America's Army and the Recruitment and Management of 'Talent': An Interview with Colonel Casey...

gamificationmilitary gamesAmerica’s Armyimmaterial labourUnited States Armyanthropology

America’s Army, the official and free downloadable US Army video game franchise, has been continually updated with new versions for the past twelve years. Formerly managed out of the Office for Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) at West Point, it has been an immersive, interactive advertisement for the Army, resting its rationale within in a military desire to recruit in a cost-effective way a new kind of ‘talented’ soldier. This reflects a military desire to, in the words of an OEMA publication, ‘move the Army beyond personnel management to talent management’. Drawing on a 2009 interview with OEMA director Colonel Casey Wardynski (retired), I argue that America’s Army has been primarily oriented towards recruit-ing the labour of a new kind of post-Fordist soldier – one who is part of the growing mass of immaterial labourers who can be identified as ‘the cognitariat’.

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[Our] charter is to build the Army of the future. It’s about recruiting talent, assessing talent, deploying talent, and retaining talent.

(America’s Army Chief Operations Officer, Marty 2009)

America’s Army (US Army 2002), a novel experiment in military marketing and recruiting for the labour of war through video games, was first released for free PC download on 4 July 2002. As the first game released that uses the new Unreal Engine 2 as its core game engine technology, America’s Army quickly gained popularity within mainstream first-person shooting gaming circles, which celebrated it as an immersive and well-designed squad-based tactical shooter. This was made all the more realistic to its players due to its direct connections to an army already engaged in combat in Afghanistan. Through the following decade of American war, America’s Army continued to be developed across various entertainment platforms while also being applied within the military training for other simulations and technologies.

As a way to influence user interpretations, America’s Army continually reit-erated that it produced the authoritative message about the US Army – that ‘nobody gets the Army like the Army’ (Hey Kids! Let’s Play War!: U.S. Military Recruiters Target Children with a New Video Game Called ‘America’s Army’ 2012). Marketing campaigns, for example, advertised that three quarters of the audio samples from America’s Army 3 (US Army 2009) were recorded at more ‘authentic’ locations, such as firing ranges. And while Army rules of engage-ment are regularly ignored in mainstream games and films, America’s Army was explicit about these rules. The ways in which entertainment media ‘get it wrong’ about US Army practices were deemed problematic from a public relations perspective, and the US Army saw America’s Army as one way of counteracting negative or inaccurate portrayals of military service in popular entertainment media.

Alongside an increasingly extensive military simulations sector, America’s Army shaped the serious gaming industry just as ‘serious games’ became a major buzzword in interactive media. However, while the America’s Army franchise continues to put out new versions of the video game (the latest being America’s Army: Proving Grounds [US Army 2013]), its influence in the interactive entertainment industry has waned drastically over the past decade. Largely defunded in 2009 and now developed by government software engi-neers, the game is no longer competitive with popular first-person shooting games. The game’s technology and assets, however, continue to be applied in military settings beyond recruitment. Further, as this interview article indi-cates, the underlying rationale for the game is indicative of larger trends in military recruitment for the labour of war.

America’s Army, as a ‘soft power’ tool for projecting military institutional logics beyond the institution, was far more than merely a gamified and inter-active version of a US Army television commercial. Like similar commercial military-themed games, it takes part in a much broader process of normali-zation of military and paramilitary power as a go-to solution for complex social issues, such as immigration, disaster relief and international diplomacy, to name a few. This sociocultural process is what Cynthia Enloe calls ‘mili-tarization’. ‘The more militarization transforms an individual or a society’, Enloe writes, ‘the more that individual or society comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions to be not only valuable but also normal.


Militarization […] involves cultural as well as institutional, ideological, and economic transformations’ (2000: 3).

While America’s Army was indeed a gamified effort to recruit for the labour of war, I argue here that the game, as well as Wardynski himself, was a harbinger for the post-Fordist turn in the cultural militarization of the United States that is currently underway. Just as ideas of work and leisure as well as education and entertainment become less discrete through contem-porary labour practices, so do ideas about what constitutes war and game, and a soldier and a civilian, become obfuscated through militarizing tenden-cies in entertainment and news media. On a structural level, these trends that move away from binary models are very much related, and contribute to a smoothing of institutional power across the realm of the social, in a way akin to that described by Gilles Deleuze (1992) in his analysis of the new ‘societies of control’ that were in emergence now over twenty years ago.

Over the course of my ethnographic research (2006–2009) within the America’s Army game development studios and its network of government, military, marketing and contracting organizations, I learned that the struc-ture of the America’s Army project was eminently embedded in the logics of market analysis and neo-liberal business principles. At the heart of the project was the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA), an economic and policy-focused research organization within the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, led by its director colonel Casey Wardynski (now retired). OEMA is an interdisciplinary institution that hosts a variety of mili-tary researchers with advanced degrees. The office has traditionally provided analysis and recommendations to the Army for a wide range of issues by building innovative projects for addressing systemic problems that the Army faces in its organizational structure.

In its market-based rationalizations, OEMA challenged the more insti-tutionalized recruitment and simulation procurement practices of the Army, and in so doing, made a series of institutional rivals, if not enemies, within the greater US military complex. More entrenched organizations were able to outmanoeuver America’s Army in terms of funding and contract bids. In 2008, for example, the US Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation (PEO-STRI) and Czech developer Bohemia Interactive Simulations won a bid against OEMA/America’s Army and other military organizations for their product Virtual Battlespace 2 (now Virtual Battlespace 3) to become the official Army training simulation for enlisted soldiers (Robson 2009). These games have never been made commercially available; they are simula-tion trainers that use classified information for enlisted US Army soldiers.

In my conversations with him, Wardynski made clear his perspective as a competitor that institutions like PEO-STRI were an endemic military prob-lem. From Wardynski’s standpoint, the end goal of America’s Army has always been to increase the operational efficiency and quality of recruited soldiers and decrease unnecessary expenditures and procedures, while larger, institu-tionalized organizations are marked by bloated budgets, low quality products and wasteful practices, along with attitudes of complacency. Such objectives are often overlooked in press reports and writings that have sensationalized the fact that the US Army game is ‘taxpayer-funded’ (e.g., Hodes and Ruby-Sachs 2002: n.p.).


Yet from my perspective, there also seemed to be rather wasteful spend-ing practices that seem less endemic to just America’s Army, but government contracting in general. One example that was repeated to me several times was that the sub-contracting organization managing the game developers would be paid $100,000 to manage a game developer making $50,000/year. The prime contractor (SAIC) would be paid $150,000 to manage the sub-contractor managing this individual. These are, of course, generalizations, but they were generalizations made by America’s Army employees.

Under Wardynski’s leadership, OEMA researchers published a series of studies arguing that a ‘talent-focused strategy’ for recruiting officers is imper-ative since, due to a dearth in supply of mid-career officers, ‘there are increas-ing and accelerating signs that [the] Officer Corps will be unequal to future demands unless substantive changes are made in its management’ (Wardynski et al. 2009: 3). This emphasis on ‘talent’ accentuates a military need and desire to recruit officers who demonstrate

intelligence [and] aptitudes for rapid learning and adaptation. Talented officers … discern quickly patterns of activity within new situations, and … leverage these innate aptitudes to become expert in the competencies to which they are drawn. These may range from deep technical skills to broad conceptual or intuitive abilities, all of which the Army requires.

(Wardynski et al. 2009: 15)

In conjunction with this series of published assessments, Wardynski super-vised the creation of a ‘talent management system’ for officers that would place ‘the right leader, in the right position, at the right time’ (2014).

According to this study, titled Towards a U.S. Army Officer Corps Strategy for Success: A Proposed Human Capital Model Focused upon Talent, an underly-ing issue is in ‘accessing, developing, and employing talented people [whose] intellectual agility allows them to master diverse competencies demanded now and in the future. Such a strategy … will move the Army beyond personnel management to talent management’ (Wardynski et al. 2009: vi). Although this published study is not directly connected to the America’s Army project, the fact that it originated from the same institution and director underscores how the need for ‘talented’ Army labourers could be addressed in part through novel recruitment solutions like America’s Army.

The connotations of ‘talent’ as described here coincide quite closely with the general characteristics of labour in post-Fordist knowledge economies, which increasingly depend on ‘immaterial’ labour as the hegemonic form of labour organization (see Berardi 2009; De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2009; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Weeks 2012). Like the need for officer ‘talent’, immaterial labour tends to emphasize flexibility and adaptability, as well as affective, cognitive and communicative forms of labour over the characteristically Fordist privileging of structured time and manual labour, epitomized by assembly line work – or in this case, the ‘cog in the wheel’ characterization of the grunt soldier.

Computers and new technologies are often central in configuring immate-rial labour, and Wardynski himself had been writing about the need for the Army to move towards an informational economic model of labour since at least the mid-1990s. The Army’s ‘expanding reliance on information technol-ogy’, he argued, ‘will give rise to an increasing requirement for highly educated individuals’ who will be drawn to work in growing non-military high-tech sectors (1995: 61). As an initiative for recruiting talented post-Fordist soldiers/


immaterial workers who might be attracted to non-military high-tech work, America’s Army actively engages a demographic of young men who have access to computers and basic knowledge of these informational competencies that are most valued among high-tech, immaterial labourers. One assessment that has been levelled at America’s Army is that it does not provide equal access to the game for underprivileged and minority youth who may not have access to computers in their domestic life to play the PC-exclusive game. (Versions of America’s Army for the Xbox and Xbox 360 are not being updated.) This assessment, however, misses the point that it is precisely the persons who have regular access to computers that America’s Army wishes to reach.

In their analysis of the history of video games, Greig De Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford demonstrate how game development work, once seen in the 1970s and early 1980s as a line of flight from the institutionalized and dehumanizing structure of Fordist work, was ultimately re-appropriated and coopted by capital as perhaps the most quintessential industry exemplifying post-Fordist immaterial labour, as I discuss above in relation to computerized work (2009). This re-appropriation continues in both military and non-military spheres. Video games originated primarily from within military-funded initi-atives but quickly came to be associated with a growing counter-culture of anti-authoritarian hackers.

It is safe to say that capital has, for the most part, tamed the rebellious-ness and recaptured the labour of knowledge workers – called the ‘cognitar-iat’ by Bifo Berardi – to such an extent that ‘the dynamics of neoliberalism have destroyed the bourgeoisie and replaced it with two distinct and oppos-ing classes: the cognitariat on the one hand … and the managerial class on the other, whose only competence is in competitiveness’ (Berardi 2009: 52). Echoing the territorializing cycle of the war machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; cf. Hoffman 2011: 1–14), the military, however, is still in the process of re-militarizing immaterial labour. The logics enumerated by OEMA/America’s Army management exemplify a military desire to do just this. America’s Army is a biopolitical tool for militarizing, recruiting, managing and ultimately re-capturing the labour of the post-Fordist cognitariat.

I interviewed Dr Wardynski in May 2009, near the end of my period of formal fieldwork. Wardynski’s market approach went straight to the issue of increasing demand among tech-savvy ‘kids’ (his terminology) to join the Army. In the heart of West Point, we sat down to talk in his modest office facing the Hudson River.

Casey Wardynski: We [at OEMA] assume that markets are pretty efficient, and we know that government isn’t. So if you can make government behave more like markets, maybe you would be better off.

Robertson Allen: So more of a kind of business model?

CW: Right. So if we were looking to see where to put our Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programmes, well, what’s the hardest thing to do in terms of getting an ROTC cadet? Is it training, or is it getting them interested in ROTC? My thinking is [that] the hardest part is getting talented people interested – building demand. So if building demand is the hard part, the question is really a function of two things: what schools do they want to go to and at those schools what could we do to make them interested in ROTC?


RA: It’s pretty specific to the school and the place.

CW: Yeah, and so given that we want crackerjack people, what schools are they interested in? Because if we’re at the wrong school, we’re out of luck no matter what we do. So that’s a whole different question from what the Army asks. Right now, the Army is asking, how much do we get out of our ROTC battalions at the other campuses? Well, if you’re at the wrong campuses, you’re never going [to solve your underlying problems] with that analysis. You have to ask a whole different kind of question: Of the people that want to go into the military, where do they want to go to school? … So we built the Army a framework for how to deal with these questions globally. We asked, of the people who come into the Army directly who have a college degree, where do they come from? And of people who are applying to West Point from all over the United States, where else did they apply? And you find out that it’s really a whole different set of schools.

RA: Where are they?

CW: The Pennsylvania schools [Penn State and U Penn] are at the top of their league. And a lot of schools [that have ROTC] aren’t even on the list. That’s a question about markets – where does the market say we should be, versus where are we? So with game technology, the question would be that we don’t really understand all the attributes of games all that well. We know there’s goodness there, but we don’t know what the ingredients are and in what ratios. But there are things that we do know. We know they move fast [in the market]. We know that they are extremely interesting to the same sort of people in the military – young males. For example, we created a Facebook page for the new launch of America’s Army 3 about two or three days ago. Ninety-four per cent of the people who are fans of our Facebook page are male. That’s pretty good information right there – we’re in the right market.

RA: Two days and you already know that.

CW: Yep, I think we have about 2600 fans now: 94% are male, 30% are 13–17, 21% are 18–24, and 23% are 25–34. The vast majority are under age 34. OK, that’s good. So there’s native interest there, and we’re in the right spot for this game technology thing. And the kind of game we’re making, it’s not Chutes and Ladders; it’s a first-person [shooter] game. So that’s how you narrow in the genre. And the next thing to ask is what you can get from this game. They evolve very quickly and are pretty much at the cutting edge all the time. The industry is over there, moving at light speed – better, faster, quicker, more players, more immersion, more intuitive. All of these are the attributes of good games, and when you look at the Army, where are we going? We run on [game] engines that nobody has ever even heard of. We run on engines that were economic failures.1

The Army Game Project employs an enterprise approach spanning outreach, recruiting, training, education, information operations and experimenta-tion to deliver vivid, high-impact multiuse solutions that: redress systemic market failures that raise the cost of Army recruiting; achieve economies to scale across multiple user communities through reuse of project assets; [and] improve quality and accelerate innovation (Wardynski 2009: 1).


RA: So during the course of the Army Game Project over about the last ten years, what would you say are the biggest successes and missteps that have happened?

CW: I’d say the big successes are, number one, we’re still here [both laugh]. Number two, there have been a lot of efforts to mimic that haven’t succeeded, which points to the fact that this isn’t easy. 2 Now, many of those efforts were doomed from design; they hadn’t thought through the key ingredients: Is there native demand? We didn’t have to create demand; it was already there. Where’s the demand for the Navy game [Strike and Retrieve (US Navy 2005)]? I don’t see any.

RA: That’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played, I have to admit.

CW: So the Navy gets it in their head to have a game, but where’s the native demand for things that look like the Navy in a game? There’s very little demand [for] a submarine game or an airplane game that involves being a pilot or a commander. Do they hire for those jobs? No. So how do you make the jobs the Navy is hiring for be interesting in games? Well, it doesn’t seem like anybody has been able to figure it out yet. Is it likely that the military is going to figure it out if the game industry can’t figure it out? No. So what do they come up with? A fish game. All the ten people who have played it have discovered [that], but the Navy can check the logs that they have a game. Is there an Air Force game? Not really. Do they need one? Probably not. Is there evidence of existing demand? Pretty thin. Microsoft Flight Simulator …

RA: It’s an older crowd of people who play flight simulators.

CW: Exactly, so even if there is demand, is it the demand [that they want]? They’re in the wrong part of the curve. The next question would be, if you’re going to do it, do you have the wherewithal to do it right? Because if you do it wrong, there’s no point in doing it. There are enough alternatives for kids with games that just because your game is free doesn’t mean that the kid is going to come play it. So if you don’t do a high-quality product, in my mind, you might as well not do anything because you are probably going to end up hurting yourself more than helping yourself. The fact that we could do a top-quality product, being that we are in the government, to me is very surprising. Which is unfortunate, but it’s because of our procurement systems. They move at dead slow speed [and are] optimized for doing business with very large companies that have a high threshold for pain in terms of being paid late and having lots of rules and regulations.

RA: So how difficult is it to operate as if there is a market within an organization that doesn’t see it that way?

CW: It’s hard because we’re constrained by government procurement and contract rules. We’re constrained by governmental thought processes, which see a year as fast or two years as fast; whereas in the game industry, a year or two years is pretty slow. So the frame of reference is entirely different. That cultural shift is really tough. And the word ‘game’ is involved. For the first seven years [I was doing this project], using the word ‘game’ meant ‘toy’, which is kind of crazy because the Army invented war games …

The key idea of America’s Army was that there was a market failure that was hurting the Army’s ability to recruit kids. Part of it is because of the recruiters, part of it is because of the Army, and part of it is because of the


way kids receive and process information about the Army. And the things that the Army has been doing demand no proof that they should continue being done. For example, there’s no question that we need recruiters. Nobody ever asks that question. Well, I question it; I’m not sure we need recruiters. I don’t understand why we need a military guy to go recruit a kid to be in the military. You don’t have an IBM guy go out and recruit a kid to work at IBM; you have head-hunters and people to go to college fairs who know IBM. You might have a few recruiters, but really, they are human resource people who are more in the screening role than the recruiting role. Now, I can see the Army having screeners to verify that these kids would be a good match, just like IBM would do, but we have reverse-screeners: Instead of trying to keep out the bad fits, we’re trying to force everyone in that could possibly fit and then trying to see if we could get them to be a good fit after the fact. Well, in World War II, that might have made sense, but in the information age, it doesn’t. We don’t need that many kids, really, and the kids that we do need, we want them to be a good fit because they are volunteers. If they’re not a good fit, they are going to cost a fortune, they are going to be unhappy, and it doesn’t fit well with the market model. So I question the fact that we need recruiters. Could we do it virtually by getting kids interested in the Army, by test-driving, by virtually being a part of it? By having them visit bases, do Junior ROTC? I think we can do a lot more of that, but the fact that we need recruiters is not questioned.

RA: How is that received by Army recruitment?

CW: Not well. It’s slow to adapt because it’s a risk-adverse business. And I can understand that because if they miss their objectives, they’re the ones who are going to be in the hot seat. It’s hard to crack that nut. It grows its own feedstock, so recruiters who like it stay and become recruiter-recruiters. That process that they grew up in is a process that they believe in and are going to perpetuate.

RA: It becomes completely institutionalized.

CW: Completely institutionalized, whether it fits the circumstances anymore or not. So the Army does recruiting events … and the Army will have a report about how many ‘events’ they did this weekend and what they got. I’ll be like, well ok, [America’s Army] had 100,000 events this weekend, because every mission in America’s Army is an ‘event’. They are just virtual, and they cost us a nickel. People forget that ‘return on investment’ (ROI) has a numerator and a denominator. They always think of the numerator as fixed and the denomi-nator as fixed, but if you drive your cost out of the equation, now you’re in a world of disruptive technology that puts the other guys out of business because it doesn’t have to get you much. [We] challenge a lot of rules of thumb in the Army about why we are doing business the way that we do. Is there another way to do it that is cheaper and gets the same effects? Or a way that is cheaper and gets lower effects, but when you do the math you’re still farther ahead? Or a way that is cheaper and gets you better effects?

RA: Has that been the rationale around the project since its inception?

CW: Right, that the costs are so fundamentally different. America’s Army costs $4 million a year to build, and hosting online is about another $2.5 million, and the rest is whatever you want to do with it for marketing and events.3 A


normal game would have $10 to $40 million [devoted to marketing], depend-ing on the game, and it would be a big deal. We don’t have to have that kind of money. We’re virtual, so we don’t need shelf space, but it would be nice to have a little money so we could be up front and centre on places like Steam (store.steampowered.com) or Fileplanet (www.fileplanet.com) so that kids who aren’t familiar with the product could at least see that it’s there and try it for free.

But we face a lot of questions, like what is the ROI for America’s Army? OK, we get X number of hundred million man-hours of play. So how does that equate to anything the Army normally thinks about? The normal marketing model is that, first, you want to make people aware that you have a product. Awareness is measured in terms of impressions, how many people saw it. So let’s say a million people saw an ad on TV, a million impressions. How long did they see it? Thirty seconds for a million people – what is that? That’s about 8000 hours of viewer time. Did they pay attention? Maybe. Maybe they use Tevo, or went to get coffee or coke. Whose attention? Is it grandma, or is it Billy who is 19? We don’t know. What were the demographics of the TV show’s viewers you ran the ad on? Well, they generally are this, but who knows. So you try and compare a million game hours of America’s Army to that. A million hours of America’s Army are worth a hell of a lot more because: (a) they didn’t Tevo it, (b) it’s focused attention and (c) we’re way beyond the ‘did you know there’s an Army?’ part. In America’s Army, you’re part of the Army. So we can’t even have a reasonable, sane discussion about comparing America’s Army with the number of ‘impressions’.

All the literature on persuasive technology and behavioural economics supports our approach, but the legacy [recruiting] system is very difficult to defeat. There are a lot of jobs, a lot of money tied up in it. I think their budget this year for the legacy recruiting stuff was $167 million; we’re in the range of $4 million. [But if] you look at where firms are putting their money into marketing, TV is not it. TV is dying, print is dying, radio is dying, and online is what’s growing. Why does the Army value TV so much? I have no idea. It’s a one way communication method that is extremely general in nature.

At the first principles level, I would question if anything the Army is doing is right. [The Army gets] away with what we do because we have an unlimited budget apparently. Or at least when we get in trouble and the country needs us, the budget pretty much becomes unlimited, right? Just because we can do that doesn’t make it right. Now when the Army throws those resources at it, it may succeed in the recruiting mission but may not have done itself any long-term favours because the people that were brought in may not really have any idea of what they are doing […].

The real rub [is] always the dichotomy between entertainment and the purpose of the game. We understand that entertainment serves a role here; it’s the motivating factor that draws the game into pop culture. If the game wasn’t fun to play and entertaining and all of those things, nobody would play it. But the United States Army is not in the entertainment business. There is a reason that we are using entertainment as a vehicle to educate. Well, if there’s no education there, there’s no point … because the fundamental reason we’re using entertainment is to get into pop culture and overcome these human biases in decision-making to get at some of the goodness that B. J. Fogg at Stanford talks about in his work on persuasive technology (2003).

The neat thing about games is that you don’t have to wait five years [for the educating]. We can compress time and get to the inputs and outputs of


decision-making and see why the Army cares about integrity. It’s not because mommy said it was a good idea but because that guy’s life actually depends on me knowing what the hell I’m doing. The deeper things you’re trying to bring across is that there are a lot of games with guns, but there’s only one Army game because it isn’t just guys with guns; it’s guys with sanction, and that sanction has a set of expectations surrounding it which are the values. They are the Army’s values, but we didn’t make them up. We know what America expects of us, and they are a list of basic things that cordon behaviour into an area of acceptability [which most Americans are] going to be pretty comfort-able with. That is an Army. That’s the key idea that we’re trying to put across.

RA: In other games like Call of Duty [the franchise] …

CW: Yeah, you don’t have that. That’s not their purpose. They’re an entertain-ment tool.

RA: I heard somewhere, and I’ve always liked this phrase, that America’s Army is what the Army wants itself to be [Lawson et al. 2007].

CW: Yes, we’re not perfect either as an Army, but this is a model of how we hope we behave. It’s actually a model of how we hope our recruiters think about the problem because we got to be very frank and open and honest about the Army. It doesn’t do any good to hide the warts and the difficult parts from kids – the combat and all of that. We were in discussion with a congres-sional staffer about three weeks ago on this topic, and it was a pretty pointed discussion. And at one point, she said, ‘Nobody dies in your game’. They were accusing us of glossing over that, and I told her,

Wait a minute. On one hand you’re saying that the violence bothers you. And on the other hand you’re saying that the glossing over of the consequences of the use of force and the fact that people get hurt [both-ers you]. Well, we’re not operating in a vacuum. There’s a whole range of information that kids have about the Army besides the Army game. They know they can get blown up. They know they’re going to combat and all of that. What they don’t know is what it is like to be a member of one of our teams and how we operate. They don’t know about the values and what they mean, really. They don’t know how we get them ready. And anyway, you can get hurt in the game. You can get killed in the game.

‘Yeah, but there’s not a lot of blood’, she said. So I’m like, ‘Well, how much would be enough?’ Kids get it. They get the drift. They know what it’s like when they get in here. We’re going a long way from where the Army used to be with posters and TV and commercials where nobody had a gun.

RA: So what would you say to someone who says that [America’s Army] glorifies violence? [The Army sought to mitigate issues concerning violence by following the rubric for game ratings established by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), which indicated that ‘Teen’ rated games such as America’s Army should have no post-mortem manipulation of bodies, no graphic amounts of blood, and no dismemberment.]

CW: ‘The Army’s not a game. It glorifies violence’.


RA: ‘War is not a game’.4

CW: I think the way I’d approach that would be, first, why [us]? Why not Strength in Action Zone, or air shows, or just recruiters? I think the reason we’re talking about the [Army Game Project] is because it interests kids, the 17–20-year bunch. They find it fascinating and the other stuff they couldn’t be more bored by. So it’s ok if the other stuff is a waste of money, but what we’re doing is actually effective […]. The point of the military is combat – either preventing it, deterring it, or if worse comes to worse, fighting it. That’s the climax of being a soldier. Everything we do prepares you for that so that we can do what this book here [points to US Code volumes on his bookshelf] says we are supposed to do. Title 10, US Code gives us our mission: ‘The US Army is designed to fight and win the nation’s wars on land’. That’s our only function, according to that book. We have other jobs, but that’s our function. So you told us to do that in law, that’s what we organize ourselves to do, but we’re supposed to keep that a secret from the kids? That’s asinine, right?

We’re going to fight and win the nation’s wars on land: that is the climax of the story of the US Army, but we’re not going to mention it. That makes no sense to me. So if we do mention it, what’s the context? Is that all that you do? How do you get ready to do that, and after you come back, what do you learn from it? The reason we [depict combat] is that it paints the picture of why we have basic training, why it’s hard, why mommy and daddy can’t come, why we have discipline and values and teams and all that junk because when you’re in combat, there’s no time to figure it out. Everybody’s life is dependent on you knowing your job and being disciplined enough for them to count on you not to shoot at everything on God’s green earth, but just the bad guys, to watch your zone and trust that your buddy is watching his […]. We’re not glorifying anything; we’re giving you the whole damn book.

RA: What do you see the future of America’s Army being five years from now, three years from now?

CW: Well, this project can go away at a minute’s notice. Part of the prob-lem with competing with the bureaucracy and institutions is that it’s hard to institutionalize. And part of the risk of becoming institutionalized is that you become part of the problem. There are things called ‘programs of record’ and PEO-STRI is a programme of record. They are there come fair days and bad days; they’ve got a budget. In the business operating mind, they get a little less hungry and less lean. To draw it out on a blackboard, innovation kind of goes algorithmic – increasingly, you’re on the flat part of the curve. So many senior leaders aren’t crazy about programmes of record. America’s Army isn’t a programme of record. It is funded out of the Secretary of the Army’s recruit-ing initiative. It is one of his initiatives and has been since day one. It could be zeroed out at any point if it’s not performing, and it can grow if it is. It is growing usually because there has always been an advocate for it at the senior level of the Army […].

Now [in 2009] recruiting is getting easy; money is getting tight. So it’s a dangerous time [for the project]. Could we reconstitute America’s Army? If the project ended up reaching a point where economic resources weren’t viable anymore, I’d probably recommend just closing the project. I don’t think the Army could ever reconstitute it, frankly. We had a unique set of circumstances that let us do what we did […]. [OEMA] is really here to help the Army identify innovations, get them far enough to demonstrate their


viability and utility, and turn them over […]. Relevancy to compete in pop culture really is what drives this whole project, from contracting to design, to technologies that we use. When you get disconnected from that, you’re going to fall back into the normal way that the Army does business, which is going to be years and years before you change anything. But such is the life.

Wardynski likely knew at the time of this interview that he would be forced by funding constraints one month later in June 2009 to layoff the 30-person California team of game developers who were then finishing up America’s Army 3. This event, the significance of which I detail elsewhere (Allen 2013), marks the final throes of a long demise of America’s Army as a force in popular culture. It is, however, important to view America’s Army not as a one-time and independent ordeal but as indicative of a larger trend in global state mili-tary configurations to coopt the elusiveness and dynamism of the war machine by harnessing the labour power of a class of immaterial workers.

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Allen, R. (2014), ‘America’s Army and the Military recruitment and manage-ment of ‘Talent’: An interview with Colonel Casey Wardynski’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6: 2, pp. 179–191, doi: 10.1386/jgvw.6.2.179_1

Robertson Allen is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS) at Leuphana University, Germany. His research focuses on the electronic entertainment industry and the ways in which new forms of labour emerge through both the making of games and the games themselves. He is also interested in the militarization of media. His work has appeared in Critical Interventions, Games and Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures and in the anthology Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginiaries for Terror and Killing (Duke University Press, 2013).

E-mail: [email protected]

Robertson Allen has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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Design for BusinessVolume 2

Edited by Gjoko Muratovski

Gjoko Muratovski is head of the Communication Design Department at the Auckland University of Technology and area chairman for business at the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Design, Business, and Society (Intellect, 2015).

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