Andrea Andiloro

Independent research paper Mass Media in Contemporary Armed Conflicts

Cultural representation, procedural rhetorics, and videogames

INTRODUCTION
Fourth Generation Warfare is characterized by an extensive and permeating use of technology, but
the application of technology is not limited to weapons and communication tools used by armies.
Technology has deeply affected how the media works, and how messages and perceptions
concerning war are sent, elaborated, and received. Perceptions of war have been shaped in the past
by epic sagas, books, songs, plays, comic books, and movies, among other forms of media.
Videogames are just one of the more modern forms of media to emerge in the last century. The birth
of videogames can be traced back to the 1960s, and war has always been a theme explored by the
medium, with a title like Spacewar!, largely considered the first ever videogame available for the
public, released in 1962 (Carr, 2003). However, the focus of this research is not to give an historical
analysis of how the war theme has been explored in videogames throughout the history of the
medium, but to analyse the cultural representation of war (and particularly modern conflict) in
modern videogames. The author of this paper believes it of primary importance to do so,
considering the scale of the videogame industry today, which in 2015 consisted in 23.5 billion $ of
total revenue1 and 155 million people playing videogames regularly2 in the USA only. The numbers
are indeed impressive and meaningful, but, regardless of them, the fact remains that videogames
should be rightly considered not just a medium, but a cultural product able to create culture itself
and, therefore, worthy of academic interests. Big steps have been made in the last decade in order to
establish an academic discipline with the intent of studying videogames, but more needs to be done
(Shaw, 2010).
By considering videogames as a form of culture and medium, we can analyse which messages are
being sent through it, which effects they have on the receivers, and what meanings the receivers
make out of them. Although war games developed in the Middle-East have been explored and
1 Morris, C., (2016) Level Up! Videogame Industry revenues soar in 2015, Fortune, 16 February,
http://fortune.com/2016/02/16/video-game-industry-revenues-2015/
2 Campbell, C., (2015), Heres how many people are playing games in America, Polygon, 14 April,
http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8415611/gaming-stats-2015

studied (Souri, 2007), and their potential to provide a different perspective and narrative to modern
conflict, while being a source of empowerment for Arab gamers has been highlighted (Schulzke,
2014), the focus of this article will be on games developed by Western teams and published by
Western companies. This is mainly because Western games have a much wider user-base and their
messages and implications can be expected to be much more far-reaching and pervasive.
Furthermore, the authors interest was in how modern or contemporary war is depicted in
videogames, more precisely those developed after the 9/11 attacks. This is because the author
suspected to find certain patterns in the depiction of themes such as, among others, national
security, terrorism, and American exceptionalism, which could be of certain interpretative value
compared to real-life events. Following the sections exposing the theories and methods adopted in
this paper, a brief literature review around the topic of what has been written about the
representation of war in videogames will be presented, and finally the paper will illustrate a case
studies for one game, developed and published by a European company, followed by some final
considerations.

Cultural representation
Culture can be described as a consisting of shared meanings, which are exchanged, understood
and interpreted through language (Hall, 1997). Language, therefore, has a central importance for
meanings, and its role in allowing participants in a dialogue to build up a culture of common
understandings and interpretation of the world is enabled by a representational system, which is
constituted by signs and symbols (be them sounds, written words, digital images, musical notes or
objects), standing for and representing our concepts, ideas, and feelings. Representation through
language is the main mechanism through which cultural meaning is produced. There has been an
historical diatribe between the idea of high culture(i.e. the sum of great ideas, literature, paintings,
music, philosophies in a society) and the more modern interpretation of culture (i.e. widely
distributed forms of popular music, publishing, art, design, literature, entertainment, belonging to
the every-day life of ordinary people the mass culture of a society). The interpretation of culture
adopted in this research will emphasize the role of meaning in the definition of culture. That is,
culture not so much as a set of things, but as a set of processes and practices, which consist in the
giving and taking of meanings between members of a society who interpret the world in a similar
way and can communicate their feelings, ideas, and thoughts about the world in a way that is
understandable by each other. Culture thus depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully

what is happening around them in a similar way. Meaning is constantly produced and exchanged in
every sort of personal and social interaction, and in a variety of media (i.e. traditional mass media,
modern digital media, and, in the particular case which is of interest for this paper, videogames),
incorporating which in our everyday life and practices, and around which weaving narratives,
allows us to produce further meanings. Meanings, furthermore, set the rules, norms, and conditions
around which we organize and live our social life, and the shaping of their production is, therefore,
sought after by those who wish to govern and regulate the conduct of ideas of others.
In analysing produced meanings, this research will adopt a discursive perspective (Foucault,
1980). We can think of discourse as ways to refer to and construct knowledge, consisting in clusters
of ideas, images, and practices, providing tools for interpreting, talking about, and understanding,
particular topics, activities or institutions in a society. Discursive formations thus define what is
considered appropriate in our formulation of a particular topic and in our practices in relation to it,
and what type of knowledge is true or relevant in that context. The discursive approach is concerned
with the effects and consequences of representation (as opposed to a semiotic approach dealing with
how language produces meaning), and their relation to power and politics, with particular attention
to the historical and geographical context in which meaning is produced.

Procedural Rhetorics
It would be easy for a big part of the public to dismiss videogames as a form of low culture
entertainment, but there is a growing body of scholars who are starting to rethink videogames in
terms of process-based systems reproducing models and representations through player interaction,
therefore applying to videogames a quality that goes beyond that of being simply a form of
interactive or participatory medium. (Salen, 2008) This point of view focuses on videogames as
contexts for the circulation, interpretation, and deployment of meaning. A key concept in this
perspective is that of procedural rhetorics, the art of persuasion through rule-based representations
and interactions, as opposed to spoken or written languages, images, or moving pictures (Bogost,
2007). The author of a game is, accordingly, crafting laws and conveying ideologies by adding or
leaving out in-game rules or possibilities for the player in the simulation (intended as a system
model of a different system source which maintains some of the behaviours of the original system)
the developer is creating (Frasca, 2003). This ability, which is an essential characteristic of
videogames, to execute computationally a series of rule, is what sets them apart from other forms of
media, allowing them to express messages in ways that are different from traditional forms of
narrative. While the developers are creating possibility spaces, which can be explored through

play, they are at the same time acting in a rhetorical way when the games make claims about
aspects of human life and experience, either willingly or not (Bogost, 2008). The game laws and
rules, the actions players are allowed to take, those sanctioned within the game, and indeed those
not allowed, can therefore be seen as representing the game designers agenda (Frasca, 2007).
The concept of procedural rhetoric clearly lends itself very well in the analysis of war theme
games. Wars are brutal and terrible events, much more so for those directly affected by them. For
people living in war zone, the images, sounds, and actions/procedures depicted and simulated
through war games are a part of real human life and experience. Therefore by analysing not only the
images, sounds, and texts of videogames, but the procedural rules embedded within them,
researchers can make claims about what message, and in which ways, the designers are trying to
convey, and how the gamers might interpret them.

Methods
The research presented in this paper consisted of two parts. A brief literature review of what has
been written regarding war-theme videogames, and one case study. For the first part of the research,
the author collected a number of online articles, researches and books, through the online portal of
the Uppsala University and through Google Scholar, by inserting in the search tabs terms such as
videogames, war, representation, terrorism. A certain number of results were finally
discarded because focusing on particular types of war games, which are not the subject of this
research (i.e. WWII or sci-fi war themed games), although some of the articles not dealing strictly
with contemporary war depiction in videogames were included, after finding some interesting and
useful insights for the research at hand.
The game chosen for the case study was This War of Mine-TWOM (11 bit studios, 2004).
The reason for choosing this particular game was the fact that the author contingently happened to
read a number of reviews at the time of its publication, praising the game for its handling of wartheme in a radically different way compared to most mainstream war games, and thought to
experience directly and analyse whether the game could, in fact, offer a different kind of rhetoric
and narrative. The author personally played the games main campaign, taking vocal notes and
successively analysing them through the lenses of cultural representation theory and procedural
rhetoric theory, in a qualitative-hermeneutical fashion. The game was also analysed through the way
it was marketed (i.e. launch trailers, developers interviews), and through gamers feedback,
reception, and impressions, gathered through dedicated online forums and professional reviews.

Literature review
Robinson (2014) writes about the importance of videogames for international politics,
acknowledging popular culture as an important site for interrogating theory, and specifically
American exceptionalism through the critical study of military videogames. Often times the USA
are depicted as facing an hostile environment, therefore presenting the USA as an innocent victim
that is being attacked by external forces and justified in its resort to military force. At the same time
war videogames can enable debates regarding the competence of political leadership and analysis of
the temporal dimension of international relations (they are able in some instances to neutralise
periods of history of international relations that are not traditionally seen in a good way, i.e. the
Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq). Furthermore, modern war videogames can often shed a light
on the Military Industrial Complex, although whether they are presenting a critique to it or reaffirming its dominance is debatable, according to the author.
In another article, Robinson (2012) writes about the need for political science to take
videogames seriously, providing an in-depth discussion of the link between videogames and the
militarisation of politics and society through the role of the military-entertainment complex (felt in
the militarisation of the game content). The author also brings some examples of videogames that
act in a critical way towards this tendency, providing arenas of social protest, and the actions of
activist modders (activists who implement modifications in computer games to send a message). An
example of the latter is Velvet Strike, a mod for Counter Strike (Valve Software, 1999), which
allows players to download a patch in order to decorate the online in-game environment with antiwar and subversive messages. But also some mainstream titles are openly critical about war, most
notably the Metal Gear Solid series (Konami). Finally there have been a certain number of titles
developed in the Middle-East, most notably Under Ash (Dar al-Fikr, 2002) and its sequel Under
Siege (2005), which places the player in the role of a young Palestinian who becomes involved in
the Intifada, helps injured Palestinians, needs to find weapons and attacks Israeli soldiers. Under
Ash developers described the game as a call for peace, legitimating themselves by offering levels
that are inspired by real stories of Palestinian people. The game does not allow shooting civilians
and does not feature suicide bombings. Furthermore, the developers emphasise how gameplay does
not allow for consequences not achievable in reality, thus claiming Under Ash to be about history,
and mirroring the reality of the conflict which sees no solution. Other games developed in the
Middle-East are more explicitly militaristic in their tone, for example Special Force (Hezbollah,

2003) and its sequel Special Force 2: Tale of the Truthful Pledge (Hezbollah, 2007), which places
the player in the role of an Hezbollah operative during the wars between Lebanon and Israel in the
early 1980s and 2006. These last two games, although more militaristic offer a radically different
perspective and representation of conflicts compared to western games, and claims that they provide
empowerment for those players directly affected by the conflicts depicted have been brought
forward by a number of scholars.
Park (2004) lists a series of games with war as their central theme, also indicating how the
military collaborated with game developers since the early 1980s, although the first serious use of
games by the military didnt start until the mid 1990s, when Marine Doom (U.S. Army, 1996), a
version of Doom (id Software, 1993) specifically designed for the army, was used as the first 3D
videogame intended for collective training. Marine Doom was the first known military simulation
software and allowed marines to complete objectives together within the Doom game by linking
several games together. The author also illustrates different academic views on whether war games
affect those who play them, with some claiming that they do in fact consolidate an ethos of
militarization under the common assumption that American safety and security is of primary
importance, and enabling this by flooding the market with war games, thus allowing them to
maintain a certain popularity, and to immerse the players in a virtual world where violence as well
as use of force is not the last resort, but the only one. However, studies focusing on the supposed
effects of violent videogames on behaviour were largely inconclusive.
Susca (2014), in writing about violent videogames and their consequences for real war,
brings forward the example of Americas Army (U.S. Army, 2002), an online videogame designed,
developed, and published by the U.S.A. Army, the first game ever produced and conceived by the
military only, as part of its over-arching public relations and recruitment. The game, as of 2014, has
been downloaded more than 42 million times, and has a world-wide virtual army of active players
of half a million people. The game sets the player in a fictional war scenario, with the Republic of
Czervenia and its despotic President-General attacking the peaceful Democratic Republic of the
Ostregals. The author states how this fictional narrative of an unreasonable foreign despot
representing a threat to both its citizens and global peace provided fertile ground for xenophobic
and nationalistic online messages surrounding the game. The author makes a point of how for-profit
war videogames often have ties to the real-life American army (i.e. army consultants), thus
effectively creating a new world of mediated government and corporate propaganda through
videogames, in a similar fashion to what the U.S. government did in the 20th century by adopting
movies and television to shape public opinion about their enemies during the two World Wars and
beyond. The difference, according to the author, is in the fact that videogames have taken the place

of old media in the 21st century, where there is not a clear state enemy, but virtual fictional regions
and anti-terrorism messages provide an all too concrete replacement. Americas Army was billed the
Official U.S. Army Game on its website, and was an instant hit, exceeding all expectations by
placing soldiering and the roles, training, teamwork, and technology of the army, at the centre of
popular culture. The game was effectively designed as a recruitment tool by targeting adolescents,
and it was very effective in obtaining that goal. Viewed as a propaganda tool, Americas Army
creates an audience which actively (knowingly or not) act in maintaining the legitimation and
extension of the military-entertainment complex to include adolescents entertainment products,
thus having a certain influence and effect in cultivating a certain type of consciousness among its
players. Americas Army, indeed, does not only work as a recruitment tool, but has also a
pedagogical function (in providing player a realistic experience of rule of engagement, discipline,
moral, and rules of conduct within the real army).
Kumar (2004), also writes about Americas Army, stating that the game actively participates
in the production of a discourse of war, and suggests that it makes war possible by mechanising the
soldier, by obscuring the enemy and the self, and by sanitising violence. This has a number of
effects. Firstly, the game plays into a larger discourse aiming at the removal of human essence from
human bodies by making war-fighting an almost mechanical function. Secondly, the game acts as a
cyber-deterrent by providing a space for war with no enemy and anticipating any enemies that may
come in existence. Thirdly, the game simulates security by removing the need to confront insecurity.
isler (2005), writes about Americas Army as well, as an example of persuasive and
ideological videogames, which can be used as means of propaganda, be it in political campaigns
(i.e. U.S. presidential elections), to re-imagine recent historical events (i.e. battle over Fallujah, or
the Palestinian Intifada), or recruitment propaganda entering the political real-space, as the
aforementioned Americas Army or Special Forces. This means that although videogames are still
considered by many as a playground reserved for children and teenagers, they are in fact no longer
just toys for kids. Their impact and influence on the public still needs further evaluation and
research, but the fact that governments and political parties have adopted the medium as a
propaganda tool is enough to indicate their awareness of a power hidden in the medium.
Sample (2008), explores the theoretical, political, and pedagogical dimensions of tortureinterrogation in videogames set in the context of the USs Global War on Terror, by analysing
Splinter Cell (Ubisoft, 2002) and 24: The Game (2006), and arguing that these games which do
include torture as part of their gameplay reveal much of how the gamers and the public in general
conceive torture. Splinter Cell implicitly acknowledges the War on Terror, and places the player in
the shoes of Sam Fisher, an elite black-ops agent working for the National Security Agency. In the

game torture is imagined a straightforward procedure where the player is trying to extort some
information from an opponent (the game does not use terms such as victim, suspect, or
indeed terrorist), where there are no language barriers, no chance for nationality or ethnicity to
play a role, where the person being interrogated doesnt try to fight back. The interrogations are
represented with the playable character grabbing the opponent from behind, with no visual
contact, neither for agent Fisher, nor for the player. Furthermore, the player is notified when an
opponent has valuable information, thus allowing the player to always know when they have the
option to torture somebody with an immediate pay-off (i.e. the opponent might tell agent Fisher
about cameras in the next area of the game). In 24: The Game, torture is presented as a nonskippable part of the game, and is highly gamified, with the player gaining a certain score at the end
of the interrogation and the possibility to replay the section, were the player not satisfied with the
final score. This reinforces the idea that there is a certain correct way to conduct the interrogation
that might be able to give the player more points.
Kingsepp (2003), by comparing the movie Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) and the
television serial Band of Brothers (Spielberg, 2001), with the Medal Of Honour (Electronic Arts)
videogame series created by Steven Spielberg, delivers and interesting viewpoint on how death is
portrayed in videogames. Whereas in the cinematographic operas of Spielberg, death is often
portrayed in a brutal and hyper-realistic way, in videogames death appears mechanical and efficient,
with bodies often disappearing from the game, thus not representing adequately the authenticity
of death.
Clarke, Rouffer and Snchaud (2012) write about how videogames are on the one hand
influencing players perception about what soldiers are allowed to do during a war, while on the
other hand influencing soldiers behaviour during armed conflict itself, claiming that videogames
create the impression that prohibited acts (i.e. torture or extrajudicial killing) are standard behaviour
in war scenarios. The authors call for the development of more realistic videogames where players
would face the same dilemmas as combatants, and which would see an integration of International
Humanitarian Rights Law. Players would be rewarded when they respect the law and sanctioned if
they violate it. They also warn against the potential risk for playstation mentality by drone pilots.
Payne (2012), writes about the challenged faced by marketers in promoting war games,
taking the example of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare CoD:MW (Activision, 2007), the first in the
series featuring a modern war scenario. The game saw a number of military consultants
participating in the development works, and was critically acclaimed for, and regarded as, providing
a realistic depiction of modern conflict in terms of visuals, sounds, and atmosphere. While this
might be true, the author states how realisticness is not the same as realism. The game, as a matter

of fact, does not portray soldiers everyday life experience, harshness, emotional struggle, and
hardship. This might create simulation fever, a term adopted in game studies to indicate the
uneasiness and anxiety a player feels when experiencing a simulation that lacks certain aspects of
non-virtual life. In order to avoid this, CoD:MW marketers resorted to a series of parody or spoofs
videos of iconic foreign leaders, traditionally hostile towards the USA (Vladimir Putin, Fidel
Castro, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Kim-Jong-Il, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), playing the game and
congratulating the developers for the thrilling and realistic experience in a funny way. In this way,
the marketers were trying to send a message that can be interpreted as saying: dont take it so
seriously, its just a game.

Case study
This War of Mine
TWOM is a 2016 game developed and published by 11 bit studios, a Polish developing
company. The game is set during the siege of the fictional city of Pogren, but the game was
explicitly inspired by the siege of 1992-96 siege of Sarajevo. The game is different from most
mainstream war games in terms of tone, themes, gameplay, and genre. There is no definite plot,
each game session is different from the previous one. The player controls a group of civilians trying
to survive until the ceasefire (which, in the main game mode, the player doesnt know when it will
occur). Each of these civilians have names and back-stories, and more and more in discovered about
them by progressing within the game. Every day of the conflict counts as one turn, and each turn is
divided into two sections, day and night. During the day, all the civilians are in their shelter (a
bombed house), and can gather resources to make upgrades to the shelter (i.e. build beds, radios,
toys for children, stoves, heaters, fill up holes in the walls), interact with each other, exchange
resources with black market merchants, decide to help out neighbours in need, and so on. During
the night, the player gets to decide whether he wants to send one of the survivors to scavenge for
resources in other locations of the city, while the rest of the survivors are left in the shelter, deciding
who stays awake guarding the place and who sleeps. The player then controls the scavenger, who
can acquire a certain number of resources according to his particular characteristics. During these
sections the scavenger can get shot by snipers, attacked by other hostile survivors, or can meet other
friendly civilians, willing to help him or exchange resources. After the scavenger returns to the
shelter the turn ends, and the player finds out how the night went for the rest of the survivors, who

mightve been attacked by other survivors looking for resources. Characters in the game can get
sick or wounded, and the player must attend to them with medicines or bandages. They also need to
eat and drink, so acquiring food and water is a central part of the game. Players need to pay
attention to the mental health of characters as well. If for example a scavenger is forced to kill
another civilian in order to get back safely to the shelter, or steals medicine from other needy
civilians for a critically sick companion at the shelter, he/she might be torn by remorse, and fall into
depression, therefore rendering the character effectively non-playable. Other characters can try to
interact with, and take care of him/her, in the hopes of a recovery, but sometimes the experience for
the character has been too much and it can lead to suicide. These consequences seem to affect also
players, who feel emotionally attached to the characters and feel distressed when a character dies
quickly and unceremoniously3.
The game is very different from usual war theme games, in that it depicts war from the
civilians perspective. There are several anti-war messages which can be found through the game.
The game opens with an Ernest Hemingway quote: In modern war you will die like a dog for no
good reason. The first thing the player sees in the main menu is the image of a crumbling wall with
the words fuck the war written on it. During gameplay the player can read what characters are
thinking and often times they will be reflecting on the horrors they are going through. The art-style
and sound is also very different from most mainstream war games. The art is dark and gloomy, and
the music follows the same style in daytime (there is no soundtrack during the night-time sections),
opposed to the colourful colour pallet and the epic soundtrack of other games. Death is portrayed in
a radically different way as well. If you happen to kill another civilian, you will not necessarily see
a detailed depiction of the act (the game plays as a side-scroller, and the camera is at a certain
distance from the avatars), but the consequences and the implications of the act are far reaching into
the game. Your character will most likely be emotionally affected by his actions, while the
companions of the killed individual might want to avenge their friend in the upcoming nights. If, on
the other hand, the players character is the one to get killed, the image does not simply go black, as
with most war games, and there is no chance to retry the section. Instead, a realistic picture of the
dead character will appear, and the rest of the survivors will need to go on without their companion.
This will affect them, some might get depressed, while some others, shocked by the event, might
leave the shelter trying to flee the city (thus leaving the player with one character less).

3 https://www.reddit.com/r/ThisWarofMine/comments/4pqdoe/this_game_is_a_real_rollercoaster/ - see all thread.

The game was openly marketed as an anti-war game, and, in the launch trailer4, game
developer Emir Cerimovic, who experienced the war in Sarajevo when he was 9 years old, talks
about his experience as a civilian affected by war. This resonated with a number of players, some of
which went on to develop a website where real people living in real war zone can share their stories
and experiences5. Although the setting of the game having an Eastern European feel, some scholars
(Kirkpatrick & Schiltz, 2016), noted how the conditions represented in the game can easily
resemble those faced by civilians in Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria, and some players noticed this as well6,
giving them an opportunity to reflect on the events currently taking place in those regions.

Conclusion
War games, and especially first person shooters, continue to be one of the most popular
types of game played. Interestingly, both the two biggest war games series, Call of Duty - CoD
(Activision) and Battlefield - BF (Electronic Arts) are starting to distance themselves from current
war representation. The two newest CoD installations, Black Ops 3 (Activision, 2015) and the
upcoming Infinity Warfare (Activision, 2016), are both set in the future in a sci-fi context. The
launch trailers they used for both games feature famous personalities7 8, which has become a
standard in their marketing strategy. The trailers have a light and funny overtone, and while
showing shooting scenes, they dont portray the direct killing of humans (or if they do, like in the
most recent trailer, it is done is outer space, in a very sci-fi and clearly fictional setting).
With its most recent instalment, Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts, 2016), the BF series went
back to portray historical conflicts, which was what most successful war games were doing before
2007, when CoD:MW was published9. In this case the conflict represented is WWI.
My argument is that mainstream war games are currently changing their depiction of war, either
creating a clearly fictional setting, or instead going back to recreating historical conflicts. This
allows for less room for controversies. I also believe that there might be a geographical element to
4 11 bit studios, (2014) This War of Mine Launch Trailer The Survivor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=gotK5DLdVvI
5 https://www.reddit.com/r/ThisWarofMine/comments/4ou9js/read_stories_of_people_living_in_war_zones_here/
6 https://www.reddit.com/r/ThisWarofMine/comments/478jp8/this_game_is_a_reflection_of_horrors_that_people/ see all thread.
7Activision, (2015), Official Call of Duty: Black Ops III Live Action Trailer Seize Glory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejMqe1WBtEQ
8 Activision, (2016), Official Call of Duty: Infinity Warfare Live Action Trailer Screw It, Lets Go To Space,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_87zvl0LcEg
9 Hill, D., (2014), World War 2 Shooters: Its Time for a Comeback, Den of Geek!, 11 March,
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/world-war-2-shooters/233270/world-war-2-shooters-its-time-for-a-comeback

consider when analysing war videogames and the way they depict conflict. Games both published
and developed by American companies, for example, the CoD series tend to have the typical
Hollywood war-movie feeling and develop a rhetoric that aims at reinforcing the position of the
USA in the IR arena. Scholars have already noted how games developed in the Middle-East might
explore and represent different elements and points of view of war which are not otherwise often
portrayed. However, the author of this paper thinks it would be worthy of further research to
explore the representation offered, and the rhetoric used by, games developed in Europe, since the
continent has clear cultural affinities with the USA (and most European countries are military allies
with the Americans), while at the same time it necessarily needs to remain an independent cultural
entity. There might be some differences between games developed in Europe but published by
American companies and games both developed and published in Europe. The BF series can be one
example of the former: developed by Swedish developing studio DICE and published by American
company Electronic Arts, the series is often lauded within gaming culture for being more realistic
than its main competitor, CoD10, and indeed the game itself adopts this supposed realism as part of
its marketing strategy11 (although soldier gamers themselves are critical of this claim)12. However
the themes and points of view represented are quite the same as American games, as are the types of
rhetoric adopted. TWOM, on the other hand, can be an example of a game fully developed and
published by European companies, and its representation of war, the adopted points of view, the
implemented rhetoric, the choice of marketing strategies, are all radically different compared to
American games, as well as to the examples we have of Middle-Eastern games. Unfortunately this
argument proposed by the author is purely speculative, given the limited scope of this paper, but he
hopes to be able to continue his research further on.

10 http://www.gamespot.com/forums/games-discussion-1000000/why-battlefield-is-far-superior-to-call-of-duty32920604/ - see all thread.

11 Electronic Arts, (2011), Battlefield 3 Trailer Is it real?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=FlxX8DBMITE
12 Thang, J. (2012), What do real soldiers think of shooting games?, IGN, 23 February,
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/02/23/what-do-real-soldiers-think-of-shooting-games?page=2

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Ludography
Afkar Media, (2005), Under Siege, Dar al-Fikr
Central Internet Bureau, (2007), Special Force 2: Tale of the Truthful Pledge, Hezbollah
Dar al-Fikr, (2001), Under Ash, Dar al-Fikr
DICE, (2016), Battlefield 1, Electronic Arts
Dreamwork Interactive et al., (1999 2012), Medal Of Honour, Electronic Arts
Hezbollah, (2003), Special Force, Hezbollah
Id Software, (1993), Doom, GT Interactive
Infinity Ward, (2007) Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, Activision
Konami, (1998 2016), Metal Gear Solid, Konami
SCE Studio Cambridge, (2006), 24: The Game, 2K Games
S. Russel, (1962), Spacewar!
Treyarch (2015), Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3, Activision
Ubisoft Montreal, (2002), Tom Clancys Splinter Cell, Ubisoft

U.S. Army, (2002), Americas Army, U.S. Army

U.S. Army, (1996), Marine Doom, U.S. Army
Valve L.L.C., (2000), Counter-Strike, Sierra Studios
11 bit studios (2014) This War of Mine, 11 bit studios

Online News Articles

Campbell, C., (2015), Heres how many people are playing games in America, Polygon, 14 April
Hill, D., (2014), World War 2 Shooters: Its Time for a Comeback, Den of Geek!, 11 March
Morris, C., (2016) Level Up! Videogame Industry revenues soar in 2015, Fortune, 16 February
Thang, J. (2012), What do real soldiers think of shooting games?, IGN, 23 February
Videos
Activision, (2015), Official Call of Duty: Black Ops III Live Action Trailer Seize Glory
Activision, (2016), Official Call of Duty: Infinity Warfare Live Action Trailer Screw It, Lets Go
To Space
Electronic Arts, (2011), Battlefield 3 Trailer Is it real?