Returning Fire: Interventions In Video Game Culture (2011) | Watch Documentary Free Online
Returning Fire: Interventions In Video Game Culture (2011) | Watch Documentary Free Online
Video
games like Modern Warfare, America's Army, Medal of Honor, and
Battlefield are part of an exploding market of war games whose revenues
now far outpace even the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. The
sophistication of these games is undeniable, offering users a stunningly
realistic experience of ground combat and a glimpse into the
increasingly virtual world of long-distance, push-button warfare. Far
less clear, though, is what these games are doing to users, our
political culture, and our capacity to empathize with people directly
affected by the actual trauma of war.
For the culture-jamming
activists featured in this film, these uncertainties were a call to
action. In three separate vignettes, we see how Anne-Marie Schleiner,
Wafaa Bilal, and Joseph Delappe moved dissent from the streets to our
screens, infiltrating war games in an attempt to break the hypnotic
spell of "militainment." Their work forces all of us -- gamers and
non-gamers alike -- to think critically about what it means when the
clinical tools of real-world killing become forms of consumer play.
