S(t)imulating War: From Early Films to Military Games

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other subject and object of representation, war has a tortured relationship to both mimetic and poetic production. Is the war story a narrative of events, casualties and experiences of battle? Or does the war story inform and shape the very act of war? Is ‘realism’ the most important criterion when evaluating a representation of war or do the stories we fabricate shape our experience and comprehension of war? Perhaps the connection between war and representation exists because, as Elaine Scarry (1985, p. 62) has argued, war itself ‘has within it a large amount of the symbolic and is ultimately […] based on a simple and startling blend of the real and the fictional.’