Gall of Duty
MICHAEL LEE
"Other people will tell you not to stay up all night staring at a screen. We'll pay you to do it."
Sounds like a pretty good deal for folks who spend their evenings watching their favorite streamer on Twitch, the Amazon-owned live streaming service with a heavy focus on gaming. Most of the time when a job offer like this comes around, it usually has the legitimacy of comment thread spam claiming you can make "5 tHouSands of doLLars each month wOrking from HoMe." But this is no horribly programmed bot ruining Disqus threads, the folks offering to pay us to stare at a screen? Why it's the US Military!
Recruitment through Twitch is the latest effort of the United States Military to reach out to young people with a hip new message. The invasive, and predatory nature of this campaign has drawn ire from lawmakers, and has brought increased scrutiny of the Military's influence on emerging online platforms. Twitch is just the latest to indulge the Military Entertainment Complex, and with the heightened press on the topic, an interrogation of how and where these spheres—the military, Twitch, gaming, tech, and Hollywood— overlap is needed.
A New Frontier
US Army National Guard Twitch stream
Twitch is the largest live streaming platform in the business, and according to its own advertising PR, Twitch reaches 80% of teen males in the United States. That's a substantial market share. What makes Twitch such an engaging platform, more so than television, film, or even passive offline video gaming, is that Twitch viewers are "not simply consuming content but are also part of a circuit of production through their engagement" T.L. Taylor writes in her book Watch Me Play, "viewing others playing games... can be an affective experience, pulling you in and kindling a ludic stance. It can be visceral and embodied; you can find yourself leaning forward, at attention."
Twitch pulls viewers in "at attention" not through the passive act of watching, but by introducing the tools for direct interaction with the broadcast. The chat window running alongside the stream provides the viewer with the opportunity to engage in conversation with the person streaming, as well as all other audience members. This heightened engagement creates a sense of intimacy and familiarity between audience and performer.
Exploiting an audience that is already "at attention" and engaged is why recent efforts from both the Army and Navy to court Twitch's young [mostly] male audience have been denounced as predatory and problematic. The military is running streams that superficially look like any other on Twitch, but instead serve as live infomercials. Under the guise of casual conversation and shooting the shit, the streamer is using the broadcast to talk to the audience about what their work life is like, and the benefits of a career in the military. To an impressionable audience, this is a recruitment pitch in all but name. During a US Army Twitch broadcast, contests to win gaming paraphernalia were promoted, with links leading to recruitment pages pulling a digital bait and switch.
Twitch's success comes from that relationship between viewer and streamer, and the social bonds that can be built through the chat window that links the two worlds. A viewer can feel as if they are right there in the room with the streamer, rekindling the analog experience of sitting on the couch with someone and playing a video game with them. The streamer speaks to their viewers in chat like a friend, as if you are all in it together with them. It creates a narrative that resonates with viewers, because they play a part in it. This is what the US Military covets, and why their presence on Twitch is dangerous. They want that same streamer/viewer relationship but with a narrative carefully controlled by the Military. Having viewers lean in, become engaged, and enlist.
War Games
A screenshot from Marine DOOM
This connection between video games and the military certainly isn't a first. War games have existed for centuries in one form or another. Used to train soldiers in tactics, these games have grown more sophisticated through the ages, from simple board games to elaborate computer simulations. While a dive into the morass that is the history of games and the military is worthwhile, to interrogate this current moment we need only dip our toe into more recent developments to get a sense of the level of sludge we are dealing with.
Starting in the 1990s, military spending in the United States shifted from contracts securing proprietary technology for explicit military usage to a greater focus on the acquisition of commercial items, components, processes and practices. The Federal Acquisitions Streamlining Act of 1994 saw the Department of Defense enter the marketplace in search of mutually beneficial production, ushering in a new era of cooperation between companies and the military.
Tim Lenoir and Henry Lowood point out in their essay Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex , this changing business model would lead companies to reimagine their relationship to the military. Companies like Lockheed Martin were working on simulation technologies for the armed forces, while also exploring the commercial application of the real-time 3D graphics technology used in that simulation tech. This research and development would lead to some of their technology ending up in Windows NT machines, and partnerships with Intel. Lockheed Martin worked the supply channel as a two way street, aiding in the development of commercial video games tech with SEGA, notably the SEGA Model 2 and 3 arcade boards, and sending this tech to researchers developing military training simulators.
This burgeoning relationship would also see the military take video games of the era, modify them, and incorporate them into their training. The most noteworthy of these being MARINE DOOM, a modified version of the 1994 computer game DOOM II. MARINE DOOM took the core first person shooter experience of the game and "adapted it to fit a more real-world simulation" by scanning images of actual guns into the game engine. The M16 rifle, M-249 light machine gun, and the M-67 grenade all became weapons in the arsenal of the player character while scans of G.I. Joe characters were used as stand-ins for enemies.
While policy change helped expedite the connection between gaming and the military, the two seemed destined to form a symbiotic relationship that would, in short order, form an additional branch of the Military Entertainment Complex.
Operation Writers’ Room
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare | Activision
The fruitful partnership between the games industry and the military not only makes use of gaming technology to advance military simulations, but has carefully constructed a (super)heroic image of war through video games. Current and former Armed Forces members work as consultants for companies like Infinity Ward, developer of the hugely popular video game franchise Call of Duty, to valorize armed conflict. These games sell millions of copies, and end up on Twitch being streamed to hundreds of thousands of viewers daily.
The Call of Duty franchise, whether in the hands of developers Infinity Ward, Treyarch, or Sledgehammer Games, prides itself on the "authenticity" of its product. The developer wants players to experience what warfare is "actually like", and as such, directly consults with military personnel to bolster its claim to an “authentic” representation. But authenticity is an interesting word to choose, as it sounds authoritative, yet it is not about "honesty" or "truth".
In existential thinking, authenticity is a relation to self and identity. To be authentic is to align one's outward self with the core values that one holds inside. If someone believes that fur is murder, then you would expect that they would never wear fur. By not wearing fur, they are being authentic. The US Military believes its intervention into foreign nations in the name of "democracy" is a just and righteous core value of its identity, and in order to be authentic to that, that value must also be reflected in representations of itself.
When we dig into the history of the Military's involvement in American cinema, through Matthew Alford & Tom Secker's book National Security Cinema, it is here where we can see how an authentic portrayal takes precedence over an honest portrayal. James Webb's semi-autobiographical novel Fields of Fire was set to be made into a movie in 1993, and as a decorated military veteran, it would be assumed that he would have cooperation from his former employer to assist in the production. The Pentagon wanted the film squashed. They found representations of the Marines in Fields of Fire objectionable, despite these being true stories from Webb's time in combat. A Marine casually firing his M16 into the bodies of Vietnamese troops to ensure they were dead; A fragging incident (the term for the assassination of an officer by their own troops); A Marine posing with an enemy POW who had just been burned by napalm. The Pentagon didn't want the public to see this side of war. It would be "inauthentic" to its sense of self.
So when you hear Studio Narrative Director at Infinity Ward, Taylor Kurosaki, talk about "authenticity" while in the same breath explaining that "we also took cues from [their military advisors] for thematic subjects of the game" he's saying without saying that script edits were made to bring the game into alignment with that "authenticity" the Military wants to project.
PoliTwitch
A snapshot from a very questionable US Navy Twitch stream
"What's your favorite war crime?" Asks Jordan Uhl in the chat on the U.S. Navy's Twitch channel during a broadcast. An attempt to rile up the streamer, or goad viewers into spamming chat with any number of atrocities that can be attributed to the US Military. The provocation sets off a firestorm. Seemingly unprepared for the possibility that people might not be stoked about the Navy gassing themselves up, training materials were hastily put together to deflect such pushback. They offer canned responses streamers can use to shut down the question, and streamers often make use of an old standby that Twitch (and gaming in general) is not a place for politics.
Taylor writes that the "very moments when people are engaging in play remain some of the most politically infused spaces... What is often cordoned off as 'simply leisure' or 'fun' is actually deeply central as well as formative in all our civic and political lives." And she is absolutely right, there are always politics at play (and in play) on Twitch. Examining Call of Duty's creative process, it becomes clear that video game narratives can be political. How games are made is political. How games are played is political. The dynamics of power found in the relationships on Twitch are political. It is in this environment that the US Military eSports teams & streamers are, by their very presence on the platform, injecting a specific politics into this already charged landscape.
By shaping the politics of this forum, controlling the narrative, the Military has created a space where nationalism (mostly of the white variety) can fester. During a stream last year on the US Navy's Twitch channel, streamer Brandon Chandler was playing the hit multiplayer game Among Us with some "close friends." In Among Us, players are allowed to input their own user name while playing—an invitation for trolling—and what ended up on stream was horrendous, if entirely predictable.
Players entered Chandler's game with the names "Japan 1945" and "Nagasaki" referring to the dropping of atomic bombs over Japan at the end of World War II. Also joining Chandler was "gamer word" a codified meme which is usually used to refer to the N-word. These names were met with laughter and coy glances to the camera. Chandler and his co-streamer Thessa L. Reed, complicit in the charade while Twitch chat vacillated between those enjoying the 'fun', and those who stuck around to berate Chandler and his cohort.
Content to let Twitch chat burn, and welcoming in more viewers brought in by the abhorrent name choices, Reed goads the crowd, saying "see chat, one thing you guys don't understand is, this is a numbers game, you guys are just helping us with the numbers."
The inner workings of the machine are revealed. These are the cold calculations of late capitalism in the digital age. The content can be deplorable, but this is a system built on actively tracking—and basing viewer recommendations on—metrics of viewership and participation. An active audience watching this trainwreck pushes the channel into the limelight, bringing in more viewers and more attention to the recruitment effort. The machine is working exactly as it should, and Amazon, and the US Military, knows it.
Shut It Down… Or Not.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare | Activision
Twitch has the authority to shut down a channel if the content breaks their Terms of Service. While the US Navy apologized for the Among Us fiasco, and removed Chandler from their streaming team, Twitch was silent. Streams can be shut down for inappropriate content on the site. With Twitch recently outlining a change to their policies regarding hate speech and imagery, the content featured on the US Navy's channel certainly qualifies for a ban. Some of the biggest names in the streaming world have fallen victim to a TOS violation. No one is safe from this should they happen to break the rules... Well, almost no one.
For parent company Amazon, any decision to ban or remove the US Military channels would come at a potentially huge cost, hence their inaction on the clear breach of TOS by the US Navy. Amazon—once the quirky online bookstore, then the online everything store, then simply the everything of everything—won't do a thing to damage their relationship with the Military because of lucrative government contracts they either have already won or are pursuing. Most of these are linked to their Amazon Web Services division.
Hidden from view, but omnipresent, AWS has become one of the fastest growing parts of the Amazon portfolio, reporting $17.46 billion in revenue in 2017, $25.65 billion in 2018, and $35.03 billion in 2019. It owns a 33% share of the cloud infrastructure services market, meaning it has considerable sway to dictate the standards and practices of the industry. With that power, they can elevate voices that help their bottom line through the digital structures AWS has constructed. If Amazon wants to help the Army and Navy eSports teams in their recruitment efforts, it can put them on the front page of Twitch, to draw more viewers in, which is exactly what they do.
Front Page Exposure
Tyler “TeePee” Polchow streaming on Twitch with the Army National Guard.
*note the branding added for the sponsored stream
Former Call of Duty Pro Tyler "TeePee" Polchow streams to Twitch 5 or 6 days a week, and on a recent broadcast, the Army National Guard joined Polchow for a 2-hour sponsored segment featuring the streamer and three National Guard service members playing Call of Duty: Warzone together. The stream received a Twitch front page boost for the entirety of their session and brought in nearly 30,000 concurrent viewers for Polchow, who can average 5,000-6,000 viewers on a good day. Polchow has strong viewership within the COD streaming community, and is a likeable personality, but the effect of the front page exposure saw his daily unique viewers rise from an average of 30,000 to nearly 700,000 according to social media data site SocialBlade. Meaning tons of eyeballs were glued to a two-hour advertisement for military service.
A number of big name streamers do sponsored content streams to promote a new video game by playing it, or for a particular product they are endorsed by, so the practice is nothing new. But, those sponsored streams don't often get a front page boost. With Amazon in charge, it shouldn't surprise many people that a two hour sponsored stream for the US Military was plastered to the front page of Twitch.
Part of Polchow’s stream included a chat command linking viewers to the National Guard's eSports landing page which viewers were directed to for "more information." The page has very little to say about the National Guard's eSports team, and is devoid of even the most basic information one would expect to find for such a page, like what their Twitch channel is, social media links, or where to find their upcoming streaming/tournament schedule. Instead the page has a form for those interested in speaking with a recruiter. This is hardly about video games. This is Amazon using a streamer to ingratiate itself with the military brass, as the company positions itself to win more government and military contracts.
The Department of Homeland Security already uses Amazon for its ICE databases. Databases used to track and apprehend immigrants, and Amazon remains in a legal fight for the lucrative JEDI contract with the Department of Defense, after the contract was initially awarded to Microsoft last year (Xbox gamers take note).
These ties to the US Military and various federal agencies make it difficult for Amazon and Twitch to discipline the US Navy for their appalling behavior on their Twitch channel. To sour that relationship would jeopardize Amazon's future profit, and if they hope to have the JEDI contract ruling overturned in their favor, they have to cozy up to organizations like the US Navy eSports team. This push for government business is an active part of Amazon's plan, with Jeff Bezos purchasing a mansion in the toniest neighborhood in Washington D.C. because the man needs a base to wine and dine government officials from.
Spin to Win [support for a never-ending state of war]
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare | Activision
In December of 2020, the Call of Duty Endowment hosted a tournament between Twitch & YouTube streamers, Call of Duty professional eSports players, and active military members from all branches of the armed forces in the US and UK. A perfect storm of PR with hurricane force spin, all in service of the Military Entertainment Complex. The event brought together the entertainment that streamers provide, a video game franchise that rewrites history, and the military itself, all under the charitable banner of a feel good nonprofit.
The Call of Duty Endowment (C.O.D.E. for short) is a nonprofit designed to place veterans into jobs upon their return from service. While the foundational goals of this organization are admirable, and have placed over 77,000 veterans into new jobs, it reeks of the hollow, token corporate giving cooked up in a marketing department. The Call of Duty franchise generated over $3 billion in revenue for the company in 2020, yet Activision Blizzard has only donated $38 million to C.O.D.E. since it was founded in 2009. That total over a decade is one tenth of one percent of Call of Duty's revenue haul from last year alone. The number is barely more than the company paid CEO Bobby Kotick in 2019, where the top executive took home compensation of over $30 million.
The headlines recently have expressed shock and outrage (rightfully so) over the Military's recruitment efforts and the offensive content of their Twitch streams, as if this is somehow a blindside. The fact that it surprises so many shows that the Military Entertainment Complex has done an effective job infiltrating popular culture otherwise. Top Gun, Transformers, Call of Duty, and blatantly jingoistic films like Operation Enduring Freedom—which received a nationwide release back in 2002—all have the bloodstained fingerprints of the US War Machine all over them. To be shocked and appalled that this now-since-deleted Twitch stream went over some kind of line of good taste, is to be blind to the fact that the military has been ingrained in pop culture, promoting a pro-military agenda for decades. If Twitch really is a bridge too far, and it is here that the military has finally been exposed, then action needs to be taken to uncouple Military involvement from pop culture spheres of influence.
All of this is just part of a never-ending PR campaign of American militarism that has only amped up in the 21st century. Twitch just happens to be the latest outlet shilling for the US Military. The Department of Defense wants to keep their budget as sky high as possible, so perpetuating war, and making it palatable to do so, is a top priority. The Military Entertainment Complex exists to create the illusion that war is always necessary, just, and heroic. Creating narratives that never let consumers see what's behind the curtain, what the cost of war truly is. The smoke & mirrors, the industrial light & magic that shroud pop culture in a sickening fog of war.
Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and is currently pursuing research on Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.
