In Press. "Games Without Tears, Wars Without Frontiers." In Magic and the Global War. Koen Stroken, ed. Forthcoming volume in Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis. Oxford: Berghahn Books. (please email me for a pre-publication version)

2010. The Unreal Enemy of America's Army. Games and Culture 5(3). (please email me for a pre-publication version)


2009. The Army Rolls Through Indianapolis: Fieldwork at the Virtual Army Experience. Transformative Works and Cultures 1(2).

Academic CV

National Science Foundation Award Abstract

On July 4, 2002, the official U.S. Army video game, America's Army, was released as a free download accessible from its website, www.americasarmy.com. Since this initial release, the game rapidly expanded to a worldwide audience of millions who join to play as U.S. Army soldiers in a first-person, squad-based tactical shooting game. Many video gamers with military backgrounds have hailed the game as being the most realistic simulation of actual combat created to this date. Successive versions and updates of America's Army, modifications that serve as educational and training tools for U.S. Army soldiers, and applications of the game that simulate future weapons systems have resulted in an expansion of this once small project to encompass a large network of commercial and military institutions known as the Army Game Project (henceforth AGP). The AGP has been a part of a new push by the Army to market itself to potential recruits and the public at large, and it has also spearheaded cheaper methods of developing training and visualization technologies for soldiers in the U.S. Army.

Although the goal of increasing civilian recruitment and improving soldier training methods may have been the original purpose of the AGP and continues to be the project's stated raison d'être, the project has expanded to a plethora of arrangements with commercial entities to produce products such as plastic soldier action figures modeled on real enlisted soldiers, a graphic novel based on the game, an arcade shoothouse game, a downloadable cell phone version of the game, the extensive Army Experience Center located inside an indoor Philadelphia shopping mall, and a 10,000 square-foot mobile mission simulator dubbed the Virtual Army Experience, currently touring throughout the U.S. to air shows and state fairs to host a 20-minute, simulated Army experience so popular that visitors have reportedly waited in line for as long as four hours to take part in it.

With all of these popular cultural appearances, it could be easy to overlook other applications of the America's Army platform that are being developed for training and simulation purposes. While expensive simulators are still being developed by large military contractors for huge sums of money, the AGP has begun marketing itself to the military and other governmental organizations as an effective money-saving tool. By reusing preexisting America's Army game software, art assets, and programming code, costs are reduced; furthermore, potential damage to expensive equipment during live training exercises can be minimized by developing training simulations. One such application of the game is intended to teach new enlistees before their entry into basic training some essentials in land navigation, military grid referencing for maps, and first aid. Other applications include a training exercise created for the United States Secret Service, applications that test and simulate future weapons currently under development, a close quarters combat simulator that uses live fire ammunition, and a convoy skills trainer geared towards enabling soldiers to make better decisions while under stress. These applications of the Americas Army platform are designed throughout a network of commercial and military design studios in North Carolina, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Orlando, and elsewhere, and their activities are overseen at offices located within the Army's Software Engineering Directorate at Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama.

My current research turns a critical eye towards these cultures of game production in the U.S. military, proceeding empirically and looking at the everyday work environments and experiences, the subjectivities and aspirations of individuals who operate within the AGP. Following Eyal Ben-Ari's call for an examination in anthropology of "the specific ways in which the military's expertise in handling—managing, controlling, and effecting—violence are represented, played out, and have concrete personal and social implications," my research is framed, but not limited, by a an overarching question that asks how the apparently binary concepts of war and game, work and play, education and entertainment, and soldier and civilian are negotiated and incorporated into the game and the larger project of the AGP. In exploring this issue, I seek to reveal how different individuals and institutions come to ascribe varying meanings to the AGP; how these apparently binary categories become solidified or blurred; and how the often ambiguous distinctions between these categories can become translated into the AGP products themselves. As an explicit attempt to disassemble a phenomenon that is often elided by the phrase "the military entertainment complex," my research draws upon a multisited ethnographic approach that uses data gathered at various institutions that work to produce the many versions of America's Army that appear on cell phones and PCs, in shopping mall arcades and soldier barracks.

In 2004, the game industry surpassed the movie industry in terms of monetary sales, an indication that the video game is developing into a considerable medium. As the United States military's presence becomes ever more visible worldwide and through a variety of new media, this research stands at a nexus of two trends that are quickly becoming important to both popular culture and political reality in the United States and throughout the world. The combination of these particularly germane topics is significant since, as Ed Halter claims, video games "have taken on a peculiarly resonant role in how we are thinking about war now." Scholars such as Derek Gregory and Catherine Lutz have for some time been theorizing about the merging of war and game, claiming that game development "projects like these dissolve the boundaries between the military and the public" and that the "distinction between things civil and things military [is] an illusion, artificially maintained." By looking at how this nexus between video game development and war quite literally plays out, my project endeavors to ethnographically document how the practices of the Army Game Project might contribute to this trend—smoothing away modern distinctions between war and game, reproducing military logics, and translating and reconfiguring this power to new subjects. Exploring such questions would advance especially relevant conversations regarding the U.S. military and empire, the militarization of civil society, and emergent technologies and media.

Miriam Kahn, Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington (chair)

Danny Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington

David Price, Professor of Anthropology, St. Martin's University

Lorna Rhodes, Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington

Phillip Schuyler, Professor of Music, University of Washington (GSR)

I hope that I didn't write these in vain. Please let me know if you found them useful:

Bibliographic Essay covering research on Raï, a genre of Algerian music

Bibliography of academic writings on tsugaru shamisen and enka