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The Unreal Enemy of America’s Army Games and Culture 6(1) 38-60 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1555412010377321 http://gac.sagepub.com Robertson Allen1 Abstract This paper explores the characterizations of enemies in military-themed video games, with special attention given to the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America’s Army. I demonstrate how the public enemy of America’s Army is one not confined to any nationality, ethnicity, or political agenda. This marks a significant departure from games such as Conflict: Desert Storm. I argue that the production of this abstract enemy—what I call the ‘‘unreal enemy’’—is significantly shaped by a biopolitical system that intertwines the military and electronic entertainment industries. This arrangement delocalizes power, distributing it through a network of institutions and subjects. Throughout, I use ethnographic examples that explore how this abstract enemy has been constructed and juxtaposed against more concrete and personal figures, such as the America’s Army Real Heroes, individuals upheld as the embodiment of personal achievement in the U.S. Army. I conclude by asserting that the unreal enemy of America’s Army is, ultimately, an enemy that is not exclusive to a video game, but one that exists as an anonymous specter, ever present in the militarized American cultural imaginary. Keywords military entertainment complex, US Army, war gaming, America’s Army, enemy, anthropology, biopower This enemy is no longer concrete and localizable but has now become something fleeting and ungraspable, like a snake in the imperial paradise. The enemy is unknown and 1 University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Corresponding Author: Robertson Allen, University of Washington, Box 353100, Seattle, WA 98195, USA Email: roballen@u.washington.edu 38 Allen 39 unseen and yet ever present, something like a hostile aura. The face of the enemy appears in the haze of the future and serves to prop up legitimation where legitimation has declined. This enemy is in fact not merely elusive but completely abstract. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004, pp. 30–31). As kids, my two cousins and I would often play the double game pack of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt, which came included with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Even though I, and most other people I knew, enjoyed playing Mario more, it was still fun to shoot computerized ducks with the electronic gun that came with the game. There was something about the way the ducks got this wacky, shocked expression in their eyes when shot that we found fun and satisfying. None of us paid much attention to the violence in our game playing, especially since I personally witnessed more actual violence in my cousins’ fighting over the right to use the Nintendo gun than I did in shooting goofy ducks or squashing monsters beneath Mario’s lethal jump. When not playing video games, we sometimes gained similar pleasures of imaginative destruction when staging immense battles of green, grey, and tan Army men, complete with Lincoln Log forts. The enemies in these battles, however, were not abstract, slightly anthropomorphic creature, but usually ones upon which we all agreed: Nazi Germans and Soviets. A large portion of video games have generally unobjectionable enemies because they do not exist in the world outside of imagination: diabolical wizards, goofy cartoon ducks, fire-breathing dragons, invading aliens, oversized humaneating plants, and sinister villains who kidnap Barbie look-alike girlfriends. Although many contemporary games still premise their plots on fighting these more abstract and universal enemies, national enemies that are particular to historical and cultural circumstances are also very evident in many games. These enemies have a history since they are often preexisting in long-standing cultural narratives originating from outside of the game world itself. When my cousins and I played with plastic Army men and Lincoln Logs, for example, we were inspired by our watching of World War II- (WWII) and Vietnam War-themed films produced during the height of the war in Vietnam, such as The Dirty Dozen, The Green Berets, and Patton.1 Like these films of WWII, which were produced during the Vietnam era, warthemed video games are often valorizations of past conflicts (e.g., Battlefield, Contra, Rush N’ Attack, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and Conflict: Desert Storm) that also concurrently parallel contemporary military endeavors. With increasingly better graphics, modeling, texturing, and motion capture capabilities, the visual elements of enemy abstraction evident in games of the past and in other genres are often minimized in these games. Concurrent with this trend to mark an enemy with a locale, history, and culture, however, has been the continuous presence of other forms of enemy abstraction—evident in war gaming practices, in television shows such as 24, and in games such as America’s Army—that envision an anonymous enemy not confined to specific regions, cultures, or historical periods. 39 40 Games and Culture 6(1) This article explores these types of characterizations of enemies in video games—the specific and the abstract—with special attention given to the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America’s Army. It has been written during the course of my ethnographic research in the U.S. Army institutions that design America’s Army, the official U.S. Army video game. I demonstrate how the public enemy of America’s Army is one not confined to any nationality, race, or political agenda. This marks a significant departure from games such as Conflict: Desert Storm, which depicts a specific, but still very public, enemy. I argue that the types of enemies in America’s Army and the placement of the Army Game Project as an actor within the ‘‘military entertainment complex’’ (Lenoir, 2000) exemplify how military institutional and disciplinary logics have become diffused throughout nonmilitary culture through ‘‘biopower:’’ in short, the Army Game Project can be seen as a networked apparatus that attempts to regulate, analyze, and administer the subjectivities of both soldiers and civilians from the interior, bypassing more localized modes of subject formation traditionally centered at specific disciplinary institutions such as prisons, schools, factories, hospitals, or barracks (cf. Foucault, 1990). The abstract enemy—what I call the ‘‘unreal enemy’’—of America’s Army is not without historical precedent, and it has been prevalent in multiple disguises in American popular culture and military practices for decades. What this abstract enemy works to produce, though, is significantly shaped by a post-Fordist economic system characterized by an increase in the ambiguity between work time and leisure time, economic privatization and deregulation of formerly state-run industries and social service programs, shorter production cycles, and the centrality of new technologies in all of these processes (Kline, Dyer-Witherford, & De Peuter, 2003, p. 64). Such a system currently shapes and intertwines the military and electronic entertainment industries and works to delocalize power, distributing it across a network of institutions and subjects (De Peuter & Dyer-Witheford, 2005). Following explanations that explore how power increasingly operates as a network in this environment (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 2004), I investigate this phenomenon through the lens of the enemy in two video games. The Public Enemy From Clifford Geertz’s work, social scientists have come to be on familiar terms with the idea that ‘‘culture is public because meaning is’’ (1973, p. 12), and McLuhan’s observation that ‘‘games are extensions, not of our private but of our social selves, and that they are media of communication’’ is an observation that, now, is not particularly earth-shattering (1964, p. 216). However, these are the basic premises that I begin with in exploring how a public enemy in games can come to express the cultural assumptions and values of both its developers and its players, becoming a powerful symbol for state and consumer citizenship. The appearance of public enemies as opponents in games is not a new phenomenon, and it can be traced as least as far as the early 19th century. The games Chess 40 Allen 41 and Go are abstract representations of war that have traditionally been given anecdotal authority regarding their efficacy in the visualization of war, but the modern practice of war gaming had its origins in the game Kriegsspiel, which was designed to train officers to envision battles as being constituted by complex but manageable units of operation. Created by a Prussian officer in the aftermath of Napoleon’s military ascendancy and eventual defeat, Kriegsspiel captured the German public’s imagination in the mid-19th century and is one of the first examples of a civil society actively participating in the leisurely gaming against a public enemy. This mathematical simulation of combat and casualties eliminated from the game of many of the contingencies common to actual war, reducing battle to a Malthusian calculus of cost-benefit computation. It proved to be an efficient mode of training, and similar war gaming practices came to inform the strategies and theory of warfare in other Western European nations and in the United States. As several histories of war gaming indicate, the application and improvement of the kind of top-down, God’s-eye point of view presented in the war gaming introduced by Kriegsspiel continued throughout the 20th century; this practice was influential in shaping how war was envisioned, planned, and taught to officers in the U.S. military and other states (Caffrey, 2000; Dunnigan, 1992; Halter, 2006; Lenoir & Lowood, 2005). These practices not only were a characteristic of state militaries but were also enthusiastically adopted—and significantly shaped—by civilian populations as a form of entertainment. H. G. Wells’ Little Wars (1913), essentially a set of rules for playing with toy soldiers, is one early example of this phenomenon, and later board game designers of war games, such as Charles Roberts and James Dunnigan, built upon these previous war games in the 1950s and 1960s to develop a full-fledged genre of commercial war gaming that made a general transition from the board game to the computer in the early 1980s (Dunnigan, 1992). In the midst of this changing commercial industry, the U.S. military was also continuously war gaming. SIMNET, the U.S. military’s distributed simulator networking project developed during the mid-1980s and functional by the late-1980s, was a watershed project in its ability to network a huge number of combat units at theaterlevel operations within an expansive virtual environment that simulated troop movements and combat. As histories of these war gaming practices indicate, in the 1980s there was increasing cooperation between the U.S. military and the commercial war gaming—and video gaming—industry. Through the creation of institutionalized arrangements—the most visible and written about one being the Institute for Creative Technologies, designer of both the officer combat training simulator Full Spectrum Warrior and its commercial spin-off—a symbiotic relationship between the commercial video game industry and military simulation became more fully realized throughout the 1990s and the early 21st century, with the private sector as the driving force in technological innovation. The emergence of this ‘‘military entertainment complex’’ and its connection to war gaming is itself complex and has been thoroughly investigated through a variety of lenses (e.g., Chaplin & Ruby, 2005; Der Derian, 2001, 2003; Gray, 1997; Halter, 2006; Kline et al., 2003; Lenoir, 2000, 41 42 Games and Culture 6(1) 2003; Lenoir & Lowood, 2005). At the risk of glossing these histories, I now turn my attention to the specific articulations of this military entertainment complex in the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America’s Army. The releases of Conflict: Desert Storm, Conflict: Desert Storm II, and Conflict: Vietnam between the summers of 2002 and 2004 coincide nicely with the preinvasion, invasion, and occupation of Iraq. Conflict: Global Terror appeared in stores in early 2005, and this game’s widened scope, featuring counterterrorist missions against a network of terrorist cells in regions as far removed from one another as Columbia, Ukraine, South Korea, and the Philippines, also reflects prevailing concerns at the time of its release. In the two Desert Storm games, both of which take place during the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq, players control a squad of one to four U.S. Delta Force soldiers.2 Players are given various missions, such as rescuing hostages, destroying bridges, and disabling Iraqi military equipment. Squad-based games such as those in the Conflict series have become a budding genre in the gaming industry, and their valorization of past and continuing conflicts is not coincidental. Many of the scenarios in military-themed combat games either revisit and recreate history (e.g., Medal of Honor series) or speculate on possible scenarios in the near future (e.g., Ghost Recon 2, which envisioned a conflict in North Korea in 2007). The Conflict series of games was, therefore, rather unique in that it not only prefigured the 2003 invasion of Iraq but also concurrently revisited the past conflict in that country.3 To further blur the lines between past and present, the endgame of Conflict: Desert Storm is the assassination of General Aziz, a figure who happens to appear very similar to Saddam Hussein before his capture, subsequent beard growth, and execution. If the enemies in games such as Conflict: Desert Storm are historical ones, they often are enemies that have existed in the discourse of national politics—communists, fascists, and national enemies being among some of the most prominent in the history of the United States. The Iraqi enemy, often characterized in the U.S. media in the early stages of the occupation of Iraq as being ‘‘elusive,’’ is very easy to find in Conflict: Desert Storm: while fighting these Iraqi enemies from the security of their home in the months prior to the U.S. invasion, Americans were able to continually preemptively strike after them within the game. Since the first Gulf War, and after years of negative media representations about Iraq and the Middle Eastern male, the image of this Iraqi enemy was readily accessible to the American public. The timely emergence of the Conflict series of video games, alongside similar games such as the more insipid Kuma\ War, both reflected and augmented the salience of this publicly shared Iraqi enemy, indistinguishable along the lines of Shiite, Sunni, or Kurd. Players who expressed their desire for a new Conflict game, ‘‘perhaps for the Iraq war part two, or some anti-terrorist missions, like rescuing hostages or something,’’4 echoed the sentiments of America’s Army players who participated in its gaming community while simultaneously listening to news reports during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Li, 2003, pp. 69–70). One of the special qualities of Conflict: Desert Storm is that it is well adapted for play with either one or two people. On a review forum on amazon.com, players of 42 Allen 43 the Conflict games noted with excitement the joys of this shared experience. One youth wrote, ‘‘I like two-player cooperative campaigns where I get to play with one of my buddies as we fight the bad guys. All my friends want to come over and beat the game it is so much fun. . . . It is a great interaction game because you can associate with other people.’’ Several other people commented on the shared pleasure experienced while playing against this common enemy with their friends, family members, or significant others: ‘‘I never liked shooting games but my husband made me play this and boy was I glad I did.’’ ‘‘It’s funny when the Iraqis are running around on fire after you hit them with a grenade or blow up a fuel tank. Beware of the head shot, you’re dead. I play it with my 12 year old boy.’’ ‘‘Conflict: Desert Storm is the best game I’ve ever played on because I play with my best uncle ever.’’ ‘‘The best thing I liked about this game is that it is two players.’’ I can also attest to these statements based on my playing of the game; Conflict games, especially when played alongside a friend, are fun. This world of the game and the common enemy within it, the visceral practice of playing the game, the comments of players about the game and their experience of playing, and the marketing of the game itself all constitute elements of a gaming cultural field that is not solely confined to any game but exists within a larger sociocultural and political milieu (Bourdieu, 1993). Just as every person playing Conflict: Desert Storm experiences the same game world and fights the same enemy, the same physical, repetitive experience of playing brings about a certain community among players. Although this phenomenon of gaming against a national, public enemy of the state is not necessarily a new one, it is heightened by the increased immersion within the cybernetic environment of the game. This aspect of community formation through shared gaming experiences is well documented in game studies and is especially apparent when a game is played online, as is the case with America’s Army. Networks of the Army Game Project Released by the U.S. Army on July 4, 2002 for free download and online play, the stated goals of America’s Army were ‘‘to educate the American public about the U.S. Army and its career opportunities, high tech involvement, values, and teamwork’’ (Army Game Project, 2002, p. 1). In achieving these goals, the game went beyond the call of duty, for numerous people worldwide played it as a form of entertainment and socializing. Since its inception, the game continued to evolve with periodic updates and counted over 9 million registered players by early 2008.5 Successive versions of America’s Army—the latest being the 2009 release of America’s Army 3—in addition to modifications that serve as educational and 43 44 Games and Culture 6(1) training tools for Army soldiers and applications that aid in the visualization of future weapons technologies, have resulted in a gradual expansion of this once small project to encompass a large network of commercial and military institutions known as the Army Game Project. The Army Game Project not only significantly contributed to a new push by the Army to market itself to potential recruits and the public at large but also spearheaded cheaper methods of developing leadership and skills-oriented training technologies for soldiers in the U.S. Army. The project has had contractual agreements with a variety of companies in the electronic entertainment business, including game industry giants such as Ubisoft and Epic Games. Through these arrangements, the franchise at its height expanded well beyond the online game to include console versions of the game, America’s Army plastic action figures, a coin-operated arcade game, a downloadable cell phone version of the game, and also a 10,000 square-foot mobile mission simulator dubbed the Virtual Army Experience, which has toured throughout the United States to air shows and NASCAR events, hosting hundreds of people for a 20-min, immersive Disney-style simulated Army gaming/recruiting experience (Allen, 2009).6 With all of these popular cultural appearances, it could be easy to overlook other applications of the America’s Army platform that have been developed for military training and visualization purposes. For example, one application teaches new enlistees before their entry into basic training some essentials in land navigation, military grid referencing for maps, and first aid. Others include a training exercise created for the United States Secret Service, applications which test and simulate future weapons under development, a close quarters combat simulator using live fire ammunition, and a convoy skills trainer geared toward enabling soldiers to make better decisions while under stress. These adaptations of the Americas Army game have been designed throughout a network of commercial and military studios in North Carolina, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Orlando, and elsewhere, and their activities are overseen at offices located within the Army’s Software Engineering Directorate at Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. The reasons for the existence of such a broad network of offices devoted to the Army Game Project are multifaceted, and the benefits for the Army in placing a high-caliber game in the middle of popular gaming culture are numerous. In addition to being an efficient and cost-effective marketing tool to the target enlistment demographic of teenage boys, America’s Army was seen by its designers as a relatively cheap way to train soldiers while increasing retention rates by providing ‘‘a realistic intro to the Army before getting to boot camp’’ (Zyda, 2004). Added salary incentives; greater opportunities to gain advanced university degrees within the Army; and an institutional push by the Army to market itself as an option with multiple career trajectories also play into this retention strategy. In an era when American troop deployments severely tax the manpower requirements of the military and resources of the U.S. government, and when the domestic and international image of the U.S. military is often an understandably negative one, such engagements 44 Allen 45 which cut costs while concurrently providing public outreach opportunities are important for the U.S. military. Around the turn of the millennium when America’s Army was first being developed, the U.S. Army initiated a long-term transition commonly called ‘‘Transformation,’’ referring to organizational, technological, and conceptual changes consciously being integrated into the practices of the Army. Part of this general process entails an ostensible transition not only to more technologically networked environments on the battlefield but also to organizationally networked ways of operating.7 Smaller modular brigade-level units of operation, for instance, started being phased in to replace larger units. These modular units were meant to be able to deploy more quickly than in the past, and they were devised to be entirely self-sufficient, requiring no support units, for a specified period of time. New Stryker brigades became one of the models of this ‘‘Army Transformation’’ toward more highly mobile, and increasingly decentralized, units of operation. Such units, in the eyes of the architects of Army Transformation, are to enable the Army to be less invasive while strengthening its ability to invade. This transformation toward a technologically savvy military poised for rapid, flexible deployment was further envisioned and celebrated through the body of the Future Objective Force Warrior, a soldier improved by prosthetics that protect, enhance vision, and provide real-time networking with other soldiers. This ideal of the Future Objective Force Warrior was expected to become embodied by enlistees sometime between 2010 and 2015 (Chaplin & Ruby, 2005, pp. 197–198; Steele, 2001)—although we are still waiting mostly; the Army Game Project, to the minds of some in the military, has constituted one of multiple means of computer-mediated training and recruitment making way for the arrival of this cyber warrior. This network-centered conceptualization of unit deployment and power distribution is also beginning to be reflected in the contracting side of the Army as well. Although military defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have historically had a tendency for very long production cycles and a vertical organization still evident today, several people in the Army and elsewhere are seeing a need to change this. Two ‘‘netwar’’ scholars, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, claim that networks such as Al-Qaeda can only be defeated by other networks and that the Army needs to operate more like one itself (2001). Not coincidentally, their book is a central text for courses taught at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, located next to the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis, where the Army Game Project’s management headquarters is housed and where several top military officers involved in the Army Game Project maintain their offices. It is therefore not surprising that these individuals, such as Colonel Casey Wardynski, view their work as an effort to make a conscious change in the organizational structure of the Army. As I observed from fieldwork at the game’s design studio and was told by multiple people, America’s Army has been largely run like a video game entertainment business. The civilian employees at the California game studio, which designed the online game and developed much of the content and assets for other applications, 45 46 Games and Culture 6(1) saw themselves as working and advancing their careers within the video game industry—as opposed to the defense contracting industry—and this institution in particular had the relaxed and casual working environment that is often idealized in accounts of game industry work. The game is a part of a larger post-Fordist, neoliberalizing process in the military, which involves increased privatization through short-term contracts, more networked production processes, and borrowing from business models. These transitions toward increased privatization and more networked organizational structures in the military are not insignificant, and they are integral to how enemies are envisioned by the military and, in turn, the nonmilitary populations who play America’s Army. The Army Game Project unabashedly aims to produce the conditions in which civilian gamers can have better access to information about the Army for potential soldiers to be more easily recruited; as such, this network supervised by the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis is, not coincidentally, an explicit manifestation of biopower, the name of the office itself aptly expressing an imperative to regulate living bodies that is so integral to biopower. America’s Army is a self-conscious attempt to produce a militarized gaming subject. Through its applications to various soldierrelated skills training, the Army Game Project makes it easier for the Army to manage and discipline its own soldiers internally, but the online version of the game and the America’s Army franchise products also enable the projection of Army discipline outwards toward a global population, with the idea that in so doing the Army can gain a reserve army of both American and non-American sympathizers while targeting a demographic of teenage boys within the United States to consider enlistment. This outward projection of institutional disciplinary logics enables the civilian to safely play as a soldier, effectively blurring the lines between these roles. The structure of the Army Game Project—as something that spans the entertainment industry, defense contracting industry, and the military—further calls this demarcation between civilian and soldier into question.8 This blurring has been a common trope in a large portion of press articles on America’s Army that are often alarmist in tone. Indeed, the modernist assumption that society is discretely divided between civilian and military spheres has itself been problematized repeatedly in academia and from various channels.9 Like other war games of the past such as Kriegsspiel, civilians and soldiers alike are gaming against an abstract enemy, but this enemy now operates within the framework of biopower, working to produce a ‘‘hybrid subjectivity’’ that is constituted ‘‘outside the institutions but even more intensely ruled by their disciplinary logics’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 330–332). For this very reason, video games ‘‘have taken on a peculiarly resonant role in how we are thinking about war now’’ (Halter, 2006, p. xxv). The Unreal Enemy With its array of military and commercial connections, America’s Army is situated in a particularly interesting location in this new conceptualization of war through video 46 Allen 47 games. The generic enemies found within America’s Army are not entirely new, and their behaviors and appearances follow established genre-specific conventions for first-person shooters. America’s Army, for example, uses the Unreal game engine, one of the most popular video game engines for first-person shooters.10 Giving designers a tool to shape the physics within an environment, visually render data, define the behavior of artificial intelligence, and store system files (among many other things), game engines are the backbone on which everything else in a game is layered. America’s Army was one of the first games to use the Unreal Engine 2, and its designers attribute part of its early success in 2002 to its presentation of the engine’s then cutting-edge graphics, which were made available to gamers for free. A plethora of successful console and PC games such as Gears of War, BioShock, and Mass Effect use the Unreal Engine 3, as does America’s Army 3, released in 2009. In allusion to the Unreal Engine, the foundation on which America’s Army was created, I use the term ‘‘unreal’’ to describe the type of enemy appearing in the game and in the examples explored throughout the remainder of this article. This enemy resides within the uneasy, liminal space established by the double entendre in the phrase ‘‘the unreal enemy of America’s Army.’’ (This phrase can be read a variety of ways, all of which are correct. ‘‘Unreal’’ can refer to the engine, or the adjective, or simultaneously both; ‘‘America’s Army’’ can refer to the game, or the military institution, or both.) Here, I do not necessarily use the term ‘‘unreal’’ with its typical adjectival sense denoting the negation, opposite, or nonexistence of the ‘‘real’’ entirely in mind; the unreal enemy is not so much the mirror or opposite of a ‘‘real’’ enemy but rather the means through which the real enemy is configured and understood (Baudrillard, 1994; Eco, 1986). Although it has become cliché to invoke Baudrillard and the hyperreal in game studies—as Kline et al. say, ‘‘finding examples of Baudrillard’s hyperreality in the world of video and computer games is like shooting fish in a barrel’’ (2003, p. 70)— such appeals generally equate the simulation of the computer game with the cultural simulation with which Baudrillard is concerned. This is not necessarily an accurate characterization, and Baudrillard’s idea of cultural simulation is particularly important because the unreal enemy is not confined to America’s Army or the realm of video games, but rather acts (as all games do) within a process of cultural production that is much broader than any game. A plethora of assemblages, some of which are explored below, constitute an unreal enemy, which prefigures a corporeal enemy. This is what Baudrillard calls ‘‘the precession of simulacra,’’ in which the unreal enemy precedes, and perhaps aids in the realization and creation of, the real enemy. In other words, ‘‘how we prepare for future enemies might just help to invent them’’ (Der Derian, 2001, p. 108). Like the Future Objective Force Warrior’s prosthetic enhancements of body armor, infrared vision, and networked communication, the unreal enemy is also an enhancement of the soldier (or the civilian playing as the soldier) and not his opposite.11 This enemy, if he is an ‘‘other,’’ is an internalized other that cannot exist without the presence of the American soldier as well. This is illustrated in the game 47 48 Games and Culture 6(1) Figure 1. Examples of enemy and U.S. Army Soldiers in earlier versions of America’s Army. Figure 2. Enemy and U.S. Army Soldier comparison in America’s Army 3.13 by the fact that no player can play as an enemy of the United States. Although there are usually two teams of players fighting against one another—one assaulting while the other defends, typically—the point of view of every human player is that of an American soldier. This design in the game, called the ‘‘swapping paradigm’’ by its developers, means that two players on different teams appear to themselves as U.S. soldiers but to one another as enemies. Every human player sees the human and computer opponents as opposing enemy forces who, in the earlier versions of the game, were often veiled in ski masks or other useful apparatuses erasing racial indication 48 Allen 49 (see Figure 1). In America’s Army 3, this kind of enemy masking was done away with and both enemy and American soldiers featured the same assortment of faces (see Figure 2). The stipulation that U.S. soldiers can never be a target in the world of America’s Army is reinforced by the rules of engagement (ROE), which punish players for friendly (and often very unfriendly) fire in the game by removing ‘‘honor’’ points, a factor that can affect a player’s level of prestige, access to servers, and the selection of more desirable weapons and leadership positions in the game.12 The erasure of a differentiating enemy race was deliberate, for it aided in the construction of an anonymous enemy who was potentially anywhere and applicable to any situation. In an interview, during the early stages of my fieldwork in 2006, Sergeant Ryder,14 an Army recruiter and an avid America’s Army player, made this connection explicitly: The game teaches you not to shoot at the friendlies. It emphasizes fighting terrorists, not communists or certain nationalities. You don’t see their features, so you can’t be biased or prejudiced towards any race or group of people. Nothing about the game creates a desire to kill or racist attitudes. It is designed for teamwork and positive attitudes, not negative ones like killing and racism. Designers of the game indeed made this erasure of race a deliberate part of the game’s design, but it also served other practical purposes regarding the game’s playability. An individual working in the Army Game Project, Zeke, indicated that this practice was definitely on purpose. For one, it’s for the reasons that we’re talking about [regarding race and nationality]. Two, it’s kind of a double plus in our favor because it also gives the enemy a distinguished look from friend. So when you are playing a game like this where it’s not always clear—black and white—who you should be shooting at from far away, if there’s not distinct things on the character, it’s going to be hard. I can only imagine that it’s probably like that [in actual combat], if you’re not always in contact with where your teammates are in a real battle . . . . But that’s one of those things where gameplay-wise, we have to make it fun since if it’s too hard people are not going to want to play. So things like using ski masks or some crazy weird camo just to make them stand out helps out a lot in just distinguishing the enemy (see Figure 3), plus there are no implications there. At least that’s the goal. I think that all war games get flack from time to time. This one just probably gets more because of the Army. Even though the faces of enemies are clearly visible in the new America’s Army 3, there are minimal indicators of enemy ethnicity. A wide variety of geographical markers presented in the game over the years presuppose an enemy not from one specific region. The environments of America’s Army, such as a snowy wilderness, swamps and farms reminiscent of the Deep South, abandoned eastern European cities, and central Asian terrains which have, in some cases, been modeled directly from landscapes in Afghanistan (Halter, 2006, p. xiv), attest to the universal 49 50 Games and Culture 6(1) Figure 3. Comparison of NME (enemy) and U.S. Soldier silhouettes in America’s Army 3.15 applicability of this type of enemy that can be of any ethnicity and located in any setting. This enemy is in stark contrast to that of Conflict: Desert Storm, for rather than externalizing the enemy as an Iraqi ‘‘other,’’ the terrains and enemies of America’s Army imply that the enemy could very well be located internally. Zeke further discussed how linguistic and cultural considerations also play a significant factor in the game’s appearance, verifying that making an enemy—that’s really hard to do without making a lot of people really upset and pissed off considering it’s the Army game . . . . There’s never been a directive; nobody’s ever come to me in my office and said things like, ‘‘No, you can’t put Arabic lettering on this door.’’ I have been told not to use English letters and I’ve heard references to not using things that make those kinds of implications, but that’s also a personal thing—I just don’t do that. But it’s definitely been said a lot of times in our reviews. And on the flip side of that too, like on U.S. soil stuff, one of the objects I made had lettering in it. It had a made-up brand on it, but I remember in our art review the producers said, ‘‘You know, we don’t want to use U.S. lettering.’’ We actually have our own made up language. So, for example, on a bus that I was working on it had ‘‘City Transit’’ written on the side. After talking with the producers about not having U.S or English lettering or any kind of recognizable language, I have to go to [another person] who made a whole pseudo-algorithm for changing things like the letter ‘‘L’’ to this, ‘‘Th’’ combinations to that. It’s really neat to actually see the difference, making up a phrase or word and then giving it to him to change it to some crazy other language that is made up. Later, the release of America’s Army 3 featured such imaginary languages and geographies even more prominently, extending the cultural imaginary of an unreal enemy further through the creation of a fictional nation, Czervenia (Allen, IN PRESS). In this vaguely eastern European country, the unreal enemy of America’s Army became 50 Allen 51 more fully articulated even as it borrowed from a myriad of preexisting geographical landscapes, histories, languages, weapons, and architectures worldwide. A game designer, Samuel, explained how he cobbled together Czervenian, the new fictional nation’s language, through online translation technologies: [The Army] wanted to get away from Iraq and all of that. They wanted to create a political situation that didn’t exist . . . . So basically we took Croatian and Slovenian and eastern European languages that have a Russian influence and combined it with the grammatical structure of Spanish . . . . I pull up babelfish.com and dictionary.com and a few other translation websites, and I put a word in there and try to create interesting sounding words out of Spanish and Slovenian usually, or sometimes Czech. Basically I create something that sounds cool and flows well, and if I create a sentence I say the sentence a few times in a ridiculous eastern European accent. If it sounds kinda cool, ok, we use that. This construction of an anonymous but proximal enemy, complete with its own ambiguous language, is entirely in keeping with war simulation and tactical training exercises of the U.S. Army. In anthropologist Catherine Lutz’s book Homefront, such exercises are examined as connecting points between the symbiotic histories of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and adjacent Ft. Bragg and Pope Air Force Base. Lutz examines the impact of large-scale simulation exercises that often take place off-base and with the collaboration of civilians. These live simulations, which envision in great socioeconomic and cultural detail a territory called ‘‘Pineland,’’ are further described by Anna Simons (1997), also a military anthropologist.16 Both Lutz and Simons describe how local civilian populations aid in these war simulations by role playing as guerrillas or citizens of Pineland. Much like the way in which the languages, landscapes, and items of America’s Army are modeled from generalized locations, Pineland is intentionally a vague but recognizable place, mirroring the surroundings of Fayetteville and constructing a ‘‘mythic’’ model of the enemy and the world: Any military simulation attempts to draw an objective model of the world and its potential situations. But because it involves peering into the void of the future and the blurry shapes of the present, it must also be mythic: It has to draw on culturally tutored imagination, fears, and wishes. To look at . . . war games, then, is to see certain American anxieties played out as if to tame them. (Lutz, 2001, p. 87) My limited experiences with war simulations outside of video games are more humorous, although no less serious, than those described by Lutz. When taking an introductory ROTC course in military science, I participated with my fellow undergraduate classmates in several similar exercises of imagination for practicing the communication of orders using a standardized military OPORD (operational order) format. When given an open-ended option to create a role-playing scenario for practice, cadets envisioned an enemy of pecan-stealing squirrels with high morale, 51 52 Games and Culture 6(1) extra sharp teeth and claws, tails that stung like scorpions, and rabies. Virtual combat with the squirrels extended from the university campus into the fraternity houses, and the cadets, armed with Axe body spray,17 peanuts, and a new secret drug that enabling them to jump into the trees, eventually subdued the animals. Although Lutz asserts that such ‘‘ludic moments’’ of ‘‘war game spectatorship’’ have ‘‘redefine[d] the role of the citizen from one who questions and acts to one who observes and is entertained by the state and by power itself’’ (2001, pp. 107, 109), the unreal enemy, as an enemy formed through public engagement with biopower, is an enemy that is by definition enacted and performed and not one that is merely experienced passively. The medium of the video game demands this kind of cybernetic performativity, and the Army encourages it in ways that reach beyond the game. The Real Heroes The unreal enemy is an enemy with minimal cultural, linguistic, or ethnic indicators and therefore one which is simultaneously anonymous yet potentially anyone. Everywhere and nowhere at once, the unreal enemy is a tabula rasa on which any enemy can be extrapolated. For Lutz, this type of ‘‘unreality in which war games swim ... has posed special challenges to the separation between foreign and domestic use of force and has potentially allowed cultural slippage between home and enemy’’ (Lutz, 2001, pp. 103–04). As I have sought to illustrate from a sampling of examples above, I have found this slippage to be very visible at particular moments during the course of my fieldwork—when I play America’s Army as a U.S. soldier fighting enemies in landscapes that appear uncannily similar to the surroundings of my grandmother’s birthplace in Alabama; when I sit among a class of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets who imagine my university’s surroundings as a backdrop for wars against pecan-stealing squirrels; when I speak with the designers of America’s Army about the careful attention they must give to erase identifiable cultural backgrounds from their enemies; and when I read about the mapping onto the preexisting geographies of Fayetteville the nation of Pineland. This slippage is the stuff of the unreal and it is apparent in many of the public appearances and practices of the Army Game Project as well. In bringing its message to the public, the Army Game Project has been accumulating a history of live staged performances, the first of which occurred in 2002 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), where America’s Army burst into the gaming world with much critical acclaim. At the 2002 E3, Army soldiers rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters down the side of the Los Angeles Convention Center to storm the building (Halter, 2006, pp. vii–xi). Later E3 Army appearances included a daily morning staging of Golden Knights Army specialist parachutists jumping 2,500 feet from a Chinook helicopter into a parking lot near the expo, followed by evening shows in which Special Forces soldiers used a converted auto dealership to stage a mission taken from the game with ‘‘real equipment, weapons, and uniforms’’ (Larkin, 2005). Other early public exposures to America’s Army at expositions such as 52 Allen 53 the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts further emphasized the fidelity between in-game elements and actual Army weapons and practices through exhibits that combined virtual and physical environments in intriguing ways (Chapman, 2004; Davis & Bossant, 2004). Similar types of domestic invasions are underway with the Virtual Army Experience, which is being ‘‘deployed’’ to large public events across the United States, and the Philadelphia-based Army Experience Center, a now completed pilot project in Army recruitment via new media, community outreach, and the ‘‘soft sell’’ (Allen, 2009; Army Game Project, 2007; Jauregui, 2009). These performed domestic invasions bypass much of the ‘‘virtual’’ and ‘‘real’’ binary often encountered in popular and academic discussions about video games and call into question the utility of such categories. The Army itself encourages an indistinction between the ‘‘real’’ and the ‘‘virtual,’’ supplying an in-game ‘‘Virtual Recruiting Station’’ that players can visit to learn more about ‘‘Real Heroes’’ who are upheld as model soldiers (see Figure 4). Such visits potentially provide visitors a wealth of information on specific Military Occupational Specialties (MOS), uniform decorations, and individual biographies of enlisted soldiers. In contrast to the abstract, unreal enemy in America’s Army, players are encouraged to connect with these Real Heroes and are rewarded with bonus ‘‘honor points’’ for visiting the Virtual Recruiting Station. The 3-in. plastic figurines depicting each Real Hero are used as promotional merchandise to be given away at events, and several of the actual Real Heroes have toured the country with the Virtual Army Experience, making public appearances at air shows, NASCAR races, state fairs, and other large public events. One could say that the ‘‘real hero’’ in this case is not only the individual Real Hero—represented through a convergence of media and upheld as a model for future achievement—but also the player/participant/potential enlistee, and both have singular identities that are far from being abstract. The Real Hero, in other words, is the individual, and he stands in opposition to the abstraction of the unreal enemy. Although America’s Army is not a role-playing game (RPG) as it is typically defined in most taxonomies of video games, the game attempts to encourage people to emulate the Real Heroes as ‘‘aspirational figures’’ and its developers have consciously sought to incorporate more role-playing elements into both the online games and the two console versions of the game, America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier and America’s Army: True Soldiers. Plans for another America’s Army game, subtitled Soldiers, that was to be more exclusively focused on role-playing a career path in the Army, were discontinued in the early stages of the project, but the desire on the part of the developers to include role-playing elements within the game has influenced later versions and applications such as the Virtual Army Experience and the Army Experience Center. In the context of the game, the ‘‘true soldiers’’ and ‘‘real heroes’’ are the players, and perhaps in this ambiguity between soldier and player the efficacy of the game as a public relations tool is the most profound and obvious. Individual players, for example, are periodically upheld by the Army Game Project as model citizens, as was the case when an America’s Army player provided medical aid at a car accident. 53 54 Games and Culture 6(1) Figure 4. A ‘‘Real Hero’’ of America’s Army in graphic, plastic, and photographic representation.18 He credited the basic medical training that all players of America’s Army must sit through to play the game—a 15-min lecture in a virtual classroom—as being crucial to his ability to care for the victim of the car crash. Colonel Wardynski, director of the Army Game Project, called this player a ‘‘true hero,’’ adding, ‘‘We are pleased to have played a role in providing the lifesaving training that he employed so 54 Allen 55 successfully at the scene’’ (Army Game Project, 2008). As one Army enlistee and player of America’s Army told me, ‘‘Everything is realistic in the game, because it was designed entirely by the Army. Even the medic is real life.’’ The Army, however, makes sure that enlisted soldiers are the ones who are ultimately interpreted as being the ‘‘true soldiers’’ and the ‘‘real heroes.’’ The America’s Army website periodically publishes articles that feature biographical information about the Real Heroes—including personal photos of their families, detailed information of badges and awards that each Real Hero has received, and video interview footage. Stories of combat experience are the predominant characteristic of these biographies. In one such description, a Real Hero’s experience of being fired upon by an Iraqi combatant is revisited in an interview article published on the website: ‘‘At this time,’’ he says, ‘‘the vehicle got hit by the second RPG [rocket propelled grenade] . . . .’’ Just as the attacker readied another RPG, he was spotted by the Americans. Wolford observes the attacker, ‘‘He must have thought he was bulletproof. He knelt down in the middle of the road, and dropped another round in it. We engaged him, and we didn’t have to worry about that RPG anymore.19 Here, the Real Hero’s language does the work of abstracting an Iraqi enemy into an inanimate object that acts as an unreal enemy: instead of worrying about the Iraqi soldier, the RPG is the enemy to be worried about. These accounts by the Real Heroes, which attempt to define and interpret the gaming experience, also enable a valorization of the figure of the Army soldier that is not merely one directional, but enacted and cybernetic—as is any game. The similarity between the acronyms for ‘‘rocket propelled grenade’’ and ‘‘role-playing game’’ is, of course, a coincidence, but this similarity aptly captures the conflation between techno-military and gamer jargon in the military entertainment complex, divulging how both are used and abbreviated as a technology of war; from the point of view of biopower, both kinds of RPGs are, in a sense, weapons. To conclude, just as the Real Heroes are useful to the Army in enabling players to emulate and envision themselves in the position of the ‘‘true soldier’’ and the ‘‘real hero,’’ the unreal enemy is a useful way for the military to envision its targets. The flexibility of this enemy enables its application to any situation, and with a new modular brigade-level conception of Army organization expressed in the plan for Army Transformation, responsive flexibility and versatility in unit deployment is emphasized above all else (Steele, 2001). In contrast to Conflict: Desert Storm, with enemies from a specific location in space and time, America’s Army provides little in the way of conceptualizing the enemy within temporal or spatial fields. The unreal enemy of America’s Army is a return to enemy abstraction that is not as pronounced in games such as Conflict: Desert Storm. It is an abstraction, however, that is not based on computing limitations or aesthetic choices in design (cf. Wolf, 2003) but one that is more pervasive and encompassing of both in- and out-of-game contexts. Nameless, elusive, and always just around the corner, the unreal enemy is not 55 56 Games and Culture 6(1) confined to any singular game or moment. He influences and precedes the production of real enemies of the United States Army; comprehending how this production of a cultural imaginary occurs is crucial in achieving any sort of knowledge regarding the real consequences of war and conflict. Acknowledgment The author wishes to thank Miriam Kahn, Danny Hoffman, and Lorna Rhodes for their encouragement and advice while formulating this article. The author would also like to thank Rebecca Carlson for her helpful comments and organization of this issue; the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments; and members of the Army Game Project. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article. Funding Portions of this research was funded by the United States’ National Science Foundation in the form of a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for Cultural Anthropology. Notes 1. 3DO’s prolific series of Army Men video games also draws upon these established cultural narratives and modes of play. 2. Players have the option of playing with either U.S. Delta Force soldiers or British SAS soldiers. 3. According to Halter (2006, pp. 172–173), similarly titled Operation Desert Storm, released in 1991 for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), was one of the first video games to represent a war contemporaneous to its release. The first Gulf War, characterized as one that ‘‘did not take place’’ (Baudrillard, 1995), was often popularly compared to video games, and this comparison has been reinforced by the network of linkages between entertainment and defense institutions. 4. Player comments on Conflict: Desert Storm are opinions expressed in public forums on amazon.com customer reviews of the game. 5. This figure, taken from the official website (www.americasarmy.com), is admittedly misleading. In March 2008, just over 5 million of these registered users had completed the tutorial stage of the game known as ‘‘basic training,’’ which is necessary to complete to advance to the rest of the game. In addition, it is likely that a number of players have more than one registered user name. 6. With homage to Baudrillard’s analysis of Disneyland, one is left wondering to what extent the Virtual Army Experience and America’s Army are there to conceal that the ‘‘real’’ country, all of ‘‘real’’ America, is part of the military—‘‘a bit like prisons are there 56 Allen 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 57 to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carcereal’’ (1994, p. 12; see also Crogan, 2007). See Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001); Der Derian (2001, 2003); Gray (1997); Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004); Lenoir (2000); and Virilio and Lotringer (1983) for further explorations of the idea of the network as a central operational logic of the U.S. military. Zhan Li’s master’s thesis (2003) provides an excellent ethnography and discussion regarding this interplay between the civilian and military public spheres in the context of America’s Army. See, for example, Gregory (2006, p. 215); Lutz (2001, p. 8); and Virilio and Lotringer (1983, p. 16). A variety of well-known games have been developed using the Unreal Engine. These include Lineage II, Unreal Tournament 2004, games in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Star Wars: Republic Commando—all of which use the Unreal Engine 2. I use the pronoun ‘‘his’’ deliberately because the discourse surrounding the Future Objective Force Warrior and his enemy is decidedly masculine. Excessive retaliation from teammates who are mistakenly shot by new players is common. When I first began playing America’s Army I would shoot at anything that moved out of gut reaction, despite knowing about the ROE. As a medic, I would try to offer to heal those whom I would shoot on my team, but in many cases I would be killed by my mistaken victim before being able to type any message of atonement. ROE violations, because they are publicly known in the game, are not as scorned as cheating, however. America’s Army Server Admins (AASA), now defunct, was an independent, militialike organization monitoring and documenting ‘‘illegal’’ activities of players in the game by publicly posting screenshots of actions classified as ‘‘cheats’’ alongside the names and the clan affiliations of the cheaters (formerly located at www.aaserveradmins.com/ index.php). AASA functioned through donations and volunteers while remaining unconnected to any institution of power. It, nevertheless, had significant authority to ban an avatar from participation in the America’s Army community by publicizing their cheats. For a player, this was, in a sense, another form of biopolitical, albeit digital and delocalized, ‘‘administration of bodies’’ (Foucault, 1990, pp. 130–145; Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 22–41). http://manual.americasarmy.com/index.php/Target_Identification:_Know_Your_Enemy, accessed April 5, 2010. SFC Ryder’s identity and the identities of other interviewees, like the enemy, shall remain anonymous. http://manual.americasarmy.com/index.php/Target_Identification:_Know_Your_Enemy, accessed April 5, 2010. Simons paints a different picture of Fayetteville and Ft. Bragg than Lutz, one that is exclusively from the point of view of the Special Forces soldiers with whom she conducted fieldwork. She describes how a growing emphasis on missions involving ‘‘direct action’’ (i.e., combat) is changing the type of soldier interested in joining the Special Forces. This emphasis, Simons laments, is at the expense of the other three areas of 57 58 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Games and Culture 6(1) Special Forces operations that do not involve direct combat but nevertheless make up the overwhelming bulk of Special Forces missions: unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, and special reconnaissance. The iterations of America’s Army: Special Forces (2.0 to 2.8.3.1 currently), as a game that almost exclusively emphasizes direct action, reinforce this trend. Axe products have been advertised in military-themed video games such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter in addition to Axe’s very own series of online marketing games that are loaded with male heterosexual fantasy. Such symbiotic relationships between various products and industries—deodorants, video games, the military, and so on—are often left unsaid or even unrealized by consumers and academics alike. The cadet whose idea it was to use Axe body spray as an Army weapon, however, made this connection. http://www.americasarmy.com/realheroes/index.php?id¼4&view¼media, accessed April 6, 2010. http://www.americasarmy.com/realheroes/index.php?id¼4&view¼bio, accessed April 6, 2010. http://manual.americasarmy.com/index.php/Target_Identification:_Know_Your_Enemy, accessed April 5, 2010. http://manual.americasarmy.com/index.php/Target_Identification:_Know_Your_Enemy, accessed April 5, 2010. http://www.americasarmy.com/realheroes/index.php?id¼4&view¼media, accessed April 6, 2010. References Allen, Robertson. (2009). The army rolls through Indianapolis: Fieldwork at the virtual army experience. Transformative Works and Cultures, 1. Retrieved April 6, 2010, from http:// journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/80/97 Allen, Robertson. (IN PRESS). Games without tears, wars without frontiers. In Koen Stroken (Ed.), Magic that perpetuates war. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. 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After being awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, he carried out ethnographic research over a period of two years at U.S. Army offices, recruitment events, and military video game development institutions. His dissertation, ‘‘War Games at Work: Networks of Power in the U.S. Army Video Game Project,’’ is based upon this research. 60