Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

6 Other Players in Other Spaces: War and Online Games

The American new media artist/activist Joseph DeLappe is waging an interventionist campaign in the U.S. military’s own multiplayer online game, America’s Army (U.S. Department of Defense, from 2002). Having qualified for entry to the multiplayer mode of the game by completing the basic training (or “boot camp”) missions, he joins a game on one of the official game servers as a member of one of two teams involved in the squad-based tactical combat. This allows him to stage his intervention into the normal routines of gameplay. He does not participate actively in the combat play— a refusal to act that soon results in his avatar’s demise—but uses the multiplayer text chat channel to list the name, rank, and date of death of American armed services personnel who have been killed in Iraq during the invasion and ongoing occupation of that country by the armed forces of the U.S. and its allies in the “Coalition of the Willing.” Unlike most commercial first-person shooter–based games, if your avatar is killed during a mission in America’s Army, there is no respawning to rejoin the game while the current mission lasts. Instead, players return to the action as a kind of revenant, capable of observing and communicating but not interacting through their now-inert avatar. Players can observe the rest of the contest by selecting and switching between the points of view of 6 Other Players in Other Spaces War and Online Games One cannot say outright: this is play, this is a project, but only: the play, the project dominates in a given activity. —georges bataille, cited in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community 111 112 other players in other spaces their own avatar and those of the other players on the mission map. They can also continue to use the online text messaging system of the interface. As “dead_in_iraq,” DeLappe takes advantage of this spectral, textual “presence ” to perform his intervention. He includes some screenshots of his practice on his Web site with some instances of the responses of other players to his chat messages, ranging from incomprehension to questions about his relation to the people listed to player identification of their own relation to real armed conflict—one player states that he or she is a soldier in real life (Figure 4).1 DeLappe’s work is an elegant attempt to interrupt the smooth workings of the online multiplayer entertainment form that America’s Army has set out, with considerable success, to become for the purposes of marketing and recruitment propaganda.2 I have opened the consideration in this chapter of the online multiplayer gaming community with dead_in_iraq because what I see as key themes of concern in this book are at the heart of DeLappe’s poignant unworking of networked group play in America’s Army. One of figure 4 Joseph DeLappe, dead_in_iraq, 2006, courtesy of the artist. other players in other spaces 113 these is the relation between the work and its interruption. That is, we will examine the complex interactions between the way the net of individual user–computer–communicationsystemsworkstogethertoenabletheshared space of common interaction and how community arises both within that working and, as with DeLappe’s practice, in its suspension. The fact that DeLappe accesses the community of users in and through his technical competence both in computer use and in the game’s basic skill sets, so that the community his intervention targets is indeed a part of the technical affordance of the computer game system, also signals something crucial for our discussion. Third, dead_in_iraq’s introduction of death—not only actual military deaths as a nonvirtual, social-political context of gameplay, but the individual deaths of specific, recently existent individuals—into the usual ephemeral flow of in-game dialogue is a key to its power to illuminate the routine, realtime operation of these exemplary technocultural, virtual community forms. DeLappe’s is a decisive defamiliarizing gesture.3 This chapter will set out some hypotheses about the nature of the engagement with others in online gaming in virtual spaces. Its examples will be in the main chosen from war and conflict-based games, which include firstperson shooters, fantasy role-playing games (massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs), combat-based flight simulation, and strategy games involving war and conflict scenarios. While these represent the largest proportion of the games played online in...