Joystick Soldiers

Nina B. Huntemann is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. She produced and directed the documentary film Game Over: Gender, Race, and Violence in Video Games, distributed by the Media Education Foundation. Matthew Thomas Payne is a Media Studies doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. He has served as a coordinating editor for FlowTV (www.flowtv.org), a critical forum for television and new media culture, and is a co-editor of the anthology Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, forthcoming).

Foreword Ian Bogost Introduction Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne Section 1: Historicizing the Joystick Soldier 1. Living Room Wars: Remediation, Boardgames, and the Early History of Video Wargaming Sebastian Deterding 2. Target Acquired: America’s Army and the Video Games Industry Randy Nichols 3. Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: The Soft Power of Military Games David B. Nieborg Interview with James F. Dunnigan edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne Section 2: Representing War 4. Behind the Barrel: Reading the Video Game Gun Scott A. Lukas 5. War Games as a New Frontier: Securing American Empire in Virtual Space C. Richard King and David. J. Leonard 6. Future Combat, Combating Futures: Temporalities of War Video Games and the Performance of Proleptic Histories Josh Smicker Interview with Rachel Hardwick edited by Matthew Thomas Payne Section 3: Producing Pedagogical War 7. Mobilizing Affect: The Politics of Performative Realism in Military New Media Dan Leopard 8. A Battle in Every Classroom: Gaming in the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College Jeffrey Leser and James Sterrett 9. A Battle for Hearts and Minds: The Design Politics of ELECT BiLat Elizabeth Losh Interview with Colonel Casey Wardynski edited by Nina B. Huntemann Section 4: Playing War 10. “No Better Way to ‘Experience’ World War II”: Authenticity and Ideology in the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor Player Communities Joel Penney 11. “F*ck You, Noob Tube!”: Learning the Art of Ludic LAN War Mathew Thomas Payne 12. Playing with Fear: Catharsis and Resistance in Military-Themed Video Games Nina B. Huntemann Section 5: Resisting War 13. Playing Against the Grain: Machinima and Military Gaming Irene Chien 14. “Turn the game console off right now!”: War, Subjectivity, and Control in Metal Gear Solid 2, Tanner Higgin 15. Dead-in-Iraq: The Spatial Politics of Digital Game Art Activism and the In-Game Protest Dean Chan. Gameography. List of Contributors. Index