April 18: Se Young Kim, “Player-Gamer-Soldier-Killer”
Wednesday, April 18, 4:10 pm
Center for Digital Humanities, 344 Buttrick Hall
Se Young Kim, “Player-Gamer-Soldier-Killer: The War on Terror and Video Game Shooters as Military Training”
Se Young Kim is a Mellon Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. His areas of teaching and research specialization include contemporary East Asian and U.S. cinema, digital media in Korea and Japan, political economy, as well as classical and contemporary film theory. He was a 2017-18 Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities, and the Colloquium talk will focus on his Mellon project.
The project scrutinizes the militarization of US culture in the years following the September 1, 2001 attacks. Theorizing a broader process of militarization that includes US police forces, the project examines how mass culture in the twenty-first century familiarizes the civilian population with military technique. Focusing on first-person and third-person video games, such as the Call of Duty (2003-ongoing) and Grand Theft Auto (1997-ongoing), the project brings together an archive of player data that challenges dominant notions regarding video games and gendered aggression. It also analyses the more urgent relationship between the medium of video games, its users, and the mediation of state violence in post-9/11 America.