Beyond the shadow of 9/11? Videogames 20 years after 9/11

Played by billions, videogames have become perhaps the pre-eminent way in which the public experience, engage with, and encounter the war on terror and its legacies. Commentators argue that military videogames were widely played by citizens who found solace in “spectacular war”, becoming “bedazzled” and willing participants – what Stahl terms “virtual citizen soldiers” – in highly “orientalist” representations of conflict. Finally, there remains a remarkable failure in most scholarship to problematise the continuing assumption that players are somehow militarised through playing games: that through the act of game playing they are complicit in acquiescence and/or support for war and its violences. The growth of gamification and gaming-based recruitment, allied with concerns about spreading militarism and the role of popular culture in what is widely termed “militainment”, would suggest such concerns are not without foundation.