The Gamification of Terror: The Imaginary of Videogames from the War on Terror to the Islamic State

In the last decades, various scholars began to address the issue of the so-called gamification of warfare. Contemporary wars, according to this perspective, visually resemble the structure and the aesthetics of videogames (as the vast debates around the use of drones seems to demonstrate). Videogame has always been a crucial medium in the symbolic and visual economy of contemporary warfare and this process became even more apparent after 9/11, within the so-called War on Terror. The essay will analyze the role played by videogames in this con text following two different but intersecting path. On the one hand, it will be argued that videogame played an important role in the process of legitimization of Bush’s war, both in term of recruitment and of collective imaginary. On the other hand, the essay will show how jihadist organizations promoted a reappropriation of this medium in various and still widely unexplored ways