After more than a decade of research, it is no longer necessary to make the case for the study of games in IR. It is now established in the field that popular culture, and its various constitutive artefacts, are relevant for a host of global politics’ core thematics, from militarism and war to identity, gender, empire, and resistance (Grayson, Davies and Philpott 2009; Caso and Hamilton 2015; Daniel and Musgrave 2017). Catalysed in part by the 21st century explosion of the videogames industry – now the world’s most lucrative entertainment medium – the study of games in IR has focused upon the teaching of theory and history in the classroom (Asal 2005; Horn, Rubin and Schouenborg 2015; de Zamaroczy 2017), the place of game theory in analysing global affairs (Snidal 1985; Brams 2000) and, most substantively, the role of war-based videogames in the spread of militarism (Robinson 2012, 2016,; Schulzke 2014, 2017; Ciută 2016; Berents and Keogh 2018).

*Originally published in 2025. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Frequently centred on first-person shooters and post-9/11 foreign policy misadventures, this literature has examined the politics and productive effects of simulating righteous wars against orientalised others. Grounding itself in the intersection of the commercial and military gaming spheres (Kaempf 2019), it has examined various dimensions of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET) (Der Derian 2009) or military-entertainment complex (Lenoir 2000), most often with a view to elucidating and critiquing their militarising effects on civilian gamers. Neglected in the main in these debates has been the question of the games played within the military.

While the spread of ludic militarism (I am grateful to Meera Sabaratnam for this framing) to the civilian gamer world has occupied centre stage, the roles and effects of games within the defence establishment has received relatively scant attention in IR. The principal exception to this rule is James Der Derian, whose work mapping the MIME-NET blazed a trail by tracing the place of models, simulations, exercises, and games in US military training and warmaking. Writing candidly, in a policy environment hostile to critique, that ‘war with Iraq is not simply a game – it is a stupid game’ (Der Derian 2003, 37), Der Derian showed over the course of two decades how virtual technologies enable the ‘continuation of war by means of verisimilitude’ and thereby create new ‘hyperrealities’ of war, in which ‘actors act, things happen, and the consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations themselves’ (Der Derian 1990, 301). Since the publication of the second edition of Der Derian’s landmark book Virtuous War in 2009, the military use of games – disaggregated from models, simulations, and exercises – has continued to expand and evolve. However, IR has not paid sufficient attention to these developments. If the field is to more fulsomely understand the effects of games on militarism and the conduct of war, it is necessary to expand IR’s focus from military-themed civilian gaming to gaming within the military itself.

Wargaming in the US Military

A wargaming renaissance began in the US defence establishment in 2014. Prompted by DoD-wide memos from then Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel and Deputy Bob Work (Hagel 2014; Work 2015), the US military has acted to reinvigorate wargaming across the services over the past decade. Identified as a key asset in two major reform programmes – the Defense Innovation Initiative (DII) and Third Offset Strategy (3OS) – wargames played variously on digital devices and table-tops have proliferated across the services’ recruitment, training, research, and professional military education programmes. From vehicles and weapons training, language and cultural sensitivity modules, and strategic planning efforts, games are now routinely played by warfighters across the services and spectrum of rank. In a period of declining enrolment, games and esports have successfully boosted the military’s recruitment efforts (Derby 2016). They are played to promote unit cohesion during down-time on base, both at home and when deployed. They feature in the military’s reintegration and recovery programmes to help warfighters process trauma and acclimate to prosthetics (Hirst 2021). Games thus play a key role in the production and management of military life, from recruitment to training and through to rehabilitation (Hirst 2022).

At the helm of these military gaming activities is a professional wargaming community of practice (hereafter, CoP) housed variously within military schoolhouses, think tanks, research centres, and consulting firms. Committed to the claim that wargaming saves lives (see also Caffrey 2019; Schechter 2020), these wargaming specialists design, facilitate, and analyse games in order to train and teach service members and to experiment with and analyse operational and strategic plans. Seeking to understand how gaming works in the production of warfighters today, I have spent the better part of the past decade researching these gaming activities, conducing fieldwork at wargames, exercises, and conferences, and generating 100 hours of interview data with the CoP and those they teach and train. The result is the........

© E-International