America's Digital Army

Robertson Allen is an independent scholar and ethnographer who researches digital games, war and violence, and food cultures.

"Play scholars should not overlook Allen's book as just another study of FPS games. His is a unique study, both microscopic in its examination of the work of the game developers and macroscopic in its putting the development of America's Army into the larger perspective of the rise of the militarization of American culture and the creation of a military-entertainment complex-the late-capitalist version of the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address. Allen's book is smart about many of the issues the reader will find in the body of scholarship on digital gaming and culture."-Jay Mechling, American Journal of Play “Robertson Allen convincingly demonstrates that America's Army has blurred the old, neat margins between local and global, real and virtual, in a new ‘globital’ era of war in which we are all soldiers.”-Daniel Binns, Michigan War Studies Review"America's Digital Army is at once a description of the decade-long foray of the US Army into the production and deployment of video games as recruiting tools and, more tellingly, an analysis of how the production of militarized labor is increasingly diffused throughout US society."-Steven Gardiner, American Ethnologist “A rigorous and fascinating glimpse of what is more than just one online game. America’s Digital Army opens up crucial issues about the conflation of war and work, play and drill, pleasure and simulation, as well as the labor involved in the production of the militarized, fear-ridden cultural politics of the contemporary United States.”-Jussi Parikka, professor of technological culture and aesthetics at the University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art “A compelling account and a critical assessment of a gaming reality and the militarization of society; a groundbreaking ethnography deciphering the illusory separation between the real and the fictional, and the fun and the dead-serious.”-Sverker FinnstrÖm, coeditor of Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1. America’s Digital Army2. The Art of Persuasion and the Science of Manpower3. The Artifice of the Virtual and the Real4. The Full-Spectrum Soft Sell of the Army Experience5. Complicating the Military Entertainment Complex6. The Labor of Virtual SoldiersNotesGlossaryReferencesIndex