America's Digital Army: Games at Work and War (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780803285293)

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.


Author: Robertson Allen
ISBN-10: 0803285299
ISBN-13: 9780803285293
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 07/01/2017
Pages: 228
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.11lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d