War Games

By Jonna Eagle

SERIES: Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture

Rutgers University Press

The word “wargames” might seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, the declaration “This is war” is meant to signal that things have turned deadly serious, that there is no more playing around. Yet the practices of war are intimately entangled with practices of gaming, from military videogames to live battle reenactments. How do these forms of play impact how both soldiers and civilians perceive acts of war?

This Quick Take considers how various war games and simulations shape the ways we imagine war. Paradoxically, these games grant us a sense of mastery and control as we strategize and scrutinize the enemy, yet also allow us the thrilling sense of being immersed in the carnage and chaos of battle. But as simulations of war become more integrated into both popular culture and military practice, how do they shape our apprehension of the traumatic realities of warfare?

Covering everything from chess to football, from Saving Private Ryan to American Sniper, and from Call of Duty to drone interfaces, War Games is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand the militarization of American culture, offering a compact yet comprehensive look at how we play with images of war.

Let Eagle’s brisk storytelling shuttle you through a labyrinth of training simulators, re-enactments, video games, epic films, and more. You will be rewarded with a staggeringly rich meditation on our cultural obsession with representing the unrepresentable. From capture the flag to capture the real, I know of no other text that delivers an Olympian glimpse of the whole spectrum with such breadth, clarity, and style. Roger Stahl, author of Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze

As Eagle’s comprehensive overview of war gaming shows, war cannot be understood apart from its mediation. The visual, narrative and operational logics of war games have shaped the experience of warfighting through and through, often to the detriment of those who fight or get caught in the crossfire. Stacy Takacs, co-author of American Militarism on the Small Screen

Lucid and engaging, War Games describes a world permeated by symbolic figurations of war, from toy soldiers, to full scale combat simulations, to the screen media of film and video games. A fascinating, well-written work. Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

Eagle delivers an impressive survey that reads like a veritable tour de force across the various technological and mediatized arenas of past, present, and future war. Holger Pötzsch, ALH Online Review

JONNA EAGLE is an associate professor of film and media in the department of American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is the author of Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017).

Contents
Introduction

1. Live
Tabletop Games 
Gaming in Miniature
Combat and Contact Sports
Military Maneuvers
Recreational Reenactments

2. On Screen
Authentic Violence and the World War Two Combat Reports
Saving Private Ryan and the Reenactment of the Real
Vietnam on Big Screens and Small
Somatic War in the Twenty-First Century

3. Interactive
Flight Simulation and the Technologies of Preemption
The Military-Entertainment Complex
First-Person Shooters
Realism in Videogames
Back to the Battleground

Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Works Cited
Index

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