America's Army Game and the Production of War

This paper will take an approach where, rather than looking to individuals and behaviour, it will focus on the production of a discourse of war through a particular videogame, America’s Army: Operations (AA:O),3 to contemplate and complicate some of the ways in which war is made possible. My writing is oriented by a commitment to International Relations, specifically its subset Security Studies and as such, this paper is animated by a concern with security. Security has traditionally been conceived of as the protection of states from objective threats which originate from the outside of state borders. In light of much critical scholarship, punctuated by the events of September 11, this notion of security has become troubled. This paper strives to unsettle the notion that security can be thought and written outside of a discussion of representation.