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Militainment is a portmanteau of "Military" and "entertainment". It is defined as either entertainment featuring and celebrating the military, or controlled by the military.

The U.S. military in particular excels in the authorship of militainment, although the Russian military also has plans to produce their own TV channel.

Typical examples consist of a broad array of media, from television and movies, to reality shows and video games. It also involves the manufacture of pop culture icons with military like characteristics that people, typically young men, can look up to.

Militainment serves a number of purposes, from recruiting to public relations and history of events depicted in news and history books. The military, through public affairs departments, maintains close ties to the entertainment industry as a way of enlisting their help in creating and distributing these forms of media and adding high production value and legitimacy.

[edit] Video games

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The game America's Army is an example of the genre as it features and is developed by the U.S. Army.

Kuma\War is distributed for free over the web by Kuma Reality Games.

The SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs series is linked to the Navy SEALs. United States Navy recruitment videos are some of the videos the player can view in the game, and Zipper Interactive has also had competitions for SOCOM players to attempt to pass real boot camp for prizes as a promotion for the game series.

The United States Marine Corps also has a video game called Close Combat: First to Fight where there are two versions, civilian and military. The latter is used for the purpose of training individual Marines in handling drug addiction and battle fatigue in their squad^{[clarification needed]}.

Other military-inspired video games are Operation Flashpoint and its sequel, ArmA: Armed Assault and its sequel, DARWARS Ambush! and Full Spectrum Warrior.

These games were inspired by military training simulators - Operation Flashpoint 1/2, ArmA was inspired by the VBS1, while Full Spectrum Warrior was inspired by a simulator game made by Pandemic Studios; and PRISM: Guard Shield, a first-person shooter (FPS) video game developed by the US Army National Guard and Rival Interactive.

• Harpoon 3 Pro was a version of the game Harpoon which was available only to professionals, which simulated naval combat with a high degree of accuracy. Various other games in the series were available to the general public.

[edit] See also

• Military science fiction
• Serious games

[edit] External links

• Navy Office of Information West, http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navinfo/navinfowest.html
• "That's Militainment! The Pentagon's media-friendly "reality" war" by the director of peace and justice studies at Fordham University
• "Theatre of war: The military entertainment complex" analysis (42 pages) by two professors from Stanford University
• "Unsettling the military entertainment complex: Video games and a pedagogy of peace and Struse" by a Washington State University professor
• "Militainment, Inc." Book by University of Georgia professor, Roger Stahl. Also a documentary film by the same name, distributed by the Media Education Foundation.
• "Spot On: Games get political - Using both propaganda and education, games are making ripples in the political world." by Tom Leupold.