Exploring In-Game Military Identities Within CS:GO

This study examines how players construct in-game military identities while playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), a competitive multiplayer first-person shooter, framing the work as an in-progress ethnographic investigation into a relatively understudied area of identity formation in FPS games. It positions the research against a backdrop of extensive scholarship on identity in RPGs and MMORPGs, noting that FPS games offer fewer avatar customization options yet provide rich contexts of interaction with both the game and other players within a competitive scene. The authors draw on the concept of "militainment," the convergence of military and entertainment interests, and adopt Stahl's triangulated categories of training, battle, and recruitment as an initial analytical framework.

The study is guided by two research questions: how respondents construct in-game military identities, and how their educational context relates to those identities. The ethnographic data were collected in 2017–2018 from seven male students, aged 17 to 18, at a vocational school with an esports programme in Finland. Participants shared roughly nine hours of screen recordings spanning ten games across two teams, and took part in seven group interviews. The choice of CS:GO was made by the participants rather than the researchers.

Preliminary findings indicate that respondents do construct soldier identities in relation to recruitment and training, though the game's competitive structure appears to privilege gameplay over a realistic experience of warfare. The all-male composition of the sample is attributed to the predominantly male online gaming culture, which shapes the identities constructed. Earlier analysis suggests that technomasculinity norms strongly influence these identities, and the authors propose that this lens could illuminate players who seek a more realistic military identity than those offered by fantastical shooters such as Overwatch.