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After six years in the Marines, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chris Velazquez struggled to readjust to civilian life and suffered from PTSD. A former civil affairs operator, Velazquez wanted to warn young people about the physical, mental, and sexual trauma that can result from service, something recruiters rarely mention when touting the perks of military life.
“These are things that a very small population of America—the veteran population—are witness to, and we don’t know there are other people wanting to talk about them,” Velazquez says. “I spent many years suffering.”
While searching for ways to help, Velazquez learned that the military’s recruiting tactics had shifted drastically since they became a Marine in 2004. At that time, the military’s presence in the gaming world was limited to a proprietary first-person-shooter called America’s Army, which featured missions modeled after real-life combat scenarios.
But starting in 2018, the military, struggling to meet enlistment goals, began invading gaming communities as part of a larger, digital-first strategy. Recruiters who had once stalked school assemblies and shopping malls began streaming games on social media and competing in tournaments to court new enlistees online.
Since then, the military’s online recruiting strategy has expanded to the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch, which attracts 140 million active users per month. The Army, Navy, and Air Force churn out hours of Twitch content per week, including streams of popular first-person-shooter games—a trend detailed by journalist Jordan Uhl for The Nation in 2020. The Armed Forces claim their gamers—who are culled from both regular and reserve forces and compensated accordingly—aren’t technically recruiters. But anti-war advocates say they might as well be: Children as young as thirteen, who are too young to legally enlist, can interact directly with military streamers, receiving answers to any questions they might have about service.
To counter this, Velazquez became a community developer for Gamers for Peace (GFP), the first peace organization formed to mirror the military’s online recruiting practices: While streaming popular games like Halo and Rocket League, its members—many of them veterans—offer career advice and mentorship to teens, talk politics, and discuss the realities of war. They also share information about online military recruitment tactics at in-person gaming conventions such as PAX Unplugged. These initiatives, members say, give prospective recruits the tools and knowledge to see other options and reconsider enlisting.
With limited funding and a mostly volunteer-based staff, GFP is taking on a government body with nearly unlimited resources in an asymmetrical battle of ideas. In 2020, the Navy alone allocated 97 percent of its advertising budget, nearly $33 million, to digital enterprises. The Army followed suit by sponsoring major gaming events and producing new digital ads that highlight benefits like housing assistance, pensions, and paid vacation.
“They just have more money, superyachts worth of money,” says GFP volunteer and Army veteran Zach Guiliano, who enlisted when he was eighteen. “We have an operating budget of a fraction of a drop in the bucket compared to them.”
The group has already accrued nearly 600 Twitch followers as well as 400 members on the popular messaging service Discord, where users share anti-recruitment resources and plan in-person and online events.
When military gamers stream these games, they further erode the line between the online world and reality, creating the impression that enlistees will go on to play games for a living, at no risk to their physical or mental health.
Members of GFP, an offshoot of the anti-war organization Veterans for Peace, hope to create their own e-sports teams and eventually compete in tournaments against the branches for which they once served. It won’t be easy; the Armed Forces’ players practice and compete professionally. And in May, all six branches competed in their own day-long, federally recognized tournament, further legitimizing their standing in the e-sports world.
GFP, at just under two years old, has already become a support hub for people considering military service as well as parents or grandparents who hope to dissuade their loved ones from enlisting. The group also gives advice to young activists like Danni, whose Ohio high school still hosts in-person recruiters. “It was at least a weekly occurrence that there was a booth from some branch at my school,” says Danni, who is now entering her senior year. “And there were posters everywhere.”
Danni, who gave only her first name, says she sometimes distracts recruiters with small talk or swipes their pamphlets as a form of civil disobedience. But she wants to find a more sustainable solution that will keep recruiters away for good as she returns to school this year.
Veterans for Peace members suggested that Danni advocate for on-campus representatives from alternative career paths any time a military recruiter is also there, especially because recruiters often target students who believe they have no other viable career path after graduation. The only other career booths at school, Danni says, are for restaurant jobs or similar entry-level positions. “Part of it might be having different options that younger people are going to see as careers,” Danni says. “Not just, ‘Oh, I could get a summer job or a job to help pay for my car.’”
The military’s entrenchment in the gaming world dates back decades: America’s Army was first released in 2002 and received two decades of support. The game series was recently shuttered, partly because blockbuster hits like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike have done a better job at enticing a new generation to join the military. Modern first-person shooter games feature sensationalized combat scenarios and accurately-modeled weapons that, although graphically realistic, fail to capture the traumatic consequences of warfare. They’re primarily meant for entertainment, after all, not for teaching gamers what it’s like to endure real combat.
When military gamers stream these games, they further erode the line between the online world and reality, creating the impression that enlistees will go on to play games for a living, at no risk to their physical or mental health. In reality, thousands of soldiers apply to be a part of the military’s e-sports groups every year, yet only a handful are chosen as representatives. And activists say that even viewers who never go on to join the military may instead wander into more extreme online communities, including the kinds of far-right militia groups that fuel mass shooters.
Until recently, criticism of the military’s digital recruiting tactics largely came from individual activists. In 2020, scores of Twitch users inundated the Army’s account, leaving comments that called attention to U.S. war crimes and human rights violations. After the Army banned those who had commented, the ACLU warned that, as a federal body, the military had no right to censor free speech. Months later, the Navy received backlash when one of its streamers laughed at other players’ usernames, which referenced the U.S. bombings of Japan and the n-word.
In July 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sponsored a bill that would have banned the military from Twitch and other streaming platforms, but the measure failed a House vote. And although the Army halted its streaming operation for a month to review its practices, it has since resumed its e-sports activities.
In the long-term, GFP hopes to revive legislation that protects children from online recruiters. But it's also pushing for smaller-scale change, such as lobbying Twitch to allow streamers the ability to opt-out of military advertisements attached to their videos.
Meanwhile, veteran members say the group has offered another unexpected benefit: Creating a new narrative about veterans and what they stand for. Giuliano explains that the most visible forms of veteran representation in films, TV shows, and video games are often laced with misogyny, violence, and nationalism. “A lot of people lump veterans into this big monolith,” Giuliano says. “[GFP] is doing a lot to push back on those stereotypes of what a veteran is supposed to be.”
It’s also a space where former service members can transform their own psychological wounds into something positive by sharing the kind of information they so desperately needed when they first considered enlisting.
“That's the thing that’s been most important to me in the last few years,” Velazquez says. “Having a community to be able to work through my own traumas and experiences, share them, and have a lasting impact.”