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Atrocity Propaganda in Military-Themed First-Person-Shooter Video Games

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Atrocity Propaganda in Military-Themed First-Person-Shooter Video Games Atrocity Propaganda in Military-Themed First-Person-Shooter Video Games 9th of July 2020 Word count: 8209 Author: Sean Steven Magee 12490067 Supervisor: Tom Dobber Master’s Thesis Graduate School of Communication Master’s programme Communication Science University of Amsterdam Abstract The present study examines whether military-themed First Person Shooter (FPS) video games can be used as a tool of atrocity propaganda in eliciting certain emotional states and perceptions of the in- and outgroups that their narratives project. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) was the key subject of this investigation, and two of its campaign levels were employed to gauge the effects of an atrocity-driven and non-atrocity-driven narrative on participants’ emotional states, and their humanization, animalistic dehumanization and mechanistic dehumanization of the narratives’ projected Arab ingroup and Russian outgroup. The results showed that exposure to the atrocity- driven narrative had a significant and substantial effect on increasing participants’ levels of self- reported Fear, Disgust and Anger, in addition to other negative emotions, while also significantly lowering positive emotions. However the results did not show atrocity-driven FPS narratives to have any significant impact on manipulating individuals’ humanization, animalization and mechanization of the groups portrayed. Instead, the analysis suggests that simple visual exposure to FPS gameplay with a certain ingroup projected as the player or the player’s allies has a significant and moderate effect on humanizing the relevant ethnicity for viewers. Introduction The capacity of video games to trigger aggressive behavior and cognition in both the short- and long-term has been evidenced in numerous studies (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Bushman & Anderson, 2002; Hollingdale, Greitemeyer, & McCormick, 2014); particularly when an effort is made to convey violence as realistically as possible to players (Jeong, Biocca, & Bohil, 2012). Although violent interaction through video gameplay has received ample attention over the years, the effects of violent video game story-narratives remain less well understood; a troublesome fact when one considers that violence-justifying narratives traditionally also tend to increase the probability of aggressive behavior (Geen & Stonner, 1974; Paik & Comstock, 1994). The question of game narrative is particularly relevant in light of the increasingly popular and realism-oriented military themed-FPS (First Person Shooter) genre of video games, which as its name suggests, often assumes narratives that mirror present-day armed conflicts. This novel entertainment medium also offers an increasingly unambiguous space in which we are unable to escape our role as victim or perpetrator; thereby assigning such FPS narratives an unprecedented level of power in communicating messages of deep political significance. As with violence mediated through more traditional channels like TV and movies, justified violence has been found to drive about 77% of video game narratives (Smith, Lachlan, & Tamborini , 2003); accounting for the frequency with which players adopt roles of moral agency in defending universal values in their struggle against enemies (Schneider, Lang, Shin, & Bradley, 2004). There has consequently also been ample debate over how FPS narratives might be used as a tool of one-sided political communication; albeit almost entirely in a theoretical context and supported only through anecdotal evidence (Der Derian, 2001; Halter, 2002; Leonard, 2004; Stahl, 2006; Gagnon, 2010; Hitchens, Patrickson, & Young, 2013). Central to this discussion however, is the untested assumption that this game genre offers a new medium in which players’ attitudes towards certain real-life outgroups might be affected by explicitly depicting active belligerents of ongoing conflicts in a certain way. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare; arguably the most successful and popular military-themed FPS game in recent times, features an atrocity-laden narrative that mirrors the ongoing war in Syria with Russian enemies and Arab allies. Having sold 4.75 million digital units during the month of its launch in 2019 (Valentine, 2019), and having passed $1 Billion in global sales by December of the same year, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has become the most played edition of its generation (Bhat, 2019); reportedly receiving over 3 hours of gameplay from the average player per week (Gaston, 2011). The game also serves as a most recent example of how some media outlets (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare faces Russian backlash, 2019) have used the term ‘propaganda’ to describe yet another supposed soft power mechanism by which the USA and Russia contest each other culturally. This study therefore seeks to examine whether the game’s campaign can actually be used as a tool of atrocity propaganda in effectively influencing players to achieve desired emotional states and perceptions of the enemy, and poses the following research question: RQ: How do atrocity stimuli attributed to outgroups in First Person Shooter (FPS) video games affect players’ emotional states, and their perceived humanization or dehumanization of the in- and outgroups projected by these FPS narratives? Theoretical Framework Propaganda As with propaganda more generally, atrocity propaganda’s presumed effects have been the subject of considerable speculation but scant empirical research. This is perhaps due in part to the fact that no robust and widely recognized definition or theoretical framework for atrocity propaganda has ever existed (Morrow, 2018), and that the function of ‘propaganda’ has also been reformulated numerous times and by numerous scholars since its inception (Jowett & O′Donnell, 2012). Lasswell wrote that the overarching cultural approach of propaganda involved the “presentation of an object… in such a manner that certain cultural attitudes will be organized toward it” (1927, p. 629 - 630), whereas Ponsonby believed the more specific aim of atrocity propaganda was the “stimulation of indignation, horror, and hatred” against an enemy, in a manner “assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind” (1929, p. 1). Military-themed FPS video games would therefore offer an unexplored but highly engaging avenue for the stimulation of such attitudes towards groups they depict as adversaries. More lacking than a common formulation of propaganda however, is a concise definition of what constitutes atrocity stimuli; in light of the quite fractured theoretical approach it has received in social science research. Bromley, Shupe and Ventim concluded that false stories of moral indignation or atrocity tales primarily functioned by evoking “outrage,” authenticating preconceived notions of “evil,” and thereby bolstered a form of “social control” over communities (1979, p. 1). This is a similar observation to Bar-Tal’s later claim, that by placing adversarial groups in “extreme negative social categories which are excluded from human groups… considered as acting within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values,” through a process involving “intense negative emotions that derive from… extremely negative contents,” nation states had found an effective soft power instrument to delegitimize their enemies (1989, p. 171-172). Effective atrocity propaganda would therefore seem to trigger some emotional heuristic through morally or normatively outrageous stimuli, reflective of the “‘inhuman’ character of a perceived enemy’s conduct” (Morrow, 2018, p. 51); consequently inducing a broader and negative attitudinal change towards said outgroup. To the best of our knowledge however, the heuristics and attitudinal effects ascribed to atrocity stimuli have remained empirically untested; underscoring a substantial gap in the academic literature this study hopes to fill. FPS narratives as a mediated experience The difference in how narratives are mediated via video games versus TV and movie mediums have important implications for how messages are received and integrated. As Thompson has pointed out, the ‘hypodermic needle’ conceptualization of media affects; highly popular in the traditional propaganda framework, doesn’t accurately capture the “processes of encoding and decoding” that occur between a game narrative’s message and the players who actively interact with it (2008, p.20). Tilo Hartmann argues that video game narratives operate through one of two “mutually exclusive modes of perception;” the experiential over the rational processing system (Moral Disengagement During Exposure to Media Violence: Would It Feel Right to Shoot an Innocent Civilian in a Video Game?, 2012, p. 110). If we assume a rational processing system, the player is completely aware of the “mediated origin of the representations they encounter” while playing the game (Hartmann, Moral Disengagement During Exposure to Media Violence: Would It Feel Right to Shoot an Innocent Civilian in a Video Game?, 2012, p. 110), and is therefore always aware that in terms of story-narrative and interaction, the game ‘is not real’ (p. 110; Klimmt, Schmid, Nosper, Hartmann, & Vorderer, 2006). In this sense, the player would therefore feel neither any emotional connection to virtually-mediated humanoid representations, nor any attitudes about his or her interaction with them. Hartmann however argues that because narratives “feel apparently real to the players’ senses” via the interactive experience video game mediation offers, players may nonetheless be under “intense illusions of violence,”
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