{"title":"First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Bordere","authors":"Juan Llamas-Rodriguez","doi":"10.25158/l10.2.2","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Digital networked media actively participate in the nation-state’s and tech entrepreneurs’ efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands. These media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering popular reference points for the new technology being developed (e.g. Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable. This article analyzes one such reference point within the first-person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). Like other border-themed video games, The Cartel borrows on colonial tropes and ideologies by creating playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through its virtual modes of representation and interaction, the game encodes the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. While its digital aesthetics animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the first-person shooter reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare, an ideological orientation to the border underground that channels the players’ purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. Analyzing the narrative and procedural work of this ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures structure and shape specific forms of racial and colonial violence.\n","PeriodicalId":7777,"journal":{"name":"Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.25158/l10.2.2","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Digital networked media actively participate in the nation-state’s and tech entrepreneurs’ efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands. These media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering popular reference points for the new technology being developed (e.g. Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable. This article analyzes one such reference point within the first-person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). Like other border-themed video games, The Cartel borrows on colonial tropes and ideologies by creating playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through its virtual modes of representation and interaction, the game encodes the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. While its digital aesthetics animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the first-person shooter reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare, an ideological orientation to the border underground that channels the players’ purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. Analyzing the narrative and procedural work of this ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures structure and shape specific forms of racial and colonial violence.
数字网络媒体积极参与民族国家和技术企业家想象和管理边疆的努力。这些媒体通过为正在开发的新技术提供流行的参考点(如Google Maps, poksammon Go, Call of Duty)以及通过提供实际的工具使这些想法变得可行,从而促进了对边界的虚拟思考。本文将分析第一人称射击(FPS)主机游戏《Call of Juarez: the Cartel》(育碧,2011)中的一个参考点。与其他以边界为主题的电子游戏一样,《The Cartel》通过创造可玩的叙述来借用殖民主义的比喻和意识形态,并将不可征服的边界和种族化的主题定位为“他者”。通过其虚拟的表现和互动模式,游戏编码了种族化过程,继续塑造大众对边界的想象。虽然它的数字美学创造了一个充满可能性的动态空间,但第一人称射击游戏的逻辑却限制了动画空间的扩展性,将其限制在地道战的互动体验中,这是一种对地下边界的意识形态取向,将玩家的有目的动作引导到直接对抗和种族暴力的空间中。分析这款表面上反动的电子游戏的叙事和程序工作,可以展示边界基础设施是如何构建和塑造特定形式的种族和殖民暴力的。