4th Tuesday Films: Returning Fire, Interventions in Video Game Culture

War video games are part of an exploding market whose revenues outpace the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. These games offer users a stunningly realistic experience of ground combat and a glimpse into the increasingly virtual world of long-distance, pushbutton warfare. What are these games are doing to users, our political culture, and our capacity to empathize with people directly affected by the actual trauma of war? For three culture-jamming activists these uncertainties were a call to action.

In three separate vignettes, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Wafaa Bilal, and Joseph Delappe moved dissent from the streets to the screens, infiltrating war games in an attempt to break the hypnotic spell of "militainment." Their work forces all gamers and nongamers alike to think critically about what it means when the clinical tools of real-world killing become forms of consumer play.

Film is free and open to all.

http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=152