The Players Realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming edited by J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith

Section 2: Discourse and Ideology
The Green Berets to America's Army: Video games as a vehicle for political propaganda.

• Special forces embodies many characteristics typically associated with the genre, its storyline is unique: players assume the role of Islamic militants repelling an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Designed by Hezbollah, a militant Shia group widely viewed as a terrorist organization, special forces is intended to attract new recruits while bolstering support for the fight against occupation. Within a few month of its release, more than 10000 copies had been distributed in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

• Developed for the U.S army by the Modeling, Simulation and Virtual Environments Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School, America's Army deliberately taps into immersive game context in the hopes of recruiting young americans into the Army. With more than 1.5million copies downloaded over a six month period.

• Both games are consciously designed to foster support for the military objectives of their creators, while recruiting youth to pick up arms in pursuit of their goals. By many measures, both titles could be considered propaganda. However, the development teams responsible for these games classify their handiwork as educational entertainment.

• "Compelling worlds created by game designers have the potential to shape attitudes in dangerous ways. Goebbels was so frightening because he had a pretty good grip on how to uses modern media for propaganda purposes. Right now, we're all too dumb to figure it out. Someday, we'll have our interactive Goebbels." Chris Crawford

These two games are both incredibly obvious examples of games being used as propaganda. These games really interest me as they show how a game can be used to make people think about a certain game or topic, and as is the case with these games, have an affect on the audience, however this games do it through complete obviousness and not through careful metaphor. In the next post I will continue to follow the book, and show how it expands on the idea of propaganda and how persuasion is created in videogames.