America's Digital Army
eBook - ePub

America's Digital Army

Games at Work and War

  1. 240 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

America's Digital Army

Games at Work and War

About this book

America's Digital Army is an ethnographic study of the link between interactive entertainment and military power, drawing on Robertson Allen's fieldworkobserving 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.

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Yes, you can access America's Digital Army by Robertson Allen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Epigraph
  6. Contents
  7. List of Illustrations
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. 1. America’s Digital Army
  10. 2. The Art of Persuasion and the Science of Manpower
  11. 3. The Artifice of the Virtual and the Real
  12. 4. The Full-Spectrum Soft Sell of the Army Experience
  13. 5. Complicating the Military Entertainment Complex
  14. 6. The Labor of Virtual Soldiers
  15. Notes
  16. Glossary
  17. References
  18. Index
  19. About Robertson Allen
  20. Series List
  21. Illustrations