Abstract
Digital games are rapidly becoming the preferred pastime of men and women all over the world. Whereas the research and development into simulation technologies was initially the domain of military communities, over the last few decades the commercial game development industries introduced new modelling and simulation technologies. By the appropriation and adaptation of successful commercial game technology, the United States military contributes to specific areas of research and development thereby deliberately tapping into youth popular culture.
This thesis examines the status of the free state-of-the-art PC game America's Army within the military-entertainment complex and contemporary youth popular culture by exploring the implications of the interaction between commercial game culture, technology, marketing and military culture. Since the United States military uses the same simulation technologies as commercial game designers do, there is a blurring between commercial (military-themed) games and governmental military simulations.
America's Army is a logical outcome of the expanding military-entertainment complex and signals the successful linking of entertainment and defence. The U.S. army is just one of many institutions using games to promote its services. However, unlike many other companies thus far, the Army can claim that it has been very successful at it. Why it became such a success is only part of the question, but its implications are equally important.
By juxtaposing the game within the broader range of First Person Shooter games the aesthetic and socio-economic implications of a new generation of computer games in an age where war has become an experiential intertextual commodity will be explored. The realistic approach to both the production of America's Army and the representation of the U.S. Army in a virtual environment raises questions about the status of America's Army as a game. By analysing the game itself, its production, distribution, and its reception, four different dimensions of the game will be proposed: a recruiting tool, a propagame, an edugame, and a test bed and tool for the U.S. Army.
The success of America's Army has consequences for thinking about games and simulations and the use of these interactive texts for advertisement, education, analysis and propaganda. The appropriation of a global game culture results in a dynamic relationship between the top-down institutional nature of the U.S. Military and the bottom-up participatory character of game communities and signals a shift of the changing status of the representation and simulation of war. The extensive and multi-dimensional analysis of a single PC-game documents its curriculum vitae and at the same time provides a framework for further game research of this kind.
"Changing the Rules of Engagement: Tapping into the Popular Culture of America's Army, the Official U.S. Army Computer Game" by David B. Nieborg, Master's Thesis, Utrecht University, 238 Pages, Acrobat PDF
