From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games
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From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games by Ed Halter
Male
102 years old
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
United States
Last Login: 6/16/2008
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From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games's Interests
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| General | About the Author: Ed Halter is a critic for The Village Voice and a curator of film and media. His writing has appeared in Cinemascope, the New York Press, Kunstforum, indieWIRE, Filmmaker, Vice, Rhizome, Cinemad, Paper and elsewhere. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the critically-acclaimed New York Underground Film Festival, one of the most important exhibition events for alternative cinema in the US, and has curated for venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Eyebeam, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and Cinematexas. Halter has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, Sundance Channel, Channel Four (UK), ARTE and MTV Brazil, as well as in a number of documentaries. A graduate of Yale University, he is a visiting professor in the department of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, and has lectured at Harvard, NYU, and other schools. From Sun Tzu to Xbox is his first book. He lives in New York City. For more about Ed Halter, visit his homepage at edhalter.com
| | Movies | Occupation: Dreamland, Apocalypse Now, Tron, Top Gun, Full Metal Jacket, The Last Starfighter, WarGames, Toys, Hackers, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Revenger of the Nerds, Real Genius, Control Room, Iron Eagle, War at at Distance, Universal Soldier, War of the Worlds, Small Soldiers, Black Hawk Down, Fail Safe, Punishment Park, Dr. Strangelove, The War Game, Saving Private Ryan, Patton, The Thin Red Line, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, Doom, Platoon, Rambo III | | Television | .. width="425" height="350">..> | | Books | Little Wars, The Bomb and the Computer, War and Cinema, War Games, Homo Ludens, Man Play and Games, Trigger Happy, Joystick Nation, Supercade, More Than A Game, Gaming, War and the Iliad, Hackers, Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense, The Art of Wargaming, The Ultimate History of Videogames, Videogames: At the Beginning, Everything Bad is Good For You, Against Interpretation, The Dream Life, War Against War, Blood Rites, Virtuous War, GAM3R 7H30RY, Invasion of the Space Invaders, Science Against the People | | Heroes | Cory Arcangel, Ralph Baer, Eddo Stern, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon, Michael Macedonia, Willy Higginbotham, Constance Wilde, H.G. Wells, Baron Von Reisswitz, Robert MacNamara, Von Clauswitz, Newgrounds.com, Radwan Kasmiya |
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From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games's Details
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| Status: | Swinger | | Here for: | Networking, Friends | | Zodiac Sign: | Capricorn | | Smoke / Drink: | No / No |
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From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games's Blurbs |
About me:
Official site: http://www.fromsuntzutoxbox.com
Book blog: http://www.warandvideogames.com
Buy it at Amazon
Filled with high-tech weapons, gung-ho desert soldiers, and terrorist scenarios ripped from the headlines, today's ultra-realistic video games have moved to the forefront of the militarization of popular culture. How did this once innocent pastime—now rivaling Hollywood in popularity—become so deeply enmeshed in America's entry into global warfare?
From Sun Tzu to Xbox is a definitive history of the longstanding relationship between games and military culture, from wargaming's roots in ancient civilizations, to the Cold War development of computing for battle, to a recent crop of Pentagon-funded shoot-'em-ups, big-budget commercial titles and homemade hacks.
Examining US military projects like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior, commercial games from Battlezone to Conflict: Desert Storm, as well as mods, artworks, and homebrewed games created as critiques and responses, From Sun Tzu to Xbox offers the first political history of the video game and a powerful argument of its role in the way Americans have come to think about war.
What They're Saying
"Steeped in a deep history of gaming and simulation, Halter's expert tome is primarily about a long-standing American obsession with technology, which he illustrates by examining the adoption of video-game culture by the military. The U.S. military is enthusiastic for things which are transformational, such as tactics and training billed as capable of making it over into something it isn't: an instrument for winning wars without fuss...[Halter] describes how America's Army was an online blockbuster, a thrilling experience for its makers and gamers, unattached to the reality of the war on terror."—The Village Voice
"Halter is after a bigger philosophical picture befitting of the subject's moral grey area, and he tackles the queasy coupling of the entertainment industry and Warfare Inc. with impressive intellectual rigor" - Time Out New York
"Ed Halter has written the definitive account of the military entertainment complex. This book is essential for anyone interested in the future of games, computers, media, culture, war—and peace." - McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto
"Yes, just when you thought American political culture could not get any more bizarre, Ed Halter drops the bomb. This superb book is more than just a weird riff on the limp machismo, hero worship, and couch potato patriotism of combat themed game culture. These pages are shot through with original and important ideas, each of which could easily be spun off in to whole dissertations. You must read this book." - Christian Parenti, author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq
"After exploring the intertwined histories of combat and play, from chess to modern 'war game' exercises, Halter probes the nexus among the US military, academia, Hollywood, and the gaming industries that led to the development and promotion of such popular games as Full Spectrum Warrior and America's Army. I almost wrote 'unholy nexus' but that's probably not the phrase Halter would use. He has a deceptively calm 'just the facts ma'am' style that lays out all the information and leaves it to readers' heads to explode." - Tom Moody (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody)
"An extremely engaging, well researched and fascinating treatise bursting with intriguing ideas about war and gaming in general. It is a scholarly book and Halter obviously knows his shit. But his writing is punctuated by just the right amount of irreverance." - BadLit (http://www.badlit.com)
"Halter draws attention to many of the corporate entertainment/military alliances that currently interlace the game world, noting, surprisingly, that it is often the military that demands the most cutting edge technological innovations...Halter doesn't give us much to look forward to, but he is to be applauded for opening our eyes to this grim future in his sober and sobering account." - Evergreen Review
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