Have you played the war on terror?

The border-crossing of video games between military and civilian spheres alongside attendant discourses of war is described with particular focus on the ways that war has been coded as an object of consumer play. It is argued that official production aimed at training and recruitment have cast video games as players themselves in the War on Terror and this crossover has initialized a third sphere of militarized civic space where the citizen is supplanted by the figure of the virtual citizen-soldier.