War/Play

War/Play is a brilliant analysis not just of how militarization is increasingly embedded in every aspect of society, but how it is pedagogically deployed through video games that parade as entertainment. For John Martino, video games play a crucial role in shaping subjectivity, desire, values, and modes of identification. Violent videos parading as military entertainment promote pedagogical practices which reach far beyond developing a dangerous and ethically problematic insensitivity to violence. More importantly, they shape individuals as the subject of violence itself. This is a crucial book for understanding video games and popular culture as a form of public pedagogy that is in every way as important pedagogically as the schools and the more established modes of education.
(Henry Giroux, McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest; Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University)
John Martino's War/Play brings home the importance of critically analyzing digital artifacts as political because of their potential to be used as 'perception weaponry' - i.e., propaganda tools that, in this case, work toward normalizing the military and military values in society. His focus on first person shooter military-themed video games exposes how crucial it is to understand militarization as a far- and deep-reaching process intimately tied to the Age of the 'Information Empire' and its connection to and impact on our everyday lives.
(Susan T Jackson, Associate Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme)