America's Digital Army

America's Digital Army Games at Work and War - Anthropology of Contemporary North America

Paperback (01 Jul 2017)

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Publisher's Synopsis

America's Digital Army is an ethnographic study of the link between interactive entertainment and military power, drawing on Robertson Allen's fieldwork observing video game developers, military strategists, U.S. Army marketing agencies, and an array of defense contracting companies that worked to produce the official U.S. Army video game, America's Army. Allen uncovers the methods by which gaming technologies such as America's Army, with military funding and themes, engage in a militarization of American society that constructs everyone, even nonplayers of games, as virtual soldiers available for deployment.

America's Digital Army examines the army's desire for "talented" soldiers capable of high-tech work; beliefs about America's enemies as reflected in the game's virtual combatants; tensions over best practices in military recruiting; and the sometimes overlapping cultures of gamers, game developers, and soldiers.

Allen reveals how binary categorizations such as soldier versus civilian, war versus game, work versus play, and virtual versus real become blurred-if not broken down entirely-through games and interactive media that reflect the U.S. military's ludic imagination of future wars, enemies, and soldiers.
         

Book information

ISBN: 9781496201911
Publisher: Nebraska
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 355.480285536
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 228
Weight: 350g
Height: 228mm
Width: 151mm
Spine width: 19mm