In the Army Now: Narrative Elements and Realism in Military First-Person Shooters

This study examines 189 military-themed first-person shooters released between 1992 and 2010, responding to a gap in empirical research on FPS content despite theoretical claims about the military-entertainment complex and possible persuasive effects on players. Framing the genre at the micro level of the individual soldier, the authors argue that narrative, external, and behavioral realism moderate how persuasive these games may be, and they pose questions about which conflicts, locations, and protagonist nationalities dominate and whether these patterns shift over time.

The analysis, drawing on Gamespot and IGN reviews alongside Wikipedia entries, finds that World War II settings account for 63.6 percent of the conflicts depicted, and that 82.3 percent of protagonists are American and 95.5 percent are white. The most common enemies are Germans (28.8 percent) and Russians (15.9 percent), though the range of opponents diversified after 2001, with Middle Eastern and North American adversaries appearing more often in war-on-terror and future-conflict titles. WWII games scored significantly higher on realism than war-on-terror titles, which leaned more heavily on fictional elements, and multiplayer factions generally mirrored single-player sides, with America's Army and the 2010 Medal of Honor as notable exceptions.

The authors conclude that the genre presents warfare largely from a Western, and particularly American, perspective, relying on recurring stereotypes of exotic settings and villainous enemies such as Russians, Middle Eastern terrorists, and Latin American rebels or cartels. The post-2001 diversification of settings and antagonists is linked to real-world events such as 9/11, with US-led operations increasingly framed as self-defense. FPS games are judged to achieve high audiovisual fidelity while offering limited narrative and behavioral realism, and the authors argue that the interplay among these realism dimensions merits further study of player attitudes and beliefs.