University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses December 2020 Military-Themed Video Games and the Cultivation of Related Beliefs and Attitudes in Young Adult Males Greg Blackburn University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Mass Communication Commons Recommended Citation Blackburn, Greg, "Military-Themed Video Games and the Cultivation of Related Beliefs and Attitudes in Young Adult Males" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 1997. https://doi.org/10.7275/18820211 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1997 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MILITARY-THEMED VIDEO GAMES AND THE CULTIVATION OF RELATED BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES IN YOUNG ADULT MALES A Dissertation Presented by GREGORY R. BLACKBURN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY SEPTEMBER 2020 DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION © Copyright by Gregory R. Blackburn 2020 All Rights Reserved MILITARY-THEMED VIDEO GAMES AND THE CULTIVATION OF RELATED BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES IN YOUNG ADULT MALES A Dissertation Presented By GREGORY R. BLACKBURN Approved as to style and content by: _____________________________ Erica Scharrer, Chair _____________________________ Michael Morgan, Member _____________________________ Seth Goldman, Member _____________________________ Lisa Keller, Member _____________________________ Sut Jhally, Chair Department of Communication DEDICATION This manuscript is dedicated to the Essex and her crew, stove by a whale on the twentieth of November in the year 1820, thousands of miles from home. ABSTRACT MILITARY-THEMED VIDEO GAMES AND THE CULTIVATION OF RELATED BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES IN YOUNG ADULT MALES SEPTEMBER 2020 GREGORY R. BLACKBURN B.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST M.A., UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Erica Scharrer Military themed games have been broadly critiqued as ideological vehicles that support western military institutions and militaristic attitudes. At the heart of these critiques is a concern for the potential influence these games may have on their audience, yet little empirical evidence exists to either support or refute that concern. Using cultivation theory as a general framework, this study investigates whether associations between playing military themed video games and military-related thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes can be found in an online, national survey of 410 young adult men. Consistent with cultivation theory’s predictions, significant associations between the use of military themed video games and second-order cultivation effects were found, including militaristic attitudes, Islamophobia, and the perceived likelihood of a terrorist attack. Moreover, military themed games were a stronger predictor of such effects than general measures of gameplay, which predicted a participant’s propensity to enlist in the military. However, this study failed to find evidence of first-order effects, nor did it find that trait v transportability or the perceived realism of military games were meaningful moderators of second-order effects, as predicted by cognitive models of cultivation theory. These results highlight the potential problematic relationship between military games and their players, but cast some concerns as to the fitness of cultivation theory as the ideal framework to fully explore this relationship. Keywords: cultivation theory, video games, militarism vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................ v LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................. ix LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................... xi 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 2. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE .................................................................... 10 Cultivation Theory Overview .............................................................................11 Cognitive Mechanism .................................................................................... 14 Narrative transportation ................................................................................. 17 Perceived Realism ......................................................................................... 18 Genre-Specific Cultivation ............................................................................ 20 Cultivation Theory and Video Games ............................................................... 20 Cultivation Games Studies ................................................................................ 27 Traditional approach. ..................................................................................... 28 Genre specific cultivation studies. ................................................................. 32 Experimental cultivation research. ................................................................ 38 Overall trends. ............................................................................................... 40 3. A CRITIQUE OF MODERN MILITARY GAMES ......................................... 44 War Games as Ideological Vehicles .................................................................. 48 Formal Features ................................................................................................. 50 The Enemy ..................................................................................................... 51 The Protagonist .............................................................................................. 59 Selective Realism .......................................................................................... 61 Counter Arguments ........................................................................................... 64 4. MILITARY-THEMED VIDEO GAME EFFECTS .......................................... 68 US Military and Military-Themed Games ........................................................ 72 Audience Studies ............................................................................................... 78 vii 5. NATIONAL SURVEY ...................................................................................... 87 Hypotheses ........................................................................................................ 88 Method .............................................................................................................. 97 Sample ........................................................................................................... 97 Measures ........................................................................................................ 99 Independent variables. ................................................................................. 100 Dependent variables .................................................................................... 101 Moderating variables. .................................................................................. 105 Descriptive Statistics. ...................................................................................... 107 Demographic Variables. ............................................................................... 107 Independent variables. ................................................................................. 108 Dependent variables. ................................................................................... 108 Moderating variables. .................................................................................. 109 Preliminary Analysis ....................................................................................... 109 Main Analysis ...................................................................................................114 6. DISCUSSION ................................................................................................. 120 Limitations ...................................................................................................... 129 Final Thoughts ................................................................................................. 132 APPENDIX: TABLES AND FIGURES ............................................................. 135 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 161 viii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Games included in the survey. .................................................................................... 135 2. Modified militaristic attitudes scale ............................................................................ 137 3. Modified Islamophobia scale ...................................................................................... 138 4. Modified transportability scale ................................................................................... 139 5. Modified perceived realism scale ..............................................................................