Studying Militarized Visualities through the Video/Digital Game: Rethinking the Aesthetic Turn in IR through Digital Militainment.

This paper seeks to think through video/digital games as practices in the study of images and visuality in critical security studies. As visuality expresses how the vision is always culturally mediated (Hughes 2007), vision is indeed never innocent, and our sight is also always a site, because the things that appear visible to us are so because of visual technologies and perspectives that shape how we see and what we see. A video/digital game offers certain visualities that may remediate real visual practices and geographies (the city, a war theater, the city of Bagdad during the US military "surge" after the main combat operations of 2003, etc.), but one that will also differ significantly due to its own mediated space. How should one study the visuality of videogames, their space design, their geographies? Can we conceive of gaming without thinking about war, about militarization? What does the digital allow and preclude? Informed by games studies, critical geopolitics, critical security studies, and visual media studies, this paper inquires how one can study the peculiarities of video/digital gaming visuality that render war both mediatized as entertainment and visually spatialized as display screens (echoing surveillance practices and other targetting, policing and tracing technologies). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]