You are now entering the The War Game Room! The War Game Room documents and showcases some of the big boys of the North American Military Industrial Media Entertainment Complex (aka the MIME). An imaginary confrontation between the forces of the MIME and the counter-MIME, with over 300,000 pixels of floorspace and over 30 exhibitors booths. An industry convention that will never happen. Your little simulated trip through a land where the simulation, gaming, and enactment of war blur into one another. Your window into the MIME complex.

Visit the War Game Room – all you have to do is stock up on some go-pills and you are off!

The collapsing distance between media and military technologies hits a zero point in times of war and escalating militarism: from the origins of the internet and videogames in the military; the current convergence of military simulation training, digital arts, and video game culture; or the ways that the imagery of war reporting has become intimately shaped by the perspectives of embedded reporters and the point-of-view shots of cameras mounted on bombs. The War Game Room attests to the increasing collaboration and interpenetration of military technologies (particularly military simulation), the Hollywood entertainment industry, war video games, broadcast news media, and new media technologies. Some call it “militainment”, others simply the MIME.

The War Game Room explores the ways that this ever-expanding repertoire of MIME-based media forms infiltrate our everyday lives, shaping specific visualization techniques and a wider visual vocabulary of 21st century war. What they allow us to see is carefully screened and controlled, as much as what they don't allow us to see. From the PowerScene digital mapping program that Milosevic, Tudjman, and Izetbegovic played on an Ohio airbase under the watchful guidance of Wesley Clark in order to arrive at a partition agreement of Bosnia for the Dayton Accords; to the Hollywood-Pentagon joint initiative the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and its pioneering training simulation Balkan Village; to the most recent wave of reality video wargames that include the ICT’s Full Spectrum Warrior, America’s Army, and kumawar. The War Game Room builds on an earlier web project Balkan Mediations in taking the ironies of today's intimate links between media and military technologies as its point of creative intervention, exploring the incongruities and brutalities of a context in which, to paraphrase Bob Ostertag, we now use the same tools to play, create media, and kill.