Problematic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal [I think this should be incipient] objects of little perceptions. As a result, ‘learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind.
-Gilles Deleuze
Video games and movies are pedagogical. And what they teach is more in the movement and perspective or framing of the image than in the ‘narrative’ component of the media. Our bodies change in their relationship to time, space, and the unexpected. Certainly the narrative of a film can be powerful, but often the power of the story is the result of lighting, sound, camera movement, the rational or irrational cuts that create a sense of time or even duration. It is also the case that movies and video games I will be discussing in this chapter are almost completely devoid of story and dialogue. They are though intensely affective films.
It will be the claim of this chapter that liberal discourse regarding censorship and the more general, and highly moralized, debate regarding violence in Hollywood demonstrates the failures of presupposing the enlightened self-possessed subject. Movies and video games alter our highly plastic body-brain network and thus which games and films we interface with on a daily basis alters everything from bodily movement, skill, emotional tendencies, to how we see and process the world around us. As neuroscience increasingly ventures into the virtual realm of experience what they find is that the body does not index experience on the measure of truth and fiction nearly as much as affect and intensity. Mirror neurons, the role of adrenaline in forming memories, all speak to the possibility that our most defining and intense experiences can be those that we feel in others or even those that we experience through the screen of film or television. The ever increasing intensity of gaming has even resulted in a number of murders in China demonstrating the affective intensity of war games and other interfaces of stylized killing.
The U.S. military of course knows the value of the simulated world; using video games to train soldiers as well as recruit them. Again preparation redoubles unto the terrain of prosecution. Numerically how would one compare the enlisting of children via the game “Call of Duty” or the use of children in Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance army? There is universal moral outrage concerning child soldiers but this dismisses what American Armed forces not to mention entertainment companies do to millions of children when they create games to play war, to enjoy, be rewarded for killing. The obvious retort is that no one actually dies in a video game. But from the position of a child playing or the adult that child will someday become what is the difference at the level of encouragement and paternal direction much less the cultivation of enjoyment.
Watch a clip of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
The game designed and freely distributed and networked by the U.S. Army, called the U.S.’s Army, has more than 8 million active members and players. The game involves the highly realistic killing of Arab-like characters in an urban setting that is a kind of hybrid between Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike other multi-user-domain games you do not have to pay a monthly fee for access. However, in order to gain access to the game you agree that you results can be tracked for the purposes of recruiting. Unlike earlier versions of U.S. Army distributed games America’s Army is not simply a ‘free gift’ to encourage contact with young recruits, it is itself a diagnostic tool. Each element of the game tests ones aptitude at any number of skills from intense pressure and rapid response time in urban settings to how to disassemble and reassemble a weapon.
Watch an 'All-Star' Performance on America's Army
Now compare the layout of the video game to actual footage from 'helmet cams' from the attack on Fallujah.
Now compare that to a clip from the Discovery Channel's hit show Future Weapons. The host introduces the 'solution' to urban warfare. A fully automatic shotgun that appears to be taken directly from the video game Doom.
Unlike the Military-Entertainment-Complex described by James Der Derian, what I am trying describe does not end with the Military deploying video games as 21 century propaganda. I am trying find the particular images and arrangements of space, killing, and bodies that seems to have an even more powerful hold over the apprehension of cities and others outside the military. This problematizes the inside/outside distinction showing the transversal connections and internal resonances. While there is a difference between being enlisted or being a civilian there may not be a difference between being in training for war and playing games of war. For instance how does the most successful video game in the world right now borrow from military aesthetics of urban combat and the perspective of a ‘first-person-shooter’ for marketing success? The game in question Crysis sold a million copies in the first financial quarter and has exceed market expectation every quarter since.
The hero or point of identification in Crysis was designed after the United States Future Force Warrior 2020 program —despite having been designed by a German company—that represents for the U.S. Military an attempt to integrate the physiology of the soldier’s body with the U.S. global information and weapons network. Future versions of the integrated suit include artificial sensory technology directly fed into the body’s neural network as well as a real time reactive exoskeltons that responds to the bodies muscle impulses rather than the bodies slower movements (the effects of those impulses).
Heralded as "Best Crysis Game Ever"
This suit was not created ex nihlio it also feeds back into the world of gaming and science fiction. A U.S. ranger developed the idea for the suit after reading Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The U.S. ranger was recovering from a broken back caused by a parachute accident and has sense spawned several exoskelton projects. Each iteration pushing further from the exo to the interior of the soldiers body.
There is thus a feedback loop between popular film, gaming, and military gaming. Something draws these various media together. In addition to war games the chapter wil investigate the rise of zombie films that both borrow and contribute to a sense of claustrophobic space and hordes or unstoppable numbers as problems for killing and control. The aesthetics of mele and the suppression or destruction of that mele play a role in the imagination and organizing of contemporary urban warfare.
The film 28 Weeks Later is a case in point. The film starts with the military reclaiming London after a debilitating outbreak of zombies and then follows the military and medico-bureaucratic discussions regarding population control that are in some sense the extreme case of the physiocrat dilemma ; how do you maintain order when the unexpected exceeds the mechanisms of social control? The model of social control is in this case organized around the norm rather than the crisis and the consequence of failure is global extincion. The answer to this problem in 28 Weeks Later is to eliminate the population. The military ultimately fails to contain the spread of zombies thus resulting in the end of the world. This is a common theme in zombie films, what makes this film interesting is that it was the freedom given to the population and the mercy shown to those who broke the rules that results in extinction.
Those who think this is beyond the current moral sensibility should consider the video game that was created with the movie as well as many other first person shooters, success or wining is always extinction of the other. It is also the case that the stakes of the current war on terrorism oscillates wildly from the existence of Western Democratic Civilization to survival of the human race in the case of public scenario planning for nuclear, biological, and checmical attack.
I am not claiming there is a simple causal relation between violence and games but there is a complicated but powerful resonance. To provide some insight into some of the ways games and films may organize the body as well as how the films and games frame the subject/viewer this chapter will look at the ‘priming’ and ‘framing’ techniques that produce particular kinds of affect. The central argument is that the affect generated by the complex of new media form part of a highly destructive resonance machine that builds connections between fear, hate, enjoyment, killing, and control. The result is an emerging biopolitical aesthetic of violence that can both manage the population—the global—while telescoping in on the body—the local, all within a particular milieu of the city and the newly emerging battlefields.
In all of the movies and games discussed there is a signature sequence I call the biopolitical shot in which a Point-of -View camera angle (or the digital camera effect in the case of video games where a POV shot is created by the movement of the game not an actual camera) zooms out from a single entry wound or bullet impact in a body until the entire population or in the case of the film Resident Evil: Apocalypse the entire earth can be seen. The bodily and the global are interconnected coordinates in one truly universal or total system under the purview control or potential control.
Biopolitical POV Shot
The last section of this chapter emphasizes that the images of totality and interchangability (every person a possible kill shot or target) is not however egalitarian. The resonance machine built from the new media, the military, and gamers share archetypes of racialized bodies whether it be the overt Arab stereotypes or the zombie body that codes abnormality with threat and abjection resulting in what I will call a racial affect even if not a racial image. The body, the city, and the affect are not neutral or ahistorical configurations. They are not generic categories. Each finds its ‘local’ expression in the racially marked bodies that organize other forms of violence.
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