This article is an English translation of the original French version that first appeared in Le Grand Continent.
Since the start of the operation launched with Israel against Iran, the Trump administration has been staging a spectacle of cruelty based on video game codes. This gamification of war is neither accidental nor gratuitous. By appropriating a visual grammar understood by millions of young gamers, it is fully in line with Trump’s political agenda.
A semiotic break: Washington borrows the heads-up display from virtual infantry
Since the Gulf War, wars have been filmed from the sky. We see targets on an infrared screen, a building collapsing silently, with commentary from CNN over the top. The code has been well-established for thirty years: clean, surgical, remote-controlled warfare, watched from afar.
The video released by the White House at the start of the war—in a post that has since been deleted—breaks with this code in a way that is anything but accidental. The point of view is subjective. The editing is fast-paced, like in a war movie, like in a first-person shooter (FPS) video game. The graphical interface is reminiscent of a heads-up display (HUD) from a military video game. For a few seconds, the informed viewer might think they are watching a sequence from Battlefield or Call of Duty where the player calls in an air strike.
A significant detail can be found in the choice of weapon: the ordered bomb is a Mass Guided Bomb (MGB). In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, this is no ordinary strike. It is the reward for a killstreak—unlocked by players who achieve 30 consecutive eliminations without any outside support, and is the reward for absolute mastery. When the MGB is called in, the game is over, and the opposing team has no choice but to submit.[1] By choosing precisely this weapon in its propaganda video, the White House is staging the coup de grâce that ends the game and leaves the opponent no chance.
What is new in this video is not the staging of filmed strikes. That has been around since 1991. It is the borrowed semiotic code. The final call for air support is not a generic military metaphor but a specific gesture: that of the player who, at the end of the game, unleashes his most powerful weapon. It is killing by technology. No direct combat. No hand-to-hand fighting. Air superiority activated at the touch of a button, excessive, spectacular, terminal. Political scientist James Der Derian has theorized this mechanism under the name “virtuous war”[2] to describe a clean war: exactly the kind practiced in a video game, without dying civilians, without traumatized drone pilots, without visible international humanitarian law. The White House video does not depict a real war: it stages a virtuous war, and it frames it in the language of those who have already played this war hundreds of times.
The White House video does not depict a real war: it stages a virtuous war, and it frames it in the language of those who have already played this war hundreds of times.
FPS scenarios and Pentagon scripts in post-9/11 culture
In 1999, the US Department of Defense created the Institute for Creative Technology in Los Angeles, a few miles from the Hollywood studios. The stated objective was to develop simulation technologies for military training. The real goal was to formalize an organic collaboration between the Pentagon, the film industry, and the video game industry. This symbiotic relationship took shape in shared physical spaces:[3] the military provided the studios with access to equipment, technical advice, and professional authentication in exchange for narratives that fostered a sense of global insecurity conducive to the defense effort.
The Pentagon was thus able to indirectly subcontract narratives that permeated the gaming culture submitted to contemporary ideological dynamics. What James Der Derian calls the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, the MIME-Net, is an institutional architecture whose contours are sufficiently documented to be taken seriously as subject of analysis.[4] This synergy produces a specific military aesthetic, where war is gradually established as a familiar cultural genre, as unquestioned as westerns or film noir.[5]
Military video games add an extra dimension to this dynamic: they offer the transition from spectator to agent. Players no longer observe war from a dark room; they embody it in the first person, resolving moral dilemmas with a controller in their hands, in a scenario designed to make these dilemmas both urgent and inevitable.[6] It is this narrative incorporation, much more than any institutional product placement, that makes military FPS a powerful vehicle for acculturation in the history of American cultural industries.
[The] game does not explicitly say “war is just,” but it ensures that war is the only available response, mechanically, structurally—inevitably.
The conditions of war simulation also imply a procedural rhetoric in which the rules of the game are a political discourse.[7] When the game makes it impossible not to shoot, when it punishes retreat and rewards offense, it encodes a philosophy of force long before the player forms a conscious opinion about it. Of course, the game does not explicitly say “war is just,” but it ensures that war is the only available response, mechanically, structurally—inevitably.
Some FPS games can thus convey the representation of a clean war, stripped of its victims and traumas, in which the superiority of American weaponry is constantly on display as an eschatological horizon.[8] Following in the footsteps of Edward Said, game studies researchers have also shown how military FPS games construct the Middle East as a permanent war zone populated by faceless enemies to be eliminated. From Ghost Recon to Six Days in Fallujah, the settings are invariable: desert, Arab city, diffuse threat—and the American soldier as the sole moral horizon. Generations of gamers have internalized this neo-Orientalism long before even taking an interest in what is really happening in the region.
In Iran, Battlefield 3 had already won
Released in October 2011, Battlefield 3 depicts a US military operation in Iran motivated by an imminent nuclear threat. The player takes on the role of a soldier sent to defuse a crisis that could set the region ablaze. The scenario includes an airborne attack on Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, operations by American tanks and fighter jets in Iranian streets, and an international coalition alongside the United States. The Islamic Republic officially banned the game. Since 2011, millions of players around the world have spent hours winning in Iran. They bombed Mehrabad and neutralized the nuclear threat. This experiment offers a fictional scenario. But above all, it establishes a horizon of possibility, showing intervention in Iran as feasible, legitimate in its narrative form, and spectacular in its effects.
Obviously, Battlefield 3 did not predict the strikes of June 2025, nor Operation Epic Fury. But the video game helped to create the imaginary in which these strikes became conceivable. The latest generations of military FPS games have thus been able to stage future conflicts, such as the Iranian nuclear crisis, Russian ultra-nationalism, and Chinese expansionism, thereby producing the very insecurities that legitimize the actions of the security state, even before diplomats have named the threats. Games are no longer content to be a reflection of geopolitics; they participate in its cultural construction.
FPS entertainment: a new grammar of reality
However, we must guard against misinterpretation. The Department of Defense—now aptly renamed the Department of War—did not create the military FPS subculture. The links between Activision Blizzard and US government institutions remain informal and are based more on shared values than on a direct relationship of subordination.[9] In reality, military shooter video games have largely developed as an autonomous field, with their own aesthetic codes, communities, internal controversies, economic logic, and staging. This field existed before the Pentagon took an interest in it, and it could continue to exist without it.
What the White House video reveals, however, is that the US administration has now appropriated the codes of this subculture to communicate about its own violence, not by seeking to legitimize it in the legal or moral sense of the term, but by framing it in terms of popular complicity. In other words, it is not a question of convincing, but of sharing a common language with an audience that has already played this war on screen and instinctively recognizes the grammar of killstreak, HUD, and air support triggered by the press of a button.
[The] US administration has now appropriated the codes of this subculture to communicate about its own violence, not by seeking to legitimize it in the legal or moral sense of the term, but by framing it in terms of popular complicity.
The dehumanization of Iran and the people killed there is achieved not through ideological discourse but through the humor of familiarity—the same humor that makes players smile when navigating a map they know by heart. The link between FPS games and the production of armed violence among soldiers is a commonly made one that remains poorly substantiated today. This convenient shortcut, often brandished in parliamentary debates after mass shootings, confuses the medium with behavior, the imaginary with the act.
The political significance of the phenomenon observed here lies elsewhere. Soldiers do not mistake reality for a video game. It is the video game that becomes reality, not in the minds of the combatants, but in the staging that the authorities choose to give to their strikes before the world. The autonomous symbols that this counterculture has produced—notably through gameplay videos posted on YouTube—have provided it with a language that is immediately understandable to millions of viewers: a new grammar.
Pete Hegseth and the soldiers of reactionary acceleration
A veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and former Fox News host, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has made ostentatious military masculinity a hallmark of his political identity. In his public statements, he expresses open contempt for institutional procedures, Pentagon lawyers, and general officers trained in rules of engagement (ROE). This opposition is deliberate. Far from being a bureaucrat, Hegseth is a “warrior” who sometimes exaggerates to the point of caricature the cultural synthesis between FPS culture, reactionary masculinity, and military power.
Military shooting games articulate a popular gendered militarism: the soldier in Call of Duty is not just a character. He is a stoic, offensive ideal type, loyal to his team and impervious to moral doubt.[10] While the gaming world is obviously far from being limited to neo-reactionary ideas, the FPS imagery found on certain far-right forums is an important semiological breeding ground for MAGA theorists who denounce a “weak” democracy, doomed to incompetence, and call for a strong executive branch disconnected from procedures.
The vocabulary is at hand: we need a CEO of the state who can win and eliminate threats—without rules of engagement. Nick Land, a figure of Accelerationism, turns rule-breaking into a political act in itself. It is also a theme often central to the campaign modes of major franchises, such as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, in which the world is threatened in the near future by the reign of a military private company that de facto replaces democratic states that are failing and unable to protect their populations.
The latest generations of FPS games such as Battlefield and Call of Duty have built their appeal around simulating the potential of American technological superiority—sometimes taken to futuristic extremes, modeling a perfectly successful “revolution in military affairs.” Players pilot armored vehicles, see at night through infrared goggles, and launch precision strikes from invisible drones. This technological excess is not a secondary narrative device; it is at the heart of the game mechanics and the source of enjoyment.
Gaming culture does not lead to the enjoyment of war. It is the political sphere—inspired by the neo-reactionary movement and others—that invokes its codes to draw a large Western audience into its finalist work.
In these pages, writer and former Marine Phil Klay proposed reading Trumpist communication through the Augustinian prism of the digital Colosseum: communication consists of images which, when accumulated, inflict moral wounds. By debasing the viewer, they transform him, in the words of St. Augustine, into “a worthy companion of those who led him there.” Gaming culture does not lead to the enjoyment of war. It is the political sphere—inspired by the neo-reactionary movement and others—that invokes its codes to draw a large Western audience into its finalist work. It exploits the dystopian representations of these confrontational games to make strikes on Iran immediately understandable, without explanation or justification. By playing on the obvious and the familiar, it precipitates the future that the game was already depicting.
Making the viewer an accomplice
What is striking about the video released by the White House is not that it is aimed at the gaming community. It is that, in a way, it no longer needs them. The visual grammar of video games has long since left its original medium. It has migrated to YouTube and TikTok where compilations of “best moments” and “POV” montages of air strikes that rack up millions of views without their viewers ever having held a controller. The most lasting legacy of Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty is not players, but a way of seeing, a regime of perception of violent action in which technical performance is morally justified, in which the spectacular absorbs the political. Epic Fury is staged precisely in this vein.
The name chosen for the operation itself gives it away: military operations are no longer named with the solemn gravity of international law and strategic doctrine, as Desert Storm or Infinite Justice were. They are named like YouTube videos or kill streaks. The expression Epic Fury already belongs to the realm of memes before it belongs to that of war. In the grammar of viral gameplay, this name immediately encodes the strike in a narrative regime where victory is a premise in the service of epic spectacle.
With these sordid videos, the White House is not trying to convince anyone—it is trying to draw attention. According to Hannah Arendt,[11] when entertainment replaces culture, it does not destroy political judgment through violence or lies, but through the permanent occupation of attention, which leaves no room for thought. Washington does not address its domestic electorate. It speaks a global language. Millions of people who have never voted in the United States or attended a congressional hearing instantly recognize the format. The global audience does not need to be convinced of the legitimacy of the operation—it is enough to make them complicit in a purely formal way.
Spectacle as a goal of war
At the end of his term in January 1961, Eisenhower warned against a military-industrial complex, fearing its growing influence on the decisions of the Republic. He had names to put on this complex, addresses, contracts, CEOs. The complex that the White House is plunging us into is much more difficult to grasp. No one asked YouTube to prepare global public opinion for drone strikes—and no memorandum was signed between video game publishers and the Pentagon to harmonize their visual grammars. This convergence took place without collusion, simply through the affinity of ecosystems: the platform educated a perspective that political power now exploits. This makes the military-entertainment complex all the more difficult to denounce and all the more effective in its operations.
The presidential tweet no longer dictates the grammar of video games; it is now a product of them. As spectators around the world, unwitting heirs to fifteen years of digital pop culture, we have become players without having chosen to be. In previous media conflicts, the narrative followed the war because we were looking for a language to describe what already had its goals, its doctrine, its logic. Now, however, it is as if the order has been reversed.
The gameplay and memes of the video game no longer seem to be mobilized in the service of a military operation. They occur concurrently. In the absence of clearly articulated war aims, a comprehensible doctrine, or a strategic objective that public opinion could evaluate, the spectacle itself takes the place of the end goal. Visual domination is a political victory. Technological domination, translated into images, becomes a horizon—with highly uncertain consequences.
In the absence of clearly articulated war aims, a comprehensible doctrine, or a strategic objective that public opinion could evaluate, the spectacle itself takes the place of the end goal.
Video game culture was born underground, on the margins. It has built a decentralized aesthetic of ironic distancing where everything can be mocked, turned around, transformed into a meme. This subculture was possible precisely because nothing in it was real. This distance was its immunity. With tweets from the White House, this subculture has exploded into reality—and distancing has become operative. Irony has turned into a mode of government, whose purpose seems to be nothing more than maintaining the spectacle of destruction.
Louis Lapeyrie works in the French public administration and is interested in contemporary strategic issues. He participates in the Chair of Major Contemporary Strategic Issues (Chaire Grands Enjeux Stratégiques Contemporains) at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and regularly contributes to public discourse.
[1] See the original gameplay video featuring the probable killstreak clip used by the White House.
[2] James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment
Network, 2nd ed., New York/London, Routledge, 2009 [1st ed. Boulder, Westview
Press, 2001]
[3] Ibid.
[4] Nick Robinson, “Have You Won the War on Terror? Military Videogames and the State of American Exceptionalism,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 450-470.
[5] Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture, New York/London, Routledge.
[6] Brian Kalafatian, “Call of Duty video games as a tool for influencing and promoting US foreign policy,” Stratégique, 131-132(2-3), 2024, pp. 111-122.
[7] Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007.
[8] Alexis Hudelot, “First-person shooter (FPS) video games and the Pentagon: the limits of narrative for political science,” Politique et Sociétés, vol. 34, no. 2, 2015, pp. 17-38.
[9] Kalafatian, op. cit
[10] Nick Robinson, op. cit
[11] Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of Culture, Paris, Gallimard, 1972
