Kontour, Kyle (Ph.D., Communication, School of Journalism and Mass Communication) War, Masculinit... more Kontour, Kyle (Ph.D., Communication, School of Journalism and Mass Communication) War, Masculinity, and Gaming in the Military Entertainment Complex: A Case Study of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Dissertation directed by Professor Stewart Hoover Over the last decade, critical scholars have pointed to the acceleration of the cultural, aesthetic, technological and political economic ties between the military and entertainment industries, noting both its synergistic nature and the purported effects of militarism on an already masculinized, technophilic culture of gaming. This may have deleterious effects on society, where videogame players may be trained to think like soldiers—both in terms of combat performance and hegemonic military masculinity. Utilizing game studies methods of textual analysis and cyberethnography, and drawing on critical work concerning war and masculinity, this dissertation argues that while it is true that games such as these are imbued with problematic ideolog...
Thus far, the bulk of effects research on violent video games demon-strates troubling correlation... more Thus far, the bulk of effects research on violent video games demon-strates troubling correlations between playing violent video games and increases in (or primers for) aggressive behavior, which suggests that overall, violent video games may be detrimental to society. However, there may be significant weaknesses in this body of research, concerning not only methodological issues such as study design and the ways in which ‘aggression’ or ‘violence’ are conceptualized, but also containing fundamental misunderstandings of games as text, apparatus, or cultural artifact. Because these studies may not have a sophisticated enough un-derstanding of games as objects or gaming as an activity, we must there-fore reconsider the conclusions and implications thus far arrived at in this research and look for new ways forward for assessing violence in/and video games.
With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm ... more With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective, a potentially productive means of understanding the complexities of this sphere is through the lens of Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality—a concept that ties together the actions and preferred outcomes of the modern surveillance state with the microlevel actions of individual behavior. In this analytical framework, social norms are inculcated through subtle forms of coercion, where the state establishes the field of action in which state subjects ultimately perform self-discipline. This article argues that the first person shooter genre inculcates what I refer to as the governmentality of battlefield space: a form of discipline in which players adhere to gamic norms of performance—efficiency, proficiency, and masculine performativity—which are delineated by ludic structures and largely understood on terms which originate within the social ecology of gaming. The genre accomplishes this though disciplinary techniques such as informational verisimilitude, statistics, and masculinized “gamer” discourse, particularly during multiplayer instances, in which players constitute social understandings of what is “good” and “bad” play. It is on these terms that virtual combat performance and player performance become conflated in a kind of masculinized performance, which both adheres to and undermines traditional, hegemonic norms of (Western) military masculinity. This phenomenon transcends local social realities, and highlights the ways in which particular aspects of gaming and combat appear to have increasingly overlapping phenomenological and ontological qualities, working to produce a form of self-performance that may be required of tomorrow’s soldiers.
Kontour, Kyle (Ph.D., Communication, School of Journalism and Mass Communication) War, Masculinit... more Kontour, Kyle (Ph.D., Communication, School of Journalism and Mass Communication) War, Masculinity, and Gaming in the Military Entertainment Complex: A Case Study of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Dissertation directed by Professor Stewart Hoover Over the last decade, critical scholars have pointed to the acceleration of the cultural, aesthetic, technological and political economic ties between the military and entertainment industries, noting both its synergistic nature and the purported effects of militarism on an already masculinized, technophilic culture of gaming. This may have deleterious effects on society, where videogame players may be trained to think like soldiers—both in terms of combat performance and hegemonic military masculinity. Utilizing game studies methods of textual analysis and cyberethnography, and drawing on critical work concerning war and masculinity, this dissertation argues that while it is true that games such as these are imbued with problematic ideolog...
Thus far, the bulk of effects research on violent video games demon-strates troubling correlation... more Thus far, the bulk of effects research on violent video games demon-strates troubling correlations between playing violent video games and increases in (or primers for) aggressive behavior, which suggests that overall, violent video games may be detrimental to society. However, there may be significant weaknesses in this body of research, concerning not only methodological issues such as study design and the ways in which ‘aggression’ or ‘violence’ are conceptualized, but also containing fundamental misunderstandings of games as text, apparatus, or cultural artifact. Because these studies may not have a sophisticated enough un-derstanding of games as objects or gaming as an activity, we must there-fore reconsider the conclusions and implications thus far arrived at in this research and look for new ways forward for assessing violence in/and video games.
With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm ... more With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective, a potentially productive means of understanding the complexities of this sphere is through the lens of Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality—a concept that ties together the actions and preferred outcomes of the modern surveillance state with the microlevel actions of individual behavior. In this analytical framework, social norms are inculcated through subtle forms of coercion, where the state establishes the field of action in which state subjects ultimately perform self-discipline. This article argues that the first person shooter genre inculcates what I refer to as the governmentality of battlefield space: a form of discipline in which players adhere to gamic norms of performance—efficiency, proficiency, and masculine performativity—which are delineated by ludic structures and largely understood on terms which originate within the social ecology of gaming. The genre accomplishes this though disciplinary techniques such as informational verisimilitude, statistics, and masculinized “gamer” discourse, particularly during multiplayer instances, in which players constitute social understandings of what is “good” and “bad” play. It is on these terms that virtual combat performance and player performance become conflated in a kind of masculinized performance, which both adheres to and undermines traditional, hegemonic norms of (Western) military masculinity. This phenomenon transcends local social realities, and highlights the ways in which particular aspects of gaming and combat appear to have increasingly overlapping phenomenological and ontological qualities, working to produce a form of self-performance that may be required of tomorrow’s soldiers.
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