Description
Book SynopsisCovering 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.
Trade Review"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 *
Table of ContentsContents
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
