"Have you played the War on Terror?"

How are war and video games related? In the article "Have you played War on Terror?”, Roger Stahl describes the "border-crossing of video games between military and civilian spheres." Stahl is an associate professor at the University of Georgia who focuses on rhetoric, media, and culture. He has a Ph. D. in Communications Arts and Sciences, and has done research on the rhetoric of war and has taught courses devoted to the subject.

People have been concerned about the connections between war and video games since at least the Gulf War. In 1991 General Norman Schwarzkopf even reminded Americans at a press conference, "This [Operation Desert Storm] is not a video game" (quoted in Herz, 1997, p. 197). Stahl focuses on three fields: the field of military simulation, the merging of TV news and video games in real-time presentation of war, and military outreach and recruiting. He also introduces the idea of the virtual citizen-solider, which he describes as  “a symptom of information-age warfare of “Netwar” (p. 113).

Netwar citizens now play two roles: one as the object of war and the other as the subject of war. As the object citizens become the object of violence and the casualties shift from the soldier to the citizen. Whereas, when citizens become the subject, they are active participants in the violence. In video game war simulators such as Real War and Full Spectrum Warrior, players engage in the process of making decisions on the war field and killing terrorists. Commercialization of war activities began merging with current military events, and the Defense Department even encouraged collaboration between the military and the entertainment industries (pg. 117). 

Rhetoric around the war-themed games was similar to the War on Terror of the Bush administration. The enemies in games started to resemble the portrayal of the real world terrorists, being characterized as “insane” and beyond the point of reason. People are no longer able to recognize these enemies as human, but rather they are the faceless objects of attack. Stahl acknowledges, “War games have caught up with the wars themselves.”

 In the early 2000s the Army developed a game, America’s Army, to encourage people to join the Army. The game experienced major success for its cutting edge graphics and realism. However, when people are killed in the game, the responses are minimal and the bodies vanish. Instead of considering the real consequences of war and fallen soldiers, the bodies disappear. If you’re killed in the game, that doesn’t mean the ultimate end; you can come back to life to play again, instead of being sent home in a coffin (which is not depicted in these video games).

These video games have created blurred lines between the citizen and the solider, forming a “third sphere” of cultural production. Stahl calls it “ a symptom of a larger social militarization, of the recoding of the social field with military values and ideals” (pg. 125). The war-themed video games that use to portray a fantasy war field now mimic the actual battlegrounds and create the virtual citizen-soldier. In researching responses to this reading, I found bloggers agreed that this rhetoric and realism of war in videogames is desensitizing people to the violence and minimizing the fatal consequences attributed with actual war. It’s important to acknowledge the effect these games have, and as Schwarzkopf said, war is not a game.