From 2004 to 2008, Frances Townsend, Activision Blizzard’s senior counsel, worked as an assistant to then-president George W. The company behind Call of Duty, Activision Blizzard, has a long history of crossover with the military. More from this author Welcome to Hustler's University These military gamers presumably communicate with civilians - who might, one imagines, make fine recruits.And the latest Call of Duty instalment comes at a time when the military is desperately struggling to find capable individuals.
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There are now so many professional gamers in the US military that it has its very own Esports team, divided into the following divisions: Fortnite, League of Legends, Overwatch, Magic: The Gathering, and Call of Duty, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Actively working with the video game industry, Secker argues, enables the US military to reach recruitment targets, with the game acting as “a recruitment portal”.
Other documents show that the military’s partnership with Call of Duty started long before 2018: the United States Marine Corps (USMC) collaborated in the production of Call of Duty 5 in 2008. Both these aircrafts feature heavily in the Call of Duty franchise. Francini, alongside other powerful individuals in the entertainment industry, were shown AC-130 planes and CV-22 helicopters. There, the Air Force demonstrated its hardware, the aim being to make individuals like Francini more “credible advocates” for US military propaganda. One, shared with MintPress News, purports to show that in September 2018, the United States Air Force flew Coco Francini, an executive producer with close ties to Call of Duty, to their headquarters at Hurlburt Field, Florida. Suggested reading Why gamers can't play politicsĭocuments obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Tom Secker, an independent researcher, appear to shed some light on the connection between national security and the video-game industry. The US military even created its own multiplayer shooter game - America’s Army - to train recruits, before working directly with game makers behind franchises such as Doom and Call of Duty. So, is it a stretch to imagine that the US military might use Call of Duty, a game that has more than 118 million active users worldwide, to influence young, highly-suggestible gamers?
Tank crews use virtual-reality systems to simulate the realities of war. Video games are also frequently used for military training purposes. When Edward Snowden disclosed thousands of state documents a decade ago, it quickly became clear that agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Defense have for years used video games for counterterrorism operations, with spies conducting surveillance operations inside World of Warcraft. But is there more to it than realistic entertainment? The connection between the US national security state and the entertainment industry is incredibly strong. Like the order to kill “Ghorbrani”, the order to kill Castro sounded like it was coming straight from the Pentagon.Ĭall of Duty wouldn’t be the first video game to have a storyline based on real events - so no wonder there are parallels with US army operations. The mission reminded me of another, in Call of Duty: Black Ops, released in 2010, in which players were ordered to murder Fidel Castro. He is, the player learns, a Russian-controlled puppet. Sporting a big white beard, “Ghorbrani”, the Iranian general in the game, even looks like Soleimani. It shares a number of striking similarities with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military officer who was killed by the US military in 2020. Take one of the very first missions in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Tens of millions of these gamers play Call of Duty religiously. So, much as Hollywood once served as the primary vehicle for Pentagon-approved propaganda, why wouldn’t those in power utilise video games to spread particular messages and influence the masses? After all, in the United States, a country of 331 million people, 215 million now play them on a regular basis. The video game industry is worth $365 billion by 2030, that figure is expected to jump to $470 billion. It is now worth a rather trifling $29 billion.
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Today, however, the movie industry has lost much of its reach.
And for several years during and after the Second World War, the film industry worked very closely with the US military to push certain narratives to domestic consumers. The British-American writer Alistair Cooke called Hollywood “the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings”.
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