Abstract
With the four anti-Terrorism games I wish to dissect here, there is the mission to liquidate terrorists to make a safer world (or in Spec Ops: The Line, to blot out an American force that is operating like a terror group in a political vacuum). That higher mission, however, is soon torn apart by the dependence on military agents to subdue terrorists whose anti-Western and pro-Islamist ideologies are not to be killed. For how does one kill an ideology cherished by millions on the ground, and whose belief is strengthened every time the death of an innocent Afghan or Iraqi civilian is witnessed? Rather than being preached at in an op-ed about our country’s failures and sins, or hearing it second hand, we take in the information from our own hands that pressed to shoot and our own eyes which saw the civilian sink fast. My analysis of the ideological ambiguity that strains inside these anti-terror video games is that they at first offer a U.S. Marine’s gung-ho vociferousness, a straining to accomplish the mission or what game theorists call achieving a “victory condition.” To understand that hunger to meet and defeat the enemy, we can travel with embedded reporters on real missions of engagement. One embedded reporter Tara Brown, for 60 Minutes Australia, records the thoughts of one American Marine in a Humvee on a 2006 search and destroy mission against the Taliban after dusk and then by day, where things were calm and suddenly violent. The Marine tells here: “They like the night, they like the moon, they like the mountaintops. … [During the day] they talk on the radios but they never wanna come out an’ play. Yeah. If I go somewhere an’ I’m gonna be away from my family, We need to play. … OH, Incoming. Yeah. OH, right there!” (qtd. in Brown 2006, min. 10:40-11:10). Video games of war have an appetite for destruction as this Marine’s, but then these four particular video games I address settle the player into a guilty morass. As Bogost, Ferrari, and Schweizer accurately observe, buttressed by articles from The Times of London, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, “terrorism cannot be attacked surgically, and violence begets more violence” (2010). However, the point is not to preach this to gamers but to let them experience it firsthand. I echo, then, what game theorist Miguel Sicart finds: that “the game has the ability to turn its player into a moral being, by stimulating ethical reasoning rather than telling players its message outright” (qtd. in Bogost et al. 2010).
Published Version
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