Participation, Conflict and War: Simulating the Interpellation of 'I Want You' in the Rhetoric of First Person Recruitment

America’s Army is a freely distributed simulation that aims to accurately represent the U.S. army’s presence abroad and their actions in the war on terror. First released on 4 July, 2002 it was designed in the wake of the War on Terror as both a didactic tool and as recruitment platform. I will argue that these functions result in two formal aspects of the game’s simulation of conflict. Firstly, the ‘swapping paradigm’ which disables playing from the opponents’ perspective. Secondly, the game’s use of the first-person perspective, which structures singular identification by directly addressing its subject using the first person perspective, thereby casting the player as actively performing the American soldier. This singular identification with the American army turns the second person address of the ‘I want you’ on traditional recruitment posters into the first-person experience of the ‘I,’ already simulating the player’s contribution to the war effort. My argument draws firstly on Marxist theories of interpellation and its subsequent development into other media by media scholar John Fiske, who develops the mechanism of interpellation to mediatized expression. Secondly, I employ politicologist Chantal Mouffe’s multifocal agonistic model of politics and the Political – arguing against the consequences of silencing political antagonists.status: accepte