Introduction: Mission Briefing
You are a US soldier. You stand in a dusty windblown street in Zekistan's largest city. Automatic weapons fire from insurgents loyal to the dictator Mohammad Jabbour Al-Afad echoes through the city's narrow alleys as your team attempts to reach an injured medic. Consulting your global positioning device, you are able to identify a route by which your unit will be able to reach the downed man without exposing yourself to the enemy's line of sight. If deemed necessary, air support can be called in to strike enemy positions. Providing a degree of control in a chaotic situation, your maps are an essential weapon of war.
Of course there is no nation called Zekistan on most maps. It is the fictional setting of Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic Studios 2004), a popular video game developed by the Institute of Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in collaboration with Pandemic Studios, with the support of generous grants from the US Department of Defense. This coming together of military, business, and academic interests in the creation of cultural artifacts is exemplary of the social formation described as the military-entertainment complex (Lenoir 2000, Wark 2007).
Zekistan is one of a number of imagined Middle Eastern countries that serve as virtual battlefields in video games. Some of these simulated spaces refer to actual countries, such as Afghanistan in Medal of Honor (Danger Close 2010) and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward 2009), and Iraq in Kuma\War (Kuma Reality Games2004) and Conflict: Desert Storm (Pivotal Games 2002). Others create identifiably Middle Eastern spaces using similar tropes to Full Spectrum Warrior, including Adjikstan in SOCOM Navy Seals: Combined Assault (Zipper Interactive 2006) and the unnamed settings of 50Cent: Blood on the Sand (Swordfish Studios 2009) and Battlefield: Bad Company (EA Digital Illusions CE 2008). Still others construct less realist versions of the Middle East, for instance in the Arabian Nights inspired Prince of Persia series (various developers 1989-2010), the historical remix mode of “god games” such as Age of Empires (Ensemble Studios 1997) or the frequent appearance of sandy, magic carpet ride and bottled genie indicated spaces in platformers like Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo EAD 1993) and Little Big Planet (Media Molecule 2009). Taken collectively as an archetype of an exoticised geography, I will refer to this imagined territory as Fauxrabia.
My analysis of the spatiality of video games and their role in the construction of a racialized Other is rooted in the postcolonial scholarship of Edward Saïd's Orientalism (1995). In order to apply a postcolonial discourse analysis in the context of digital culture, I also draw on concepts from the emerging fields of video game and new media studies. Thinking around the construction of racial identities in digital environments by scholars such as Lisa Nakamura (2000, 2005) and Beth Kolko (2000) is particularly relevant to this inquiry. Finally, because I am looking at issues of spatiality, and particularly the use of maps as tools of authority and domination, critical perspectives from the field of geography provide a basis for my conception of cartography in the gamespace.
To be clear, I am approaching the question of race from a social constructionist perspective (Nakamura 2000, p2). Racial categorisations are primarily cultural, not biological. However, this should not be taken as an argument that racial identities are not real. On the contrary, my intent is to demonstrate one way in which the construction of subjectivities contribute to the very real lived experience of race. Indeed, I will argue that the construction of power relationships between the Western audience of video games and the Middle Eastern Other has contributed to the production of destructive, sometimes deadly, material effects in a time of war and neo-colonial military occupation.
Fauxrabia then, is a way of articulating the contradictory nature of this imagined (and in some sense experienced through gameplay) country that is both unreal and contributes to the production of reality. To describe the cultures represented in these games as being arab, or muslim is to conflate the vastly diverse cultures of people from as far afield as Morocco and Kashmir, Kazakhstan and Somalia into a singular signifier of Otherness when held in oppositional relationship to the Western player-character.
Fauxrabia is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994). It is a lie that expresses a truth about the West's conception of itself in opposition to the Other. It is a computer-generated, player-navigated, screen-represented space. It is a contemporary cultural manifestation of Saïd's model of orientalism:
Of course there is no nation called Zekistan on most maps. It is the fictional setting of Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic Studios 2004), a popular video game developed by the Institute of Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in collaboration with Pandemic Studios, with the support of generous grants from the US Department of Defense. This coming together of military, business, and academic interests in the creation of cultural artifacts is exemplary of the social formation described as the military-entertainment complex (Lenoir 2000, Wark 2007).
Zekistan is one of a number of imagined Middle Eastern countries that serve as virtual battlefields in video games. Some of these simulated spaces refer to actual countries, such as Afghanistan in Medal of Honor (Danger Close 2010) and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward 2009), and Iraq in Kuma\War (Kuma Reality Games2004) and Conflict: Desert Storm (Pivotal Games 2002). Others create identifiably Middle Eastern spaces using similar tropes to Full Spectrum Warrior, including Adjikstan in SOCOM Navy Seals: Combined Assault (Zipper Interactive 2006) and the unnamed settings of 50Cent: Blood on the Sand (Swordfish Studios 2009) and Battlefield: Bad Company (EA Digital Illusions CE 2008). Still others construct less realist versions of the Middle East, for instance in the Arabian Nights inspired Prince of Persia series (various developers 1989-2010), the historical remix mode of “god games” such as Age of Empires (Ensemble Studios 1997) or the frequent appearance of sandy, magic carpet ride and bottled genie indicated spaces in platformers like Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo EAD 1993) and Little Big Planet (Media Molecule 2009). Taken collectively as an archetype of an exoticised geography, I will refer to this imagined territory as Fauxrabia.
My analysis of the spatiality of video games and their role in the construction of a racialized Other is rooted in the postcolonial scholarship of Edward Saïd's Orientalism (1995). In order to apply a postcolonial discourse analysis in the context of digital culture, I also draw on concepts from the emerging fields of video game and new media studies. Thinking around the construction of racial identities in digital environments by scholars such as Lisa Nakamura (2000, 2005) and Beth Kolko (2000) is particularly relevant to this inquiry. Finally, because I am looking at issues of spatiality, and particularly the use of maps as tools of authority and domination, critical perspectives from the field of geography provide a basis for my conception of cartography in the gamespace.
To be clear, I am approaching the question of race from a social constructionist perspective (Nakamura 2000, p2). Racial categorisations are primarily cultural, not biological. However, this should not be taken as an argument that racial identities are not real. On the contrary, my intent is to demonstrate one way in which the construction of subjectivities contribute to the very real lived experience of race. Indeed, I will argue that the construction of power relationships between the Western audience of video games and the Middle Eastern Other has contributed to the production of destructive, sometimes deadly, material effects in a time of war and neo-colonial military occupation.
Fauxrabia then, is a way of articulating the contradictory nature of this imagined (and in some sense experienced through gameplay) country that is both unreal and contributes to the production of reality. To describe the cultures represented in these games as being arab, or muslim is to conflate the vastly diverse cultures of people from as far afield as Morocco and Kashmir, Kazakhstan and Somalia into a singular signifier of Otherness when held in oppositional relationship to the Western player-character.
Fauxrabia is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994). It is a lie that expresses a truth about the West's conception of itself in opposition to the Other. It is a computer-generated, player-navigated, screen-represented space. It is a contemporary cultural manifestation of Saïd's model of orientalism:
“...it not only creates, but also maintains; it is rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power...”
-Edward Saïd, Orientalism (1978, p 12).
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