The Political Purpose of War Games

The release of America's Army followed a long history of close relations between the video game industry and the military-industrial complex. Since the birth of video games, the game industry has been providing the military with simulations for use in training, these simulations commonly being remanufactured and rereleased as consumer video games. Such video games have spawned what has been called "advergaming," or games packaged as consumable media that also function to shine a positive light on war and bloodshed. It has been argued that war games serve to desensitize the public to not only the notion of war, but to extreme violence, bloodshed, murder, and hostility as well. At the same time, especially with warfare becoming increasingly more digital every day, today's wargames also serve to train its players to be comfortable with gaming software and hardware as they are now regularly being adopted by the military to replace obsolete or inferior technology. I have provided two links to a few interesting articles that talk about this trend:

"Game Controllers Driving Drones, Nukes"
"Military Use of Consumer Technology: Wargames"

With the invasion of video game technologies into every American household over the past decade, it only made sense that this "new" medium would be used as a means of reaching the masses. After an obscene increase in the miltary's recruitment budget, the America's Army project was launched and by October 2007, "the game had been downlaoded more than forty million times and had more than 8.5 million registered users around the world" (p. 40). With the development of the game having been committed to realism, elements of the game, such as the "maps," weapons, and even military campaigns were based on actual locations, weapons and events. However, death was portrayed very mildly and unrealistically, in what many believe was an attempt to lessen the association of death with war. I honestly believe that advergames such as America's Army are very effective in what they aim to do. In making war games enjoyable and through the "glamorization" of war, game companies have helped to make a mobile population of gamers ready and willing to go to arms simply for the sake of the excitement and action associated with war. However, this is no different from the commercials and movies the public is exposed to that also function to advertise and to glamorize war; new medium, same old tricks.