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.