Video Games Are a Key Battleground in the Propaganda War

By the late 1990s, the US Department of Defense was beginning to sense the power of the games industry over adolescent men — the Department’s main audience — and created a campaign of recruitment and manipulation around gaming. Serious institutional power underwrote the move to tie the global video games industry to the Western military complex. The Pentagon spent more than $150 million on military-themed games or simulations in 1999 alone, with another $70 million injection in 2008 and still more since, all on projects with their own, very particular political agenda.