Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

English

Committee Director

Kevin A. Moberly

Committee Member

Angelica J. Huizar

Committee Member

Matthew T. Payne

Committee Member

Don T. Rodrigues

Abstract

This dissertation examines the military science fiction video game franchise, Gears of War (2006– ), as a complex cultural artifact that reflects, distorts, and critiques the political apparatuses of post-9/11 American state fantasy and the mythologies sustaining the Global War on Terror. Analyzing the original trilogy’s worldbuilding, gameplay, and narrative through the interrelated frameworks of global technoculture, political theory, and military history, this dissertation situates Gears of War’s ludic text as a prescient work of speculative fiction. In effect, the games invite sustained engagement with the symbolic discourses underpinning the long cultural traditions of American militarism, exceptionalism, and national mythmaking. Weaving together an interdisciplinary framework that draws from theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Richard Slotkin, Fredric Jameson, Richard Jackson, Darko Suvin, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, this dissertation contributes to Game Studies and war media scholarship by arguing that Gears of War constructs a meaningful ludic possibility space – one that invites players into a self-reflexive confrontation with the ideological contradictions of post-9/11 counterterror warfare and the cultural myths that justify its function as a fundamental thread of the American cultural tapestry.

Structured around the thematic pillars of Global, War, and Terror, this dissertation traces how Gears of War models the underlying suicidal tendencies of postmodern technocapitalist world-systems, interrogates the mythological constructions of patriotism, and reconfigures the political body of the monstrous terrorist Other. Central to this analysis is the concept of impure war – a model of warfare that disrupts the sanitized spectacle of traditional militainment, instead presenting counterterror war as an iterative cycle of loss, futility, and systemic collapse. Ultimately, this dissertation contends that Gears of War models a grim but vital cultural logic – one that invites players to confront a self-destructive world-system where a “war on terror” inevitably transmogrifies into a forever “war of terror.” In doing so, Gears of War invites a symbolic reckoning with America’s unresolved post-9/11 anxieties, exposing how the fantasy of perpetual war – and the endless search for a monstrous enemy – is not just a narrative trope but a lasting foundation that foregrounds the affective undercurrent of dread shaping American political and cultural identity.

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DOI

10.25777/k3n3-kn83

ISBN

9798280752894

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