Re-imagining "the East": Digital games, neo-orientalism and representation of the other in military shooter games

Cultural and ideological media that enable the continuation of the imperial and colonial domination of the West on the East, have gained diversity. Producing, publishing and distributing all kinds of information easily and quickly through digital technologies and communication devices, together with economic and technological power, from the West and Western perspective, which are in the position of political authority, is also being reflected to media contents; all kinds of media texts as films, music, newspaper, magazine, toys have been the carrier of the political, social, cultural and ideological structure of the West. Media texts, in particular, produce discourses on the 'East', and reposition the East as the 'Others'. In this context, digital games should not be considered as independent of the political, social, cultural and economic structure, either. How the mass media, just as it was in the past, is being used to influence the thoughts of the audience and to do this in a narrative through the use of fictional texts, digital games are also influenced by the period and conditions in which they exist. In connection with this, the attacks on Washington and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, caused the East to be rebuilt as the Other and represented negatively on the media. This affects the narrative structure of the military first-person shooter games, and these games create negative imagery of the East. From this point of view, military first-person shooter games named Medal of Honor (2010), Medal of Honor Warfighter (2012) and Battlefield (2011) that belong to US-based digital game developer, publisher and distributor company Electronic Arts' have been chosen in order to reveal the relationship between Neo-Orientalism and visual and discursive elements in these games. In order to reveal the relationship between Neo-Orientalism and visual and discursive elements in these games, John Fiske's three-stage frame which he formed with a semiotic approach and called "The Codes of Television" (2001) is used.