#Video Games

Their Call of Duty – Their Cold, Dead Hands

The country of mutually supportive consumerism and militarism is the country that sells (or did sell until last week) Bushmaster rifles at Wal-Mart for the gun-loving consumer. That country is the same country that spends and makes billions producing and promoting the eternal arsenal of democracy; is the same country that is called upon or calls upon itself to provide globe-spanning security for itself and imitators; is the country that via nuclear weapons held the entire world hostage on behalf of its “way of life”; and is the same country that also invests and returns billions producing and promoting the likes of Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed – and two, three, many more sequels each. Maybe it is all coincidence, or maybe we Americans kill with guns at obscenely high rates because, for complex reasons, we have become or remain highly proficient killers, possibly the world’s experts on killing or at least on certain means and methods.

Posted in Culture & Entertainment, Politics Tagged with: , ,

Call of Post-Modern Warfare – Video Games as Propaganda

Despite the game’s macho bluster, Call of Duty speaks to us as a culture of fear: fear of terrorism, fear of foreign invasion, fear of duplicity and deceit on the part of our leaders. It helps accustom us to a post-9/11 view of war that is perpetual and global, a conspiratorial view of world events, and an apocalyptic outlook that views collapse and catastrophe as ever imminent.

Posted in Miscellany Tagged with: , ,