At the beginning of August, I got to present a nice prĆ©cis of my ongoing research into how governments (militaries, really, but weāll get to that) are approaching video games as a contested, strategic space for reaching youth and influencing publics. I want to summarize the talk I gave.
In this presentation, I invoke some words to give shape to exactly what I am talking about: strategic playfulness, gameful propaganda, what information spaces are and what it means to contest them, and so on. The easiest place to start is at the beginning. I think the idea of an information space is intuitive enough: an abstracted āspaceā (much like the public sphere) where communication about stuff is transmitted, received, processed, and re-transmitted, without much claim to any specific size, directionality, or outcome. Instagram is an information space; so is the entire field of video games: both are fields of where communication takes place, even if it happens in very different ways at different scales with different degrees of interactivity. To contest such a space is to compete for control of it; in international relations that looks a certain way, while in my home discipline of public relations (or maybe more helpfully, mass communication research), it looks a slightly different way. Those ways arenāt very important for this discussion, just keep in mind that I am intentionally choosing language that both fields would recognize.
The dual concepts of playful and gameful are a bit more complicated. I think this slide does a nice-enough job of distinguishing them, even if this might only seem like a minute distinction academics love, there is real utility in distinguishing goal-oriented from freeform behavior, especially when youāre considering intent. This becomes relevant when looking at national governments contesting an information space: are they doing so aimlessly, just to engage and to dominate? Or do they have concrete goals they want to accomplish?
I think it is the latter: governments rarely do things just for fun or for no real purpose; they tend to behave strategically in goal-oriented ways. Positing the idea of āstrategic playfulness,ā as I did in an earlier iteration of this talk, deliberately raised a contradiction to complicate how we were thinking about intent and outcomes. After all, a state might not need to accomplish something specific if it simply wants to dominate the terms of debateāhence, it might be able to behave aimlessly, or seemingly aimlessly, since its goal is not specific enough for it to behave otherwise. I canāt think of many examples of this, but I figured itās a potential thatās worth acknowledging.
Gamefulness is a more revelatory idea for applying to the reasons why governments get involved in gaming: they want to accomplish something. With Americaās Army (and itās Chinese equivalent, Glorious Mission), there was an explicit goal of encouraging more young people to take up military service. In the case of a game like Call of Duty or Six Days in Fallujah, the goal is more to exonerate and lionize US service members, maybe with a secondary goal of lowering resistance to enlistment but primarily about reputation-building for the armed services. Just because there may not be quantifiable metrics behind such projects, they are nevertheless measurable and can have clear success conditions. I think this can fairly be called propaganda despite the baggage associated with the term, and I think it is a gameful process by the state, so there we have the origins of the term āgameful propaganda.ā
But what does this mean, really? While my talk segued into discussions of grand designs over the speech boundaries of online gaming spaces (a big deal, Iāve been talking about it for years and years), I think thereās a closer-to-home example we can look at, instead. But first, I think we need to establish some facts, specifically the decades of challenges the military has faced in meeting recruitment goals under conditions of voluntary service. It is a challenge that has come and gone over the years, often in response to reckless military adventurism or changes in national leadership (hard to ignore the dates on some news stories). And, of course, there are shenanigans in measurement we donāt have time or space to disentangle here. Maybe just keep in mind that militaries need bodies in uniform in order to do military things, so they donāt only need a pipeline of new recruits, but also a big enough pool of service members willing to stay in and maintain institutional knowledge. Retention, in other words.
Which is why I was thrilled to see the US Armyās 3rd Infantry Division offering soldiers a 4-day leave pass to play Grand Theft Auto VI if they agreed to re-up their service for a few more years. This is, to be clear, ridiculous, but it also speaks to how video games are giving shape to emerging dynamics in military operations that are fascinating and what drives a lot of my interest in the topic. The offer, on its face, might seem silly, but I would dispute that. On the contrary, this is a brilliant way to goose reenlistment numbers without giving up very much. A four-day leave pass is not administratively burdensome for anyone in the chain of command, which has discretion in how and to whom it grants one.
Consider: if someone is sick of being in the armed services, why or how would a few days of playing a video game be worth years more of that same service? Whose mind will actually be changed by this offer? Variety reports that 20 of the 130 eligible soldiers in an engineering battalion have taken up the offer (for context: battalions can vary widely in size, from a few hundred to well over a thousand soldiers). It might sound crazy that 15% of a unit reenlisted for a video game, but consider that last year the US Army exceeded its reenlistment goal by more than 10%, continuing a multi-year trend (the 3rd ID also routinely exceeds its reenlistment goals). Soldiers generally want to stay in the service, and across the board the army is offering financial incentives targeted at job specialities it has declared high valueā¦ like engineering.
So, if retention is going so well, why would anyone in the army need a small video game incentive in order to stay in uniform? The short answer is: they donāt, not really. But duty-based military service has been in a multidecadal decline. People just arenāt signing up for patriotic reasons anymore, and the few who do end up suffering much worse mental health outcomes from the mismatch between the ideals of patriotism and the realities of military service. The āpropensity to serveā is nearly rock bottom: only around 10% of younger demographics are even interested in service, much less able to overcome the various physical boundaries needed to serve, and even that number is bolstered more by women choosing service while men do so in smaller numbers. Instead, more people are staying in uniform because of the perks: financial (bonuses, pensions, discounts), occupational (both skills training and preferential hiring post-service), travel (āsee the world!ā), even access to healthcare (Tricare is excellent insurance). The US military is also one of the most diverse institutions in American society. Whether fairly or not (certainly not under its current leadership), a lot of people think they can get a fairer shake at life by putting on a uniform than they can by working they up from the bottom of a civilian employer.
The US military knows this ā they are the source of most of my claims above. So, in this context, appealing to duty or service is not going to do much to keep enlistment numbers high, whether new or renewal. It just isnāt the primary driver anymore, even (or maybe despite) the need to keep pretending it is in public communication about it. Instead, the military is making a pitch to younger people to keep them in uniform longer, like a corporate headhunter: stay in, and you get these perks. And for someone already considering staying in for other reasons, it makes a lot of sense to grab onto those perks. It is aimed at weakly-motivated reenlistment to pull someone a millimeter over the line. While itās certainly worth pondering who might sell a few years of their life for a few days of playing a video game everyone will be able to buy and play anyway, I donāt think it is particularly surprising that young people make impulsive decisions with long term consequences ā thatās sort of a permanent story in human history.
To loop this back round to the top of this blogpost, you could say the 3rd Infantry Division is using video games to propagandize weakly resistant servicemembers into giving service another few years in uniform. The Army has spent decades using video games to make service seem cool, from 2002ās Americaās Army to the contemporary build out of its esports team. They are engaged in play, or offering play, in order to achieve some goal: maintaining enlistment numbers.
More broadly, you can also see the ongoing collaboration (influence, really) the military has with the video games industry as supporting this dynamic. If you are relying on the appeal of video games to get and keep people in uniform, then you donāt want video games to turn people into skeptics of the military. I think there is a big question mark over whether that is a grounded fear or not (recruitment numbers declined despite a massive army push into gaming), but it would be a bit weird to act as if that fear is unreasonable or nonexistent. Whether it ends up being meaningful or not, it is at least real.
This is why I find the ways governments use videogames to do things so very interesting. It is not a linear dynamic (more gaming -> more service), but it is a legible and mappable set of incentives and outcomes if you start connecting a bunch of things that happen behind all of the public discourse about patriotism and duty. I think itās really interesting that military service is decreasingly a matter of patriotism or desperation and more a model for career development! This has always been a subtext of military recruitment messaging, and seeing it fully reflected in the general population is a dynamic I donāt think enough people are talking about. Iām also not entirely sure what it means or where itās going, but at the very least I think we should be past sneering at these tactics. The nature of military service is changing fundamentally, and pretty rapidly, and I think thatās pretty damn interesting and worth thinking really closely about.