For my final project, I intend to write about the relationship between games and the military industrial complex. My paper will center around the question of why we like to replicate war in games, and what the effect of this mimicry is on our understanding of war’s relationship to culture. My paper will examine if and how militarism is ushered into our unconscious through the games we play and witness in everyday contexts, placing a particular emphasis on the tools and methods of warfare (rather than the explicit acting-out of conflict). Is there a violent meta-language in games like Risk that may seem innocent to us? Are we complicit in sharpening state surveillance tools when we play Pokémon GO? Through research into the development of war games, I hope to resolve some of the questions I have around the consequences of militarism on play. 

While games are typically thought of as all fun and play, scholars like Mary Flanagan and Shoshana Zuboff push us towards a critical analysis of play, where we discover elements of the military industrial complex embedded, for example, in the surveillance data and locative media central to some games. We might also consider the psychological connections between the state of play and the military state: Brian Sutton-Smith encourages us to consider the “dark side of play”, which implicates power and social relationships in the context of games. In addition to a close-reading of the tools and language of the military industrial complex in game design, my paper will examine the explicit replication of war in games, taking examples from simulated war games like Call of Duty and official “war gaming” to sports games that enact the agonistic qualities of play. My research will be supported by our readings from Flanagan’s Critical Play (2009), Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play (1997); as well as writing found off the syllabus, including T.J. Cornell and T.B. Allen’s book War and Games (2002), James Der Derian’s 1990 article, “The Simulation Syndrome: From Warn Games to Game Wars”, and Matthew Thomas Payne’s book Playing War: Military Games After 9/11 (2016). I will also consider texts that challenge the relationship between war, games, and our own perceptions of national identity and cultural memory, such as Phillip Hammond and Holger Potszch’s book War Games: Memory, Militarism, and the Subject of Play (2021) and Pötzsch, H. & Šisler, V.’s article “Playing cultural memory: Framing history in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Czechoslovakia 38–89: Assassination”. My paper might, at this point, benefit from a more narrow focus: I may hone in on Google Earth as a way to synthesize my interests in data surveillance, locative games, and military strategies presented through game design. Finally, I will turn to theorists like Judith Butler to engage with the affect of war in playable media. Butler’s 2009 book The Frames of War offers a critical analysis of the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, which surely complicates the creation of propagandistic war games developed in the aftermath of 9/11.

One of the best parts of reading N. Katherine Hayle’s introduction to Electronic Literature was the broad survey the book gave of innovations, authors, and works in the world of electronic literature. While I recognized some of the writers, theorists, and platforms mentioned, I found myself engaging with the rest of the unfamiliar names in a nearly ergodic way, navigating from PDF to an internet browser tab where I broke up my reading with visits to online texts and author websites referenced by Hayle. I appreciated the span of genre and medium in the electronic literature mentioned by Hayle, especially as she made a case — like Upton, vis a vis games — for a critical engagement with electronic literature. Through Hayle’s framework, we see an urgent need for a critical theory of electronic literature that is distinct from literary theory more generally. As Hayle implores, “to see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all” (Hayle 3). By advocating for a rigorous way of reading electronic literature, we might even understand literature, broadly speaking, more clearly. In naming electronic texts “literature”, Hayle and her colleagues hope to “stimulate questions about the nature of literature in the digital age” (Hayle 4). I think that these are very important questions to ask ourselves, as both readers and critical thinkers: what does the experience of reading actually entail? How does the nature of reading change us? Does reading Hayle’s book on my computer, as a PDF document, offer me a different interpretive experience than if I were to read a physical, paper copy? This line of questioning opens up into a philosophy of the mind, and dovetails with research that neuroscientists have conducted to analyze the behavior of “your brain on fiction”. 

An area in which Hayle and I might differ — at least, if I were to measure my perspective in 2024 against Hayle’s in 2008 — is on the role of generative literature. As Hayle states in 2008, “generative art, whereby an algorithm is used either to generate texts according to a randomized scheme or to scramble and rearrange preexisting texts, is currently one of the most innovative and robust categories of electronic literature” (Hayle 18). I was troubled by this assertion, especially as it is nested in a chapter which enumerates many non generative (yet sophisticated, thought-provoking) examples of electronic literature. I also can’t help but compare Hayle’s conception of generative literature — which, to be clear, involved something of an equality within the writer-reader-text relationship — to contemporary generative art, which relies largely on artificial intelligence at the expense (and even the evasion) of human input. Although there is a long history of generative literature — I think of William Burroughs’ “Cut Up Method”, or the dadaist poems described in Mel Gooding’s A Book of Surrealist Games — there is a clear distinction between what might have been the direction of generative art in 2008 and the reality of generative art in the age fo AI. In Gooding’s book, Tristan Tzara’s instructions for creating a “cut up” poem end with the assurance that “the poem will be like you” (Gooding 36). When we use AI to create art or text, what about the final product is “like” us? Interactive and electronic literature have so much potential to tell us more about who we are and what we are like, both as readers and writers. At a time when it is convenient and tempting to substitute AI for homegrown coding and writing methods, I hope that Hayle’s critical theory of electronic literature reminds us that, even beyond entertainment, the joy of reading and writing digitally accompanies a process of self discovery.

While reading from Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, my interest piqued when Google Earth was mentioned in the context of Pokémon Go. As much as I find Google Earth (and its accompanying tool, Google Street View), a fascinating (and oftentimes beautiful) means to explore the world, I’m deeply concerned about the implications of this seemingly omniscient location technology on private life. One of my primary anxieties about Google Earth rests in its ability to dictate our ways of viewing the world: not only does Google Earth collect data about its users’ movements, but it also shapes how those movements are plotted. Although violations of privacy through Google Earth have been widely documented, and should not be minimized, I’m interested in how the “shadow text” of location softwares contributes to a grammar of seeing that suppresses our agency. Zuboff writes that, “even when knowledge derived from your behavior is fed back to you in the first text as a quid pro quo for participation, the parallel secret operations of the shadow text capture surplus for crafting into predication products destined for other marketplaces that are about you rather than for you” (33). With Google Earth, the product we inherit is not simply tips about traffic slow-downs or road closures, which we enable through participation with the platform; rather, we are taught to “read” the world through the pathways and conventions presenting by Google Earth. 

When using Google Earth as a navigation aid, the “choice architecture” of this mapping software determines where you might “channel your attention” or “shape your action” as you traverse the world. Google Maps has the ability to modify its users’ behaviors for profit by pre-determining how users experience space, as evidenced by the use of “sponsored locations” in Pokémon Go. The maps interface can disrupt our ability to exercise our own autonomy and self-determination as we plan out travel routes, or even as we toggle through distant cities on Street View, inhibiting us from looking down certain alleyways or learning about a foreign country beyond a 2-dimensional representation of its streets and thus limiting the self-regulatory processes that grant us power (6). While we might mistake the open-world nature of Street View and Google Earth for freedom, we sacrifice our awareness of these platforms’ political overreach when we fail to interrogate what they might gain by welcoming us into the digital map. 

Central to my unease about Google Earth is the question of politics. As Zuboff succinctly recounts, Google Earth initially came into being as a CIA-funded satellite mapping startup (17). As incursions into citizens’ privacy have catastrophic social and financial consequences, like predictive algorithms that jack up healthcare premiums or surveillance technology that disproportionately targets Black and brown people, we must also consider how the state’s deployment of surveillance capitalism implicates us in the project of oppression. How are we, as everyday users of this innocuous navigation software, used to justify support for military technologies? Zuboff’s asserts that, “key to our interest is the growth and elaboration of behavioral modification as an extension of political power” (27). Indeed, when corporate and political power increasingly collapse into one another, I share this interest keenly. In response to the overwhelming reach of Google Earth, I think of Zuboff’s words of caution that “every threat to human autonomy begins with an assault on awareness” (15). In using Google Maps — which, unfortunately, can be inevitable — I try to remain aware of my role in the physical world represented by the map. One way I like to do this is by insisting that I sidestep the prescribed walking routes the map offers to me, following an improvised scenic route or exploring a different block every time I go somewhere familiar. Another antidote involves opening up randomstreetview.com and zooming through unfamiliar countrysides, in the hopes that I’ll stumble across a site of intrigue like those documented on Jon Rafman’s 9-eyes.com. As long as I retain a sense of wonder and incredulity towards Google Earth, I hope that I can be the one conducting the evasion that otherwise targets my individual awareness in the age of surveillance capitalism (14).

When confronted with the prospect of turning Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a game, I was fascinated by the idea of the reader-as-player introduced by Upton in The Aesthetics of Play. As everyday readers and literary scholars alike have engaged Carroll’s text in their own analyses of feminism, Victorian culture, British imperialism, narrative lens, and various other interpretive angles, what sorts of reactions and observations might be opened up through an interactive telling of the story? How can a “game” version of a literary text reveal new modes of meaning-making? Like Upton, I was interested in using play to examine “how meaning-making play is not merely a feature of play, but permeates virtually every aspect of human culture — how understanding the structure of play helps us to understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even the structure of critical theory itself” (Upton, 12). Upon a second reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I thought about how the structure of the text might lend itself to a picking-apart and piecing-back-together in the form of an interactive game. In Derrida’s Writing and Difference, he presents (and subsequently rejects) a conception of structure that relies on its center: “The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure — one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure — but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure” (Derrida, 278). With this in mind, I wondered what the interpretive “center” of Carroll’s story might be; and could this center be revealed through a reconstruction of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? How might “play”, as experienced by the reader, contrast with the sort of “play” initiated through my group’s project?

My group determined that an interactive, decision-based game would be the best way to adapt Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To begin our project, my group decided to map out Carroll’s original text in order to determine where we could insert decisions points for the player while moving through the story’s plot. I read through the story, and plotted each of Alice’s most consequential decisions — like drinking and eating things that changed her size, initiating conversations with other characters, and asking questions that led to more information about the world she’d found herself in — in a flowchart. This schematic allowed us to read Alice’s story in almost a Borgesian way, as a “garden of forking paths”; and separated Alice’s actions from the chronology of the original text. Because of this, my group deemed the narrative sequence of the story less important as an organizing logic than the modular interactions Alice shares with the rest of the book’s characters. Typically, I think of time as a crucial element of narrative: things need to happen in a certain order and at a consistent (or justified) pace so that readers arrive soundly at a story’s conclusion. While other themes and symbols can be subject to various interpretations, I’ve always considered the linear structure of a work of fiction to be universal to the reading experience. However, I was thrilled to find that reading took on a new (and rather timeless) dimension through the playing of my group’s game. Depending on the choices a player/reader makes, one moves through the story at a unique pace. Some decisions will result in an abrupt end to the story; while others bring Alice towards new experiences and interactions, regardless of their order of appearance in the original text. 

Given the news of Robert Coover’s death last week, I was reminded of “The Babysitter”, his short story which elegantly toggles between past, present, and future while moving the reader through a turbulent narrative. Unlike my group’s retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Coover’s story is not actually interactive (although it sometimes feels this way, what with Coover’s repeated making and unmaking of his characters’ decisions); but I think that both our project and Coover’s story are good models for allowing the reader/player to respond to narrative time as it is liberated from the “center” of a story. As a result, players of my group’s game can respond to time as a variable in Alice’s narrative, interjecting their own hopes and expectations about the narrative’s pace into their experience with the game text. By understanding the structure of the game as independent of time — and instead centered around decision-making — I was able to better understand how time and linearity are used in Carroll’s original text.

On Labor Day, I watched the Mets play the Red Sox at Citi Field. I’m told that Honus Wagner, legendary shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, once proclaimed: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer, if you’re a ballplayer.” Although I’m no ballplayer, I found that there ain’t much to being a ballplayer — that is, understanding the game of baseball — if you’ve read Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games. My first observation was that the baseball players themselves might not be considered “players” at all: instead, these professional athletes “who must think in terms of prize, salary, or title,” are more accurately identified as workers (Caillois, 6). With this in mind, I expanded my conception of the playground to include my fellow spectators. As soon as I finished my crackerjacks, I got to work parsing the great American pastime according to Caillois’s classification of games. 

Agôn: The players on the field were clearly engaged in a game of agôn, wherein their competitive match hinged “on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside assistance, in such a way that the winner appears to be better than the loser in a certain category of exploits” (Caillois, 14). Indeed, the Mets emerged victorious over the Red Sox and their success earned them accolades from fans and sports commentators alike (and maybe a wild card spot in the MLB postseason?). Since both teams played each other at the same time, on the same field, and under the same conditions, spectators could conclude that, under the rules applied equally to both teams, the Mets must possess more discipline and perseverance than the Red Sox in order to clinch their victory (Caillois, 15). 

Alea: If the ballfield was the site of legitimate competition, then the stands were where alea, or games of chance and destiny, thrived. In between each inning, announcers led the crowds through games like “Follow the Cap”, “Running for Dunkin’”, “8th Inning Karaoke”, and the infamous T-shirt cannon. Nestled into our seats, the spectators remained “entirely passive” throughout these games: we did not deploy “resources, skill, muscles, or intelligence” (Caillois, 17). Instead, when it was time to grasp for a lucky t-shirt or appear, triumphantly, on the big screen, all we could do was wait, “in hope and trembling, the cast of the die” (Caillois, 17). Even as we watched the baseball game play out below us, the spectators were immersed in an entirely separate world of play. Interestingly, the spectator play was bound by similar — if opposing — limits as the baseball play: our games in the realm of alea could only take place when the competitive play of agôn was at a standstill. The spectators’ play occupied the negative space left by the professionals’ play. 

Mimicry: Although I don’t own a blue and orange cap, hundreds of the baseball fans at Monday’s game sported Mets-themed (and Red Sox-themed) outfits and accessories. These fans proudly demonstrated their “identification with the champion” after the game was won, reenacting the bat-swinging motions of the players and acting out the tension of the final inning through sportscaster-like recollections of the game on the train ride home (Caillois, 22). Luckily, no one took their mimicry of the game so far as to wage a brawl between fans of the opposing teams (who, by engaging in such a clash, would be mimicking the stakes of agôn they’d just witnessed on the ballfield). 

Ilinx: Finally, the dizzying thrill of ilinx was apparent in the behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Met. Laboring under the weight of their giant, baseball-shaped heads, this rowdy couple surrendered “to the intoxication of many kinds of dance”, unleashing a contagious frenzy of jumping, bobbing, and swaying across the stands (Caillois, 25). The pleasure of joining in on Mr. and Mrs. Met’s movement was heightened by the truly vertigo-inducing decision to set the stadium lights to strobe, creating the effect of being inside a Gravitron while the beat of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” propelled the spectators briefly away from the baseball field and into a new, imaginary playground, separate from the rest of reality but nonetheless grounded in a strong feeling of play (Caillois, 26).