Graduation Year
2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Humanities and Cultural Studies
Major Professor
Todd Jurgess, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Amy Rust, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Scott Ferguson, Ph.D.
Keywords
video games, terrorism, hacker, war, first person
Abstract
Around the turn of the century, as the United States increased its military presence in the Middle East in what was widely known as the War on Terror, computer games were also rising in popularity. Military inspired narratives and settings are very common in video games, especially in the genre known as the first person shooter – characterized by a single player, first person point of view. Alexander Galloway provides a vocabulary for understanding the video game, and the first person shooter in particular, derived from the framework of game studies. Scholarship around video games usually either seeks to affirm their utopian possibilities or critique their excessive depiction of violence. I argue that, while video games do present wider opportunities for user participation than other forms of media, there ultimately limited ideological possibilities as evidenced by popular first person shooter games. In particular, I look at Counter-Strike, an online first person shooter game widely popular in the 2000s. Through my exploration of the communities surrounding Counter-Strike, I argue that video games do provide opportunities for players to more actively engage with media, despite its politically charged narrative and aesthetics often being taken as apolitical by the community itself.
Scholar Commons Citation
Silva, Enya C., "From Counter-Strike to Counterterrorism: How the Cheater Reconfigures Our Understanding of Asymmetric Warfare" (2023). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10139
