War, time, and military videogames: heterogeneities and critical potential

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to a small, but growing, scholarship on military videogames. Focusing specifically on diverse manifestations of temporality within these games, it demonstrates that this genre both is more diverse and has greater critical potential than is often recognized. The article begins with a brief overview of contemporary scholarship on temporality, war, and global politics. A second section then identifies three different ways in which temporality features in military videogames: (1) as a horizon, or historical background, against which they are produced and consumed; (2) as a dramatic setting around which games and their narratives are structured; and (3) as duration – which may be accelerated or decelerated – experienced by those playing these games. These three instantiations of time are then investigated via a new typology of military videogames, ordered around mainstream military shooters, critical military shooters, critical procedural military games, and civilian-centred military games. This typology enables us, first, to show the centrality of temporal assumptions, arguments, and experiences to the ways in which war is made meaningful across these games. And, second, to demonstrate the significance of distinct productions and experiences of temporality for the critical potentiality thereof.

KEYWORDS:

• videogames
• war
• militarism
• military videogames
• temporality
• time
• global politics

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Elizabeth Cobbett, Suzanne Doyle, Michael Kyriacou, and Adriana Sinclair for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See http://www.army.mod.uk/startthinkingsoldier, last accessed 3 May 2018.

2. Our thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for encouraging us to clarify our approach here.

3. A similar argument may equally be made in relation to debate around American decline.

4. For a recent critical engagement with challenges posed by temporal periodizations such as pre- and post- 9/11 (see Toros 2017).

5. In setting out this typology, we are not claiming that others have not also sought to expose the critical intent within videogames (see e.g. Robinson 2012; Schulzke 2017b). Instead, we offer a uniquely comprehensive framework, which explores military games in their totality.

6. Whilst many of the mainstream games we analyse are made in North America, it is important to emphasize that a number of the critical games that we consider below are made elsewhere (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line is made by a German developer, This War of Mine is made by a Polish developer; Sunset is made by a Belgian art collective, and the Metal Gear Solid series are made by a Japanese developer).

7. In making this claim we do not deny that players retain significant potential to question and critique such messages. Instead, our emphasis is on the narratives, settings, and gameplay within such games.

8. One important exception is the game September 12^th (2003), a non-commercial, activist-produced game which similarly seeks to question the efficacies of shooting and destroying both for the player and – by implication – of the US war on terror.

9. Data on MGS series from vgchartz.com as of April 2017. Splinter Cell Conviction (2010) is perhaps the outlier here, with a more action-centric pattern of play.

10. Both Home Behind (2016) and Valiant Hearts (2014) also feature civilians as the main protagonists, but they feature a more action-centric pattern of play and are thus very different in feel.

11. Sales data for these titles are conservative estimates derived from steamspy.com which captures PC-based download figures activated on Steam. TWOM, in particular, was distributed as a ‘free title’ on PlayStation Network (February 2017) and will thus have higher user figures than estimated here.

12. As Stahl (2006, 118) argues, ‘11 September 2001 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ushered in a boom in sales of war-themed video games for the commercial market’.