A new Costs of War paper examines how the U.S. military uses video games and gaming culture for recruitment, training, and public relations, raising questions about the blurred line between play and militarization.
Today, the United States military uses video games and gaming technologies for a host of goals—chief among them training, recruitment, and public relations—because of their ubiquity and due to their popularity with younger, would-be recruits. Yet a game is never just a game. This is because, no matter how fantastic or abstract the content, games resonate with players for all the ways they connect with a lived reality. The question is how does our government use video games and to what end? The Pentagon’s decades-long investments in game-making and its esports recruitment efforts all point to instrumental uses of games for buttressing the military and its strategic goals.