The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives War, Culture of: The United States and World War II (original) (raw)
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Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2013
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Focusing particularly on Call of Duty: World at War (Activision, 2008), this article considers how the First Person Shooter (FPS) recalibrates three key elements – the citizen soldier, the war as a visual construct and the notion of the ‘Good War’ - within the American cultural narrative of World War II. Given that the FPS is a vital presence within the current mediascape, it is no longer sufficient to focus on film and television when studying mediations of World War II. Analyzing World at War as a simulation reveals not only how the FPS reduces World War II to its most basic components of contested spaces and weaponry, but also that it exposes aspects of the narrative obscured by other mediated representations of the conflict.