Figments Under Fire: Identity and the Transmedial Rhetoric of Combat in Film and Military Shooter Games

This dissertation takes up the question of transmedial adaptation and projective identity to compare the ways in which video games, film, and literature depict the experience of combat and the ways in which our cultural understanding of combat is shaped by the interaction of these media. It begins with a critical review of New Media approaches to rhetoric and narrative before moving on to argue that media specific analyses of the film miss the crucial role that video game sensibilities shape the overall film. Refusing to draw a bright line between gameplay and narrative the analysis concentrates on the ways that this relationship can be exploited through strategic remediation, it examines the ways in which Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan uses the visual and logistic priorities of the subjectively oriented shooter game genre to disrupt the generic conventions of the combat film. It then takes up the relationship between subjectively oriented shooter game and feature film and examines the ways in which this new melding of sensibilities plays out to make the personal, small unit perspective of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers the de facto representational paradigm of the American military experience in World War II. It examines several World War II shooter games to determine how commercial game designers use the affordances of their medium to address the new set of concerns opened up by Spielbergs works. Critical attention is given to how these mediums reinforce cultural values of heroism, loss, vengeance, sacrifice and trauma. The last chapter looks at pedagogical applications for the first-person shooter game as a primary text in the college writing classroom. It outlines a pedagogical methodology suited to a cultural studies oriented approach to media rhetoric that expands on Gee's observations about the theories of learning embedded in video games. It focuses specifically on the problem of helping college students close the loop between media literacy and critical analysis to develop what the New London Group calls 'Critical Framing' before moving on to explore the ways in which player-centered design can be used to reshape composition pedagogy.