War And Video Games

I’ve been thinking a lot about war lately. For my entire life, and long before that, my country has been on a lengthy campaign of ruination against anyone we want.

In fact, the round-the-world murder machine is so commonplace that we regularly forget about it for stretches of time. Wild, right? We go around bombing and destabilizing millions and millions of people, and yet a particularly noteworthy football game or cool video game is enough to make us forget, for a time, about the death cult we live in.

“Soldiers sent to war don’t die for their country. They just die.”
Dan Olson

Obviously, the vile war of aggression against Iran has most recently raised my hackles, and the way these monsters brag about it has made me particularly spicy today.

Look at this shit:

It should go without saying that the administration and the loathsome propaganda weasels they employ should be condemned for the callous and odious interweaving of video game footage with real destruction, but I cannot stop thinking about the creative work that can so easily fit into such a reprehensible series of moving pictures.

It’s instructive about what Activision makes and the public enjoys: War porn. “Call of Duty” and its competitors are media created for people who like to think about realistic (and hyper real) war. You know: Murder and destruction on a very large scale.

Even when the warfare is fictional, it evokes the real deal. That’s kind of their whole thing, right? They want you to live out the power fantasy of shooting people in the head. That’s what tens of millions of people are signing up for.

I don’t think that violent video games make people violent in the real world — that’s the ridiculous moral panic I grew up with from politicians who want something easy to blame for our failure to keep children and teachers safe in schools.

I don’t even think that the people who play and enjoy “CoD” are necessarily antsy to double-tap some poor Middle Eastern person. Heck, they might not even be jingoistic! But we have to actually consider the space that these games inhabit.

I’m certainly not the first person to consider that the cause and effect are actually flipped in the classic violent video game argument. Games don’t make people violent, but people make games violent for a whole host of reasons. For example: Propaganda, power fantasy, profit.

You don’t have to stop playing “Call of Duty” because I made a frowny face at you, but maybe you’d be willing to stop playing those games because Microsoft is under boycott for its complicity in the genocide against the Palestinian people.

Think more about what you’re playing and who makes it. Please.

Image credit: “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III”