Playing discreet war in the US: Negotiating subjecthood and sovereignty through Special Forces video games

Introduction

On the night of 1 May 2011, unbeknownst to Pakistani authorities, a team of US Special Forces ¹ slipped secretly into a town on the outskirts of Islamabad to seek out the most wanted terrorist in modern history. Within 40 minutes, the Navy Seals had succeeded in finding and killing their target, Osama Bin Laden. In an attention-charged media atmosphere, a narrative unfolded in the US that centered not on the ethical, legal or political implications of the clandestine breach of another nation’s sovereign borders nor on the extrajudicial execution of an unarmed fugitive, but rather on the military stories and images behind ‘Operation Geronimo’. The hi-tech weapons and stealth vehicles. The heroic soldiers and their trusty dogs. The assault tactics and killing techniques, all responsible for taking out America’s enemy number one. Unlike any previous US ‘covert’ assassination, the Bin Laden hit ‘overtly’ embraced the media and (re-)mediation ² making use of a vast military lexicon that would have once required a trained understanding in the art of war, but now only required a fluency in playing Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision, 2010), the highest selling videogame in history. ³

Since the First Gulf War, the proliferation of first person shooter (FPS) ⁴ games, notably the Special Forces subgenre, spotlights the growing confluence between the videogame industry, the Pentagon and defense contractors, and more importantly, the greater acceptance of discreet war ⁵ as a space for consumptive pleasure and political endeavor. Serious military videogames serve as a tool of recruitment (see America’s Army, US Army, 2002–2009), a practical heuristic to train officers in strategic systems modeling (see SimCity Baghdad, Mockenhaupt, 2010) as well as tactile simulators for piloting unmanned aerial vehicles (Scott, 2008). Conversely, commercial videogame developers draw not only from real-world conflicts in shaping their narratives but, increasingly, on the expertise and combat tales of actual soldiers. In games such as the Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision, 2010) and Medal of Honor: Anaconda (Electronic Arts, 2010) black ops soldiers and paramilitary contractors lend their true-life experiences from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq to assist game designers in crafting artificial worlds that attempt to accurately portray the realities of modern war. While this partnership between the military establishment, videogame industry and weapons factories makes it difficult to see where the imaginary combat zone ends and the actual physical battlefield begins, the aesthetics and politics of the Special Forces shooter is important because it reflects the way actual political doctrines are constructed in order to validate covert military force as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. By condensing larger power relationships into ritualized games of algorithmic play, ⁶ the Special Forces shooter mimics the methods used by both dominant (nation-state) and emerging (market-state) constitutional orders to seek legitimacy in response to strategic transformations of the battlefield.

The concept of a market-state (Bobbitt, 2008), refers to an emerging ruling system that no longer seeks legitimacy by ensuring the welfare of its citizens, but rather seeks authority by creating an environment that maximizes their opportunities. Unlike the geographical and bordered nation-state, Bobbitt suggests that this new constitutional order emulates the spatial and operational character of the multinational corporation, outsourcing a large majority of its activities to the private sector, depending less on procedural law and regulation and more on market enticements, and disengaging individuals in the actual political sphere where the sources of terror conflicts originate. The market state strives to create economic rather than political relationships with its citizens as individuals. It should be noted that while the nation-state remains the dominant narrative of Western democracy, I concur with Bobbitt that the market-state exists as a strong set of tendencies and powerful force rather than as a full-blown actuality.

Thus, in addition to serving as an official response to the War on Terror and the 20-year gap in US strategic military doctrine, ‘Irregular Warfare’ (IW: Department of Defense, 2007) and ‘Counter-Insurgency’ (COIN: Department of the Army, 2006) and their more recent revised editions, Special Forces games (and their respective constitutional orders) for instance, envision a future of protracted global conflict against faceless, non-state adversaries operating from behind the sovereign borders of foreign nations. As the Department of Defense (2007: 9) contends:

The absence of effective governance in many parts of the world creates sanctuaries for terrorists, criminals and insurgents. Many states are unable or unwilling to exercise control over their territory or frontiers, leaving them open to exploitation.

In the dystopian future envisioned by IW, when ‘failed’ states prove ineffectual or powerless to police themselves against insurgents or when economic sanctions fail to force unfriendly yet neutral nations from offering up transnational fugitives, Special Forces missions (namely, black ops), serve as a necessary and regulating ‘grey’ solution. Similar to the growing legitimization of covert military force as an acceptable means to sustain global security, Special Forces videogames ‘convey to the gamer that continuous warfare lends safety and cohesion to society rather than destabilizing the world’ (Hoglund, 2008: 11). Given their ties to the trinity of military, political and corporate power, Special Forces videogames do not simply imitate political and constitutional realities but rather serve as a necessary component of them. While mainstream films and news media increasingly pay homage to discreet war, the Special Forces shooter goes a step further by providing a participatory middle ground that seeks to naturalize and legitimize covert force solutions as acceptable instruments of statecraft. The Special Forces game accomplishes this by allowing individuals to connect to wars in a way that was previously not possible. Computer games mirror real-world politics and military strategies not only through narrative and aesthetics but in the logics and mechanics of their game play.

Here lies one of the key differences that separates games from film or other mediated forms: namely, their reliance on time-based, goal-orientated frameworks. Like the doctrines of IW or COIN, in shooter games, players take their worldview from the crosshairs of their weapon. In order to win the game, players must develop their targeting ability while internalizing the logic of the system, the game’s over-riding algorithm, its constitutional order. Alexander Galloway (2006: 91) argues that the procedural thinking involved in videogames is ‘at their structural core, in direct synchronization with the political realities of the informatics age’. Concurrent with Galloway’s belief, Hardt and Negri (2004: 13) assert that in the new global order, a pattern is emerging where ‘war must become both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of bio-power aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life’. The more deeply and widely the logic of the discreet war and the black ops narrative are tied to our everyday media habits of connecting with, communicating about and consuming/playing war, the more natural it appears. Thus, the aim of this article is to analyze the various ways in which the aesthetics and politics come together in the shooter to organize, structure, and legitimate vying political frameworks of subjecthood and sovereignty.

Realism, battlefields and the global market place

Since the prelude to the War on Terror, notably with ‘Operation Infinite Reach’ in 1998, when the US launched simultaneous cruise missile strikes against suspected al Qaeda operatives in two countries (Afghanistan and Sudan), on which it had not declared war, US imperatives for global security have sought to undermine the sanctity of the national border while at the same time legitimizing the usage of pre-emptive unilateral aggression. In the wake of the transnational non-state adversary threat, discreet strategies – drone attacks, targeted assassination, torture and sabotage – have rapidly become the favored, fast-track option of Western political decision makers (Zenko, 2010). Offering more limited economic and human cost-risks than conventional military engagement, these predominantly CIA-driven initiatives are not subject to public scrutiny, political debate or even congressional approval (Bergen and Tiedemann, 2011; Rohde, 2012). Moreover, due to their clandestine nature, the majority of such actions rarely end up in the media, diminishing the likelihood of negative political reprisal if they fail to meet their strategic goals (McKelvy, 2011; Shah, 2012; Voice of America News, 2012). Discreet war strategies cut through the cumbersome red tape and uncertain nature of international judicial body approval as well as the time-consuming burden imposed by the internal processes of due process (McKelvy, 2011).

Invariably, Special Forces game play allows gamers to follow but also participate in such political narratives and coercive grey actions. In games such as Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike (Valve, 1998) and America’s Army, game play centers on punishment strategies that erase the need for political dialogue and which strive to make national borders irrelevant. Based increasingly on real events and real hero avatars, Special Forces players do not simply transform into elite, Navy Seals or Delta Force soldiers, but rather into patriotic crusaders whose goal is to liberate failed nations, police states of concern, protect national security interests and vanquish pre-modern evil. The underlining subtext in many of these game narratives advocates a form of global humanitarian interventionism that justifies any breach of another country’s sovereignty, the legal justification to conduct extrajudicial killing and a narrative which brutalizes and demoralizes its faceless victims. David A Clearwater (2010: 265) writes:

Videogames are born of the same cultural processes which Der Derian (2001) identifies with the ability to make war ‘virtuous’ (virtual and infused with virtue). Indeed, these forces seem capable of completely overwhelming alternative and often more truthful representations of warfare and contemporary world politics.

This is true of many Special Forces games, especially those that tie a player’s performance on the virtual battlefield to a cash nexus. Here the combat zone transforms itself into a violent consumer paradise where gamers can maximize personal opportunity while drawing pleasure from the liminal elimination of any or all competitors. In many ways, the marketplace nature of these Special Forces games becomes a more salient and powerful construct than the virtual war itself. Conversely, Special Forces games such as Medal of Honor and America’s Army enforce the grand narratives of the nation-state, configuring game-play goals around the preservation of the body politic. Like most ideological mechanisms, these games attempt to assert themselves through their claims of realism. Here, the authenticity of the game space is conflated with the legitimacy of its political intention. Hyper-realist games of the 90s such as Counter-Strike and America’s Army are poignant examples of how modern-day strategies of battlefield and marketplace come together in the logics of Special Forces game play and how, in turn, the politics of consumption in the age of terror becomes an integral element through which subjecthood and sovereignty are constituted as the market-state succeeds the nation-state. The following section charts the ascendancy of the hyper-realist shooter and its implications.

Origins of the shooter

The origins of the computer war game can be traced back to the great utopian and dystopian contests of the Cold War: the Space Race and Arms Race, respectively. Not surprisingly, then, the first ‘digital’ virtualization of war took the form of a computer game known as Spacewar! (Russell, 1962). Created several years after the Russian Sputnik launch, Spacewar! began as a recreational experiment between a small group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students while working on one of the first ‘thinking’ machines to provide a programmer with a keyboard and display monitor. The original version of the game set two players in control of opposing avatars placed in the ominous, black backdrop of outer space, spaceships whose goal was to destroy each other with an arsenal of torpedoes while being mindful of their fuel reserves, ship velocity, approach vectors and exit trajectories, as well as the deadly gravitational field of an imploding star centered in the middle of the computer screen. True to the spirit of the times, SpaceWar! was an open source, collaborative effort between the new field of academic computing and a blossoming private electronics industry, both largely underwritten by military research grants (Halter, 2006; Herz, 1997)

For the architects of the Cold War, the desire to gauge the viability of nuclear action rose in tandem with 50s futurism, the rising vogue of the digital and a growing acceptance of the epistemology of the game. Increasingly, the computerized war game as a form of serious play would be aligned to the Cold War mentality, namely an acceptance of what Paul Virilio has termed Pure War, a philosophy of martial preparation and readiness that fits well with the extension of the war economy into peacetime (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983). Rapidly, computers were upgraded from super calculators crunching data for tabulating theoretical conflict scenarios for role play, to vision machines able to track the real-time movement of troops and vehicles as well as the trajectories of ballistic missiles in global nuclear war simulations to, ultimately, embedded strategic defense systems able to detect Soviet bombers and guide intercept missiles (Edwards, 1996; Perla, 1990; Halter, 2006). The ominous computer screen backdrop of the war room made famous in films such as Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1969) and Fail-Safe (Lumet, 1964) became part of a reoccurring iconography of the Cold War, a geo-political conflict that was only played out in the abstraction of the war-game.

For much of the Cold War, videogames were held hostage in a kind of technological 2D flatland. Commercially, the glacial processing speeds of early personal computers restricted game designers to the aesthetics and linear manner of play of game board ancestors such as Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders. Militarily, the closest the Pentagon came to embracing virtual worlds as serious heuristics was their use of aircraft and armored-vehicle training simulators. Battlezone (Atari, 1980) emerges as one of the earliest computer games to utilize the subjective POV. In Battlezone, players assumed the POV of anonymous drivers looking out the window of their tank and allowed them the ability to navigate a 3D virtual world. The goal of the game was to out-maneuver and destroy as many opposing tanks as possible while being mindful of the enemy’s hunter-seeker missiles that would randomly leap out from the horizon. Battlezone’s wireframe aesthetic, the digital skeleton of today’s 3D modeling, reflected the rudimentary aesthetics of the 3D game. While Battlezone’s importance is linked to its pioneering 3D ambitions, a much greater notoriety lay in its heuristic potential for the US military. Realizing the immense popularity of Battlezone with its own soldiers and the war game’s similarity to their own costly yet claustrophobic tank simulators, military officials commissioned Atari to make them a more complex tank trainer based on the game. The cost of developing this alternative was a mere fraction of the price tags of conventional military simulators. Though less than a dozen so-called Bradley Trainers were made, Atari became the first commercial game developer to form a business relationship with the US military (Herz, 1997).

By the mid-80s, the exponential nature of computer processing speed development allowed game designers to begin crafting far more compelling, textured synthetic worlds, and detailed human- based avatars. Military themed videogames quickly transitioned from avatars coded as mechanical fighter planes, smart missiles or tanks to sophisticated caricatures of human soldiers who not only looked but also moved in authentic human ways. In early first-person games such as Doom (Id Software, 1990), Half Life (Valve, 1998), and Quake (GT Interactive, 1996), a player’s digital alter ego was usually a soldier or soldier/scientist caught in a military industrial complex conspiracy, pitted against endless waves of sinister, flesh-eating aliens, genetically altered zombies, and nasty robots. Based primarily on military sci-fi narratives inspired by films such as Ridley Scott’s Alien trilogy, these early shooter games successfully tapped in to the cultural and political fears of the Reagan era, its aggressive foreign policy (Afghanistan, Latin America, Lebanon, Iran), its phobia about the evil, primal Other (communism), and its fetishism for high-tech weaponry (Star Wars Program).

While relationships like the Atari–Pentagon partnership of the Reagan era allowed the shooter to take form as a serious heuristic, it was in fact the hostile responses to modern capitalism and the Persian Gulf War in the following decade that spurred the shooter’s ascendancy towards mainstream commercial success. By the late 90s, the FPS began to shift its focus from imaginary ‘out in space’ aliens to real life ‘in our space’ adversaries, embracing the budding narrative of terror; namely, the bombing attacks on the World Trade Center (New York, 1993), the Khobar Towers (Saudi Arabia, 1996), four US embassies (East Africa, 1998), the USS Cole (Yemen, 2000) and the links to the immanent threats lurking in the chaotic ‘failed states’ of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Sudan. Unlike the nuclear détente of the Cold War, terror was no longer the exclusive property of the super powers or even nation-states. Nor was it existential and distant. Rather, the anti-US terrorist attacks of the 90s that culminated in the telegenic catastrophe of 9/11 signaled the birth of a new era in war where conflict would not simply be waged ‘against’ but ‘inside’ America. For the first time since the War of Independence and the Civil War, the US did not ‘go to war’ but rather the battlefield was brought home. The transformation in the strategies of war also carried new sets of rules, or at least broke the ‘old’ rules of engagement. Besides co-opting the American metropolis into the formal boundaries of the war zone, these new wars also abandoned the traditional distinctions between combatant and non-combatant, ‘external conflict and internal security’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 13).

Like the War on Terror and the subsequent doctrines of IW and COIN, the hyper-realistic Special Forces games of the 90s such as Counter-Strike and America’s Army replicate how transformations in the strategies of war challenge the ways in which dominant (nation-state) and emergent (market-state) constitutional orders seek legitimacy.

Accordingly, while these two games share similar neo-orientalist aesthetics and storylines that help to justify military action, their respective logics of game play are in fact remarkably different. It is on these differing modes of game play that I wish to focus. For each mode of play parallels the way in which vying political orders (nation-state and market-state) attempt to constitute the individual as citizen and legitimate their constitutional frameworks for statehood. In the following sections, I will examine the aesthetics and politics of play in each game, and demonstrate how they mirror the way dominant and emerging political systems construct and regulate frameworks that allow self and state to come together. I will begin with Counter-Strike.

The origins and aesthetics of Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike appeared online almost a year after the release of its commercial predecessor, the popular sci-fi shooter Half Life. Yet the game was not a product of Valve, Half Life’s original creator. Rather its development was the work of two avid fans, Minh Le and Jesse Cliffe. Utilizing the game developer’s freely downloadable, open source mods (data packages that encourage players to customize the aesthetic elements of the game without endangering the mechanics of the game), the pair transformed the sci-fi narrative into a realistic, modern warfare drama. Unlike Half Life, the bad guys-as-Other in Counter-Strike were no longer cast as aliens and robots but manifested themselves as generic terrorists while the battlefield was almost always Middle-Eastern or Central Asian. By choosing a particular Counter-Strike game map, a player could select the type of mission – bomb planting and bomb defusing, hostage rescue or simply hostile engagement (team death matches) – and also the geographical setting of the battlefield. True to Edward Said’s premise of the orientalist world being the chaotic space of the Other, the battles of Counter-Strike take place in an ancient, barbaric world embroiled in a timeless, never-ending conflict, a culture spawned by war and death (Galloway, 2006; Stahl, 2010). Generally, the cityscapes, as in many Special Forces games, are marked as primitive spaces through the insistence on medieval period architecture, the lack of modern Western buildings, perpetual conflict and chaos as signified by the war debris, and building rubble littering the streets. The cityscape shows no sign of ordinary life or ordinary people, but instead is portrayed as a deadly labyrinth filled with ruthless, ill-trained enemies. Such spaces belong not to a post-apocalyptical future but rather to a dystopian present, those nebulous ‘states of concern’ (Der Derian, 2001: 101–102) that threaten the stability of Western economic interests. As is the case with other Special Forces games, these failed nations are always depicted on the margins of Western power and where natural resources are abundant (oil refineries, pipelines, mining complexes or industrial factories and warehouses).

The politics of play in Counter-Strike

Game play in Counter-Strike bears a remarkable similarity to how notions of subjectivity and sovereignty are constructed under the ‘market-state’ model. Unlike the nation-state system (and America’s Army), where the concept of citizenship is inherently tied to individuals committed to a ‘vulnerable body politic’ (Bobbitt, 2008: 81), citizens of the market-state (and players of Counter-Strike) are responsible first and foremost to themselves as individuals, a personage likened to that of the modern day citizen–consumer. ⁷ In other words, the efforts of Counter-Strike players are primarily directed at maximizing private profit rather than enhancing public good (their team’s collective gain or ensuring their welfare). Similar to the way the market-state seeks its legitimacy,

Counter-Strike also focuses on a system of reward that seeks to personalize and optimize an individual player’s production and consumption practices. Production implies the elimination of enemies through combat, and consumption means the trading of the cash kill-points for upgrades in weapons and body armor. Following the neo-orientalist narrative, for this new breed of citizen–consumer–soldier, greater affluence and economic citizenship (subjectivity) are intimately linked to the rhetoric of security – a defense of the global marketplace rather than the body politic. It is here where corporate strategy and foreign policy come together as partner cultures.

Thus, in Counter-Strike, game play inserts this market-state logic into the virtual battlefield as a nexus of exchange. While Counter-Strike players must communicate and cooperate with their team members, the crucial facet for players’ survival and ultimate success is their own ability to generate ‘kill’ cash points during game play. The more ‘kills’ that players score, the more the governance system rewards them with cash wealth. The accumulation of this cash wealth can then be used to purchase ever more powerful weapon upgrades and stronger body armor. Importantly, in Counter-Strike the variety of weapons and range of players’ personal arsenals becomes a key factor in their game performance. Regardless of whether players’ teams win or lose, the greater their targeting skill and production acumen, the more chance they have to consume better and the more varied their gear. In this regard, Counter-Strike’s cash nexus favors the abilities of the individual over his or her skills operating as a team player. By inserting market incentives into the Special Forces shooter realm, Counter-Strike connects the individual to an instrumental logic that has buying and selling as its core rationale. Like the modern day citizen consumer, the Counter-Strike player’s path to subjecthood is wired into the transformations of the marketplace (personalization), the emergent role of the sovereign state not as guarantor of opportunity but merely its facilitator. Moreover, successful subjecthood means achieving greater material wealth and independence but also dictates an inherent understanding of and compliance to the chaotic yet vague and distant battlefield as a limitless game/market space of opportunity for investment. As mentioned earlier, the marketplace aspect of game play in these types of shooter games becomes a more salient and powerful construct than the virtual war itself.

In Counter-Strike, a player’s onscreen identity proves a more subjective, fluid approach in negotiating the possible parameters of ‘truth’. Unlike America’s Army, Counter-Strike players are free to join either terrorist or counter-terrorist teams. Citizenship in Counter-Strike does not call for a morally responsible individual concerned for the collective welfare of his or her society. Rather subjecthood unshackles itself from any political implications creating instead a citizenship based on economic reciprocity. In explaining this individuation process, Sheldon S Wolin (2008: 91) suggests

the power of the citizenry is given a sharply different focus; not as political power expressive of the will of engaged citizens but as ‘political and economic freedom’ which ensures that the nation will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity … Quietly, economic mobilization is accompanied by a de-emphasis on politics by a political demobilization.

Indeed the player of Counter Strike (like the individual of the market-state) is compelled into a world where consumer-driven logic and market place semiotics override more truthful representations of the battlefield. Yet this is precisely its purpose. Playing the game is the endgame. Like the Long War or the War on Terror or the insatiable appetite of consumer capitalism, this is a (war)game without end. So rests the survival of a political economy based on terror, a perpetual algorithm of state orchestrated but corporate sponsored conflict waged on battlefields both imaginary and actual.

The origins and aesthetics of America’s Army

America’s Army is another example of a mod whose origins, like Counter-Strike, lay in a Special Forces–military hybrid FPS, Doom. Inspired as well by the Alien franchise and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead film installments, Doom game play follows the heroic odyssey of an unnamed soldier exiled to a sleepy Martian outpost. What made Doom’s origins significant, besides its achievements in 3D graphical abilities, was the innovative way in which the game was first marketed as well as its mod capabilities. Doom was the first shooter to be networked and made available as a shareware trial version. During its first two months, it received over 10 million downloads (Herz, 1997). In 1996, two enlisted US marines who were avid programmers and Doom gamers took advantage of its mod features to customize their favorite game. They began by turning the alien monsters into enemy soldiers, the Martian dungeons into underground military bunkers and the Martian landscape into a Middle-Eastern desert. The resulting modification was unofficially given the title Military Corps Doom, McDoom, or Marine Doom (US Army, 1996) and became a huge success. As a networked game, Marine Doom brought together civilian gamers and professional soldiers. Many of Marine Doom’s civilian players not only competed against and with enlisted men, but importantly, they forged friendships. In this new community, members discussed, amongst other things, the real universe of military life and war. Combat seasoned soldiers shared their front-line experiences and expertise with young civilian gamers eager to better understand the game’s real-world referent. In 1996, only a small group of predominantly junior class military officers realized the potential of Marine Doom. Yet as the popularity of computer games rose, gaining serious commercial success and mass media appeal, the same junior officers also ascended in rank. By 2000, these officers, now in influential, senior positions, voted decisively to officially partner with the commercial video game industry on large- scale developments of military shooters as serious training simulation as well as a potential recruitment tool for replenishing the ranks for the wars of the future (Smith, 2009). The most successful of these ventures was to become America’s Army.

The politics of play in America’s Army

As an endeavor of the nation-state, it is not surprising that the politics of game play in America’s Army duplicates the way its constitutional system constructs and regulates frameworks for subjecthood and legitimates its sovereign authority. Unlike the market-state approach in Counter-Strike, game play in America’s Army dictates civic responsibility and allegiance to the body politic. This fundamental difference occurs in the regulations of and the logics behind scoring. Whereas Counter-Strike scoring revolves around a cash nexus that trades enemy kills for consumer goods, a kill-and-buy logic, America’s Army scoring is based on in-game actions that ascribe to the core principles of military life and civic duty (which are in fact synonymous with the inherent responsibilities of the citizen under the nation-state). Game play focuses on awarding points to players who assist and protect their team mates in killing enemies. While Counter-Strike game play works to promote the player as an individual, America’s Army strives to be anti-individualist. To be successful in America’s Army, a player must adhere to the actual US Army’s seven core values, namely, Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Honor, Selfless Service, Personal Courage, and Integrity. During game play, these seven values are then registered on personalized onscreen scoreboards that track a player’s in-game performance. When a player fulfills one of the prerequisites, an increase in that value will appear on the scoreboard. For instance, with Integrity, a player is awarded points for doing what’s right both legally and morally. This means that he or she cannot violate the ‘rules of engagement’ such as a harming an injured opponent or teammate. With Loyalty, players are awarded points for protective shadowing of a teammate who is in the process of scoring points. This is accomplished by physically ‘eye-balling’ teammates in virtual space or tracking their location with the assistance of the onscreen GPS. With Selfless Service, a player is asked ‘to put the welfare of the Nation, the Army and his teammate s above his own’ (taken from America’s Army website). This means a player is awarded points for treating an injured teammate who has been hit by enemy fire. Values are awarded for the complexity of a healing rescue. Unlike many other games, America’s Army aspires to greater authenticity – a single bullet hit can be lethal. If a player dies, he or she must wait out the round until it is finished. In Counter-Strike, on the other hand, the individualist orientation of game play permits players to heal only themselves and not other teammates. Moreover, true to its cash nexus configuration, in order to revive themselves, a player must first purchase a medi-kit. So realistic are the treatment procedures in America’s Army that some combat soldiers have gone on record as having attributed the actual saving of a colleague’s life from their virtual experiences performing healing rescues in the game (Jenkins, 2008).

The second main difference between Counter-Strike and America’s Army occurs in the negotiation of onscreen identity. Unlike the subjective approach in Counter-Strike, in the virtual universe of America’s Army, a player’s onscreen identity cannot be negotiated. All who play America’s Army must be US soldiers. This is accomplished through the game mechanics which invariably controls what the player sees in the virtual battlespace. When players enter the game they will see themselves and their squad mates as American soldiers, although they themselves are seen by their opponents as enemy insurgents. Recent versions of America’s Army, such as the Real Heroes installment (US Army, 2006), blur the imaginary and real worlds by super-imposing real life heroes (such as Sergeants Tom Rieman, Matthew Zedwick, and Monica Brown) onto an in-game avatar. Drawing from real-world referents, the ‘real hero avatar’ calls attention to the complex process of embodiment and immersion in virtual worlds while provoking questions regarding the implications of interpellation. By placing an authentic human face on a generic avatar, showcasing that person’s real-life exploits of military valor in the line of duty, America’s Army further connects civilian gamers to their avatar’s real-world referent. This ‘connection’ is further amplified by providing a ‘real-time’ chat function through the game’s interface that not only allows players to communicate with their real-world avatarial referent but also invites them to be a part of the soldier’s Facebook-inspired personalized social network. These personalized sections contain the hero–soldier’s record of accomplishments, medals, and skill badges as well as offering access to his or her private history through personal diaries and photo albums. Importantly, players can watch a video portrait detailing not only the hero’s present military career but also documentary images and live-action fictionalization segments of heroic combat exploits.

Like its real world counterpart, America’s Army is a restrictive order of governance camouflaged in the rhetoric of libertarian incentive and promise, the mantra ‘Be all that you can be in the Army’ or ‘Empower Yourself, Defend Freedom’ (www.americasarmy.com). Yet its inference is crystal clear. Self-actualization is linked to the inherent responsibilities and sacrifices that come with civic virtue. Subjecthood demands the allegiance to the citizen body and the preservation of the body politic. In other words, like the individual of the nation-state, the player achieves selfhood by surrender and compliance to the operating system of the game. By internalizing the algorithms of game, the player synchronizes with the desires of the body politic. As Galloway (2006: 91) explains: ‘To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system.’

Conclusion

As this article suggests, Special Forces games seek to mobilize as well as broaden civilian acceptance and entry into carefully ‘mediated’ landscapes of war while restricting access and understanding of their actual real-world referents. By duplicating the real-world strategies of modern warfare (IW and COIN), Special Forces games seek to advance an aggressive, neo-orientalist frontier logic that sees the horizons of globalization, the fringes of Western power, as a gamer-type utopia. For the gamer, the chaotic, incoherent actual world of terrorism and insurgency is simply an imperfect copy of the ordered, precise world of algorithmic play (Galloway, 2006; Wark, 2007). The Special Forces shooter instructs us to believe that, by participating in the games, we can better understand ourselves and the world around us, and thereby assert control over its increasingly emergent, unstable and hostile environment. Like the traditional media’s increasing tendencies to frame political violence as a form of consumptive entertainment (Stahl, 2010) or the restrictive nature of embedded war reporting, the Special Forces game lends itself to a specific way of seeing and interacting with war – imbuing us with a techno-fetishism for modern weaponry yet excising its true consequences of human suffering, saturating us with sanitized images of the battlefield while simultaneously removing the true horrors of collateral damage.

As I have argued, games such as Counter-Strike and America’s Army are important because they illustrate how existing and emerging constitutional orders respond to the transformations of war and how in turn they seek legitimacy and attempt to constitute individuals. By linking the dynamics of game play to political agenda and discreet war strategies, the Special Forces game enables the logics of both the nation-state and market-state through which selfhood and state are brought together and negotiated. In the case of Counter-Strike, the shooter calls into being identities that are hard-wired into the transformations of the marketplace, the emergent role of the sovereign state and its growing legitimization of discreet war. In the case of America’s Army, game play calls into being subjectivities that are morally responsible, civic-minded and devoted to the preservation of the body politic and its initiatives of global governance. In both examples, the shooter enters a participatory middle ground that seeks to re-orientate the modern visual experience by advocating the virtues of virtual war, the authenticity of simulation, and the naturalization and legitimization of discreet military action even in cases where conventional barriers, such as sovereign national borders, exist.

Though scholars have written extensively on the politics of representational media during wartime, there has been relatively little discussion on how it fits into modern consumption practices and behavior in the War on Terror. Thus, this article extends the earlier theoretical debates by Wark and Virilio on the industrialization of perception, its critical role in the monetization and legitimization of political violence, and its ability to instruct on hierarchies of power and knowledge. Specifically, this article charts new ground by addressing the relationship between commercial and constitutional forces in their collective attempts to harmonize the disconnect between the continuity and familiarity of a war and the absence of images, information or access to the actual events (from the battlefield or otherwise) to sustain its legitimacy. I argue that the virtual battlefield serves as instructional middle ground for understanding, experiencing and ultimately, normalizing discreet war as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. Thus, this article’s investigation into the relationship between a growing iconography of terror and its impact on material culture, citizenship and the role of the state, is timely, if not overdue, given the fact that we are living in the second decade of this nebulous conflict.