Suffolk University Professor Nina Huntemann is probably not calling in sick tomorrow to play Modern Warfare 3. She’s no fan.
Amid all the hype for the release of this year’s huge first person shooter, she wants anyone who will listen to know what’s wrong with Modern Warfare, Battlefield and the rest of video game’s interactive military complex.
“Since the attacks on 9/11, the largest publishers in the video game industry have profited from fear and anxiety about terrorism,” she said in a press release blasted to reporters today. “Electronic Arts (Battlefield 3) and Activision (Modern Warfare) have spent millions of dollars producing and marketing first-person shooter games that simplify and glamorise global conflict and military intervention.”
Huntemann wrote a book about this two years ago. It’s called Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. She’s modernising those arguments today, because she thinks big-budget video games still don’t properly address the costs of war.
“Instead they reduce military intervention to narratives about weapons systems and how we fight,” she wrote. “As the US government debates federal budget priorities that include decisions about military spending, it is difficult to have a thoughtful national conversation about the strategic use of the armed forces when the overwhelming attention to military conflict in the entertainment media is focused on treating war as a game.”
While Prof Huntemann’s outreach to reporters today doesn’t explain if or whether she draws a distinction between gaming’s glorification of war and movie and TV’s practices of doing the same, a movies-do-it-too defence wouldn’t be gaming’s strongest defence. Kotaku has reached out to Huntemann to find out more about her take. We’ll let you know what we hear.
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