Beyond America's Army: the military, eSports, and a “recruitment-gaming assemblage”

Abstract International Relations scholars in recent years have argued that games and gaming are poorly understood and underresearched within the discipline. Aggie Hirst (2022) observes that gaming is regarded by many academics as singularly unserious despite now being the leading form of entertainment worldwide in terms of sales. The notable exception to this depoliticization of gaming is an abundance of studies of a so-called “military-entertainment complex” (MEC), many of which focus on U.S. Military recruitment. In particular, America's Army, a free game produced directly by the U.S. Army that functioned as an extremely effective recruitment tool, has been studied extensively under the conceptual umbrella of the MEC. This paper discusses the decline of America's Army and need for scholarship to move beyond it, recognizing a sharp, highly contested, and ill-documented pivot among the U.S. armed forces toward recruiting via “eSports.” In doing so, I posit that the MEC and associated conceptual tools are ill-equipped for studies of complex, modern gaming culture, proposing assemblage as a better means for social scientists to study games not only as a boxed product but as a part of a wider assemblage that includes social groups, events, platforms, and media outside of the game's own software.