I developed a public lecture about video games and the military, which I presented at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Worcester State College on Thursday, February 25. Below is an abstract of the talk. The WPI presentation was video recorded and is available in High-Res, Low-Res and Audio-only versions. My friend Darius Kazemi drove me to the WPI talk and took close notes of my presentation. You can read his on-the-fly transcript. The Worcester local paper, the Telegram & Gazette, published a story about my WSC talk.
Joystick Soldiers: Video Games and Militarism
This presentation is an historical and contemporary analysis of the relationship between the video game industry and the military. In particular, I focus on war and military-themed video games, which represent a large portion of games sold in the US, and argue that video games are the Why We Fight films of today. By paying hyper-attention to the details of modern warfare technology and tactical strategy, military-themed games show players how we fight wars, but rarely address questions of the moral responsibility and local and global consequences of military action.
I’ve come across your PhD thesis as part of the lit.review for mine and I wanted to congratulate you on such a great & insightful effort.
I’ve seen that you’ve moved on to other topics but radio bibliography is scarce and you made a wonderful contribution to it.