Digital Game Industry Research Articles

Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence

In post-9/11 America, digital war games have increasingly come to provide a space of cyber-deterrence where Americans are able to `play through' the anxieties that attend uncertain times and new configurations of power. This article seeks to examine the increasingly close relationship between the US military and the digital-game industry, along with the geographies of militarism that this has produced. Focusing on the contribution that digital war games make to a culture of perpetual war and in the manufacture of consent for US domestic and foreign policy, the Pentagon's mobilization and deployment of digital games as an attempt to create a modern version of the noble war fantasy is critically examined. With particular reference to America's Army, the official US Army game, the article seeks to examine the influence of digital war games in the militarization of popular culture and in shaping popular understandings of geopolitics.

Console video games and global corporations

This article argues that the contemporary console video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the transnational corporations that contribute to its formation and development; in the global audience for its products; and in the complex mixing of format, style and content within games. As an exemplar of this process, the Japanese game publisher Square Enix is the focus of this case study, as it has been successful in contributing to global culture as well as to the digital games industry through its glocal methods. That achievement by a non-Western corporation is indicative of the hybridization of the digital games industry, and it is examined here as one indicator of the complexities and challenges, as well as future potentials, of global media culture.