At E3 2006, the U.S. Army hosted a spectacle of military excess outside the L.A. Convention Center’s South Hall, in promotion of the new Special Forces edition of their popular title America’s Army. As part of this spectacle, they offered passersby the opportunity to pose holding a large assault rifle next to a camouflaged special forces operative and a Hum-V. In a nimble perversion of the tourist trap, the Army even offered complimentary Polaroid photos of potential players (and recruits) posed for glorious combat. The offer was hard to resist. Even my colleague Noah Wardrip-Fruin—who is a Quaker and thus not normally inclined toward fantasies of military power—couldn’t pass up the chance to get a snapshot with the big gun.

Just like many of the now-bygone E3 spectacles, this performance benefited more than just the Army. It served the industry as a whole, drawing general attention to videogames through the paradigm of America’s Army. Here gun porn and booth soldiers took the place of soft porn and booth babes, but to the same effect: promote and reinforce the roles players want to occupy.

Reflecting on the experience, Noah recently echoed sentiments we’ve heard before from designers like Brenda Laurel: “Most games,” he mused, “offer variations on the fantasy of being a “gun/sword/spell-toting tough guy.”1 The special forces soldier, after all, is a role common to videogames in general, not just those produced by the Army. If videogames place us in other people’s shoes, those shoes are very often combat boots.

One of the promises of serious games is that they might give players access to different sorts of fantasies. The almost unthinkable success of the United Nation World Food Programme’s game Food Force speaks to this promise; Food Force is a game about being a humanitarian. Yet few serious games take on a slightly more specific challenge: are there valid, even positive fantasies that also involve gun-toting? Put differently, can games offer positive messages about carrying and using firearms?

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