Being a terrorist: Video game simulations of the other side of the War on Terror

Introduction

Terrorism and the ongoing global War on Terror are common themes in video games. Many games, including such popular series as Modern Warfare, Medal of Honor, Rainbow 6, and Splinter Cell have cast terrorists as enemies and allowed players to wage a virtual battle against them. Terrorists make perfect video game enemies, as they can be easily characterized as intrinsically evil and threatening targets, even within the context of games that have relatively shallow narratives. Terrorists fight outside the system of violence between states and carry out attacks that violate established moral and legal restrictions on war, making them natural villains. Moreover, terrorism has such a strong connotation that the virtual enemies who receive this label take on the appearance of being evil, regardless of whether they deserve it.

Despite this deep moral prohibition on terrorism, some video games offer players the opportunity to change sides to become virtual terrorists. This engagement with the terrorist’s perspective tends to be brief, only lasting for a single mission in single-player game campaigns, and is relatively uncommon, yet it is theoretically significant. Granting players access to the thoughts and experiences of a terrorist would be a radical gesture. Doing this might humanize terrorists and problematize the good vs evil binary that frames the War on Terror and much of the media about terrorism, including video games themselves. It might also show that some terrorists have legitimate grievances, despite their extreme methods, or that certain people or groups are wrongly classified as terrorists.

I will argue that despite their enormous critical potential, video games that simulate a terrorist’s point of view not only fail to deliver any radical change of perspective but further obscure the meaning of terrorism and the experiences of terrorists. These games serve a double ideological function by hiding the terrorist Other’s subjectivity, while also creating the illusion that nothing has been hidden and that the terrorist’s experience has been accurately recreated. Rather than illuminating the feeling of being a terrorist, video game simulations conceal it with a false acquaintance that gives the impression that there is nothing to terrorists aside from mindless acts of violence. These simulations of being a terrorist add to the confusion about what terrorism is by failing to address the political and ideological characteristics that distinguish terrorism from other types of violence.

I will use three games, America’s Army, Modern Warfare 2, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter, as case studies to show the range of different ways in which the terrorist’s point of view is recreated in video games and demonstrate the theoretical significance of these simulations of what it is like to be a terrorist. With the help of a graphical trick that changes the way avatars look depending on one’s team, America’s Army forces players to appear as terrorists to their enemies, but does not allow players to experience themselves or their allies as terrorists. Modern Warfare 2 allows players to act as terrorists, brutally killing innocent civilians while giving the player’s actions a sense of legitimacy because they are being carried out by an undercover spy. Finally, Medal of Honor: Warfighter gives players the perspective of a terrorist who has defected from the US government and is undergoing training in a secret terrorist base.

Each of the games takes a different approach to creating the terrorist’s point of view, yet the games are fundamentally the same in their obfuscation of that point of view. Rather than experiencing a terrorist’s subjectivity, players are simply given an opportunity to project themselves into a different perspective without any sense of how that viewpoint differs from their own. The games encourage this projection by creating relatively empty experiences that turn out to be deeply problematic when they are analyzed. The games’ claims to give players an authentic sense of what it is like to fight in modern conflicts aggravate this problem. The games are developed with sophisticated graphics engines, accurate physics, and assistance from real combat veterans. Yet, the aspirations to realism are almost entirely directed at creating realistic action sequences and accurately capturing the institutions and culture of Western military forces. The help from veterans in particular helps the games to show the Western soldier’s point of view. The visual realism and attention to detail in these games adds to the false appearance of realism when it comes time to play as a terrorist.

The first and second sections of this article will discuss the theoretical significance of imaginatively becoming a terrorist. In the first section, I will discuss the special status of terrorists compared to soldiers. In contrast to enemy soldiers, who are often described as enemies merely by convention and who therefore retain their humanity, terrorists represent a category of combatants who are evil and subhuman. In the second section, I will argue that the prospect of seeing the world from a terrorist’s point of view is a radical act, as this humanizes terrorists and raises the possibility that they may have some legitimate grievances despite their inexcusable acts of violence. In the third, fourth, and fifth sections, I will describe the experience of being a terrorist in America’s Army, Modern Warfare 2, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter, respectively. I will describe how each of these games simulates a terrorist’s point of view and how each ultimately hides that point of view by reducing terrorism to a form of desultory violence that appears to be no different from any other type of simulated violence.

Envisioning the terrorist enemy

Entertainment media play a critical role in the War on Terror, characterizing terrorists, identifying potential threats, and defining what terrorism is (Hamelink, 2008; Seib, 2011). Moreover, media narratives do this while, for most audiences, real experiences of terrorism and war are far removed from everyday life, making media images the primary means of experiencing terrorism (Carruthers, 2008; Christensen, 2008). The way the category of ‘terrorist’ is defined in popular media is especially significant, as the War on Terror is defined not as a struggle for land or resources but as a war to completely destroy a particular type of enemy.

Video games, especially first-person shooters (FPS), are often accused of dehumanizing enemies (Leonard, 2006, 2007; Šisler, 2008, 2009). FPS enemies are invariably simplistic figures that seem to be caricatures of evil. They delight in destruction and are either indiscriminate in their use of violence or deliberately target those who are most vulnerable. The strange simplicity and homogeneity of enemy avatars reinforces the narrative of the inhuman enemy. Enemies tend to have very limited dialogue, only shouting a few insults or commands to each other, which are repeated endlessly over the course of the game, giving them the appearance of being automatons. Their faces and bodies are often identical and lack the same indications of individuality as the heroes’ avatars. Games also tend to essentialize enemy characters by making them part of an amorphous group that may be marked as hostile through national or linguistic differences. The enemies’ love of violence and lack of individuation give them a subhuman status and transform them into objects of contempt that can be justifiably killed.

The construction of an evil enemy is a key part of framing the actions of players and their computer-controlled allies in heroic ways, but it usually requires an oversimplification of that enemy. Studies of real world soldiers reveal that opponents generally recognize their shared humanity and have great difficulty overcoming this feeling in order to kill each other (Grossman, 2009). They fight not because of hatred or personal motives but because of much larger political forces. As Arendt (1967: ix) says ‘the first lesson to be learned on the battlefield was that the closer you were to the enemy, the less did you hate him.’ Walzer (1977: 142) makes a similar point, saying that the vast gulf between soldiers on opposing sides disappears when they are not actively fighting. Of the enemy soldier, Walzer says: ‘he alienates himself from me when he tries to kill me, and from our common humanity. But the alienation is temporary, the humanity imminent.’ There is a great deal of value in this sense of respect between combatants. It may help to limit atrocities, and it serves as the basis of the moral equality that exists between soldiers in conventional wars, according to which soldiers on each side retain their right to self-defense and fair treatment when they are captured or wounded (Gross, 2009: 15). However, this feeling is difficult to sustain in wars against enemies that are seen as intrinsically evil and fundamentally different.

The feeling that opponents are human tends to be lost in video games not simply because the enemy characters are only simulations of real people but also because of the choice of video game enemies. The enemies in mainstream FPS are rarely ordinary soldiers. Rather, they are opponents whose ideologies or methods of fighting alienate them from any shared sense of humanity. Nazis are recurrent enemies in military FPS, as are communists, mercenaries, and, of course, terrorists. Because terrorists are generally seen as being intrinsically evil, enemies can simply be labeled ‘terrorists’ in order to be legitimate targets. They are beyond redemption by virtue of their challenge to accepted standards of war. Popular media about terrorism often rely on, and encourage, audience preconceptions that terrorists are figures that fit Agamben’s (1998: 8) concept of homo sacer. This is the category of person that is beyond the limits of conventional morality who may therefore be killed without incurring moral guilt. The presumptive evil of terrorists makes it exceedingly difficult to ever have the kind of distance that Walzer (1977: 142) thinks is necessary to see an opponent’s ‘common humanity’. As I will argue in the next section, one of the ways of regaining that sense of humanity is through understanding a conflict from the enemy’s point of view.

Subjectivizing the enemy

Terrorists generally see their actions as being excusable in light of the extreme adversity they face or because of the importance of their cause (Sluka, 2008: 175; Wilkinson, 1977: 53). Terrorists’ motives may not excuse their violence, especially if it is indiscriminate violence directed at civilians, but acknowledging that terrorists may have legitimate grievances and attempting to understand what these are can elevate terrorists from the status of an evil and inhuman enemy to something closer to that of the conventional enemy. Serious consideration of terrorists’ goals and their ideologies is fairly rare in entertainment media, as most narratives about terrorism omit any substantive discussion of why terrorists fight, regardless of whether the terrorists are real or fictional (Schlesinger et al., 1984). For the purposes of media narratives, the fact that terrorists pose a threat to national security seems to be all that matters.

Much of the entertainment media that help to define terrorism and characterize terrorists not only fail to show alternative perspectives but also actively work to demonize terrorists and justify extreme tactics to defeat them (Kellner, 2004, 2007; Roy and Ross, 2011: 289; Van Veeren, 2009). These media participate in constructing the image of the evil terrorist enemy discussed in the previous section. This lack of substantive analysis of terrorists’ motives often leads them to be defined according to group characteristics, such as religion or ethnicity. This results in entire populations, especially Arabs and Muslims, being wrongly associated with terrorism (Karim, 2000; Schulzke, 2011; Wilkins and Downing, 2002). Given the widespread tendency to avoid discussing terrorists’ grievances or motives, except in fairly superficial terms, in entertainment media it should be unsurprising that media narratives rarely take on a terrorist’s perspective. However, there is much to learn from attempting to do this.

As Moghaddam (2006: 2) points out, it is critical to remember that understanding terrorists’ motives is very different from supporting them. It is possible to learn about terrorists and even to overcome the good vs evil binaries that frame the War on Terror without condoning this violence. Understanding terrorists can even be a first step toward more effectively fighting terrorism. Moghaddam argues that

without this accurate understanding, the billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people dedicated to the ‘war on terror’ will be wasted. We will continue to enjoy victories in skirmish after skirmish, without ever tasting real success.

Terrorists generally follow strategies of organization and attack that are rational, at least in an instrumental sense (Dolnik, 2007; Enders and Sandler, 2005), but this rationality is difficult to comprehend or to predict without efforts to learn about how terrorists perceive their activities. Moreover, it is impossible to disaggregate those who carry out acts of violence from their religious and ethnic communities without some sense of what they believe and what distinguishes them from other members of their communities (Habeck, 2006).

On a more fundamental level, seeing from a terrorist’s point of view may help determine when the label ‘terrorist’ is applicable and how it should be understood. The decision to learn about an enemy by experiencing the world from the enemy’s point of view is radical in principle. Žižek (2008: 46) correctly argues that the attempt to enter the mind of someone who seems to be fundamentally different from oneself raises the possibility of sharing that person’s subjective experiences and learning that they are the same as our own. Presenting an enemy as something monstrous depends on denying that this enemy has a subjective awareness like our own. As he says of enemies:

This presupposed subject is thus not another human being with a rich inner life filled with personal stories which are self-narrated in order to acquire a meaningful experience of life, since such a person cannot ultimately be an enemy.

Žižek argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a revolutionary book because Shelley allowed the monster to speak for himself, thereby giving readers the kind of contact with the monster that subjectivized him and made him into a human figure, despite his monstrous appearance. According to Žižek (2008: 46):

Mary Shelley moves inside his mind and asks what it is like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted. The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim.

This is an apt description of any attempt to gain access to a terrorist’s subjectivity as well, since terrorists, like Frankenstein’s monster, are portrayed as both monsters and ultimately criminals. Žižek’s suggestion that subjectivizing descriptions can make any monster, no matter how evil, become a victim presents a serious challenge to narratives about the evil of the terrorist enemy, as it implies that such narratives can only be maintained based on ignorance of what terrorists are really like.

The possibility of gaining a subjective understanding of the terrorist enemy is a more real possibility in a video game than through any other medium. The passages in Frankenstein, in which the monster is allowed to speak for himself, offer readers a narrative description of what the world looks like from the monster’s point of view. However, such a description only grants indirect access to the monster’s point of view through a description, rather than direct access into the monster’s mind. Shelley might have attempted to give readers a more direct view of the monster’s thoughts and feelings, yet this too would leave the monster as an object whose subjectivity must be relayed through a narrative. Other media also have difficulty capturing subjectivity. Some films have attempted to show terrorists’ points of view in order to give audiences a deeper understanding of what terrorists are like (Martin, 2011). Nevertheless, like written narratives, films invariably characterize terrorists indirectly, by showing their actions and allowing them to speak without granting access to their subjective experiences.

Video games, by contrast, may have the potential to give players more direct access to another person’s subjective experiences, as they can not only incorporate narrative elements that describe another person’s experiences but also simulate living as someone else. The games described in the following sections are all FPS, which are phenomenologically different from traditional media, or from other types of video games. The games put the players into the character they control in the game. Players see the game world through their avatar’s eyes, interact with the world through the avatar’s body, and even receive visual and tactile cues, such as a darkening screen or a vibrating gamepad, when the avatar is tired or in pain. As Rehak (2003: 103) argues: ‘the video game avatar, presented as a human player’s double, merges spectatorship and participation in ways that fundamentally transform both activities.’ The avatar is a virtual self that operates as an intermediary for players’ experiences of the game. The connection to an avatar is always incomplete; players never succeed in becoming someone else. Nevertheless, video games bring players much closer to realizing the subjective experience of being someone else than other media because of the extent to which they allow players to become embodied as an avatar that represents another person with a distinctive point of view and subjectivity.

The first-person view in video games has the potential to show alternative subjectivities and can use this displacement to provide a critical perspective. A few mainstream video games take advantage of this capacity. For example, Spec Ops: The Line critiques American military interventionism by allowing players to control an American soldier who is responsible for atrocities and undergoes a psychological breakdown. However, examples of games actualizing this critical potential are exceptional. Game narratives generally favor the status quo for commercial reasons and because those relying on assistance from the military or from veterans may face editorial constraints imposed by these advisors (Dyer-Witherford and De Peuter, 2009). Consequently, the first-person viewpoint is typically one of the ways in which war games privilege a Western, usually American, perspective on conflicts, as players invariably take on the persona of a Western soldier. The games discussed in the following sections show various ways in which the terrorist’s point of view is simulated in popular FPS, raising the possibility of taking the radical step of exploring the terrorist subjectivity. However, in each case the simulation of being a terrorist turns out to be an empty experience that not only fails to provide a genuine sense of what terrorists are like but also adds to further obscure the terrorist subjectivity.

The impossibility of opposition in America’s Army

The US Army released the first version of America’s Army in 2002 and made it freely available online for players around the world to download. Since then, it has gone through over a dozen updates and new releases, which have been supplemented with expansion packs and new maps. Players start the game as new recruits in the US Army and are led through simulated army training courses to learn the game’s mechanics. They learn to move their avatar through the game world, how to shoot, and how to operate vehicles in a way that mirrors real Army training. The game also includes elite training programs through which players can earn special achievements and learn about more advanced weaponry. Once players have completed training they have access to the multiplayer combat between American soldiers and their opponents, which makes up the bulk of the gameplay experience. Although several editions of America’s Army feature opponents from fictional opposing states, the opposing forces (OPFOR) in most of the games appear as generic terrorist or insurgent enemies.

Many scholars have criticized America’s Army on the grounds that it is militaristic, reflects a strong pro-American bias, and promotes ongoing operations in the War on Terror (Allen, 2011; Galloway, 2004; Nieborg, 2006, 2010; Shaw, 2010). Allen’s (2011) critique is especially relevant here, as he focuses on a perceptual trick that the game employs during multiplayer play, which makes all players see themselves as American soldiers. Players in both teams see themselves as American soldiers. The game manages to give all players the subjective feeling that they are soldiers fighting terrorists, even though they appear to be terrorists from their opponents’ perspectives. Allen (2011: 48) argues that this game mechanic is a sign that the American military considers itself to be good and just, regardless of the context, and that this sentiment is so powerful that players cannot be permitted to take opposing views. Allen is right to point out that the game mechanic of giving all players the perspective of American soldiers presents a strong pro-American perspective. However, like other critics of the game, he overlooks the significance of the fact that this game mechanic also inadvertently transforms every player into a terrorist.

The experience of being a terrorist or a member of an opposing military is unintended. The game attempts to hide this experience by rendering players incapable of seeing themselves as anything other than American soldiers. However, the simulation of being a terrorist is nevertheless part of the game and is especially interesting because of the game’s attempt to conceal it. Even though players see themselves in American uniforms, they know that their opponents view them as terrorists. Within the game’s value system, according to which American soldiers are always good and terrorists are always bad, every conflict is one in which opposing sides see each other as an enemy that is fundamentally evil and undeserving of respect while also perceiving themselves as ‘the good guys’. The game encourages players to see its simulated combat in this way even though players know that their opponents have exactly the same sense of being just combatants in a battle against evil enemies. Thus, the game’s perceptual trick ultimately rests on false-consciousness; it assumes that players will ignore that they are terrorists in the eyes of other players.

America’s Army creates an unbridgeable gulf between members of the opposing teams even though the only characteristic that can differentiate them – the status of being a terrorist – is virtually meaningless within the game world. Aside from the different uniforms worn by soldiers and terrorists, there is nothing to distinguish the two sides. The game is able to make the opposing perspectives equivalent by removing any contextual or behavioral details that might make one of the competing teams seem morally better or worse than the other. One team may attack while another defends, but neither engages in the types of activities associated with terrorist or counterterrorist operations.

With no substantive differences to distinguish soldiers from terrorists, America’s Army implies that the difference between the two sides is only a matter of perspective. The American soldier’s point of view and the terrorist’s point of view are interchangeable. Thus, even as the game promotes the American Army and its actions in the War on Terror, it simulates the cliché that ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.’ This implication is, of course, unintentional, as this message contradicts the overt pro-Army message. If there is as little separating soldiers from terrorists as the game suggests, then the multiplayer combat in American Army is as much a simulation of being a terrorist as it is of being a soldier.

Clearly there are differences between soldiers and terrorists, yet the experience of being a terrorist in America’s Army is so devoid of content that it gives no sense of what that difference might be. In the end, the game only gives the impression that being a terrorist is not a matter of fighting in a particular way or adhering to a particular ideology but of appearing to an opponent as someone evil. The experience of being a terrorist in America’s Army is therefore one that does not provide any real sense of what terrorists are like and instead reverts to the simplistic good vs evil binary that is all too often used to structure the War on Terror narrative.

Infiltrating a terrorist cell

Modern Warfare 2, the second game in a trilogy that is set in a fictional global War on Terror, allows players to briefly act as terrorists during a mission called ‘No Russian’. The mission is divided into two parts. It begins with a small group of terrorists entering a Russian airport and opening fire on crowds of civilians. Each of the terrorists is armed with an automatic weapon and protected by body armor, allowing them to kill the airport’s security guards and dozens of unarmed bystanders with impunity. The terrorists calmly move forward through the security checkpoint, up the escalators to a shopping area, and down through the baggage claim area, killing dozens of people along the way. During this part of the mission, players can take part in the massacre of civilians or they may refrain from shooting. However, they may not prevent the attack from taking place; any attempt to halt the attack leads players to fail the mission. The second part of the mission is a traditional FPS action sequence, as players fight against armed opponents from the Russian Federal Security Service to escape from the airport. This part of the mission is much less shocking than the earlier scenes of violence against civilians, yet it is still a simulation of terrorism, as players fight alongside the Modern Warfare series’ terrorist antagonists and do so against state security forces who are attempting to prevent more innocent people from being killed.

Modern Warfare 2 received a great deal of criticism for allowing players to become terrorists. One reporter expressed shock at the callousness of the violence saying that: ‘you mow down unsuspecting civilians and then relentlessly pursue survivors as they flee helplessly through the terminal’ (Gillin, 2009). Another reporter reacted to the mission saying that it ‘revolves around the most provocative, forcefully uncomfortable and emotionally disturbing scene yet built into interactive entertainment’ (Schiesel, 2009). The same reporter also made revealing comments about how this uncomfortable experience offered a more direct view of the reality of terrorism: ‘rather than survey the battlefield from a clinical distance, the game thrusts the player into the harrowing experience of modern terrorism.’

These characterizations of the mission as being extremely violent, even by the standards of war games, are accurate. The enemies in the Modern Warfare series typically die in dramatic ways, losing limbs or being thrown into the air by explosions, but the scenes of civilian death in ‘No Russian’ are even more exaggerated. Some of the civilians try to surrender, others run, and many are simply too scared to move. A few heroic figures brave the gunfire to rescue family members and friends. They can be seen dragging bodies away from the destruction as the terrorists shoot their way through the airport. The non-player character (NPC) behavior succeeds in making the level an unforgettable depiction of the horror of random acts of violence. The brutality of the violence in the ‘No Russian’ mission compared to other missions in Modern Warfare 2, as well as the emphasis on the terrorists’ deliberate attacks on civilians, indicate the game’s effort to distinguish terrorism from the violence of conventional war. Whereas most FPS punish players for shooting civilians by causing them to fail the mission, this mission allows players to kill civilians without any repercussions. The attempt to portray terrorist violence as unique by including more screaming, blood, and dead bodies than in the missions simulating conventional violence is relatively superficial. This intensified destruction may be a more accurate reflection of what war is like than the violence in other missions because of the way it calls attention to the human suffering caused by violence. However, ‘No Russian’ does not help to distinguish terrorism from violence by state security forces, which could just as easily be shown with more graphical realism.

Even more importantly, the ‘No Russian’ distances players from the subjective view of the terrorist Other. Despite the mission’s emphasis on the brutal violence inflicted by terrorists, it puts players in control of a character who is not himself a terrorist and whose motive is actually to prevent terrorism. Throughout the Modern Warfare 2 series, players change perspectives between various protagonists to see different aspects of their fictional War on Terror. In ‘No Russian’, players control Joseph Allen, a playable character from one of the game’s earlier missions. When players first take control of Allen, he is an Army Ranger fighting insurgents in Afghanistan. His courage earns him a new job with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the assignment of infiltrating a Russian terrorist cell. The game narrative emphasizes that Allen participates in the airport attack as part of his cover; he mirrors the terrorists’ violence in order to gain their trust.

The game hedges its representation of terrorism by casting Allen, and by extension the players who control him, as being unwitting terrorists. The game presents Allen not as a terrorist but as someone with good intentions, who is misled by his superiors. Allen has no desire to take part in the attack; he only hopes that he can exploit this trust to destroy the cell he has infiltrated. Allen’s situation raises some interesting questions as it is a reflection of the enduring problem of soldiers justifying immoral actions on the basis of following orders, yet the game narrative refrains from engaging with these issues or from reflecting on how the line demarcating soldiers from terrorists can become blurred when soldiers blindly follow orders.

Thus, the experience of being a terrorist in Modern Warfare 2 turns out to be little more than a graphically realistic scene of the routine video game activity of hurting civilians. The game appears to give players an authentic experience of being a terrorist even as it conceals the phenomenon of terrorism by failing to give it any substance as an experience of the terrorist subjectivity. This leads the game to reflect a deep uncertainty about what terrorism is, about what distinguishes it from other types of violence, and about what kind of people engage in terrorism. This uncertainty cannot be resolved within the game, as those engaging in the virtual terrorism do so either with misguided good intentions or with no motive at all. This leaves the game to characterize its terrorists by falling back on stereotypes about terrorists being evil people who carry out purposeless and unpredictable attacks.

Training as a terrorist

Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s approach to simulating terrorism is similar to that of Modern Warfare 2, as the game allows players to take the role of a terrorist who is actually a covert operative sent to infiltrate a terrorist cell. However, the game suggests that the agent, who is code named Argyrus, has defected and is intentionally acting as a terrorist. Before his mission begins, the game shows a cut scene in which its main characters speculate about whether Argyrus, who is out of contact, is still on their side. This opening makes Argyrus’ perspective ambivalent, leaving players to take control of a character whose alliances are uncertain, but suggests that, unlike Allen and the avatars in America’s Army, he may be intentionally acting as a terrorist. Strangely, the game never resolves this ambiguity. Argyrus’ role in the game is restricted to a single training mission, after which he is not heard from again. His role in the game only serves to familiarize players with the game’s basic controls and to give them a closer look at the terrorists they will fight throughout the game.

Unlike the brutal violence of the ‘No Russian’ mission in Modern Warfare 2, Argyrus’ mission does not involve any acts of violence against people. Rather, it is a simulation of Argyrus undergoing training in Yemen. The mission opens with Argyrus waking in a small cell to the exhortations of a man speaking in Arabic, claiming that ‘the infidels are at our door.’ The man continues to criticize the Americans throughout the mission yet, aside from these exhortations, the training mission proceeds much like it does in any FPS. Players learn the basic game controls just as they would in any FPS training mission: by walking around, crouching, running, firing a weapon at different ranges, and throwing a grenade. After learning basic movements, the drill consists of shooting hostile silhouette targets inside an airplane.

The mission seems to be a more deliberate attempt to change the player’s perspective than those in America’s Army or even Modern Warfare 2. This is evident in the mission’s revealing title: ‘Through the Eyes of Evil’. This title is significant both because it labels Argyrus as evil and because it promises to give players the experience of being a terrorist. Each of these claims turns out to be problematic. If Argyrus is preparing to carry out a terrorist attack, then he is morally condemnable, yet calling him and the other virtual terrorists ‘evil’ shows the same simplistic way of thinking about both the terrorists and morality that is evident in much of the entertainment media about terrorism. However, the problem with the ‘evil’ label goes much deeper than this.

The perspective that players take on, which is supposed to be both different and evil, turns out to be almost indistinguishable from the perspective of the game’s heroes. The entire training mission parallels the training that players undergo while playing as a counterterrorist operative in Warfighter’s other missions and in other popular FPS. Training missions are highly standardized across FPS, with games invariably leading players through almost identical training missions. By carrying out the same mission from the perspective of a terrorist, the game suggests that the differences between the heroes and terrorists are slight, and that they are different only because of the cause they fight for. The exhortations to fight and kill the enemy are similar to those that players hear in other missions and in other war games. The only difference is that Argyrus is told to kill Americans rather than members of a fictional terrorist group.

The shooting drill that players carry out to complete the mission is especially strange, since it is a hostage rescue simulation and therefore seems to be at odds with Argyrus’ mission as a terrorist. Players must selectively clear the plane by destroying the armed targets and protecting those who are unarmed. This type of hostage rescue shooting drill is a fixture of FPS training missions, but is elsewhere one the counterterrorist operatives perform. Its reappearance here makes it unclear whether the character Argyrus actually intends to take part in a terrorist attack at all and further blurs the distinction between the game’s heroes and its villains. Thus, ‘Through the Eyes of Evil’ purports to give players a unique perspective into the mind of a terrorist and a view of terrorists’ activities, but this perspective turns out to be identical to that of the counterterrorist operatives, aside from the assertion that the US government is the enemy. The mission’s game mechanics, interface, map, and mission objectives are interchangeable with FPS missions that are played from the perspective of counterterrorist operatives. The structural parallels between this terrorist simulation and conventional FPS missions show that, even when a game narrative attempts to cast an experience as being from a different perspective, that perspective can be empty if it is indistinguishable from others. Lacking structural difference or a sufficiently developed narrative, the experience of being a terrorist remains largely empty.

As in the other simulations of the terrorist’s point of view, ‘Know the Enemy’ fails to deliver on much insight into what terrorism is. Players learn virtually nothing about the terrorists they fight in the game. Their ideology is not discussed, nor does the game give any sense that terrorism is a distinctive type of violence. Nevertheless, the game pretends that it has imparted some wisdom. When players complete the mission they earn an achievement called ‘Know the Enemy’, which asserts that players have somehow gained a deeper understanding of people like Argyrus. The claim that players completing the mission know the enemy suggests that the only relevant information players should know is that they are evil enemies. No other details beyond this seem to be needed to understand a terrorist’s point of view. Thus, like America’s Army and Modern Warfare 2, Warfighter shows failure of FPS to provide any sense of what the enemy in the War on Terror is like and fails to realize the radical possibilities of adopting a new perspective on the War on Terror.

Conclusion

Entertainment media play an important role in shaping public perceptions of the War on Terror by characterizing terrorism and terrorists. Much of the popular entertainment based on the War on Terror creates simplistic narratives, in which terrorists are evil enemies that cannot be understood and that are simply driven by a desire to commit acts of senseless violence. The video games discussed in this article offer a partial look at how media might challenge dominant narratives by showing the world from the point of view of those who are too often classified as immoral monsters with motives that are beyond comprehension. However, as I have argued, the video games that seem to offer some prospect of giving players a glimpse into the other side of the War on Terror invariably fail to deliver on their radical potential. A close investigation of these games reveals that there is little substance beneath the appearance of more realistic simulations of violence. Moreover, these games actually work to further conceal the terrorist perspective by creating the illusion that the games accurately reflect terrorists’ points of view even as they hide them.