According to the gaming industry, three out of every four, or 244 million people in the U.S., play video games, an increase of 32 million people since 2018. Much of that recent growth was fueled by the coronavirus pandemic. And, according to the National Institutes of Health, 81 percent of online gamers are male, with a mean age of 28 years old. Research shows that for many players, the social aspects of the game were the most important factor in playing.
Veterans for Peace got on the gaming bandwagon with a project called “Gamers for Peace,” in which military veterans enter gaming spaces to build relationships with a demographic that is also sought after by U.S. military recruiters.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Chris Velazquez, who served as a U.S. Marine in both Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. He grew up playing video games and finds them a good way to connect with fellow veterans. Here, Velazquez, who’s active in the Gamers for Peace project, talks about the outreach he and others engage in to present young people with alternatives to military recruitment and service.
CHRIS VELAZQUEZ: Gamers for Peace – we’re a community of gamers, veterans, allies, accomplices, friends, family of people that have served that is concerned about the military’s active presence recruiting and grooming children for acceptance of state violence and warfare. We’re concerned about that. We push back on that actively by streaming content. We have e-sports teams that compete directly against the Army; e-sports teams in the various games they play so that when we’re at tournaments there’s an active counter-voice there talking about options that are more peace-oriented, that create and foster a culture of inclusion, safety and peace, non-violence and community organizing.
The range of games played by the military – and everybody – is wide. We see time and time again that studies show that violent video games in and of themselves are not the issue. It’s the context and the culture that is found in gaming-adjacent spaces. And this is what the Army and the Navy and even as far as violent extremist groups like right-wing violent extremists, or ISIS, or groups like that. They sit in spaces like Call of Duty or Fortnight or Minecraft even, which is a sandbox world where you just dig and build to your heart’s content. There’s nothing going on other than what you create. To Call of Duty, which is a first-person shooter — what’s known as a “military sim” shooter — you’re simulating the military experience and they advertise themselves on their realism. And that’s an entry-level “mil sim”; there are much more graphic and intense and realistic military shooters out there as well.
There’s value in all those games across the spectrum for a lot of things: sublimation; helping vets stay in touch or deal with their PTSD as part of their own therapeutic value. There’s tons of value in those games. The problem lies in the culture that surrounds it has been capitalized by people who glorify that or use that and engage in behavior that starts talking about glorifying the military experience.
So that’s why we see recruiters in that space. And developing para-social relationships, one-sided relationships where the viewer — because there’s an interactive nature — is giving information and it’s single-way communication with an illusion of reciprocity. So, it’s not so much that the games are violent and that they’re bad. It’s an issue of who’s populating the spaces around them and who’s controlling the narrative and the culture around that. We see links to Gamer-gate from years ago and “incel” culture and violent extremism all linked to this space that’s been cultivated out of hobby and community for gamers that stay in touch and want to play games and enjoy the activity to people that are capitalizing on that for other purposes like the U.S. military and extremist groups.
MELINDA TUHUS: So, Chris Velazquez, it’s not that Veterans for Peace is introducing your own games into the space, it’s that you’re playing the games that are out there and trying to have a different influence on the people you find in those spaces, is that right?
CHRIS VELAZQUEZ: Yeah. Gamers for Peace and Veterans for Peace isn’t designing games. We play games. We play D&D (Dungeons & Dragons); we stream content. So Monday nights we play tabletop games. Dungeons and Dragons is a very popular tabletop role-playing game, rolling dice and creating cooperative storytelling is a way to think of it. On Fridays, we play first-person shooters and talk about current events and give context to how the military-industrial complex and the war experience relates to it. So we’re not so much designing our own games, though we know that there are a lot of gamemakers out there working to create content that is other than the mainstream – more violent content. We would love to develop games eventually; there are lots of avenues by which we want to promote a culture of peace and push back on the war drums, really.
MELINDA TUHUS: It sounds like it’s a successful way to reach people you maybe wouldn’t reach otherwise.
CHRIS VELAZQUEZ: It is. It very much is, and more than that, we do direct action and push toward legislative work and actually organizing around these things and take action around these things so that recruiters can’t recruit here.
More information, visit Gamers For Peace at veteransforpeace.
