The Entertainment Office is in enough demand to be selective in what it will advise, reportedly turning down 95% of the scripts or story treatments it receives. This is perhaps one reason why the Pentagon has collaborated with Hollywood since the early 20th century to create sympathetic portrayals on television and in film through the Entertainment Office-an arrangement often called the “military-entertainment complex.” For television shows like “24” and films like “American Sniper,” the office will not only analyze the scripts for accuracy, it will also alter scripts to improve the portrayal of the military on screen. Despite its marketing as “realistic” and messaging that it was developed with input from the Pentagon, the game-world it creates removes the complexity of urban insurgency and substitutes simplified moral dilemmas that portray the military in unambiguously good terms-an enjoyable setting for a game, but hardly reflective of the reality of the war in Iraq. The strongest incentive not to engage in combat isn’t to safeguard civilians, but to avoid personal injury to your squad mates. Set in a fictionalized version of Iraq, the game features an empty, crumbling urban landscape coded to be obviously Middle Eastern, filled only with Arab men to shoot. The company behind it, Pandemic, modified the game into a commercial release that so the Army could send the game downrange for soldiers to play while deployed. Consider Full Spectrum Warrior, a 2004 game that began development as a training simulator for U.S. When the military itself consults on the design of such a game, this leads to a number of uncomfortable questions about why those choices were made. In a “realistic” military FPS game, the presence or absence of rules of engagement, for example, will dramatically change how the player approaches a mission. While research is ongoing, experimental studies have shown that some military FPS games can cause players to become measurably more militarist in outlook. Other design choices can trigger addictive behavior. Research has demonstrated that some game design choices improve the way people focus and increase feelings of well-being. One video game designer called this effort to induce a certain type of player reaction “emotion engineering” in the design process. The design of a game’s models and systems of interactions are intentional choices by the designers, and they set the terms for how a person encounters the game. Ian Bogost, a professor of media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has argued that the interactive nature of video games makes them an inherently persuasive medium-a system of “procedural rhetoric” that encourages players to create abstract mental models for how systems work and to form judgments about those systems through the act of playing. Unlike print, radio, television, or movies, video games are an interactive format that allows them to affect people differently than more traditional forms of broadcast media. The most popular franchises, like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter-Strike and Halo, have sold hundreds of millions of copies and feature varying degrees of realism, inspiration from real-world events, and science-fiction elements. Every year, military-themed first person shooters (FPS), which simulate combat from the point of view of a combatant, generate billions of dollars of revenue. A game about the Iraq War might not seem like it poses big questions about the politics of war, but as a hugely popular form of mass media, video games can influence people’s emotional states, thought patterns, and perceptions.
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