Jack uses mainly

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3.6 See-through building technology enables Chloe O’Brian to guide Jack Bauer to the terrorists in 24: Live Another Day.

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guns, knives, and his own considerable skills as a Special Forces operative to take down terrorists, but he would not be able to pull off his heroic actions—and certainly not within the compressed time available—without the computer and surveillance systems of CTU opening doors, providing disguise or cover, and shadowing his moves. As is true within the narrative of the RMA generally, information technology is framed as a “force multiplier.” Like the show’s use of torture, its technology also reshaped the popular imaginary. The presence of advanced technologies of surveillance places 24 in the realm of near-future espionage–science fiction. Technology is critical to the legitimacy of the security services that boast their ability to master such tools to a greater extent than potential foes. This real-life emphasis on technology dictates its presence in the series, while, in a representational feedback loop, such fictional depictions of technology help shape their presence in the cultural imaginary. The clunky cell phones available to normal citizens may have left us suspicious about the technology Jack and CTU had at their disposal to fight terrorism in 2001, but by 2014 those high-tech cell phones seem perfectly normal, if not already obsolete in comparison to modern smartphones. The magic of 24 was to accelerate the “virtual” deployment of techniques and technologies in R&D stages at agencies such as DARPA as though they had already been perfected for realworld use. Thus, fictional technology appeared as a premonition, a harbinger more real than reality itself, paving the way for reality to follow. Occasionally viewers might question the relation of technology represented in 24 to that in the real world. In a symposium on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation in 2006, Michael Chertoff, then secretary of Homeland Security, sidestepped a question about whether Homeland Security

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had satellite technology that could penetrate buildings to locate terrorists.24 While other forms of infrared and radar scanners currently in use by law enforcement and the military can penetrate walls, an imaging satellite of this sort isn’t known to exist. Surnow’s answer to how closely 24 relates to reality is clearer than Chertoff ’s: “Now this is interesting because, on the face of it, the show is not realistic. I mean, the technology and stuff we make up. And the pace of things is absurd. More stuff happens in an hour than could happen in a lifetime. So what’s real about the show? The answer is that it’s realistic psychologically and emotionally … And that to me is what we’re trying to do as storytellers … I don’t care whether you can reposition a satellite in eight minutes. What I care about is the emotional and psychological struggles and dilemmas that all these people must go through, with Jack Bauer leading the charge.”25 Despite assurances that 24’s technology and tactics are fictional, the representations of agents lit by glowing screens as they hack into computer systems, their tech-talk punctuated by the high-speed clicking of computer keys, upload bars screaming along, and rapid access to schematics, satellite images, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera feeds enabling CTU agents to track down terrorists in adrenaline-packed action sequences shape our perceptions of the real contours of law enforcement capabilities. Even the CIA itself lends credibility to the affective realities of 24 as more than cinematic by constructing recruitment videos, such as a CIA advertisement shown before movies in 2006 that mimicked the aesthetics of 24, including the rapid cutscenes, split screens, and high-tech operations centers, while inviting would-be recruits to embrace a world of change and adventure by joining the agency.26 Similar ads for the Clandestine Services were widely shown for recruitment as well.

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We can see how such intertextual references participate in constructing viewers’ perception of the real by considering another example. Nearly every episode of 24 involves hacking into a computer system or decrypting a locked file to acquire or fabricate information that will assist Jack. In Season 4, Chloe must retrieve files from a terrorist’s laptop and, in seconds, decrypt the “the Blowfish algorithm” that protects them by using CTU’s “proprietary algorithm.” Developed in the early 1990s by the security expert Bruce Schneier, Blowfish is widely recognized as a strong, if now outdated, encryption algorithm that presents significant barriers to brute force cracking.27 The assertion that imaginary CTU agents could break it easily had a ripple effect in the (legitimately) paranoid cybersecurity community. Schneier first posted that 24 had referred to Blowfish, noting he wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or upset, while other postings by security experts on his blog chimed in on the ridiculous representation on 24 and other shows of the ease of hacking such algorithms. A number of commenters mentioned they love 24 but are frequently amused by the show’s representations of computer technology. Still, despite such criticism from the tech community, scenes of quick and easy hacking of major encryption systems persisted, becoming a common cliché on 24 and other crime dramas that continues to the present. Four years later, in 24’s seventh season (2009) Blowfish appeared again, this time with the claim that the algorithm’s author had built in a backdoor that law enforcement could exploit. Schneier posted the citing on his blog again, and this time along with the postings decrying the ridiculousness of building a backdoor into an open-source and publically auditable algorithm, some of the responses actually supported the claim of a backdoor that compromised Blowfish’s strength. Resurrecting the comment thread over two years later, one

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commenter, “Richard,” who identified himself as someone who had tested software for several decades, posted: “Unfortunately, I think this purely fictional ‘backdoor’ account, comes painfully close to the truth. You see it turns out the most widely published Blowfish code that Bruce himself distributed DID have the rather unfortunate property that it could be broken in seconds due to an ‘accidental’ implementation ‘bug.’ A ‘bug’ which compromised it to the point that for a large number of key selections the security of Blowfish was indeed pretty much ZERO (could be broken in seconds to minutes even on home PC grade hardware).” Richard explained the source of the bug and concluded, “So, just guessing here, this is probably the source of the ‘backdoor in blowfish’ rumors that were circulating long before the 24 writers seized upon them for this fictionalized account.”28 In light of subsequent NSA leaks from Edward Snowden that confirmed the existence of the topsecret “Bullrun” program, which boasted an impressive $255 million annual budget for inserting vulnerabilities into encryption software, such implementation errors take on an additionally sinister hue. Schneier, on the other hand, claimed that the writers probably just chose his algorithm because Blowfish “is a cool-sounding name. Let’s face it, Rijndael or AES just doesn’t sound as codewordy.”29 Hacking took a different turn in a later plot of 24, moving from a tool of law enforcement to a force multiplier for terrorists. In the 2014 revival of the series, 24: Live Another Day, a terrorist cell in London hijacks a fleet of American drones as part of a larger plot to assassinate the American president. Terrorists manage to hack into the authentication flight key of an American drone pilot and insert code that allows them to override the system, take control of his drone, and eventually to pilot a fleet of ten drones. To find the override amid the millions of lines of code in the system, Jack

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3.7  Jack Bauer seizes the joystick for the hijacked drone from the terrorist just in time to avert the destruction of Waterloo Station, London.

turns to Chloe, who has become a member of Open Cell, a London-based hacktivist group evoking a mashup of Anonymous and Wikileaks. Chloe convinces the Open Cell hackers to devote their skills to finding the override code hidden in the massive code dump recovered from the authentication key. Open Cell’s master-hacker leader succeeds without much ado. (Fig. 3.7) The dynamic of normalization is thus very much in evidence throughout the life of 24. Much like the representation of advanced technology such as smartphones, the hacking proficiency demonstrated in the series seemed magical in earlier seasons, but by 2014 the Wikileaks-like Open Cell, the many revelations of real-world activities of the NSA, and the intertextuality of algorithms like Blowfish lent a sense of reality to superhacking, normalizing it as an essential tool in the fight against terrorism. The persistence of this representation of hacking in nearly every TV series that touches on security issues, from 24 to Spooks and on to Scandal and House of Cards, creates an appearance of reality difficult to counteract.

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For nearly a decade, 24 and its British counterpart, Spooks, produced high-intensity television representations of the War on Terror that provided imagery and material to politicians and judicial and opinion leaders as examples of how Homeland Security and intelligence agencies should function. Central to this process of normalization were representations of communications and surveillance technologies, along with military special operations practices, that were all imagined as necessary pieces to fight terrorism as it transitions from foreign soil to the homeland. While such RMA technologies provide vital tools for fighting these imagined terrorist threats, these tools are inevitably established as solutions that foreground their technological expedience and pragmatism over their effect on civil liberties or other traditional limits to government power.

Act of Valor If we were to identify a film that conveys the image of the new American way of war that the Pentagon would like to project, the best candidate would be Act of Valor. Premiering in February 2012, Act of Valor is unique in Hollywood film history: it is a full-length action film starring a group of active-duty US Navy SEALs. The film originated from the Navy Special Warfare Command’s 2008 invitation to several production companies to create a documentary on the SEALs that would honor fallen commandos, serve as a recruitment video, and correct the popular image (from some films and videogames) of navy SEALs as lone wolfs rather than hardworking team players. The project offered filmmakers access to SEALs as well as military assets, but no direct funding. The production company Bandito Brothers got the assignment. Cofounded by

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Mike “Mouse” McCoy, a former off-road racing champion and stuntman, and Scott Waugh, who had run his own stunt company and went on to direct the movie Need for Speed in 2014, the Bandito Brothers had previously specialized in shooting action-driven viral ads for brands such as BMW and Mountain Dew. They had also filmed several successful commercials for the Navy Special Warfare Command. Both McCoy and Waugh had spent years working on Hollywood back lots as stuntmen and had learned the filmmaking trade by looking over the shoulders of great action filmmakers they had worked with, such as Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, and Michael Bay.30 After landing the contract and spending some time talking with members of a navy SEAL unit about their work, McCoy and Waugh convinced Captain Duncan Smith, commanding officer, Naval Special Warfare Recruiting Directorate, to expand the project vision from a documentary video to a fulllength fictionalized account of real life navy SEAL operations. In describing their goals for the film, McCoy and Waugh explained they wanted to create an authentic film centering on the SEALs’ bond of brotherhood and the community of sacrifice they share with one another and their families. The film provides the audience an immersive experience of “the patriotism, heroism, and incredible bravery of these quiet professionals and the sacrifices they make for their brothers, their families, and their country.”31 To create their story the filmmakers consulted with members of the US Special Operations Command about the threat scenarios facing the United States in the world today, and they compiled five recent stories of SEALs’ acts of valor in battlefields addressing those threats. In a press conference about the film, Admiral William McRaven, the head of Special Operations Command and a former SEAL himself, said, “We think it accurately represents a number of the acts of valor that have occurred over the last 10 years with

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respect to the SEAL teams.”32 In filming the movie, McCoy and Waugh worked in conjunction with SEAL training operations the navy already had planned, and the SEAL actors in the film designed the onscreen missions themselves. The resulting film, an adrenaline-fueled journey, depicts the SEALs’ role in the War on Terror and synthesizes the key components of the DoD’s imagined future-threat scenarios. In so doing, it displays nearly every piece of high-tech hardware in the navy’s arsenal of covert operations for fighting terror. The film tracks an eight-man SEAL squad on a mission to recover Lisa Morales, a captured CIA operative in Costa Rica, who has picked up hints of a terrorist plot involving an international drug smuggler, Mikhail “Christo” Troykovich, to sneak suicide bombers into the United States across the Mexican border. Christo’s men have captured Morales and are torturing her in a jungle compound. SEAL Team Seven deploys from their base in Coronado, California, to rescue Morales. Using a combination of high-tech surveillance aids, such as a small drone that tags and tracks enemies, together with classic SEAL team stealth tactics and marksmanship, the SEALs eliminate a force of guards and rescue Morales. A “hot extraction” follows, but not before the team has recovered a guard’s cell phone that provides an entry into the terror network and leads to more details about the planned terrorist plot. Intelligence confirms that Christo is working with a former schoolmate and Chechen Muslim terrorist, Abu al Shabal, who is intent on bringing jihad to the United States by using contacts and smuggling routes arranged by Christo and his organization. This plot provides a broad framework for the filmmakers to represent several engagements between the SEALs and enemy forces from South America to Africa, and to the doorstep of the United States, thus illustrating the global nature of the War on Terror. (Figs. 3.8, 3.9)

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3.8  Navy SEALs launch a Raven drone from a Special Operations Craft-Riverine (SOC-R) in Act of Valor. 3.9  A screen view of the automated targeting of a terrorist by a Raven drone in Act of Valor.

Above and beyond its remarkably sparse narrative, the film is completely focused on high-intensity covert actions and tension-filled combat. In addition to the use of live ammunition throughout, the filming was done in the “post-cinematic” fastaction, rapid-cut style discussed earlier. Crucial to creating the film’s sense of immersive action was its use of multiple lightweight, highly mobile 5-D Mark II Digital SLR camera platforms, which Canon made available just as the team began to plan the film. These super-lightweight cameras enabled the cameramen to defy conventional motion picture camera physics while still capturing a high-quality cinematic image.33 (Figs. 3.10, 3.11)

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In addition to this affectively centered shooting style, narration in the film is minimalist and focused on expressions of the camaraderie and brotherhood of the SEALs and their devotion to one another, their families, and their country. There is little to no character development. In fact, apart from the SEALs, the film’s main characters are the high-tech tools,

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3.10  Scott Waugh filming Act of Valor with a Canon EOS 5-D Mark II camera to generate a firstperson videogame aesthetic. 3.11  The helmetcam rig for generating first-person POV footage in Act of Valor.

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3.12  A navy SEAL’s firstperson POV in a terrorist camp in Act of Valor.

techniques, and weapons that enable the SEALs’ missions: namely, C-130 transports conveying SEALs to a high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) stealth parachute mission in Costa Rica; a pair of Chinook helicopters dropping in Special Operations Command-Riverine swift boats with large-caliber miniguns that decimate enemy forces; a reaper drone gathering audio and infrared from the enemy compound where agent Morales is tortured; a handheld drone released at the start of the insertion to track and report locations of enemy combatants; and a nuclear submarine with a SEAL submersible delivery vehicle, to name a few. (Fig. 3.12) Like other products of the military-entertainment complex, Act of Valor provides no historical, political, or social context for its plot. In fact, the script functions very much like a videogame narrative, in which players receive brief descriptions of missions to be undertaken and almost nothing about larger contextual issues that might inform the situations they encounter. The likeness to videogame action is very much to the point in this film: its action scenes recall similar moments from Call of Duty. Shane Hurlbut, director of photography for Act of Valor, explained that he sought a shooting style like that in a “first-person shooter and we

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wanted to use this gamer POV [point of view] just enough so that it really put you in the firefight of what a SEAL would see through his eyes.” The Act of Valor camera crew devised a 5-D helmet-cam with wireless video and wireless follow focus: “everything to get that first person perspective.”34 In the many firefights, scenes are frequently shot from the firstperson point of view and often framed through night-vision lighting or gun sights, as in a videogame. The first-person

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3.13–3.15  A first-person video sequence of a navy SEAL shooting the bad guys as he loses consciousness in Act of Valor.

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POV in the film extends the videogame convention and deepens the film’s immersive quality by including not only the objective view but also the subjective experience: when a SEAL is badly wounded in the film’s climax, the view through the screen reddens and fades, which is exactly what happens when the player takes damage in Call of Duty. (Figs. 3.13-3.15)

Iron Man Although Act of Valor showcases the new American way of war and military values of brotherhood, sacrifice, and patriotism, it did not attain the blockbuster status of other products of the military-entertainment complex, such as superhero films like Transformers (2007) and Iron Man (2008). Both these films appeared during summers of superhero blockbusters: Spider-Man 3 (ranked no. 1 in 2007), Transformers (ranked no. 3 in 2007), The Dark Knight (ranked no. 1 in 2008), Iron Man (ranked no. 2 in 2008), and The Incredible Hulk (ranked no. 17 in 2008) were among the two years’ biggest hits. The release of these films coincided with deep national dissatisfaction, a sense that America’s place in the world was slipping. The war in Iraq had not gone as planned, and the US military involvement in Afghanistan was dragging on far longer than expected. In February 2007 fully twothirds of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center (67 percent) said the war in Iraq was not going well—the largest percentage expressing this view since the war began. And in February 2008 a 54 percent majority said the United States had made the wrong decision in using military force in Iraq.35 Additionally, the country was suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression: the housing market collapsed, Wall Street and Detroit were on the ropes,

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unemployment was on the rise, and, as a final sign of the times, retail gasoline prices increased from $1.35 per gallon in 2002, soon after the start of the war in Afghanistan, to $3.25 in the summer of 2008. As a result, Americans were questioning their country’s status as a superpower. It was therefore a good time to call on a superhero like Iron Man to rally support for the military and US exceptionalism. In discussing his film Iron Man, the director Jon Favreau points out that superhero narratives play off deepseated fears rooted in systemic global problems that are seen, magically, as resolvable by an exceptional individual. In Favreau’s own case, he observes, “Growing up in the Cold War and the nuclear age … those fears were always very present, and superhero movies and comic books especially always found a way to comfort people to know that there was this character that was going to watch over them, this hero that was going to protect them from all the things that frightened them, whether it was crime on the streets of New York or the threat of the Soviet Union attacking us.”36 Such Cold War affects were ever-present when Stan Lee debuted Marvel Comics’ Iron Man character in 1963, aiming at a generation shocked by America’s decline in the Vietnam War. Unlike Superman, whose power originates from another planet, or Spider-Man, bitten by a radioactive spider, Tony Stark, the Iron Man, is not an otherworldly figure. Rather, as an MIT grad and genius inventor, he makes his own magic. He is the personification of can-do Americanism, but also the heir to his billionaire defense contractor father’s wealth. Stan Lee has said that he created Iron Man at the height of the Cold War as a challenge to his readers: “I [chose] a hero who represented [war] to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer. He was providing weapons for the army. He was rich. He was an industrialist. But he was

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good-looking guy and he was courageous … I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like—that none of our readers would like—and shove him down their throats and make them like him.”37 In all his qualities, Stan Lee’s Tony Stark embodied the military-industrial complex of his day. In taking Iron Man to the big screen, Favreau’s goal was to preserve the same cathartic escapism that comic books once offered by not making the film “so realistic that you feel like you are facing a reality that doesn’t allow you to relax and escape as you go to the movies.” At the same time Favreau didn’t want his Iron Man to be irrelevant, so he designed the character not as “somebody who could offer a simple solution, but instead … a guy who seemed singularly suited for the challenges of our day.”38 The film, accordingly, offers a carefully tuned narrative that shifts Iron Man from representing the old way of American warfare to embodying the new military style of the Revolution in Military Affairs instead. In the film, Tony Stark, head of the defense-contracting firm Stark Industries—strongly resembling Boeing and Lockheed—is in war-torn Afghanistan to demonstrate the company’s new “Jericho” missile to US military leaders. The missile is astonishingly destructive, taking out what seems to be a whole mountain range with one explosion—evoking the collateral damage of the military-industrial complex’s style of warfare. Stark’s convoy of Humvees is ambushed by an alQaeda-like group of terrorists, the Ten Rings, and Stark is critically wounded, shrapnel piercing his chest. Stark awakes to find himself captured along with another man named Yinsen, who has rigged an electromagnet in his chest to prevent the shrapnel shards from reaching his heart. Tasked by their captors to build them a Jericho missile system, Stark and Yinsen instead build a powerful electric generator—an “arc

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reactor”—to power Stark’s vital electromagnet, along with a weaponized suit of armor. Stark builds the prototype metal super-suit from leftover parts of Stark’s own missiles in the terrorists’ weapons bunker and blasts his way out of confinement. Along the way, terrorists kill Yinsen, and Stark takes revenge by slaughtering his terrorist captors before he flies away in the improvised metal suit and crashes in the desert. Back in the United States, a born-again Stark announces that his company will abandon the weapons business and focus its creative talents on clean energy production (represented by the arc reactor). At this point Favreau’s choices in fashioning Tony Stark’s character become striking. Replacing Stan Lee’s model of Howard Hughes, the enigmatic genius inventor and World War II defense contractor, Jon Favreau identified Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who cofounded such successful ventures as PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, as inspiration for the new Tony Stark.39 Equally important to the character is the actor Favreau chose to play him: Robert Downey Jr. brings effortless cool to the part, along with a wit that allows him to improvise and riff on the bare-bones script Favreau supplied. Further, from a metafilmic perspective, the recovering addict and ex-con Downey brings his own fitting backstory to Tony’s efforts to “get clean.” Not everyone, however, in Tony’s world appreciates his newfound conscience and desire to move away from war profiteering. Obadiah Stane, his father’s old partner and the company’s manager, advises Stark that the proposed shift will ruin Stark Industries. But Stane has an ulterior motive: he wants to replace Tony as company head. To this end, Stane has been supplying the Ten Rings terrorist group with weapons, and he even plotted with them to kill Tony. Stark decides to end Stane’s treachery and set things right in Afghanistan, retreating to his “home workshop”—a fantasy version of

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3.16  Tony Stark designing and fitting out his Iron Man suit in his home lab.

Lockheed’s Skunk Works furnished with intelligent robotics, 3-D holographic computers, and futuristic communications systems—and building improved versions of his Iron Man suit and arc reactor. (Fig. 3.16) With this suit, loaded with high-technology and precision-guided weapons, Stark, now a special ops superhero, heads back to Afghanistan to take out the Ten Rings terrorist group. The high technology and the thematics of Iron Man illustrate just how important the RMA has become for creating popular entertainment. Along with drones, smart weapons, advanced AI, and robotic systems, exoskeletons with brain-machine interfaces were among the systems targeted by the proponents of the RMA as advanced technologies needed for the special forces of tomorrow.40 The defense contractor Raytheon has been working on an “iron man” suit for the US Army since 2000 at its Salt Lake City facility, Raytheon Sarcos. Though it does not fly (yet), the Sarcos Exoskeleton is a wearable robot that amplifies its wearer’s strength and endurance without impairing the wearer’s agility to climb stairs and ramps—and even play soccer. Simultaneously with the launch of the Iron Man movie, Raytheon ran a press release promoting its Sarcos project, reporting

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that “in its May issue, Popular Science magazine likens the Sarcos Exoskeleton to the ‘Iron Man’ in the movie of the same name and suggests a blurring of the lines between science fiction and reality.”41 The leader of the Raytheon exoskeleton project, Dr. Stephen Jacobsen, explained that he found inspiration in science fiction and finds Iron Man stimulating for his work. Apart from Raytheon’s exoskeleton suit, there are also several product-placement firsts in Iron Man, among them the F-22 Raptors scrambled to intercept Iron Man as he jets home from Afghanistan to Malibu. The Lockheed F-22 Raptor made its first onscreen appearance in the film despite its being a turbulent time in the history of this stealth fighter. The F-22 was selected for development as the US Air Force’s advanced tactical fighter in the 1990s, but its relevance to contemporary warfare was constantly challenged until finally, in November 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proclaimed the Raptor irrelevant in post–Cold War conflicts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the Obama administration, Gates called for ending F-22 production in fiscal year 2011, leaving the USAF with 187 production aircraft. The first of these 187 aircraft were at Edwards Air Force Base in California, going through final tests, when Iron Man began filming, and the Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office was eager to see them represented in the movie. In addition to the fighters, 150 servicemen from Edwards had roles as extras or pilots in the movie. The flight scenes were filmed on the base, as were the desert scenes of Afghanistan. Master Sergeant Larry Belen, the superintendent of technical support for the Air Force Test Pilot School, said, “I want people to walk away from this movie with a really good impression of the Air Force, like they got about the Navy seeing Top Gun … This is a chance to show people what we’re made

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of and what we’re able to do. It makes me feel proud to be a part of it.”42 Echoing his tone, Captain Christian Hodge, the Defense Department’s project officer for Iron Man, said, “This movie is going to be fantastic. The Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars.”43 The F-22 Raptor is an appropriately chosen adversary for Iron Man: at once representing the old military-industrial complex in decline, yet still incorporating the very latest in high-tech systems, the plane reflects an early false start in the Revolution in Military Affairs. It is the first fighter jet to combine supercruise (able to sustain supersonic flight without using fuel-inefficient afterburners, which enables greater endurance at supersonic speeds) and supermaneuverability (an innovation enabling maneuvers impossible with a purely aerodynamic design) capabilities with stealth and sensor fusion. In the F-22’s sensor fusion, an integrated processor filters and combines data from a variety of sources into a common view, thereby reducing pilot workload. Another feature of the F-22 represented in the movie is the Visionix Scorpion helmet worn by pilots. Like Iron Man’s helmet, the Scorpion is capable of projecting the aircraft’s airspeed, altitude, weapons status, and other important flight data on the helmet visor. It also enables the pilot to see necessary data in his field of vision no matter where he looks, rather than needing to align the plane’s crosshairs with its target. The Scorpion allows the fighter pilot to steer sensors or weapons and to designate targets simply by looking. Moreover, the Scorpion enables sharing of real-time battlefield information between aircraft and ground platforms.44 Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit incorporates all these features in the sleek body of the exoskeleton system, complete with helmet visor for communications, visual cuing, and targeting. The viewing audience of Iron Man seems to inhabit the military machine. (Figs. 3.17, 3.18)

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To locate a clearer representative of the old militaryindustrial complex in the film, we turn to Tony’s erstwhile father figure. Stane reverse-engineers his own version of the Iron Man suit from the recovered parts of Tony’s first suit in the Afghan desert. Because Stane is unable to master the physics needed for miniaturizing the power system, his “Iron Monger” suit is a gargantuan hulk nearly two stories tall, with massive hydraulics controlling the arms, the opposite of Stark’s sleek and elegant system. Whereas Iron Man uses directed force weapons emanating from his palms, Iron

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3.17  Iron Man’s intelligent helmet with data visor. 3.18 Iron Man’s intelligent system for precision targeting of terrorists.

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Monger has rocket launchers and machine guns bolted onto his arms. In the most pitiful contrast of old militaryindustrial complex versus the RMA, as Stane pursues Iron Man into the upper atmosphere we see a gigantic trail of rocket exhaust reminiscent of an old ICBM billowing from the Iron Monger: the military of old is clunky, dirty, and ready for a serious upgrade. (Fig. 3.19) What Tony Stark offers is not the end of the militaryindustrial complex, but its transformation into a cleaner, more flexible, mobile, and lithe intelligent military machine that escapes the hulking footprint of the old Cold War military-industrial complex that brought with it mass devastation and collateral damage at huge political and economic cost. Tony does not want to build weapons, but if he has to rid the world of bad guys, it will be with Silicon Valley–style smart systems that use advanced surveillance and targeting systems to eliminate threats with precision, at a distance, and without imposition of an occupying force. As Favreau explains, Iron Man is “a guy who could go in as a one-man army and separate the good guys from the bad guys and attack the people who are bringing [injustice] to the world while preserving innocent human life and leaving a very small military footprint where we’re involved … It’s sort of our special forces to the Nth degree.”45 At the end of the film, Tony announces to the assembled press, “I am Iron Man.” Echoing Tony, we declare, “Iron Man is the Revolution in Military Affairs.” In this analysis of the television shows and movies of the military-entertainment complex, we have highlighted the ways they feature both New Hollywood cinematic techniques, such as spectacular stunts and special effects, and the familiar repertoire of RMA personnel, tools, and activities. The former provide the breathless, adrenaline-fueled

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thrills that keep addicted audiences coming back for more, while the latter inscribe in spectators’ imaginations the new American way of war.

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3.19  Iron Man being chased by the lumbering Iron Monger billowing fire and smoke that is reminiscent of the outdated ICBMs of the Cold War era.

CHAPTER 4

Press X to Hack: Cyberwar and Videogames –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

A major sector where the new militaryentertainment complex intersects with the Revolution in Military Affairs is in the use of information technology itself to conduct wide-ranging espionage and sabotage operations. Since the turn of the millennium, hacking— or its state-sponsored offspring, cyberwarfare—has become a standard trope in many forms of entertainment.

PRESS X TO HACK: CYBERWAR AND VIDEOGAMES

In this chapter we examine the function of hacking in popular entertainment and how its representations help produce an imaginary favorable to the rapidly growing cyberdefense industry. The entertainment industry mobilizes certain archetypes because they open up possibilities for the creation of diverse and compelling narratives, yet they have implications beyond this narrow usage through the cultural expectations they establish. As Western economies and militaries increasingly depend on information technology, the vulnerabilities of these systems have come under intense scrutiny. While the complexity of computational systems enables the circulation of and control over information that has made the Internet so influential, it also potentially opens these information streams to third parties when software, hardware, or human controllers do not perform as expected. As policy debates about privacy and cybersecurity have intensified since 2000, the persona of the hacker has framed in popular entertainment what seems real about digital security generally. In 2016, for the fourth year in a row, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress that hackers are the United States’ greatest security threat, more dangerous than global terrorism or WMD proliferation.1 Such pronouncements, however, are hollow: at the time of this writing, examples of physically destructive cyberattacks are few, and they have often been carried out by the United States rather than against it. Compared with the University of Maryland START program’s count of 11,952 people killed by terrorism in 2013 alone, death by hacker is nonexistent. How was the hacker menace constructed as a grave security threat, requiring billions in taxpayer investment, when actual examples of hacking range from inconvenient, embarrassing information leaks to data deletion or theft—hardly on a par with

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the costs in life and treasure of terrorism or war? Given that hacking generally takes place without any spectacular outward effects and that hackers—especially state-sponsored cyberwarriors—are rarely caught, how is hacking formed in the public war imaginary, and what is its relation to popular entertainment representations? The history of cybersecurity discourse and popular entertainment are enmeshed beginning in 1983 with the popular movie Wargames. Featuring a young Matthew Broderick as David Lightman, a rebellious teen who unwittingly hacks into North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and nearly triggers a nuclear war with Russia, Wargames ignited the first public discussion of cybersecurity. In the months following its release, Wargames garnered significant media coverage, complete with expert commentary on its realistic treatment of hacking threats to military and financial institutions. Clips were screened on the floor of Congress, cited by subcommittees, and even referred to by President Reagan himself as evidence of the emerging hacker menace. A year later, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was adopted, providing stringent penalties for anyone gaining unauthorized access to government and financial computer systems.2 A decade later, Wargames’ plot resurfaced: prosecutors successfully used the CFAA to isolate the hacker Kevin Mitnick from telephones during his prison term, citing the possibility that Mitnick could “whistle into a telephone and launch a nuclear missile from NORAD”—a bizarre paraphrase of the movie.3 The movie, CFAA, and the extreme analyses that surrounded them defined the problem of hacking in terms of individual conduct rather than systems development and problematic programming. For example, in Wargames Lightman can access a NORAD supercomputer because the system

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designer added a backdoor with an easily guessed password. Rather than highlighting such poor security practices as the source of digital vulnerabilities, the plot line implies that it is Lightman’s genius and resulting conduct that are the real cause of the problem. The magical hacker myth frames digital security itself as a losing game because computer geniuses always penetrate cyberdefenses, shifting liability from developers and systems administrators to rogue users. In this context, wide-ranging surveillance and powerful legal deterrents emerge as the strongest possible solutions. Following the trend established by Wargames, public officials and the growing cyberdefense industry have repeatedly mobilized apocalyptic scenarios involving hackers to gain lucrative security contracts. This policy discourse is defined by conflicting impulses, arguing for strong investments in cyberdefense because of hacking dangers while also advocating cyberaggression to gain strategic advantage. Since the early 1990s, security experts have warned of an impending “Cyber–Pearl Harbor” even as neoconservative RMA advocates argued for the development of offensive cyberwar capabilities to protect and assert American supremacy in the digital realm.4 Such predictions and recommendations have initiated public policy shifts that have led to the militarization of cyberspace. For example, in DoD quadrennial defense reviews (QDR) from 1997 to 2006, the word cyber appears only fifteen times, five in 2001 and ten in 2006. In QDR 2010 cyber appears seventy-three times, and in 2014 forty-five times, which indicates a significant shift at the level of policy and military investment. This reevaluation of the threat landscape tracks the creation of a new military command, the US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), to work as a military wing of the NSA to protect and secure DoD networks and critical national infrastructure. Though much of the official language

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surrounding USCYBERCOM’s creation characterized it as defensive in nature, QDR 2010 also vaguely indicates more, saying that it “will prepare to … conduct full spectrum cyberspace military operations” in the future—something that we now know is a regular occurrence.5 Justifying the necessity of militarized cybersoldiers, military officials amplified the threats posed by hackers in op-eds and other media to convince the public of their menace. William Lynn III, former deputy secretary of defense, argued that cyberspace requires a special military focus because cyber capabilities (1) are asymmetric, allowing small and underfunded groups to cause effects out of proportion to the investment required to wield them; (2) favor offensive rather than defensive use; and (3) are difficult to attribute and respond to in a timely manner, which makes retaliation challenging. Lacking historical evidence of collapsed power grids and financial institutions to validate the hacker threat’s enormity, Lynn leveraged hypothetical scenarios to justify the militarization of cyberspace: “A dozen determined computer programmers,” he claimed, could “threaten the United States’ global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities, or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target.”6 He then asserted that other nations and shadowy hackers, knowing this possibility, are developing capabilities to target not only government computers, but also “critical civilian infrastructure,” such as “power grids, transportation networks, or financial systems.”7 Against these odds, militarizing cyberspace seems like the smartest move. Mike McConnell, former NSA director (1992–1996) and director of National Intelligence (2007–2009), intensified the alarm, claiming in a 2010 op-ed that we are already in the midst of a cyberwar—and we are losing. Writing in the aftermath of a simulation called Cyber Shock Wave, in which par-

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ticipants brainstormed solutions to a hypothetical cyberattack that left “40 million people without power; 60 million cellphones out of service; [and] Wall Street closed for a week,” McConnell claimed we are woefully unprepared to defend against cyberwarfare at all: “For all our war games and strategy documents focused on traditional warfare, we have yet to address the most basic questions about cyber-conflicts.”8 Citing the theft of intellectual property and insufficient legal frameworks from which to ground cyberdeterrence as evidence of our losing this war, McConnell argued for making the Internet more amenable to government control and surveillance by altering fundamental networking protocols to make traffic easily traceable and attributable within milliseconds. A systemic problem with such proposals, however, is that their implementation would effectively destroy anonymity on the Internet for everyone, not just for those with malicious intent. What joins Lynn and McConnell to other cyberdefense hawks and popular entertainment narratives is both their mobilization of hypothetical “cyber-Armageddon” scenarios and their attempts to illustrate why a defensive or technological posture in protecting cyberspace is insufficient. The entertainment industry draws on experts like Lynn and McConnell to lend fictional narratives minimal plausibility, but one should not assume that writers are drawn to the spectacular potentials of hackers for reasons aligned with those of such experts. Looking at Wargames’ effect on public policy, we can more accurately argue that the cybersecurity discourse in public policy relies more readily on the fictional narratives of the entertainment industry than the reverse. Lacking historical precedent for narratives that justify the militarizing of cyberspace, policy makers draw on the vivid imaginations of writers, directors, and game designers to sell these hypothetical threats to their constituents. The entertainment industry, on the other

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hand, has its own reasons for increasingly drawing on hackers to craft immersive and thrilling entertainment experiences.

Hacking Narrative Since 2000 movies and TV shows dealing with crime, law enforcement, politics, law, and technology have increasingly integrated computer hackers into their plots. In fact, many TV shows have so thoroughly adopted the hacker trope that they now have dedicated cast members who spout technical jargon on command and accomplish the impossible with a few keystrokes. Hacking linked to terrorism encompasses the full spectrum of contemporary warfare, creating a new antagonist: the cyberterrorist. As a supporting character, the hacker leverages arcane talents to produce information that helps the protagonist accomplish amazing feats. Just as changing the setting of popular wargames from World War II to the War on Terror initiated a shift from the ordinary soldier to the modern-day Special Forces supersoldier, the hacker trope both embodies exceptional prowess and enables other exceptional characters to perform extraordinary feats. The militarization of the Internet in popular entertainment, we argue, is driven primarily by the spectacular affordances offered by fictionalized rather than realistic hackers. The realistic representation of hacking runs up against constraints similar to those confronting warfare more generally. As warfare in videogames is purged of the quotidian boredom of guard duty, building infrastructure, and negotiating with locals, as well as traumatizing moments of terror, bloodshed, and brutality, so hacking is refashioned to fit into the affective regime of contemporary adrenalized entertainment.

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Anyone involved with cybersecurity research knows that nearly all hacking is text-based work: boring to watch and time-consuming. It involves multiple stages of research, programming, and, often, significant social engineering. Not only is watching a character type obscure phrases into a command line interface tedious and inaccessible to most popular audiences; it also disrupts the visual spectacle and pacing of most modern entertainment. As a result, when the process of hacking earns valuable screen time, it usually involves complex three-dimensional animations, flashy graphical interfaces remote from the real thing, or, at a minimum, sophisticated hacking command centers with multimonitor displays scrolling with neon text. Rather than emerging from wide-ranging collaborations between cybersecurity firms and popular entertainment, the hacker trope is reproduced because it provides certain affordances to the creation of fast-paced narratives, whether these are adrenaline-soaked action flicks such as Live Free or Die Hard or more procedural shows like CSI: Cyber. As we have argued with regard to the RMA in previous chapters, however, the utility of such representations does not exempt them from cultural critique for their roles in circulating affectively charged assessments of both the problems associated with asymmetric warfare and the possible solutions to these problems. But whereas the larger RMA discourse offers military high technology and Special Forces raids as solutions to the problem of terrorism and insurgency, the problem of hacking is often shown as a disease without a cure—or, more properly, a disease that can be treated only homeopathically, using the pathogen as remedy. Investigating and mitigating cyberthreats in popular media generally take place at the fingertips of dedicated “good” hackers who hack-back “bad” ones. Since hardening digital defenses and creating software to foil hackers are

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The Narrative Affordances of Hackers and Cyberwarfare Hacking Plot Hackers in popular entertainment are almost always the best at their craft. If they are not the best, it is because they are dueling with someone who is better, which adds tension to a plot. Usually, if a task is given to a hacker, she or he will probably succeed with minimal effort. Whether the task is accessing a target’s CCTV surveillance system or an e-mail server, tracking or bugging a smartphone, downloading confidential databases from a highly secure mainframe, or taking down a regional power grid, very little stands in the way of a competent hacker. The information hackers provide generally moves plots forward in ways disproportionate to the narrative investment in the hacks themselves. Typically, the “how” of a hack is displaced by its tangible results, which usually prove decisive for plot resolution. Hackers, therefore, often occupy 210

the role of the deus ex machina in modern, technocentric narratives.

Cracking Pacing and Tempo Hackers are popular characters because they allow writers to easily modulate the kind of pace they want in a narrative. Since the turn of the millennium, the pacing of visual narratives has increased, culminating in a post-cinematic regime that privileges affect over narrative. Following the successes of popular TV franchises such as 24, cinematic time is not only a commodity to exploit but also a means of amplifying the plot’s adrenaline rush—often at the expense of communicating a clear narrative. Just as flashy special effects, quick camera cuts, and dramatic narrative twists are designed to increase the shock value of entertainment, so hackers are a tool for writers to speed up, slow down, or otherwise sculpt the af-

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fective terrain of an experience. Hackers are experts at providing “just-in-time” information, creating narrative suspense, and orchestrating cathartic resolution. Consider the “encryption” trope. When a group encounters some piece of information that they know is the key to a puzzle, yet it is not the optimal time in the

narrative to reveal that piece of information, a hacker must figure out how to “crack the encryption” or break through a firewall or some other digital defense. These situations either slow down or create suspense in a plot: a computer must be broken into before an operative is discovered, a key piece of evidence must be cracked to allow

W4.1 In Watch_Dogs, you steal a trove of encrypted data that you know is key to rescuing your kidnapped sister as well as unlocking wide-ranging conspiracies, but you are unable to immediately access the data. You therefore embark on subsequent missions to find other hackers (T-Bone) capable of cracking the encryption. When it is cracked, the narrative conflict quickly resolves.

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W4.2  In the TV show 24, Chloe O’Brian and Aaron Cross, leader of Open Cell, magically discover an override code allowing terrorists to take control of US drones – hidden among countless lines of code – just by looking at it.

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other characters to do something important. The opposite of encryption is apparent when hackers can magically access whatever they want effortlessly. Whether this is access to a target’s surveillance cameras, an e-mail server, or the ubiquitous mainframe, this avenue allows a quick injection of new information to carry the story forward at a quicker pace. These techniques can also be combined to great effect by using encryption to establish a sense of trust in a system like a military drone program that, when cracked and taken over, provides viewers with a shock that inverts the structure of power in a narrative.

Shadowy Characters with Strong Personalities Hackers provide authors with characters who are, by nature, largely beyond comprehension. Not only do they lack appropriate interpersonal skills, but their hacker status accords them an understanding of information technology beyond the comprehension of other characters and viewers. In place of accessible explanations about how they accomplish their 213

feats, hackers chronically toss off technical jargon that reinforces them as beyond the ability of anyone to truly identify with. Hackers therefore need little character development, yet they make significant contributions to plot development. Hackers perform a great deal of narrative work, though minimal narrative investment is required. That is, hackers contribute to the generation of narratives while also resisting inclusion in these narratives. This axiom, of course, does not preclude the development of hacker characters but, rather, allows authors to determine the amount of investment they wish to make in them. More often than not, these moments of characterization take place in dimensions other than the digital environments the hacker masters, such as when the hacker provides physical or emotional support, which humanizes the hacker for a few precious moments. The hacker’s status as a magician is compounded by stereotypes of hackers as quirky counterculture geniuses who seriously lack social skills, “interfacing” with computers far better than with other humans. These

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character defects further push the business of hacking behind the scenes while also justifying the obscure nature of their contributions. When a hacker is asked how he or she conjured key information, expect technobabble that confounds everyone involved. The awkwardness of hackers gives a show more diversity and makes leading characters seem normal

and relatable to in comparison. Male hackers are usually cast as uncharismatic or less attractive than lead characters and generally have poor physical fitness— a common source of comic relief. Female hackers, on the other hand, are often highly sexualized and free-spirited, providing foils or love interests for leading male characters.

W4.3  In Watch_Dogs, supporting hackers are heavily aestheticized and have strong, quirky personalities. Clara (left) is sexualized, is in need of protection, and is a quasi-love interest for Pearce. T-Bone (right) is eccentric, brilliant, and capable of providing all means of support for Pearce.

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not extraordinary and exciting in the same way that agonistic fights for virtual control are, the question of digital security disappears into a virtual free-for-all. The hacker is also a conduit through which affect flows far better than classic, expository narrative. Given that the hacker persona is constructed in a way that actively disrupts narrative explanation and is designed either to make viewers say “wow” or to enable other characters to instill similar levels of amazement, hackers participate in the “post-cinematic” visual style that emphasizes serial moments of affect over logical enjoyment of plot or deep connection with characters and their experiences. The hack itself emerges as another form of special effect that glosses over ambiguous and nonsensical plots, filling the gap between isolated bits of narrative. The emergence of hackers as a cliché in popular entertainment constructs a pessimistic mythology about the kinds of security we can expect from the digital realm. Rather than accounting for the nontrivial effort and time involved in compromising digital devices, hackers, in the popular imagination, can accomplish amazing feats nearly instantaneously and with near-perfect success, producing what we call a “fantasy of absolute access” that shapes cultural assumptions about digital security and privacy. As is true of cybersecurity discourse, this fantasy generalizes barely plausible scenarios to all digital devices and compresses the time and effort necessary to perform hacks—for example, from days, weeks, or even years to nearly instantaneous extraction and exploitation of necessary data. Such magical capabilities lend credibility to the apocalyptic predictions circulated by cybersecurity firms and policy makers and position computer-security professionals as the only solution. Under the fantasy of absolute access, digital defense is a game already lost: hackers already own the keys to the digital kingdom because they can bypass every lock and

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protection. Rather than fortifying defenses against this magical threat, cybersecurity merges with offensive cyberwarfare, moving focus away from building walls around end users to more actively militarized solutions such as surveillance and deterrence. If anything is possible in the digital realm, a strong offense emerges as the best defense.

The Fantasy of Absolute Access in Popular Gaming As the hacker trope has become popular in television and film, AAA games have integrated hackers into their plots largely as supporting nonplayer characters (NPCs). For example, in the Tom Clancy Splinter Cell franchise, Sam Fisher is supported by hackers who provide intelligence and surveillance capabilities for his clandestine missions. As in other media, these hackers give the protagonist room to focus on more exciting pursuits without needing to piece together a fragmented game narrative. They enable the flow of affect produced by the interactivity of the game while minimizing the necessity of players’ stopping to think. As of mid-2015 examples of AAA games interpolating players in the position of the hacker are few. We expect that deeper exploitation of the hacker trope, including leveraging the unique ability of games to place the player in the hacker’s position, will become increasingly popular in franchise wargames as cyberwarfare becomes standard operating procedure. One of the first wargames to attempt this interpolation within the context of cyberwar and the RMA is Call of Duty: Black Ops II (BO2).9 BO2 effects a key transition that subsequent wargames are likely to follow: whereas previous games offered on-screen tips such as “Hold X to Interact,” BO2 began offering “Hold X to Hack” in select situations. By pressing X

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and tapping a few buttons on the avatar’s sleeve, the player can open locked containers and doors, activate enemy drones to defend himself, or hijack other enemy equipment. (Fig. 4.1) Like its representation in other media, hacking is ubiquitous in BO2 and takes place at the push of a button. While the shift from “interact” to “hack” is purely rhetorical, it significantly alters the symbolic relationship between players and digital devices in the game. Interaction suggests openness to technology—anyone can use it, given the right interface. Hacking, on the other hand, more aggressively connotes control and appropriation, inscribing antagonism at the heart of any relationship with technology. In addition to small game mechanics like this one, the campaign narrative of BO2 provides a vivid enactment of cyberdoom scenarios that goes beyond even those of government officials. BO2 is set in the near future, and the US military is digitized to the extreme: drones are pervasive and largely autonomous, high-tech suits provide near invisibility, and command and control systems are all networked together.

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4.1  Hacking a locked case is as easy as pressing X for a few seconds in Black Ops II.

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4.2  The hijacked drone fleet descends on Los Angeles in Black Ops II.

The primary antagonist of BO2 is Raul Menendez, a charismatic, yet largely anonymous, leader of an international populist movement against economic inequality. Menendez launches a false-flag cyberattack against Chinese financial institutions for which the United States receives blame. In response, the Chinese prepare for war and cut off the supply of rare-earth minerals to the United States—a serious problem since US military might relies on electronics that require these resources. Menendez then develops a quantum computing device so powerful it can break all computer encryption in an instant. He accomplishes an asymmetrical attack, taking control over the entire US drone fleet, tasking it to attack Los Angeles. (Fig. 4.2) After wreaking havoc, Menendez eventually turns the drone fleet against itself, destroying it in a populist gesture to relevel the playing field. A typical Call of Duty narrative, this story is wildly unrealistic yet provides an epically exhilarating experience moment after moment. Explosions and whizzing bullets banish

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even the slightest pretense of thought and compel the player to act as directed. Precisely how the player hacks enemy drones doesn’t matter: in itself, hacking improves his chances to win. It doesn’t matter that Menendez’s appropriation of the drone fleet would require not just digital control over military systems but also pervasive physical control—without which the physical infrastructure controlling the drones, such as satellite relays, GPS, and IT systems, could be destroyed and his plot thwarted. Seeing a US drone fleet turned against a US city is one of the most epic and affective moments of the game, so critique is rapidly buried beneath shouts of the player’s companions and the crumbling city. In BO2, cyberdefense—no matter the level of encryption or strength of a firewall—is doomed by magical hacking devices. At the level of rhetoric, it becomes clear: since others will use cyberwar to their advantage, it is a foregone conclusion that the United States should as well. While BO2 engages with the larger geopolitics of cyberwarfare, the RMA, and the dangers of overreliance on digital technologies, it doesn’t have much to say about the explosion of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities that information technology and the growing War on Terror have introduced. Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs (2014) is not a wargame per se, but it addresses the totality of cyberwarfare in ways likely to influence future wargames and further shape discussions about digital security. Watch_Dogs is an open-world game in which surveillance and hacking are ubiquitous. The overarching narrative follows Aiden Pearce, a vigilante hacker who accesses a centralized computer system controlling the infrastructure of a near-future Chicago. Following a blackout that kills nearly a dozen people, Chicago and other US cities turn to the Blume Corporation to develop a central operating system to run the

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4.3 Hacking a steam pipe from a hacked surveillance camera in Watch_ Dogs.

whole city. Stoplights, cell phones, surveillance cameras, steam pipes, and electrical grids are all controlled by this new “ctOS.” As the player completes game missions, he uncovers an information war involving the Blume Corporation, city officials, organized crime, and other hackers over control of this system. Widespread surveillance, coupled with poor digital security, leads to constant privacy violations and blackmail by corrupt parties. While the game acknowledges the enormity of these problems, it also makes the player complicit with these systems as he hacks his way to the center of the conspiracy. In contrast with BO2, Watch_Dogs wears its ideology on its sleeve. Moments into the game, Pearce’s hacking partner arrogantly claims, “We are the modern-day magicians.” As in BO2, the hacking in Watch_Dogs is quasi-magical, happening at the push of a button. Pearce travels around town looking at his smartphone, pressing buttons to instantly steal money from passersby, eavesdrop on phone or text conversations, or steal any car the player chooses. Pointing at a video camera and pressing X gives the player immediate POV access to that camera and all its facial recognition capabilities. If it is in the line of sight of another camera, pressing X hacks that one as

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well and shifts the player’s perspective accordingly. From a camera or on the ground, the player can hack virtually any device, including major computer servers, traffic lights, bridges, routers, smartphones, forklifts, cranes … pretty much anything imaginable. (Fig. 4.3-4.6) The ubiquity of hacking in the game puts the player in a state of constant information overload: everything digital is a potential tool for accomplishing his mission. Despite the complexity and variety of these systems, however, there is a simplicity lurking within: the player need only press X to find the solution to any puzzle. Both BO2 and Watch_Dogs hired cybersecurity advisers for help in constructing their virtual environments and narratives, and both games perpetuate the fantasy of absolute access at a massive scale. Watch_Dogs in particular stresses that all the game’s hacking techniques are at least plausible—it even produced a viral “hidden camera”–style ad in which people were given a free cell phone app to unlock cars, change traffic signals, and turn off streetlights, much to their surprise.10 In marketing interviews, the development team claims to have performed extensive research into hacking techniques to avoid the obvious faux pas of other Hollywood hackers.11 Typically,

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4.4 In Watch_ Dogs Pearce’s cell phone uses facial recognition technology to profile passersby, snoop on conversations, and steal money and information.

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4.5  At its hardest, the hacking in Watch_Dogs takes the form of small puzzles.

however, this realism involves anchoring a tiny shred of reality in a representation and then pushing it to hyperbolic, exciting extremes: games, after all, have to be fun and widely accessible if they are to recoup their significant development costs. The hacking in Watch_Dogs, while technically feasible in limited circumstances, is extremely temporally condensed. Hacking methods are completely obfuscated by a smartphone interface that scans, targets, compiles, and deploys exploits in the time it takes to press X. Watch_Dogs portends the app-ification of hacking, where a hack’s entirety is obscured by a simple button providing instant feedback. Such immediate feedback allows the translation of hacking into a set of game mechanics for players to deploy as they race from police at breakneck speed through the streets of Chicago. In addition to being rewarded with cool zooming animations, explosions, and car crashes, the player receives positive feedback through high-quality sound effects and tactile vibrations that reinforce the immediacy of his hacking skills even if they are outside his field of view. The prospect of new hacks, such as the ability to jam enemy communications or use ctOS to automatically tag and track opponents, provides incentive to keep progressing in the

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game, entwining positive affect with an ever-growing power fantasy of ultimate digital access. Though Watch_Dogs introduces enough critical moments to call into question the ethics of the surveillance state, such fleeting thoughts are counteracted by the player’s complicity in using these same systems to accomplish his own ends. As a result, like BO2, it glosses over the many questions that underpin digital security in favor of the transmission of an affective power fantasy through which players ultimately save the day by leveraging RMA technology.

From Press X to Hack to Plan X With BO2 and Watch_Dogs, cyberwarfare comes front and center in a ludic form that equates it with magical powers. Combined with the cyberdoom scenarios that plague cyberdiscourse, digital security appears to be a serious problem without a solution. As hackers are built up as magicians in entertainment and their threats pushed to extremes in political discourse to motivate proper military investment and policy change, some tensions emerge that reveal the ideological un-

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4.6  Watch_Dogs seamlessly allows you to “hack” into other players’ single-player games and steal their data. The target is notified when you begin installing a backdoor virus, and the other player must eliminate you before the installation is complete or face the consequences.

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derpinnings of this fantasy. As warnings about cyberattacks on physical US infrastructure reached a fever pitch in 2010, security researchers discovered a highly sophisticated cyberweapon targeting the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz. Developed by the United States and Israel under the top-secret program Olympic Games (2007–2010), Stuxnet launched precisely the type of infrastructural attack that government officials had been warning could cripple the United States.12 Instead of aiming at water-treatment plants or power grids, however, Stuxnet targeted industrial control units for centrifuges enriching uranium, making them highly inefficient and eventually breaking nearly one thousand of them, thereby setting the Iranian nuclear program back several years. The successes of Stuxnet buoyed US investment in offensive cyberwarfare programs but also revealed the vast difficulties of conducting large-scale cyberwar. When NATO forces were preparing to conduct air raids against Libya in 2011, proposals were circulated for using a cyberweapon to disrupt air defense systems to minimize threats to NATO assets. Instead of having magical hackers with their fingers ready to fire, NATO members realized a dramatic gap exists between traditional weaponry and cyberweapons: missiles can be aimed and fired, but cyberweapons require significantly more development time and customization for the particular system targeted. Rather than being a capability that can be deployed as quickly as it is in popular entertainment, US officials claimed it would take a team of programmers at least a year to design cyberweaponry for this particular use.13 Even with government-level talent and resources, sophisticated hacking is extremely difficult. As a result of this fiasco, the DoD created a new DARPA program called Plan X in 2011 and provided $110 million to develop foundational strategies and capabilities for the con-

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duct of cyberwarfare and to close the deployment gap between traditional weapons and cyberweapons. Though the program is not directly tasked with creating offensive cyberweapons themselves, its goal is to make the conduct of cyberwarfare as easy as it is in popular entertainment. The first step in this process is to develop platforms allowing officers to facilitate both offensive and defensive cyberwar without requiring sophisticated technical knowledge about networks and computer systems. As the project creator, Dan Roelker, puts it, “Say you’re playing World of Warcraft, and you’ve got this type of sword, +5 or whatever. You don’t necessarily know what spells were used to create that sword, right? You just know it has these attributes and it helps you in this way. It’s the same type of concept. You don’t need the technical details.”14 Such metaphors are telling and reveal the startlingly close relationship between Plan X and the gaming industry. Dan Kaufman, the director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, who is overseeing Plan X, formerly worked in the videogame industry and was the COO of Dreamworks Interactive when the Medal of Honor franchise was created. Plan X also leverages the pioneering interface design occurring in the entertainment industry to render cyberwarfare conduct as visual, intuitive, and accessible as a franchise videogame. DARPA turned to Frog Design, an interface design firm that worked on past design projects such as the Sony Walkman and the Apple IIc, for a prototype interface for this cyberwarfare platform for dummies. The initial prototype runs on a Samsung SUR40 Touch Table, what Noah Shachtman describes as “a kind of 40-inch, multi-person iPad,” and features intuitive visualization of network topology and information flow, along with touch-based targeting and weapon deployment. Massive Black, a conceptual art studio that has worked on gaming proj-

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4.7  The Plan X prototype for visualizing cyberwarfare.

ects ranging from Bioshock and League of Legends to Risen 2: Dark Waters, was also contracted for interface design. Under its guidance, a weapon interface was designed as a playbook “like Madden Football. You might have a running play a passing play, a fake.” Since much of network conflict involves running the same programs repetitively, Massive Black aims to “build a template and then just allow a planner to look through all the different plays they have” to simplify the process.15 Each weapon features an easily recognizable icon that indicates the risk and power associated with its use. Every time an exploit is used, the effectiveness of that exploit in the future is reduced, so weapons are ranked and categorized according to the investment in them so that operators can weigh potential risk against potential gain. Selecting a “play” instructs a computer to begin compiling the exploit for the targeted system, and the user can fire when ready.16 Plan X is also experimenting with using Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets to visualize cyberattacks and detect intruders.17  (Fig. 4.7)

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These interfaces could allow for more intuitive conduct of cyberwarfare, but they also address only half of the puzzle. Cyberweapon apps are effective only if you know where to point them. A second dimension to Plan X, therefore, is the development of network-mapping tools to categorize access points and vulnerable systems worldwide. These maps will indicate which exploits will work and where to point them. At the time of its first demonstration to the press in 2013, Plan X was more videogame than cyberwarfare platform: it was just an interface that displayed fake information and didn’t actually weaponize anything. Since then, however, defense heavyweights such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, along with smaller companies like Data Tactics, Intific, Apogee Research, and Aptima, have received nearly $74 million in contracts. After receiving these contracts in mid-2013, Data Tactics was acquired by L-3 and Intific by Cubic Corporation, both defense giants looking to expand their cyber expertise. With this kind of power and money behind it, Plan X may ultimately succeed in making “Press X to Hack” a reality.

Digital Munitions or Digital Security, Not Both The folly of such pursuits becomes evident only when we break through the rhetoric of cyberdoom scenarios and jettison the mythology that hackers are digital magicians. Rather than the biggest threat to Western society, the magical hacker is a projection of the US government’s own desires. We now know that the US government is the largest investor in the market for unreported computer vulnerabilities (“zero-day exploits”). Rather than giving researchers or hackers incentives to disclose these vulnerabilities to vendors so that software flaws can be patched, governments worldwide are purchasing

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them for hundreds of thousands of dollars, classifying them as top secret, and hoarding them for offensive use.18 When software remains unpatched so that governments can stockpile digital munitions, the security of users everywhere is degraded. Offense and defense in cyberspace therefore exist in dynamic unease, where giving priority to one swings the other like a seesaw into a state of insecurity. Turning computer vulnerabilities into top-secret weapons also contributes to solutions approximating total Internet surveillance. Since even ordinary cybersecurity vendors cannot defend against vulnerabilities they do not yet know exist, the government places itself in a privileged position to help companies conduct cybersecurity on the basis of their classified intelligence, which creates significant privacy and confidentiality concerns. To mitigate attacks in real time, sensors must be constantly scanning Internet traffic to allow intervention before a threat reaches its target. We now know, thanks to NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that the NSA has a highly sophisticated network of hacked “implants” capable of scanning and copying Internet traffic in real time as well as automatically attacking targeted users.19 Paradoxically, this form of cyberdefense requires a strong offense that mobilizes the same kind of attacks the NSA aims to prevent. As one senior defense official put it, “We need to be inside the bad guy’s head and network … Whatever these bad guys are using in order to do their work, that’s what we’re interested in [monitoring].”20 In 2012 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed that the United States already had some of these preemptive capabilities, yet it lacked the legal infrastructure to fully exploit them in this country. Citing the possibility of a “cyber–Pearl Harbor” that “could be as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11,” Panetta pressured Congress to approve cybersecurity legislation to make cy-

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berdefense easier.21 As of mid-2016, all these bills had failed owing to significant civil liberties concerns. What gets lost in this militarization of cyberspace is the circulation of alternative solutions to the problem of cybersecurity. Defensive strategies of preemptive attack, global surveillance, and punitive legal regimes obscure the real problems: insecure programming, uninformed users. Instead of spending millions hoarding exploits, the government could place greater focus on helping vendors fix security holes and funding development and auditing of open-source software to help make computers more secure. The government could also launch digital literacy campaigns urging users not to click on strange links or wire money to that promising Nigerian prince. But such simple and effective solutions eliminate a strategic military advantage in cyberspace and fail to stimulate the burgeoning cybersecurity economy the same way that billions of dollars in defense contracts do. Such alternative solutions, if they come at all, could empower users to take their security and privacy into their own hands rather than trusting it to a cyberwarrior kratocracy. The hacker trope in popular entertainment gives a face to a shadowy threat that few understand. While hacker characters help authors and developers create fast-paced and entertaining narratives, punchy game mechanics, and antagonistic digital environments ripe for play, this magical hacker fantasy helps substantiate in the popular imaginary a rapidly growing cyberdefense industry already worth over well over $10 billion in government contracts in 2014 alone and projected to rise 7.6 percent compounded annually.22

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CounterWargaming in Spec Ops: The Line –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless. Spec Ops: The Line

Much of the work in this volume has been focused on the militaryentertainment complex and its role in creating a citizenry habituated to militaristic solutions to foreign policy problems.

DISCHARGE

Rather than emphasizing coordination between popular entertainment and the military, we have tried to show how entertainment industries have drawn on tools, technologies, and threat scenarios of the Revolution in Military Affairs to create immersive and affective entertainment experiences and a loyal, engaged fan base. Such thematics emerge not out of deference to military public relations or patriotism but, rather, from unique pressures facing the popular entertainment industries. The franchises of the military-entertainment complex find their success not through fidelity to the procedural, physical, or emotional realities of military life but instead through post-cinematic and “epically real” aesthetics that amplify affect, emotional investment, and adrenal anticipation. The result is a proliferation of widely consumed yet fragmented narratives that frame the constant conduct of state violence as a heroic necessity against the evils of the contemporary world. While many of these narratives contain enough ambiguity that they can be interpreted as thematically pro- or antiwar, much of this ambivalence does not translate directly into the player’s experience. Players are pushed to be heroes—to answer the call of duty—not to feel bad or reflect deeply on the virtual foes they obliterate. Players are also encouraged to fight for the sake of saving brothers-in-arms regardless of whether they agree with the macrocosmic pro- or antiwar sentiments a narrative might contain. Put simply, these ambivalences about war are readily obscured by the more interactive, fun, and microcosmic experiences that influence the moment-to-moment flow of play—the experience of which is almost overwhelmingly positive. Popular military shooters dealing with contemporary affairs also remain largely invariant in their assumptions about the form future wars will take and in their use of these scenarios as a vector for the production of positive affect. Franchise

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wargames give their players incentives by means of cool tools and technologies that allow them to kill ever more effectively while openly eschewing strategies for deescalating conflict or avoiding violence altogether. Because the cost of development for popular entertainment is steep and consumers want to have heroic experiences rather than negative, critical ones, we are pessimistic that the popular franchises of the militaryentertainment complex will adopt a more critical or nuanced tone about the conduct of war in the near future. Previous critical statements making inroads on franchise wargaming have taken the form of critical interventions staged more often from within established multiplayer games than from stand-alone games themselves for two simple reasons: games are expensive to create, and such themes are not popular. Notable interventions include the Velvet Strike performance within Counter-Strike, where players graffiti antiwar slogans and imagery within the multiplayer environment. Similar performances have taken place within America’s Army, when artists such as Joseph DeLappe have typed the names, ages, and positions of troops killed in Iraq into the chat box. These interventions and other politically motivated Flash games bring forward critical assumptions and perspectives obscured by the wargame interface, but they reach only a small fraction of the wargaming audience. Other franchises such as Metal Gear Solid have fared better in spreading nuanced critiques of militarism and gaming, but they contain plots so lengthy and convoluted that their effect is limited to hardcore audiences.1 One recent franchise wargame, however, goes above and beyond all previous attempts in exposing the difficulties of turning war into entertainment: Spec Ops: The Line. Spec Ops: The Line occupies a unique position within our analysis. On the one hand, it is a counterargument showing how franchise wargames can break out of the military-

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entertainment cycle; on the other, it confirms many of the points we have tried to emphasize in this book, particularly the necessary coupling of positive affect with the conduct of virtual war as a means for securing franchise success. Started in 1998 by the developer Zombie Studios, the Spec Ops franchise saw early success in the PC wargaming market as well as limited success on early-generation consoles. As squad-based military shooter games with US Special Forces units as heroes, the Spec Ops franchise anticipated core features that led to the widespread popularization of franchise wargames after 2006. Beset by diminishing returns, the franchise was shuttered after a ninth release in 2002. A decade later, Yager Development and 2K Games released Spec Ops: The Line as a reboot of the franchise, setting it on new footing and attempting to break into the significant market shares of Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor. Yet, rather than trying to beat these juggernauts at their own game, Spec Ops: The Line aims to do something different. Instead of an adrenaline-fueled experience making players feel heroic for saving the day, Spec Ops plays off these genre expectations to reveal the dark side of (virtual) war and some of the difficulties with military interventionism. The game begins typically enough: Dubai has suffered several months of apocalyptic sandstorms that have buried the city along with a US Army battalion—the “Damned 33rd”— tasked with aiding the city’s evacuation. The player steps into the narrative as Captain Martin Walker, leader of a three-man US Army Delta Force team sent to conduct limited surveillance to ascertain what happened to the 33rd and its leader, Colonel John Konrad. As Walker enters the city, however, he discovers several factions fighting over the scarce remaining resources and comes across troops from the 33rd captured and executed by unknown forces. Walker declares as a result that the team’s

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5.1 Walking through the aftermath of the white phosphorus attack that kills dozens of US soldiers and refugees in Spec Ops: The Line.

mission has expanded to include the rescue of the remaining US troops. Gradually, however, he discovers that the remaining troops from the 33rd have imposed martial law and committed atrocities against both the civilian population and fellow soldiers who questioned their methods. The CIA is also orchestrating a local insurgency against the 33rd for reasons yet undiscovered, creating circumstances ripe for unintended consequences. Without a global understanding of the multiple forces at play, Walker’s team falls prey to a series of miscommunications that place them at odds with the heroic assumptions of the mission. When the team first comes into contact with members of the 33rd, they are attacked as part of the CIA conspiracy. As a result, the player finds himself killing the American soldiers he is tasked with saving lest they kill him. Walker then witnesses the 33rd forcibly rounding up dozens of civilians for detention, further cementing their enemy status and leading the team to adopt a more offensive mandate. After seeing the 33rd conduct horrific white phosphorus mortar attacks against the insurgents, burning many alive (Fig. 5.1) , the team overpowers the Americans controlling the phosphorus launchers and

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turns the launchers against one of the 33rd’s bases. As the player rains corrosive fire on the enemies below, lit by the glow of infrared optics, Walker starts seeing his own face reflected in the targeting interface, which helps convey the trauma the protagonist experiences because of this decision: the ones he meant to save are now turning into ash. But such traumas are rationalized by shifting the blame to those sparking into flame: “They didn’t leave us any choice”; “they forced us to do this.” In the aftermath, the player is forced to march Walker through the charred carnage he caused. There he realizes, with dread, that he has slaughtered not only countless American soldiers, but fortyseven civilians—men, women, and children—who were seeking refuge in the base as well. His trauma is captured in the charred remains of a mother attempting to shield her child from the fire the player unleashed. (Fig. 5.2) From this point on, Walker will never be the same. Walker slowly descends into madness, constantly trying to justify his mistakes through appeals to necessity. Even though the team’s surveillance mission is complete and they should return home, Walker continually expands their

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5.2  A mother tries to shield her child from the effects of white phosphorus.

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military objective out of a desire to make his mistakes mean something. Soon enough, he is providing aid to the CIA insurgency and tracking down Konrad with lethal intent. Trauma and negative affect build in the player, as it does in his avatar. Like Walker, the player ceased having fun long ago, and he continues only because he hasn’t yet reached the end. Soon he discovers a radio over which Konrad confronts him with all the horrible things he’s done so far. And then he places the player in positions where he must make truly difficult moral decisions. In one of these scenarios, the team comes across two men hanging from an overpass. Konrad tells Walker that one of them—a civilian—is being punished for stealing water from the 33rd, while the other is a US soldier who killed the civilian’s family in retribution. Snipers target both men, and the player is told to kill the one who deserves death more. (Fig. 5.3) If he fails to choose, Walker will be killed along with both captives. While it doesn’t really matter which choice is made—there are no ultimate incentives one way or another—Konrad, along with Walker’s teammates, comment on the player’s choice for the rest of the game. Even though all possible choices are bad, they are nevertheless profoundly consequential. No matter what Walker does, he is confronted with the fact that he practices moral agency.2 Tormented by Konrad and pursued by the 33rd, the Delta team comes to the aid of the CIA insurgency and its plans to steal the city water reserves in order to topple the 33rd. After facilitating this theft, however, the Delta team realizes too late that the CIA operatives intend to destroy all the water, effectively killing everyone in the city within four days, for the purposes of burying the troubling actions of the 33rd and allowing the United States to save face with the rest

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of the Middle East. With the player’s unwitting help, the CIA has rung the death knell of Dubai. Falling deeper into madness, Walker leads the team farther into Dubai in search of revenge for all that has come to pass. Only killing Konrad and the rest of the 33rd will bring back his sanity and make all his mistakes actually mean something. In contrast with most franchise wargames, whose protagonists remain heroic, unfeeling bulwarks in the face of their actions, the weight of this game presses down on its main characters. Walker’s statements while under fire are increasingly laced with profanity and hatred for the soldiers he intended to save. Walker’s avatar, as well as those of his team, become haggard and bloodied, showing the physical traces of their growing trauma. As Walker’s team members are gradually killed off in the murderous pursuit of Konrad, he eventually fights his way to the city center, where Konrad is assumed to be hiding. Entering Konrad’s penthouse, the player finds him painting a

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5.3 Konrad forces Walker to choose who lives and who dies.

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picture of the consequences of Walker’s gravest mistake: a mother shielding her child from the pain of white phosphorus. Confronted with such misdeeds, Walker blames Konrad for all that has transpired, claiming that he acted only out of necessity, because Konrad forced him to. Walker seeks someone on whom to project his negative affect—Konrad, game developers, the military-entertainment complex—all to no avail. He discovers, to his horror, that Konrad has been dead all along and that his presence in the game was a dissociative product of Walker’s splintering psyche, created to avoid being blamed for all the people he has killed. The concluding dialogue collapses the distance between the player and his broken avatar: Walker: What happened here was out of my control. Konrad: Was it? None of this would have happened if you had just stopped. But no, on you marched. And for what? Walker: We tried to save you. Konrad: You’re no savior. Your talents lie elsewhere. Walker: This wasn’t my fault. Konrad: It takes a strong man to deny what’s right in front of him. And if the truth is undeniable, you’ll create your own. The truth is, Walker, you are here because you want to feel like something you’re not: a hero. I’m here because you can’t accept what you’ve done. And it broke you.

Like Walker, the player could have exercised choice by putting down the controller and turning off the game. But the conventions of game design and the psychology of investment makes the player continue until he receives the expected experience. Spec Ops, however, refuses to give the player what he wants. The game concludes by forcing the issue: if the

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player wants to maintain that he has no choice, Konrad will kill him. Alternatively, he can admit that he has agency (and therefore responsibility for Walker’s actions) and kill Konrad, opening three alternative endings that are equally unsettling. Sitting in the center of Dubai, an American convoy approaches to rescue Walker. The player can lay down his arms and go home as if nothing has happened, or he can keep fighting against increasing odds. If the player is not good enough, Walker dies at the hands of his compatriots, knowing this is the death he deserves. If the player is dedicated enough, however, Walker can kill all his rescuers, ignoring the growing sense of unease that this course of action is still fighting against the game’s message. (Fig. 5.4) Rather than giving Walker the heroic resolution he desires and, in the process, absolving the player of his misconduct, all conclusions reinforce his complicity in the many tragedies of the game. Spec Ops is unique in its feeling of inertia, pushing the player to continue engaging a game that makes him feel increasingly terrible as it progresses. Whereas most franchise shooters justify the player’s in-game violence through outlandish terrorist plots, make killing a game by giving the player money or experience points as incentives, and bury the lasting

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5.4  Walker kills the troops that have come to save him. Game conventions inspire players to keep fighting even though such motivations are contrary to the game’s message.

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effects of virtual conduct under heroic and adrenaline-soaked sequences, Spec Ops forces the player to confront his moral complicity in the actions his avatar takes. Violence in Spec Ops lingers both in the psyches of the protagonists and in the game world in ways that few shooters have attempted.   (Fig. 5.5) As the game progresses, loading screens start breaking through the fourth wall with biting comments: • • • • • • •

How many Americans have you killed today? Do you feel like a hero yet? You are still a good person. This is all your fault. If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be here. The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn’t real, so why should you care? Can you even remember why you came here?

If the player completes Spec Ops, the game makes sure he does not feel good about it. Also unique to Spec Ops is its use of technology to reinforce rather than distract from the narrative. As we have argued throughout this book, one of the strongest themes in contemporary franchise wargaming is the use of the Revolution in Military Affairs as a context for affective game mechanics. Cool weaponry that allows players to kill in new and improved ways and techniques for tagging and tracking enemies often form the core incentives that inspire progress through popular games. Spec Ops, however, resolutely resists representing most high military technology. Rather than allowing technology to distract the player by making him feel good about the ways he is killing people—a feeling at odds with the narrative thrust of the game—technology instead inspires the most critical moments of the game, such as the white phosphorus

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scene, where the effects of the player’s violence are multiplied by high technology. In the midst of the scene he feels powerful, but these positive affects are tempered by his knowledge that he is killing people he is supposed to be saving. These positive affects are later shattered as the player is forced to walk through the graveyard he has constructed, discovering the civilians he has killed. According to the narrative designer Richard Pearsey, Spec Ops contained futuristic technologies early in the development process, such as a “‘Tac’ view which highlighted enemies on the field, allowing you to direct fire to them” that “even worked through walls.”3 Fortuitously, 2K Games removed the feature because it made the game too “tactical” in orientation. The lack of such futuristic technologies, however, elicited negative reviews that emphasized the unremarkable combat mechanics of the game—they simply were not “cool.” Though such decisions, in our opinion, sacrificed limited positive press for the sake of maintaining the centrality of the narrative, 2K also gambled incorrectly in other regards, which illustrates the difficulties in balancing consumer expectations with a counterwargame experience. Drawing on expectations established by other franchise shooters, 2K insisted on including a multiplay-

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5.5 Walker’s descent into madness: at the beginning of the game (left); after the white phosphorus scene (middle); at the end of the game (right).

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er component in the game that was dissonant with the critical single-player narrative. Because funds and development resources were dwindling, nearly two and a half hours had to be cut from the single-player narrative to make room for a clunky and out-of-place multiplayer experience that received significant criticism and little use.4 Despite several awards and widespread celebration of its masterful narrative, such mistakes were ultimately fatal for the franchise. Citing fewer than expected sales, 2K announced that there would be no follow-up to Spec Ops: The Line from Yager. The future of the franchise remains uncertain. As a critical statement about the workings of the military-entertainment complex, however, Spec Ops deserves a privileged place for trying something unique in the history of wargaming. By playing off expectations established by franchise shooters, it manages to convey a narrative questioning the many assumptions of the military-entertainment complex. As both a product of the military-entertainment complex and its critique, the game suggests possibilities for generating critical narratives that point outside the glib celebration of military violence and the necessity of high military technology for future problem solving. Even though Spec Ops met with limited success, it inevitably casts a critical shadow on future wargames for those who have the opportunity to play it. Spec Ops is a shooter that calls all other shooters into question. In doing so, it creates a fracture in the production cycle of the military-entertainment complex.

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Endnotes Induction 1

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J. C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997); Tim Lenoir, “All but War Is Simulation: The Military Entertainment Complex,” Configurations 8 (2000): 238–335; Tim Lenoir, “Programming Theaters of War: Gamemakers as Soldiers,” in Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship between Information Technology and Security, ed. Robert Latham (New York: New Press, 2003), 175–198; Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood, “Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex,” in Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, ed. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 427–456; Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network (New York: Westview Press, 2001); Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Robin Andersen, A Century of Media, a Century of War (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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Andersen, A Century of Media, 247–257; Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 106. David B. Nieborg, “Changing the Rules of Engagement—Tapping into the Popular Culture of America’s Army, the Official U.S. Army Computer Game” (MA thesis, Utrecht University, 2005); David B. Nieborg, “Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: The Soft Power of Military Games,” in Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, ed. Nina Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne (New York: Routledge, 2010), 53–66. Marcus Power, “Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 CyberDeterrence,” Security Dialogue 38, no. 2 (2007): 271–288. Corey Mead, War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 77–79. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 100. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 103. Andrew Hoskins, Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq (London: Continuum, 2004), 75. Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 122–143. Ibid., 131. David L. Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 286; Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). Andersen, A Century of Media, 211–226.

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Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 116. Important treatment of tactical games and countergaming can be found in Ed Halter, “Islamogaming: The State of Gaming in the Muslim World,” PC Magazine 25, no. 23 (2006): 136–137; Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 118. Takacs, Terrorism TV, 17–18. Giles Richards, “Call of Duty: Ghosts— Preview,” Guardian, May 25, 2013, https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/ may/26/call-of-duty-ghosts-previewhirschberg. Andrei Dobra, “Call of Duty Delivers ‘Epic Realism’ and Awesome Moments, Activision Says,” Softpedia, September 6, 2011, http://news.softpedia.com/news/ Call-of-Duty-Delivers-EpicRealism-and-Awesome-MomentsActivision-Says-220365.shtml. Yves Guillemot, “A Statement from Yves Guillemot,” Ubisoft Annual Report (2009), http://www.ecobook.eu/ubisoft/ra2009uk/. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For example, Metz and Kievit summarize one of the goals of RMA analysts as “providing a blueprint for technology acquisition and force reorganization”: Steven Metz and James Kievit, “Strategy and the Revolution in Military Affairs: From Theory to Policy,” Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, 1995, vi, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/

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awcgate/ssi/stratrma.pdf. William S. Cohen, Annual Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2000), B-1. Ibid., C-1. Ibid., B-1. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar Is Coming!” Comparative Strategy 12, no. 2 (1993): 141–165. William A. Owens, “The Emerging U.S. System-of-Systems,” Strategic Forum 63 (February 1996): 1–6. Arthur K. Cebrowski and John J. Garstka, “Network-Centric Warfare—Its Origin and Future,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings 124, no. 1 (1998): 28–35. Mark Gunzinger, “Shaping America’s Future Military toward a New Force Planning Construct” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013). Andrew Krepinevich, “The MilitaryTechnical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment” (Washington, DC: Office of Net Assessment, Department of Defense, 1992); Mark Gunzinger, “Shaping America’s Future Military toward a New Force Planning Construct” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013); Metz and Kievit, “Strategy and the Revolution in Military Affairs.” Andrew Krepinevich, Robert Work, and Barry Watts, “Meeting the Anti-Access and Area-Denial Challenge” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2003). Donald Rumsfeld, Annual Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2002), 28– 29, http://history.defense.gov/HistoricalSources/Secretary-of-Defense-AnnualReports/.

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Max Boot, “The New American Way of War,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 4 (2003), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ united-states/2003-07-01/new-americanway-war. Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review Report” (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2006), 31–32. Stanley A. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network: The New Front Line of Modern Warfare,” Foreign Policy, February 22, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2011/02/22/it_takes_a_network. Owens, “Emerging U.S. System-ofSystems.” Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). Jim Thomas and Chris Dougherty, “Beyond the Ramparts: The Future of U.S. Special Operations Forces” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013), x. William H. McRaven, “Posture Statement of Admiral William H. McRaven, USN Commander, United States Special Operations Command, before the 112th Congress Senate Armed Services Committee,” March 6, 2012; Thomas and Dougherty, “Beyond the Ramparts,” x–xi. Jeremiah Gertler, “U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems,” in CRS Report for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2012), 2. Ibid., ii. Ibid., 13. Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman, “Almost 1 in 3 U.S. Warplanes Is a Robot,” Wired, January 9, 2012, https:// www.wired.com/2012/01/drone-report/. Gertler, “U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems,” 17.

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Steven Hoarn, “SOCOM Seeks Talos (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit),” DefenseMediaNetwork, May 18, 2013, http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/ stories/socom-seeks-talos-tacticalassault-light-operator-suit/; Allen McDuffee, “Special Ops Uniform Will Transform Commandos into an Iron Man Army,” Wired, October 11, 2013, https:// www.wired.com/2013/10/ironman/. Thom Shanker and Helene Cooper, “Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to Pre–World War II Level,” New York Times, February 23, 2014, http://www. nytimes.com/2014/02/24/us/politics/ pentagon-plans-to-shrink-army-to-preworld-war-ii-level.html; Nick Simeone, “Hagel Outlines Budget Reducing Troop Strength, Force Structure,” DoD News, U.S. Department of Defense, February 24, 2014, http://archive.defense.gov/news/ newsarticle.aspx?id=121703. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2.

1. From Battlezone to America’s Army 1

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J. Martin Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” Creative Computing, 7, no. 8 (1981); Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972; Ed Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006); J. C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997). Fred Hapgood, “Simnet,” Wired, April 1, 1997, http://archive.wired.com/wired/ archive/5.04/ff_simnet.html.

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Jack A. Thorpe, “Future Views: Aircrew Training, 1980–2000,” unpublished concept paper at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, September 15, 1978, discussed in Richard H. Van Atta, Sidney G. Reed, and Seymour J. Deitchman, DARPA Technical Accomplishments: An Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects, vol. 2 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, April 1991), 16-10; Michael Harris argues that SIMNET was inspired by the Atari game Battlezone: see “Entertainment Driven Collaboration,” Computer Graphics 28, no. 2 (1994): 93–96. Van Atta, Reed, and Deitchman, DARPA Technical Accomplishments, 16-10n50. Ibid., 16-13. Jack A. Thorpe, “The New Technology of Large Scale Simulator Networking: Implications for Mastering the Art of Warfighting,” in Proceedings of the 9th Interservice Industry Training Systems Conference, November 30–December 2, 1987, American Defense Preparedness Association, 1987, 492–501. R. J. Lunsford Jr., US Army Training Systems Forecast, FY 1990–1994, Project Manager for Training Devices, October 1989 (Orlando: US Army Materiel Command), 14, cited in Van Atta, Reed, and Deitchman, DARPA Technical Accomplishments, 16–31. F. Clifton Berry Jr., “Re-creating History: The Battle of 73 Easting,” National Defense 76, no. 11 (1991). Ibid. Also see the discussion of the Battle of 73 Easting in Bruce Sterling, “War Is Virtual Hell,” Wired, January 1, 1993, https://www.wired.com/1993/01/virthell/; see especially the last two pages of the online article.

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Berry, “Re-Creating History,” 6–9; 73 Easting is also discussed in Kevin Kelly, “God Games: Memorex Warfare,” in Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), http://kk.org/mt-files/outofcontrol/ ch13-e.html. 11 US Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, “Requirements Planning for Development, Test, Evaluation, and Impact on Readiness of Training Simulators and Devices” (a draft proposed audit report), Project No. 5AB-0070.00, January 10, 1997, Appendix D. 12 See Steven Woodcock’s biography, http:// www.gamasutra.com/view/authors/73/ Steven_Woodcock.php; also see Donna Coco, “Creating Intelligent Creatures: Game Developers Are Turning to AI to Give Their Characters Personalities and to Distinguish Their Titles from the Pack,” Computer Graphics World 20, no. 7 (1997): 22–28. 13 Michael Macedonia reported that perhaps the most successful use of commercial games for training has been with Microsoft Flight Simulator. The navy issued a customized version of the software to all student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at sixty-five colleges. The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has also installed Flight Simulator at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, TX, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida. See J. C. Herz and Michael Macedonia, “Computer Games and the Military: Two Views,” Defense Horizons 11 (April 2002): 1–8, esp. 7. 14 General Charles C. Krulak, Marine Corps Order 1500.55, “Military Thinking and Decision Making Exercises,” 10

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http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/ Publications/MCO%201500.55.pdf. Rob Riddell, “Doom Goes to War,” Wired, April 1, 1997, https://www.wired. com/1997/04/ff=doom/. See Tim Lenoir, “All but War Is Simulation: The Military Entertainment Complex,” Configurations 8 (2000): 238–335; Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 182–183. Michael Macedonia, “Why Digital Entertainment Drives the Need for Speed,” Computer 33, no. 3 (2000): 124–127. Committee on Modeling and Simulation, Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997). Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 96; Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 105–106. On the development of mods and the shareware movement in gaming, invaluable sources are Wagner James Au, “Triumph of the Mod,” Salon, April 16, 2002, https:// www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/04/16/ modding/; J. C. Herz, “Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn from Multiplayer Online Worlds,” in Educause: Publications from the Forum for the Future of Higher Education (2001), 169–291, https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ ffpiu019.pdf; J. C. Herz, “Harnessing the Hive: How Online Games Drive Networked Innovation,” Release 1.0 20, no. 9 (2002): 1–22, http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/

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file_archive/041017/96a13ea1954b 4fa57ad78d790077637a/JC%20Herz%20 on%20Harnessing%20the%20Hive%20 Via%20Online%20Games.pdf; J. C. Herz and Michael Macedonia, chief scientist for STRICOM, engaged in an extremely interesting and provocative discussion on user communities, game design, and the military in “Computer Games and the Military: Two Views,” Defense Horizons, April 2002, 1–8. See especially Julian Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), http://five.fibreculturejournal. org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-moddersand-the-digital-games-industry/. Ben Morris’s career is discussed on many game websites. One of the most helpful interviews was done by Vangie “Aurora” Beal, “The Past, Present and Future of Worldcraft,” 1999, http://www.quakewiki. net/archives/legacy/design/rora-wc.html. Marc Laidlaw, “My World and Welcome to It,” Wired, March 1, 1997, http://www. wired.com/1997/03/my-world-andwelcome-to-it/. Laidlaw subsequently joined Valve Software as a writer and game designer. For background on Valve, see Jeff Dunn, “Full Steam Ahead: The History of Valve,” Gamesradar 4 (October 2013), http:// www.gamesradar.com/history-of-valve/; Michael Thomsen, “Ode to Source: A History of Valve’s Tireless Game Engine,” IGN.com, September 22, 2009, http:// www.ign.com/articles/2009/09/22/ode-tosource-a-history-of-valves-tireless-gameengine. Ron Dulin, “Half-Life Review: Half-Life Is the Closest Thing to a Revolutionary Step the Genre Has Ever Taken,” Gamespot, November 20, 1998, http://www.game

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spot.com/reviews/half-lifereview/1900-2537398/. Nicholas Tufnell, “Interview: Gabe Newell,” Cambridge Student, November 24, 2011, http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/ interviews/0012301-interview-gabenewell.html. David Houghton, “Why Half-Life 2 Is Still the Greatest FPS Ever Made, 10 Years On,” Gamesradar+, November 16, 2014, http://www.gamesradar.com/why-halflife-2-still-greatest-fps-ever-made-10years/. Minh Le, “I Am Minh Le, Aka. Gooseman, Co-Creator of the Original Counter-Strike and Now Tactical Intervention, Ama!” Reddit.com 2014, http://www. reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1dkeht/ iam_minh_le_aka_gooseman_cocreator_ of_the/; Bruce Rolston, “The Secret Life of Gooseman,” Adrenaline Vault, December 29, 2000, http://www.snappingturtle. net/jmc/flit/avault_gooseman.htm. “Cyberathlete Professional League Kicks-Off Summer Championship Event,” PR Newswire, July 16, 2002, http://www.prnewswire. com/news-releases/cyberathleteprofessional-league-kicks-off-summerchampionship-event-76218382.html. See America’s Army Fact Sheet, and America’s Army Backgrounder at http:// www.americasarmy.com/press. See Amer Ajami, “America’s Army Operations Preview,” Gamespot PC Previews, July 2, 2002, http://www.gamespot.com/ articles/americas-army-operationspreview/1100-2873293/; Brian Kennedy, “Uncle Sam Wants You (To Play This Game),” New York Times, July 11, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/11/ technology/uncle-sam-wants-you-toplay-this-game.html; Kyle Ackerman and

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Rob de los Reyes gave America’s Army their E3 award for the best business model for a game; see “Frictionless Insight’s First Annual E3 Awards,” Frictionless Insight, May 24, 2002 http://www.movesinstitute. org/~zyda/Press/Frictionless24May2002. pdf. And it was Gamespy’s “Best PC Action Game runner-up 2002,” http://gamepipe.usc.edu/zyda/styled/index.html. The study is quoted in Gary Webb, “The Killing Game,” Newsreview.com: Sacramento News & Review, October 14, 2004, http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/ killing-game/content?oid=31755. Margaret Davis et al., “Making America’s Army: The Wizardry behind the U.S. Army’s Hit PC Game,” in America’s Army PC Game: Vision and Realization, ed. Margaret Davis. Monterey, CA: US Army and MOVES Institute, 2004), 11. David B. Nieborg, “Changing the Rules of Engagement—Tapping into the Popular Culture of America’s Army, the Official U.S. Army Computer Game” (MA thesis, Utrecht University, 2005), 25. Zyda et al., “From Viz-Sim.” Webb, “Killing Game.” Margaret Davis, “He Saw It Coming: An Interview with Jack Thorpe,” in America’s Army PC Game: Vision and Realization. A Look at the Artistry, Technique, and Impact of the United States Army’s Groundbreaking Tool for Strategic Communication, ed. Margaret Davis (Monterey, CA: U.S. Army and the MOVES Institute, 2004), 30–31; reprised in Jack Thorpe, “Trends in Modeling, Simulation, & Gaming: Personal Observations about the Past Thirty Years and Speculation about the Next Ten,” Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), 2010, 1–53.

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Davis, “He Saw It Coming.” Jack A. Thorpe, “Perspectives on Distributed Simulation, Persistent Worlds, Command, and Control,” presentation at the MOVES Institute, Monterey, CA, September 2003.

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2. Creating Repeat Consumers 1

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Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 100. Robert Purchese, “Bohemia’s War: The Story of the Company behind Arma and DayZ,” Eurogamer, April 30, 2014, http:// www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-04-29bohemias-war-the-story-of-thecompany-behind-arma-and-dayz; Michael Peck, “Battle of the Video Games: Rivals Dual for U.S. Army Training Business,” Defense News, December 1, 2009. “BBN Technologies Helps to Launch ‘DARWARS Ambush!’ New PC-Based Combat Team Trainer for U.S. Soldiers in Iraq,” Business Wire, December 7, 2004, http://www.businesswire.com/news/ home/20041207005218/en/BBNTechnologies-Helps-Launch-DARWARSAmbush!-PC-Based. Sean Gallagher, “Army’s New Training Shooter Makes Out of Shape Soldiers Look Fat,” Ars Technica, May 19, 2014, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/ armys-new-training-shooter-makes-outof-shape-soldiers-look-fat/. Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 111. Jon R. Anderson, “‘America’s Army: Proving Grounds’ Out Today,” Army Times, August 29, 2013. Unless otherwise noted, game sales statistics are drawn from http://vgchartz.com.

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Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 75–79; David B. Nieborg, “Mods, Nay! Tournaments, Yay!—The Appropriation of Contemporary Game Culture by the U.S. Military,” Fibreculture Journal 8 (2006), http://eight. fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-051-modsnay-tournaments-yay-the-appropriationof-contemporary-game-culture-by-the-us-military/; David B. Nieborg, “Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: The Soft Power of Military Games,” in Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, ed. Nina Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne (New York: Routledge, 2010), 53–66. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 40. Kevin Roberts, Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands (New York: powerHouse Books, 2005), 42–43; emphasis in original. Alan Webber, “Trust in the Future: Interview with Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi,” Fast Company 38 (September 2000), http://www.fastcompany. com/41364/trust-future. Roberts, Lovemarks, 75. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 133. Richard A. Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 76. Massumi is quoted in Mary Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change (New York: Routledge, 2003), 232–233; emphasis in original. Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007); Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Nigel Thrift, “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 175–190; Patricia Ticineto Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); N. Katherine Hayles, “The Traumas of Code,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 136–157; Grusin, Premediation. Hayles, “The Traumas of Code.” Colin Milburn, Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Ibid, 56. Ibid., 55–56. Ibid., 56. Nicholas Varangis, “From Pixels to Policies,” August 2015, http://artoffuturewarfare.org/2015/08/from-pixels-to-policies/. “Washington Think Tank Hires ‘Call of Duty’ Creator to Advise Pentagon on Future Threats to US,” RT.com, September 28, 2014, http://rt.com/usa/191296pentagon-call-duty-advise/. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer of our manuscript for pointing us in the direction of the work of the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 26–27, 31–32. Seb Franklin, “The Cut and the Code: Towards a Digital Economy of Film Editing” (unpublished paper, 2009), cited in Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: 0 Books, 2010), 118. Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect, 119.

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Ibid., 124. Ubisoft Entertainment, Ubisoft Annual Report 2008 (2008), [31], https://www. ubisoftgroup.com/comsite_common/ en-US/images/Annual_Report_ 2008tcm9927542.pdf. Stephen Totilo, “Why Activision Let Go of ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘50 Cent’ Games,” MTV Multiplayer, November 5, 2008, http://multiplayerblog.mtv. com/2008/11/05/why-activision-let-goof-ghostbusters-and-50-cent-games/. Adam Satariano, “Did Activision Just Frag Itself?” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 22, 2010, http://www.bloomberg. com/bw/magazine/content/10_18/ b4176053952018.htm; Randy Nichols, The Video Game Business (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 65–66; Chris Suellentrop, “Big Franchise: Modern Warfare,” Rolling Stone, May 31, 2012. Bogost, Persuasive Games, 59; emphasis in original. The stealth-shooter genre, for example, often gives players incentives to avoid violence. While this is an exception to the general tendency here, stealth-shooter games also fall somewhat outside the popular wargame frame of reference we are using. Many of the most popular stealth-shooter franchises, such as Metal Gear Solid and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, have seen falling returns as console gaming has become more mainstream. Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013) and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes (2014), the latest entries in their respective franchises, have seen around 2 million sales each. By way of comparison, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) has sold 19.5 million copies and Battlefield 4 (2013) 12.5 million, placing them in drastically different categories.

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This is not to say that franchise wargames are incapable of dealing with controversial and thought-provoking subject matter. The infamous “No Russian” level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in which the player is tasked with slaughtering civilians in a terrorist attack, is a great example of such a provocative scenario. Content like “No Russian,” however, is profoundly rare in franchise wargames and is routinely transformed into a reason and justification for military violence rather than its critique. Aaron Thomas, “Medal of Honor: Airborne Review,” Gamespot, September 4, 2007, http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ medal-of-honor-airbornereview/1900-6178113/. Battlefield 1942 did include a single-player mode in which bots were substituted for other players, but in terms of function, that mode was similar enough to call it a multiplayer game. Scott Osborne, “Battlefield 1942 Review,” Gamespot, September 16, 2002, http:// www.gamespot.com/reviews/battlefield1942-review/1900-2880344/. Christopher Dring, “The Medal of Honor Killer: A Call of Duty Story,” MCV, November 1, 2013, http://www.mcvuk.com/ news/read/the-medal-of-honor-killer-acall-of-duty-story/0123617. Bob Colayco, “Call of Duty 2 Review,” Gamespot, November 15, 2005, http:// www.gamespot.com/reviews/call-of-duty2-review/1900-6139892/. “An Introduction to Videogame Design History,” Game Design Forum, 2014, http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/ GDH_1.html. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 40. “Battlefield 2 Review for PC,” Gamer Mall,

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July 1, 2006, http://www.gamermall.com/ computer-games/reviews/battlefield-2. htm; William D’Angelo, “Battlefield: A Sales History,” VGChartz, June 6, 2012, http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250173/ battlefield-a-sales-history/. Electronic Arts, “Medal of Honor Warfighter—EA,” 2013, http://www.ea.com/ medal-of-honor-warfighter. David Martin, “7 Navy SEALs Disciplined for Role with Video Game,” CBS Evening News, November 8, 2012, http://www. cbsnews.com/news/7-navy-sealsdisciplined-for-role-with-video-game/; Spencer Ackerman, “After Taking SEALs Hollywood, Navy Slams Commandos for Videogame,” Wired, November 9, 2012, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/ 2012/11/seal-video-game/. Simon Parkin, “Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers,” Eurogamer, January 31, 2013, http://www. eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-01shooters-how-video-games-fundarms-manufacturers. Ryan Smith, “Partners in Arms,” Gameological Society, August 13, 2012, http:// gameological.com/2012/08/partners-inarms/. Quoted in John Walker, “War Torn: EA Shouldn’t Have Cancelled Medal of Honor,” Rock, Paper, Shotgun, January 31, 2013, http://www.rockpapershotgun. com/2013/01/31/medal-of-honorcancelled/. John Walker, “Wot I Think—Medal Of Honor: Warfighter Singleplayer,” Rock, Paper, Shotgun, October 29, 2012, http:// www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/29/ wot-i-think-medal-of-honor-warfighter/. David Streitfeld, “This Is War (for a Game Industry’s Soul),” New York Times, October

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19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10 /20/technology/this-is-war-for-a-gameindustrys-soul.html. Mike Snider, “Interview: ‘Black Ops II’ Consultant Peter Singer,” USA Today, May 2, 2012, http://content.usatoday.com/ communities/gamehunters/post/2012/05/ interview-black-ops-ii-consultantpeter-singer/1. Ubisoft Entertainment, “Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter,” 2006, http://http:// www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-2/ tom-clancys-ghost-recon-advancedwarfighter/details. Technology like this was reportedly used by SEAL Team Six during the Bin Laden raid, to great effect. See Spencer Ackerman, “Eye Spy: Monocle Gives Commandos Drone Vision,” Wired, May 19, 2011, http://www.wired.com/2011/05/eyespy-monocle-gives-commandos-dronevision/; Stephen Trimble, “Report: RQ170 Spied over Osama Bin Laden’s Bed Last Night,” Flightglobal: Aviation Connected, May 2, 2011, https://web.archive.org/ web/20140714014055/http://www. flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2011/ 05/report-rq-170-spied-over-osama/. David Crookes, “Call of Duty Advanced Warfare Review: It’s Exactly What the Series Needed,” Independent, November 4, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/ life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gaming/callof-duty-advanced-warfare-first-lookreview-this-is-what-the-series-needed9838996.html. Bogost, Persuasive Games.

3. Coming to a Screen Near You 1

Jonathan Hurley, foreword to David L. Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the

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Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 13–22. Robin Andersen, A Century of Media, a Century of War (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010). Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 6. Andersen, A Century of Media, 173. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 227–230; see also Daniel C. Hallin and Todd Gitlin, “Agon and Ritual: The Gulf War as Popular Culture and as Television Drama,” Political Communication 10, no. 4 (1993): 411–424; David Holloway, Cultures of the War on Terror: Empire, Ideology, and the Remaking of 9/11 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 66–70. Stahl uses the term “spectacular war” in Militainment, Inc., 31. Marc Cooper, “Lights! Cameras! Attack! Hollywood Enlists,” Nation, December 10, 2001, http://www.thenation.com/article/ lights-cameras-attack-hollywood-enlists#. John Kampfner, “The Truth about Jessica,” Guardian, May 15, 2003, http://www. theguardian.com/world/2003/may/15/ iraq.usa2; Stacy Takacs, “Jessica Lynch and the Regeneration of American Identity and Power Post-9/11,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 297–310. James Castonguay, “Conglomeration, New Media, and the Cultural Production of the ‘War on Terror,’” Cinema Journal 43, no. 4 (2004): 102–108; James Castonguay, “Intermedia and the War on Terror,” in Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror,” ed. Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,

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2006), 151–178; James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the MilitaryIndustrial-Media-Entertainment Network (New York: Westview Press, 2001). Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11,” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June 2004): 235–270. Jacqueline Furby, “Interesting Times: The Demands 24’s Real-Time Format Makes on Its Audience,” in Reading 24: TV against the Clock, ed. Steven Peacock (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 59–70. Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: 0 Books, 2010), 1–10; Steven Shaviro, “Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption,” e-flux journal 46 (June 2013), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ accelerationist-aesthetics-necessaryinefficiency-in-times-of-real-subsumption/. Jane Mayer, “Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man behind ‘24,’” New Yorker, February 19, 2007, 66–83, http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/19/ whatever-it-takes. John Leonard, “Rush Hour. Jack Bauer Takes Another Licking. But Have the Show’s Scenes of Torture Become Too Topical?” New York Magazine, January 10, 2005, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/tv/ reviews/10797/. Mayer, “Whatever It Takes.” Dan Burstein and Arne J. de Keijzer, Secrets of 24 (New York: Sterling, 2007), 87. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 77. Bill Keveney, “Fictional ‘24’ Brings Real Issue of Torture Home,” USA Today, March 13, 2005, http://usatoday30.

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usatoday.com/life/television/news/200503-13-24-torture_x.htm. Christian William Erickson, “Thematics of Counterterrorism: Comparing 24 and MI-5/Spooks,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 3 (2008): 349. Quoted in Colin Freeze, “What Would Jack Bauer Do?” Globe and Mail, June 16, 2007, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/national/what-would-jack-bauerdo/article687726/. Burstein and de Keijzer, Secrets of 24, 162–163. Ibid., 95. Stewart Lee Allen, “Jack Bauer Wants You! The CIA Is Infiltrating Movie Theaters with a Snazzy New ‘24’-Style Ad Campaign,” Salon, September 19, 2006, http://www.salon.com/2006/09/19/ cia_ads/. Bruce Schneier, “The Blowfish Encryption Algorithm,” in “Schneier on Security,” 2005, https://www.schneier.com/ academic/blowfish/. Bruce Schneier, “Blowfish on 24, Again,” in “Schneier on Security,” 2009, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/ 2009/03/blowfish_on_24_1.html. Ibid. Christine Aylward, “Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh Talk ‘Act of Valor,’” Reel Life, Real Stories from MakingOf.com, February 22, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=ZCF7PZlwQ6A. Mike McCoy quoted ibid. Rebecca Keegan, “‘Act of Valor’ Must Balance Publicity, Secrecy with Navy SEALs,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/ 12/entertainment/la-ca-act-of-valor20120212. Daniel Restuccio, “Cover Story: Act of

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Valor,” Post, February 1, 2012, http:// www.postmagazine.com/Publications/ Post-Magazine/2012/February-1-2012/ Cover-Story-Act-of-Valor.aspx. Ibid.; Canon USA, “Canon EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR Cameras Take Moviegoers Deep into the Daring Operations of Active-Duty U.S. Navy SEALs in Relativity Media’s Act of Valor,” press release, February 24, 2012, http://www.usa.canon. com/internet/portal/us/home/about/ newsroom/press-releases/press-releasedetails/2012/20120224_actofvalor_ pressreleasedata/. Pew Research Center, “Public Attitudes toward the War in Iraq: 2003–2008,” March 19, 2008, http://www.pewresearch. org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-towardthe-war-in-iraq-20032008/. Edward Douglas, “Exclusive: An InDepth Iron Man Talk with Jon Favreau,” SuperHeroHype, April 29, 2008, http:// www.superherohype.com/features/96427exclusive-an-in-depth-iron-man-talkwith-jon-favreau. Stan Lee commentary, Iron Man DVD (Paramount, 2008). Douglas, “Exclusive: An In-Depth Iron Man Talk.” Asawin Suebsaeng, “Like Most Libertarians, Iron Man Grows Up and Moves On,” Mother Jones, May 3, 2013, http://www. motherjones.com/mixed-media/2013/05/ film-review-iron-man-3-politics. Peter W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Raytheon, “Raytheon Sarcos Exoskeleton Robotic Suit Linked to Iron Man Superhero,” press release, May 2, 2008, http:// investor.raytheon.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=84193&p=irol-newsArticle&ID

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=1139099; Gregory Mone, “Building the Real Iron Man,” Popular Science, April 9, 2008, http://www.popsci.com/scitech/ article/2008-04/building-real-iron-man. Donna Miles, “Edwards Team Starts in ‘Iron Man’ Superhero Movie,” US Air Force News, May 2, 2007, http://archive.is/kpcs. Donna Miles, “Military, Hollywood Team Up to Create Realism, Drama on Big Screen,” American Forces Press Service, June 8, 2007, http://archive.defense.gov/ News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=46352. On the Scorpion Helmet Mounted Cueing System, see product advertisements at http://www.thalesvisionix.com/. Douglas, “Exclusive: An In-Depth Iron Man Talk.”

4. Press X to Hack 1

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Brian Bennett, “Cyberattacks Pose Growing Threat to U.S., Intelligence Chief Says,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-naintel-cyber-20150226-story.html. Alex McQuade, “2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Lawfare, February 12, 2016, https://www.lawfareblog. com/2016-worldwide-threat-assessmentus-intelligence-community. Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 21–54; Declan McCullagh, “From ‘WarGames’ to Aaron Swartz: How U.S. Anti-Hacking Law Went Astray,” CNET, March 13, 2013, https://www.cnet.com/ news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartzhow-u-s-anti-hacking-law-went-astray/. Kevin D. Mitnick and William L. Simon, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the

4

5

6

7 8

9

10

World’s Most Wanted Hacker (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung, Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, & the Malware-Industrial Complex (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2014); Donald Kagan, Gary Schmitt, and Thomas Donnelly, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (Washington, DC: Project for the New American Century, 2000), 57. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2010), 38. William J. Lynn III, “Defending a New Domain: The Pentagon’s Cyberstrategy,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 5 (2010): 98–99. Ibid., 100. Ellen Nakashima, “War Game Reveals U.S. Lacks Cyber-Crisis Skills,” Washington Post, February 17, 2010, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2010/02/16/AR2010021605762. html; Mike McConnell, “Mike McConnell on How to Win the Cyber-War We’re Losing,” Washington Post, February 28, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/ AR2010022502493.html?. Earlier hacking games that do not engage with the modern idea of cyberwarfare have been skipped over here, but they have been highly influential nonetheless. Games like introversion Software’s Uplink: Hacker Elite and the many mods that followed in its wake created the genre of “hacking simulators.” While these simulators are important in their own right and merit further study, they also fall well below the popularity threshold we have used in this study. Dave Tach, “Watch Dogs Hidden

256

11

12

13

14

15 16 17

18

19

Camera Prank Wows and Terrifies Its Targets with Convincing Tech,” Polygon, May 16, 2014, http://www.polygon. com/2014/5/16/5723578/watch-dogsprank-video. Timothy J. Seppala, “The Real-Life Hacking behind Watch Dogs’ Virtual World,” Engadget, May 23, 2014, http://www. engadget.com/2014/05/23/watch-dogshacking-kaspersky/. David E. Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks against Iran,” New York Times, June 1, 2012, http://www. nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/ middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-ofcyberattacks-against-iran.html. Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Accelerating Cyberweapon Research,” Washington Post, March 18, 2012, http://www. washingtonpost.com/world/nationalsecurity/us-accelerating-cyberweaponresearch/2012/03/13/gIQAMRGVLS_ story.html. Quoted in Noah Shachtman, “This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds,” Wired, May 28, 2013, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/ 2013/05/pentagon-cyberwar-angrybirds/all/. Ibid. Ibid. Andy Greenberg, “Darpa Turns Oculus into a Weapon for Cyberwar,” Wired, May 23, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/05/ darpa-is-using-oculus-rift-to-prep-forcyberwar/. Joseph Menn, “Special Report—U.S. Cyberwar Strategy Stokes Fear of Blowback,” Reuters, May 10, 2013, http://in.reuters. com/article/usa-cyberweaponsidINDEE9490AX20130510. Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald,

20

21

22

“How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware,” Intercept, March 12, 2014, https://theintercept. com/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infectmillions-computers-malware/. Ellen Nakashima, “Pentagon Cyber Unit Wants to ‘Get inside the Bad Guy’s Head,’” Washington Post, June 19, 2014, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/ checkpoint/wp/2014/06/19/pentagoncyber-unit-wants-to-get-inside-thebad-guys-head/. Steven Musil, “Pre-Emptive Cyberattack Defense Possible, Panetta Warns,” CNET, October 11, 2012, https://www.cnet.com/ news/pre-emptive-cyberattackdefense-possible-panetta-warns/. John Slye, “Federal Cybersecurity Market to Grow amid Challenges,” Washington Post, November 11, 2012, http://www. washingtonpost.com/business/capital business/federal-cybersecurity-marketto-grow-amid-challenges/2012/11/09/ c2807218-251f-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_ story.html; Aliya Sternstein, “White House’s $14 Billion Cyber Spending Claim Is Squishy,” Nextgov, November 8, 2013, http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/ cybersecurity-report/2013/11/whitehouses-14-billion-cyber-spendingclaim-squishy/73475/. Discharge

1

While other shooter-themed franchises such as Bioshock (17–25 million sales) and Mass Effect (15 million sales) offer complex moral questions for players to engage with, they are somewhat afield of the general trend we are describing as central to the military-entertainment complex. Not only are these games better charac-

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terized as sci-fi shooters, they are also in far different sales brackets from franchises like Call of Duty (218 million sales) and Battlefield (44 million sales). 2 For more on this line of argument, see the wonderfully detailed analysis in Brendan Keogh, Killing Is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line (Marden, Australia: Stolen Projects, 2012). 3 Richard Pearsey, e-mail message to Luke Caldwell, March 29, 2015. 4 Ibid.

Linkography The Revolution in Military Affairs http://www.comw.org/rma/fulltext/overview. html http://www.army.mil/aps/2003/realizing/ transformation/operational/objective/ http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ndu/ tam/01_toc.htm http://archive.defense.gov/news/Defense_ Strategic_Guidance.pdf http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/ 2013/01/the-measure-of-superpower-a-twomajor-regional-contingency-military-for21-century https://www.discovery.org/a/655 Videogames http://www.americasarmy.com/ https://www.callofduty.com/ http://www.military.com/off-duty/games/ http://www.battlefield.com/ http://www.specopstheline.com/ http://www.thegamedesignforum.com/ Technology http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/ 2008-04/building-real-iron-man http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/ Article/604009 http://defensetech.org/ http://passcode.csmonitor.com/planx http://www.darpa.mil/ http://www.darpa.mil/program/plan-x Business http://www.saatchikevin.com/lovemarks/ future-beyond-brands/ https://www.ubisoft.com/en-US/company/ investor_center/annual_report.aspx

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http://investor.activision.com/annual-reports. cfm http://investor.ea.com/annuals.cfm http://vgchartz.com/gamedb/

Acknowledgments We are grateful to a number of persons for their contributions to our project. We owe special thanks to Jackie Winston for her collaboration with us in the design and graphical rendering of the graphic novella that introduces the themes of our volume. Patrick Herron contributed his expertise in text and data mining in extracting and quantitatively analyzing content related to themes of militarization in cinema and television from the Internet Movie Database. We draw on this work in Chapter 3. Cheri Ross provided a constant supply of feedback and editorial assistance, for which we are mightily indebted. Jeffrey Schnapp and the staff and colleagues of the metaLAB series at Harvard University Press have been exceptional in bringing this project to fruition. From conceptualization and design of the book to shepherding it to completion, they have been outstanding and persistent. In addition, the anonymous reviewers of our manuscript provided deep and insightful recommendations that we believe strengthen the argument of the book. For their comments and helpful suggestions we are grateful. Luke Caldwell would like to thank the Beinecke family for financial support through the Beinecke Scholarship Program, as well as their program director, Tom Parkinson, for his assistance, advice, and continuous advocacy. He would also like to thank the Fred and Barbara Sutherland Fellowship Endowment and the Jenkins Family Graduate Fellowship Fund for their sponsorship of research during the summers of 2014 and 2015. Portions of Chapter 2 have appeared in our essay entitled “Wargaming Futures: Naturalizing the New American Way of War,” in

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Zones of Control: War Gaming on Tabletop and Screen, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew Kirschenbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016). Finally, we want to thank our partners, Cheri Ross and Elizabeth Caldwell, for their generosity, patience, and sacrifice of many evenings devoted to the playing of wargames and viewing seemingly countless movies and TV episodes devoted to contemporary war— way beyond the call of duty.

Credits

released as a free downloadable modification of Half-Life.

Graphic novella: Jackie Winston, 2015.

1.7

Boot camp training in America’s Army. Source: Michael Zyda, America’s Army, US Army, 2002.

2.1

In Virtual Battlespace 2, targets are often engaged at greater than two hundred meters, which produces combat scenarios that are very different from those in popular wargames. Source: Virtual Battlespace 2, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, 2007.

1. From Battlezone to America’s Army 1.1

Jack Thorpe’s early vision of the military SIMNET. Source: Jack Thorpe, “Trends in Modeling, Simulation, & Gaming: Personal Observations about the Past Thirty Years and Speculation about the Next Ten,” in Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2010 (2010), 8.

1.2

A scene from the simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Source: The Battle of 73 Easting: A Simulation of War, video, DARPA and the Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, VA, 1993.

1.3

A screenshot from Doom. Source: id Software, Doom, 1993.

1.4

A screenshot from Marine Doom. Source: Dan Snyder, Scott Barnett, and Luis E. Velazquez, Marine Doom (US Marine Corps game modification of Doom), 1996.

1.5

1.6

A screenshot from Half-Life. Source: Marc Laidlaw, Half-Life, Valve Corporation, 1998. A screenshot from Counter-Strike. Source: Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, Counter-Strike, Valve Corporation, 1999;

260

2. Creating Repeat Consumers 2.2

In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 wounded enemies shoot at you with pistols until you finish them off. Source: Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision, 2011.

2.3

The aftermath of a nuclear strike in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Activision, 2007.

2.4

The Russian occupation of the White House following a sneak invasion in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Activision, 2009.

2.5

The Eiffel Tower epically crashes to the ground in Modern Warfare 3. Source: Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision, 2011.

2.6

Racing after terrorists in possession of a suitcase nuke in Times Square in Battlefield 3. Source: EA Digital Illusions CE, Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts, 2011.

2.7

The RMA aesthetic in Battlefield 3. Source: EA Digital Illusions CE, Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts, 2011.

2.8

US Navy SEALs conduct night raids on stealth ATVs in Medal of Honor. Source: Danger Close Games and EA Digital Illusions CE, Medal of Honor, Electronic Arts, 2010.

2.9

In Medal of Honor: Warfighter, US Navy SEALs rescue the hostage Captain Phillips from Somali pirates in a mission directly drawn from contemporary events. Source: Danger Close Games, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Electronic Arts, 2012.

2.10

Medal of Honor: Warfighter allows players to customize weaponry using brandname weapons, scopes, silencers, and other modifications widely available for purchase on the Internet. This Heckler & Koch 416 has a total of ninety-four parts that can be unlocked, such as the Aimpoint Micro T-1 weapon sight. Source: Danger Close Games, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Electronic Arts, 2012.

2.11

2.12

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Thermal imaging combined with smoke grenades conveys a distinct advantage to high-tech counterterrorism forces in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Ubisoft, 2008. In Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Sol-

dier, magnetic vision and sensor grenades allow X-ray vision and tagging and tracking of enemy forces. Source: Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Red Storm, and Ubisoft Romania, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, 2012. 2.13

Special operatives ride horses in Afghanistan in the 1980s, whereas forces of the future in Call of Duty: Black Ops II use sophisticated Wingsuits to deploy to enemy territory. Source: Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision, 2012.

2.14

In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Captain Price launches a nuclear weapon at Washington, DC, after breaking aboard a Russian submarine, causing an EMP blast that results in rolling blackouts and destroys the International Space Station. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Activision, 2009.

2.15

A machine gun–equipped quadcopter drone in Call of Duty: Black Ops II helps you take back Los Angeles from the hijacked US drone fleet and a coordinated mercenary ground invasion. Source: Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision, 2012.

3. Coming to a Screen Near You 3.1

RMA terms used in TV episodes, 1990– 2013. Source: IMDb.com.

3.2

RMA-US episodes as percentage of all US episodes, 1990–2013. Source: IMDb.com.

3.3

RMA terms used in movies, 1990–2013. Source: IMDb.com.

3.4

The terrorist plot countdown in 24: Live Another Day: multiple threads are in play. Source: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, 24: Live Another Day, TV miniseries, 20th Century Fox Television, 2014.

3.5

3.6

3.7

3.8

3.9

A torture scene from 24: Live Another Day. Chloe O’Brian is subjected to “harsh interrogation” in a secret CIA facility in London. Source: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, 24: Live Another Day, TV miniseries, 20th Century Fox Television, 2014. See-through building technology enables Chloe O’Brian to guide Jack Bauer to the terrorists in 24: Live Another Day. Source: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, 24: Live Another Day, TV miniseries, 20th Century Fox Television, 2014. Jack Bauer seizes the joystick for the hijacked drone from the terrorist just in time to avert the destruction of Waterloo Station, London. Source: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, 24: Live Another Day, TV miniseries, 20th Century Fox Television, 2014. Navy SEALs launch a Raven drone from a Special Operations Craft-Riverine (SOC-R) in Act of Valor. Source: Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, Act of Valor, Bandito Brothers Production, 2012. A screen view of the automated targeting of a terrorist by a Raven drone in Act of Valor.

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Source: Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, Act of Valor, Bandito Brothers Production, 2012. 3.10

Scott Waugh filming Act of Valor with a Canon EOS 5-D Mark II camera to generate a first-person videogame aesthetic. Source: Canon USA press releases: http:// www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/ home/about/newsroom/press-releases/ press-release-details/2012/20120224_actofvalor_pressreleasedata/.

3.11

The helmet-cam rig for generating first-person POV footage in Act of Valor. Source: Canon USA press releases: http:// www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/ home/about/newsroom/press-releases/ press-release-details/2012/20120224_actofvalor_pressreleasedata/.

3.12

A navy SEAL’s first-person POV in a terrorist camp in Act of Valor. Source: Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, Act of Valor, Bandito Brothers Production, 2012. A first-person video sequence of a navy SEAL shooting the bad guys as he loses consciousness in Act of Valor. Source: Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, Act of Valor, Bandito Brothers Production, 2012.

3.13–3.15

3.16

Tony Stark designing and fitting out his Iron Man suit in his home lab. Source: Jon Favreau, Iron Man, Marvel Studios, 2008.

3.17

Iron Man’s intelligent helmet with data visor. Source: Jon Favreau, Iron Man, Marvel

Studios, 2008. 3.18

TNT014\\Iron Man’s intelligent system for precision targeting of terrorists. Source: Jon Favreau, Iron Man, Marvel Studios, 2008.

3.19

Iron Man being chased by the lumbering Iron Monger billowing fire and smoke that is reminiscent of the outdated ICBMs of the Cold War era. Source: Jon Favreau, Iron Man, Marvel Studios, 2008.

4. Press X to Hack:

4.6

Watch_Dogs seamlessly allows you to “hack” into other players’ single-player games and steal their data. The target is notified when you begin installing a backdoor virus, and the other player must eliminate you before the installation is complete or face the consequences. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft, 2014.

4.7

The Plan X prototype for visualizing cyberwarfare. Source: DARPA, Arlington, VA, 2014.

5.1

Walking through the aftermath of the white phosphorus attack that kills dozens of US soldiers and refugees in Spec Ops: The Line. Source: Yager Development, Spec Ops: The Line, 2K Games, 2012.

4.1

Hacking a locked case is easy as pressing X for a few seconds in Black Ops II. Source: Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision, 2012.

4.2

The hijacked drone fleet descends on Los Angeles in Black Ops II. Source: Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision, 2012.

5.2

A mother tries to shield her child from the effects of white phosphorus. Source: Yager Development, Spec Ops: The Line, 2K Games, 2012.

4.3

Hacking a steam pipe from a hacked surveillance camera in Watch_Dogs. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft, 2014.

5.3

Konrad forces Walker to choose who lives and who dies. Source: Yager Development, Spec Ops: The Line, 2K Games, 2012.

4.4

In Watch_Dogs Pearce’s cell phone uses facial recognition technology to profile passersby, snoop on conversations, and steal money and information. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft, 2014.

5.4

4.5

At its hardest, the hacking in Watch_Dogs takes the form of small puzzles. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft, 2014.

5.5

Walker kills the troops that have come to save him. Game conventions inspire players to keep fighting even though such motivations are contrary to the game’s message. Source: Yager Development, Spec Ops: The Line, 2K Games, 2012. Walker’s descent into madness: at the beginning of the game (left); after the white phosphorus scene (middle); at the end of the game (right).

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Source: Yager Development, Spec Ops: The Line, 2K Games, 2012.

Modern Warfare 2, Activision, 2009. W2.2.1 Activision

Windows in Chapter 2 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the dramatic death of Soap (left) is followed by a violent interrogation by the team leader, Captain Price. Source: Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision, 2011.

W2.1.1 In

W2.1.2 Killing a teammate in Battlefield 3 in

order to protect Dima, a Russian special operative with information on a nuclear threat. The ends justify the means. Source: EA Digital Illusions CE, Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts, 2011. W2.1.3 A

navy SEAL team of two is vastly outnumbered by Chechen Taliban enemies in Medal of Honor. Source: Danger Close Games and EA Digital Illusions CE, Medal of Honor, Electronic Arts, 2010. customization in Call of Duty: Ghosts allows greater avatar identification and investment. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision, 2013.

W2.1.4 Weapon

W2.1.5 Captain

Price guides you on a Special Forces raid in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Instead of requiring agency or problem-solving skills, Price tells you exactly what to do. Doing otherwise breaks your cover and leads to difficulties. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty:

264

aggressively markets upgrades to its latest franchise installment. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision, 2013.

W2.2.2 Call

of Duty: Ghosts offers countless multiplayer leveling opportunities to keep players from exhausting game content too quickly. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision, 2013 building in Battlefield 3 epically collapses after an earthquake in Iraq, setting the stage for an insurgent takeover of the area. Source: EA Digital Illusions CE, Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts, 2011.

W2.2.3 A

W2.2.4 If

you deviate from the expected path in popular wargames, you are usually warned to return or die. This allows developers to ensure you receive the affective experience they intend and narrows development efforts and asset creation to strictly defined areas. Source: EA Digital Illusions CE, Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts, 2011.

W2.2.5 Players

are rewarded for getting a “Rampage” in Modern Warfare 3 with an explosion of cash. Source: Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision, 2011. W2.3.1 In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, terrorists led by the Russian Vladimir Makarov execute civilians at a Russian airport.

Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Activision, 2009.

Ubisoft, 2014. W4.2

W2.3.2 High-tech

weapons like Odin (left) and new forms of support equipment like the combat exoskeleton (right) make wargames seem new because they generate new mechanics and forms of play. Source: Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Activision, 2013; Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Activision, 2014.

W2.3.3 Weapon

leveling challenges for the ACR 6.8 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Source: Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision, 2011. AGR kill-streak reward in Call of Duty: Black Ops II gives you an automated ground robot that protects you and gives you additional kills in exchange for gaining 1,000 points without dying. Source: Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision, 2012.

W2.3.4 The

Windows in Chapter 4 W4.1 In Watch_Dogs, you steal a trove of

encrypted data that you know is key to rescuing your kidnapped sister as well as unlocking wide-ranging conspiracies, but you are unable to immediately access the data. You therefore embark on subsequent missions to find other hackers (T-Bone) capable of cracking the encryption. When it is cracked, the narrative conflict quickly resolves. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Watch_Dogs,

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In the TV show 24, Chloe O’Brian and Aaron Cross, leader of Open Cell, magically discover an override code allowing terrorists to take control of US drones hidden among countless lines of code just by looking at it. Source: Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, 24: Live Another Day, TV miniseries, 20th Century Fox Television, 2014. Watch_Dogs, supporting hackers are heavily aestheticized and have strong, quirky personalities. Clara (left) is sexualized, is in need of protection, and is a quasi-love interest for Pearce. T-Bone (right) is eccentric, brilliant, and capable of providing all means of support for Pearce. Source: Ubisoft Montreal, Watch_Dogs, Ubisoft, 2014.

W4.3 In