Dominant, damaged, disappeared: imagining war through videogame bodies

ABSTRACT

Like other pop-cultural forms, videogames commonly reify militarist representations of warfare as straightforward, precise, and moral by obscuring conflict's embodied messiness. But videogames do not just reflect militarist interests in their content; they are materially, symbiotically entangled with militarist interests. Recognising this intimate connection, and the phenomenon of virtuous warfare that results, this paper takes videogames seriously as material cultural artefacts. This paper draws on feminist IR, critical military studies, and game studies to explore three categories of bodies, and their gendered logics, produced by virtualised warfare: the hypermasculine, technologised soldier; the oft-ignored broken bodies of the soldier and game developer; and the obfuscated civilian. Together, this analysis argues that the consumption and production of videogames benefits certain parties, in ways that are reproduced and sustained through the production and obfuscation of bodies. Such entanglements have real consequences for how war, and its popular culture production, is understood and imagined.

就像其他通俗文化形态，视频游戏通过将血肉狼含糊其辞而将军国主义对战争的表达具象化得既直接又细致还公正。不过，视频游戏不单反映军国主义兴趣，还与军国主义利益有着物质上的共生关系。本文指出这层亲密的关系以及随之而来的虚拟战争现象，并将视频游戏认真地看作物质性的文化器物。本文依托 女性主义国关研究、批判的军事研究以及游戏研究，探讨虚拟战争生产的三类身体及其性别逻辑：超男高技术士兵；常被忽视的士兵破碎的躯体和游戏开发者；依头顺脑的平民。总而言之，视屏游戏的生产和消费使某些方面获益，通过身体的生产和语焉不详而再生产并可持续。这种纠缠对于如何理解并想象战争及其通俗文化的生产，是有实际影响的。

KEYWORDS:

• Videogames
• military-entertainment complex
• embodiment
• gender
• virtuous war
• materiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Helen Berents is a lecturer in the School of Justice, Faculty of Law at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research focuses on youth, peace and security, and feminist explorations of conflict and peacebuilding. Her work has been published in journals including International Feminist Journal of Politics, Peacebuilding, Critical Studies on Security, and Signs.

Dr Brendan Keogh is an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Queensland. His research focuses on the industry and culture of videogame creation. He is the author of A Play of Bodies (MIT Press, 2018) and Killing is Harmless (Stolen Projects, 2012).

ORCID

Helen Berents http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1331-3308

Notes

1 Although our attention here is on IR and military videogames, there is work being done within international relations that takes videogames seriously as a form of knowledge in constituting broader understandings of world politics. For example, Michelle Lee Brown's work exploring Never Alone, an Iñupiaq puzzle game, to discuss colonisation and practices of ownership and dispossession (2017) is exemplary of what videogame studies in IR beyond a focus on the military might offer. Jessica Auchter's exploration of the awareness-raising games Darfur is Dying and Endgame: Syria prompts questions about how violence should be seen and engaged (2016b).

2 The tripartite division of bodies offered in this piece is not to suggest these are totalising categories or that all bodies neatly fall into one or the other. We have framed our discussion here around these three pervasive and dominant forms to progress an argument for looking at rather than through bodies. Many other bodies complicate such an analysis and would be a fruitful avenue for further exploration: female combatants who perform and contradict ideas of masculinities in soldier-bodies, non-frontline military personnel who are often invisible in both videogame and real-life depictions of conflict, male civilian bodies which are rendered simultaneously feminised and suspect.

Additional information

Funding

Brendan Keogh’s contribution to this article was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE180100973).