The Unreal Enemy of
America’s Army
Games and Culture
6(1) 38-60
ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1555412010377321
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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
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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.
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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(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
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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
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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,
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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http://archive.gdconf.com/gdc_2004/zyda_michael.pdf
Bio
Robertson Allen is a Ph.D. Candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of
Washington. 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.
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