Joystick Soldiers

Joystick Soldiers is the first anthology to examine the reciprocal relationship between militarism and video games. War has been an integral theme of the games industry since the invention of the first video game, Spacewar! in 1962.While war video games began as entertainment, military organizations soon saw their potential as combat simulation and recruitment tools. A profitable and popular relationship was established between the video game industry and the military, and continues today with video game franchises like America’s Army, which was developed by the U.S.Army as a public relations and recruitment tool. This collection features all new essays that explore how modern warfare has been represented in and influenced by video games. The contributors explore the history and political economy of video games and the "military-entertainment complex;" present textual analyses of military-themed video games such as Metal Gear Solid; and offer reception studies of gamers, fandom, and political activism within online gaming.

Using a performance studies lens, this book is a study of performance in the post-9/11 context of the so-called war on terror. It analyzes conventional theatre, political protest, performance art and other sites of performance to unpack the ways in which meaning has been made in the contemporary global sociopolitical environment.

This volume addresses the persistent and frequently toxic associations between masculinity and games. It explores many of the critical issues in contemporary studies of masculinity—including issues of fatherhood, homoeroticism, eSports, fan cultures, and militarism—and their intersections with digital games, the contexts of their play, and the social futures associated with sustained involvement in gaming cultures. Unlike much of the research and public discourse that put the onus of “fixing” games and gaming cultures on those at its margins—women, LGBTQ, and people of color—this volume turns attention to men and masculinities, offering vital and productive avenues for both practical and theoretical intervention.

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

Considers how people have confronted, challenged, and resisted remote warfare Drone warfare is now a routine, if not predominant, aspect of military engagement. Although this method of delivering violence at a distance has been a part of military arsenals for two decades, scholarly debate on remote warfare writ large has remained stuck in tired debates about practicality, efficacy, and ethics. Remote Warfare broadens the conversation, interrogating the cultural and political dimensions of distant warfare and examining how various stakeholders have responded to the reality of state-sponsored remote violence. The essays here represent a panoply of viewpoints, revealing overlooked histories of remoteness, novel methodologies, and new intellectual challenges. From the story arc of Homeland to redefining the idea of a “warrior,” these thirteen pieces consider the new nature of surveillance, similarities between killing with drones and gaming, literature written by veterans, and much more. Timely and provocative, Remote Warfare makes significant and lasting contributions to our understanding of drones and the cultural forces that shape and sustain them. Contributors: Syed Irfan Ashraf, U of Peshawar, Pakistan; Jens Borrebye Bjering, U of Southern Denmark; Annika Brunck, U of Tübingen; David A. Buchanan, U.S. Air Force Academy; Owen Coggins, Open U; Andreas Immanuel Graae, U of Southern Denmark; Brittany Hirth, Dickinson State U; Tim Jelfs, U of Groningen; Ann-Katrine S. Nielsen, Aarhus U; Nike Nivar Ortiz, U of Southern California; Michael Richardson, U of New South Wales; Kristin Shamas, U of Oklahoma; Sajdeep Soomal; Michael Zeitlin, U of British Columbia.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that the ideological rifts of the period inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that “truth” now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread cultural spectacles like wars and presidential elections to more invisible or isolated phenomena like the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the “fake news” debates of 2016.

Developments in the education field are affected by numerous, and often conflicting, social, cultural, and economic factors. With the increasing corporatization of education, teaching and learning paradigms are continuously altered. Deconstructing the Education-Industrial Complex in the Digital Age is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the shifting structure of school models in response to technological advances and corporate presence in educational contexts. Highlighting a comprehensive range of pertinent topics, such as teacher education, digital literacy, and neoliberalism, this book is ideally designed for educators, professionals, graduate students, researchers, and academics interested in the implications of the education-industrial complex.

With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons, the line between war and video games continues to blur. In this book, the authors trace how the realities of war are deeply inflected by their representation in popular entertainment. War games and other media, in turn, feature an increasing number of weapons, tactics, and threat scenarios from the War on Terror. While past analyses have emphasized top-down circulation of pro-military ideologies through government public relations efforts and a cooperative media industry, The Military-Entertainment Complex argues for a nonlinear relationship, defined largely by market and institutional pressures. Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell explore the history of the early days of the video game industry, when personnel and expertise flowed from military contractors to game companies; to a middle period when the military drew on the booming game industry to train troops; to a present in which media corporations and the military influence one another cyclically to predict the future of warfare. In addition to obvious military-entertainment titles like AmericaÕs Army, Lenoir and Caldwell investigate the rise of best-selling franchise games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, and Ghost Recon. The narratives and aesthetics of these video games permeate other media, including films and television programs. This commodification and marketing of the future of combat has shaped the publicÕs imagination of war in the post-9/11 era and naturalized the U.S. PentagonÕs vision of a new way of war.