But the importance of Black Ops is not only the power of its individual fantasy. More than this, Black Ops is the entertaining face of the war machine. Young people play games like this the way British lads played in the Boy Scouts, girding themselves to become the guardians of the empire on which the sun never set, except that one day it did. While not all American boys (or girls) will sign up to be tank gunners, drone pilots, or helicopter weapons officers, the ones who do will already know the principles of seeing the enemy through the eyes of a first person shooter. As for the overwhelming majority of Americans who do not join the military, many will enjoy the action and watch it on the screens of their personal devices, where the explosions and the deaths will not seem real but instead be a visual reverberation of the video games they already know. This is how the industry of memory trains people to be part of a war machine, turning war into a game and a game into war through the narration of the first person shooter.
While the novel and the movie are also parts of the industry of memory, the first person shooter outclasses them when it comes to seducing readers or viewers. The first person shooter exploits cinematic technology and changes it from a passive technology to an active one. A first person shooter combines the duration of A Remembrance of Things Past with the intensity of a movie, each minute more engrossing than reading a novel or watching a movie. The game is not about identifying with the other and feeling for another person, those moments of sympathy and empathy so vital for finding pleasure in the novel and the movie.16 Instead, the first person shooter is built on the aesthetics of sweat and viscera and is about identifying one’s self with the shooter and feeling the joy and excitement of participating in slaughter. The slaughter does not depend on enjoying the pain of the other because the other is so distant that one cannot even conceive of the other as capable of any feelings. The other is simply nonhuman, while the pleasure of the gamer is inhuman, as he or she takes pleasure in destruction.
It is not that we will destroy the nonhuman, just as feeling deep empathy for the characters in a novel may not inspire us to save actual human beings. But the novel and the first person shooter lure us, in different ways, to accept their underlying principles of salvation or destruction. A great novel about distant others persuades us of the need to save them, which, in our laziness, apathy, or fear, many of us will likely leave to someone else to do. A great first person shooter heats the blood to the proper temperature for killing others, which, in our attachment to our humanity and instinct for self-preservation, many of us will likely leave to our army to do.17 We become accustomed to seeing through the rifle scope, then through the crosshairs of a missile with a seeing eye, now through the unblinking gaze of a drone. The first person shooter is the autobiographical point of view of the war machine, a finite view of a society which accepts the necessity of armaments and of killing others as part of daily life, whether it is on the streets and in the schools of one’s own city or on the landscapes of others. As novelist Gina Apostol puts it: “The military-industrial complex … does it not suggest not only an economic order but also a psychiatric disorder?”18
If so, it is a common and pervasive disorder, this complex that refuses to recognize or analyze itself. It is hardly surprising that Americans are then disturbed when they see how others depict them. This is not unique to Americans. All war machines program their passengers to identify with the machinery. They take comfort and pride in their machinery via its ideological software while being fearful of the war machines of others. When they encounter the memories of their others, they, too, are likely to be shocked, suspecting a viral infection from a foreign bug. One can call this either the shock of misrecognition or recognition. One of these two shocks will most likely happen to the tourist when visiting the War Remnants Museum, touted in guidebooks as one of Saigon’s top tourist destinations. Of the museum’s wide range of exhibits, the one American tourists remember most is the one that greets them on the first floor lobby, titled “Aggression War Crimes” (tội ác chiến tranh xâm lược). The average American tourist is turned off by this title. Americans do not appreciate muddled English, even if that English is better than their own grasp of the local language. Even less do Americans like being accused of war crimes, because most Americans believe that it is categorically impossible for an American to commit a war crime. But the museum does primarily feature the war crimes of Americans — massacres, torture, desecration of corpses, the human effects of Agent Orange — captured in black-and-white photos by Western photographers during the war. Suddenly the American tourist becomes a semiotician, aware of how photographs do not simply capture the truth but are framed by their framers. When forced to look at these atrocities, a fairly typical American response is say we did not do this or they did this too.19 This is the shock of misrecognition, seeing one’s reflection in a cracked mirror and confronting one’s disordered self.
Recognition is more likely for American tourists who visit Son My, remembered by Americans as My Lai. The village is located many hundreds of miles north from Saigon and is distant from the easiest tourist route on Highway 1A, and only the particularly knowledgeable and curious American tourists will visit. A museum is built on the remnants of the village, where trails of footprints in the cement pathways evoke the ghosts of absent villagers. American troops killed more than five hundred of these villagers. An outdoor mosaic shows the villagers under assault from the sky by a science fictional war machine, black and bristling with engines and bombs, an open maw of a furnace in place of its nose. Giant drops of red blood drip from the bottom of the mosaic. In the museum, a diorama shows life-size black and white American soldiers, grimacing in fury as they shoot villagers who look surprisingly peaceful in the moment of death. Americans who make this pilgrimage to Son My already know of the massacre, and rather than being average tourists are more likely mourners come to pay respect.20 They anticipate the shock of seeing this diorama. We did this, they think. We know we did this.21