War games and the stereotype of the terrorist in the video game America’s Army:

territorialization, war and Islamic otherness

Abstract

Videogames available through Internet unveil growing concerns and attention from educators and social science researchers, due to their potential effects on learning, and the alienating perspectives and social isolation experimented by their users. Beyond correlations that may exist between the videogames and violence, some games nevertheless unveils attention by the form as they enforce social representations of certain people and communities, as in the game focused in this paper: América’s Army”. This paper examines how this wargame deals with the warriors’ characters where the combatants are always American soldiers (“guardians of freedom and of the American way of life”) and, in some cases, USA allies that must accomplish various battle missions. Theirs enemies (the others, targeted to suffer the results of the combat missions), are almost always depicted as “Islamic terrorists”.