The discourse of colonial Othering that video games operate within cannot be reduced simply to a discussion of spatiality, nor should the example of the first-person shooter genre be seen as the only way in which the simulated geography of video games serves the construction of race in digital media.

For those of us in the West, the wars and occupations that our nations are conducting in the Middle East are increasingly experienced through what Paul Virilio (2002, p 31) has described as “the squared horizon” of the screen. This is true for our civilian populations, whose knowledge of the people and places that are invaded and occupied in their name is shaped by media discourse, and increasingly it is also true of the troops themselves whose experience of war is mediated by the interfaces of surveillance, mapping, and targeting systems embedded in their equipment.

A critical approach to interpreting the role of digital media in social relations between the West and the middle eastern Other might begin by developing literacies around interfaces and the underlying systems that they represent, both informational and political.