War Games

JONNA EAGLE is an associate professor of film and media in the department of American studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She is the author of Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017).

"Let Eagle's brisk storytelling shuttle you through a labyrinth of training simulators, re-enactments, video games, epic films, and more.  You will be rewarded with a staggeringly rich meditation on our cultural obsession with representing the unrepresentable.  From capture the flag to capture the real, I know of no other text that delivers an Olympian glimpse of the whole spectrum with such breadth, clarity, and style."— Roger Stahl, author of Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze"As Eagle's comprehensive overview of war gaming shows, war cannot be understood apart from its mediation. The visual, narrative and operational logics of war games have shaped the experience of warfighting through and through, often to the detriment of those who fight or get caught in the crossfire."— Stacy Takacs, co-author of American Militarism on the Small Screen"Lucid and engaging, War Games describes a world permeated by symbolic figurations of war, from toy soldiers, to full scale combat simulations, to the screen media of film and video games.  A fascinating, well-written work."— Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition"Eagle delivers an impressive survey that reads like a veritable tour de force across the various technological and mediatized arenas of past, present, and future war."— Holger Pötzsch, ALH Online Review"Lucid and engaging, War Games describes a world permeated by symbolic figurations of war, from toy soldiers, to full scale combat simulations, to the screen media of film and video games.  A fascinating, well-written work."— Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition"As Eagle's comprehensive overview of war gaming shows, war cannot be understood apart from its mediation. The visual, narrative and operational logics of war games have shaped the experience of warfighting through and through, often to the detriment of those who fight or get caught in the crossfire."— Stacy Takacs, co-author of American Militarism on the Small Screen"Let Eagle's brisk storytelling shuttle you through a labyrinth of training simulators, re-enactments, video games, epic films, and more.  You will be rewarded with a staggeringly rich meditation on our cultural obsession with representing the unrepresentable.  From capture the flag to capture the real, I know of no other text that delivers an Olympian glimpse of the whole spectrum with such breadth, clarity, and style."— Roger Stahl, author of Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze

• ContentsIntroduction1. LiveTabletop Games
Gaming in MiniatureCombat and Contact SportsMilitary ManeuversRecreational Reenactments2. On ScreenAuthentic Violence and the World War Two Combat ReportsSaving Private Ryan and the Reenactment of the RealVietnam on Big Screens and SmallSomatic War in the Twenty-First Century3. InteractiveFlight Simulation and the Technologies of PreemptionThe Military-Entertainment ComplexFirst-Person ShootersRealism in VideogamesBack to the BattlegroundAcknowledgementsFurther ReadingWorks CitedIndex