Games

The principal contributions of games to globalization are military and commercial. Electronic games have sold internationally since the mid-1980s, from arcade play to handheld consoles to online subscriptions, and from imaginary spheres of self-absorption to recruitment devices for the military. Statistics given by the gaming industry indicate that the overall commercial market of US$30 billion grew by 16% annually between 2006 and 2010. Daily downloads of military-themed games in the early 21st century were at a rate of between 10,000 and 50,000, and just under half of new military recruits report having played prior to enlistment.

Gaming has been crucial to global war and vice versa since the late 19th century when the U.S. Naval War College Game simulated Prussian and French field tactics. Such methods gained popularity after remarkable success in predicting Japanese strategy in the Pacific from 1942. By the late 1950s, computers were utilized to theorize military strategy. Game theory in 1960s and 1970s political science sought to make scientific the study and practice of crisis decision making, founded on a rational-actor model of maximizing utility that was reapplied to the conduct of states, soldiers, and diplomats to construct nuclear-war prospects and counters. These models were applied and adapted to computer programs. In the 1980s, the Pentagon worked with Atari to develop Battle-zone, an arcade game, for use as a flight simulator for fighter pilots, and established a gaming center within the National Defense University. In the early 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, games were designed to simulate new situations involving guerilla warfare and terrorism.

Games are cultural and commercial as well as militaristic. Consider Food Force, an advergame developed by the World Food Programme to highlight global hunger; MTV's Darfur Is Dying, which drew 700,000 people online in a month; Serious Games Interactive's Global Conflict: Palestine, with a journalist protagonist seeking the truth among conflicting sources analyzing the conflict between Israel and Palestine; and A Force More Powerful: The Game of Nonviolent Strategy. Other games recreating the environment include [Page 612]World Cyber Games or Second Life. The latter is a massive multiplayer online game. These virtual worlds have been popular in the United States and Europe, and Korea and China have surpassed Japan as their key Asian markets since companies there have favored the online games as a counter to piracy. Originating primarily through freeware and extra-commercial organization, they are increasingly provided by corporate commercial interests. Since 2001, women have outnumbered men as participants in these social and collaborative enterprises.

Most of the available console games played across the globe are owned by three multinational corporations: Sony, Electronic Arts, and Nintendo. Since the appearance of the original Sony PlayStation in 1995, companies providing these games control access to them, thus precluding independent programmers outside the company from creating programs for general use beyond a corporate platform. This has also led to takeovers of small companies by major firms. One of the most popular console games, Grand Theft Auto, might be considered an instance of cultural appropriation, since this setting of U.S. urban dross was actually created in Britain—but it was then marketed through a global distribution network.

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