The politics of consuming war: video games, the military-entertainment complex and the spectacle of violence

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Debord’s the society of the spectacle and Evans and Giroux’s notion of the spectacle of violence, this paper argues that a discourse on war, organised violence, and global politics has been disseminated through a military-entertainment complex that has commodified militarism into a practice of consumption. Drawing on first-person shooter (FPS) video games as a context, the paper considers the market for these games, the conditions of their creation, and the way they are marketed. The paper discusses three ways in which FPS games function as part of a contemporary spectacle of violence: through their intertextual connections to other forms of military entertainment; through the immersive experience they offer; and through the geopolitical position they establish. The paper concludes by establishing FPS games as complex, sophisticated cultural artefacts that both draw on and shape wider discourses on war and the military, in the age of the spectacle of violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Spectacle
• militarism
• military-entertainment complex
• video games
• war play

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.americasarmy.com.

2. www.wepc.com. Last accessed 15/01/2021.

3. www.wepc.com. Last accessed 15/01/2021.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty.

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honour_(video_game_series).

6. https://www.americasarmy.com/press. Last accessed 14/05/2020.

7. https://www.americasarmy.com/press. Last accessed 14/05/2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Godfrey

Richard Godfrey is currently Senior Lecturer in Strategy at The Open University. His research interests turn on the interconnections between militarism, organisation theory and popular culture. Richard’s other work informed by this perspective includes studies of humour, gender and the body, emotion and identity work in or through military contexts.