A Sum Greater than Its Parts

Media conglomeration makes product releases like those that accompanied Small Soldiers more efficient and effective. When birthed within the subsid­iaries of parent corporations such as Viacom, characters can go from product development to full market saturation in a media instant.

Technological innovation takes place more rapidly than language can account for. While the Cold War appellation “Military Industrial Complex” may have adequately described the convergence of management, research, and development that helped to fuel the arms race, twenty-first-century hookups are more flexible and complex than this nostalgic label can suggest. James Der Derian has attempted to map the structures that have replaced the military industrial complex in his book Virtuous Wars. In addition to charting the transitory nodes of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET), Der Derian attempts to “study up close the mimetic power that travels along the hyphens.”³⁰ One such power is com­puter simulation games' ability to make memories. During his tenure as a University of Central Florida professor and also director of the Media Convergence Lab, Christopher Stapleton, claimed that the military “are actually the visionaries of experiential media.”³¹ Visual technology that is operational on the Xbox and Playstation is also used by the army, with Pandemic Studio's Full Spectrum Warrior serving as the most current exam­ple.³² This real-time tactics war game serves as entertainment in the private sector and command-tactical training in the military sector.

Essentially entertainment and games, that is, entertainment and training have an intersection: it's about making memories. It's fascinating now what we're learning about the human brain.... [A] lot of what we're trying to do in training is creating memories. Memories that last forever.³³

Memories made while playing a military action game for fun could one day serve a young person in active duty with the military, their brains hav­ing been wired not only for survival but for command, evasion, and attack. As our toys become more intelligent, and therefore more like us, we become more like our toys, programmed to execute memories stored since youthful play sessions enjoyed long ago on the home front. William Hamilton's 2003 New York Times article titled “Toymakers Study Troops, and Vice Versa” introduced readers to the flow of research and development information that takes place between the toy industry and the military industry.

Hamilton cited such cross-pollination examples as Hasbro's Super Soaker on which the army based its quick-loading assault weapons design, remote control planes that have inspired reconnaissance drones, and inexpensive cell phones that became the basis for walkie-talkies with video capability. In products that could have been developed by Globotech, the control mechanisms for unmanned robotic vehicles, some of which are used in Iraq to deactivate improvised explosive devices (IEDs), have been based on video game controllers. Lance Winslow's military strategy report “Unmanned Vehicle Robotic Warfare” imagines:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles... making human fighter pilots obsolete. Might be better to use a UAV and to that have it flown by a 16-year old video game player, which will in turn be used to program the next generation of Artificial Intelligent robotic tactical UAVs.³⁴

Winslow's rapidly attainable fantasy calls up images of Ender Wiggin, the protagonist in Orson Scott Card's novel, Ender’s Game, who unwittingly destroys an entire species and its home planet, believing he is only being tested on a computer simulation training program.