Military-themed videogames are significant cultural artifacts that shape popular geopolitical narratives and venerate dominant post-9/11 War on Terror discourses. Overwhelmingly resonant with the Military Entertainment Complex, these artifacts, not excluding America’s Army (2002–2013), envision the world through a Western lens. Over the past decades, America’s Army has come to challenge dominant orthodoxies and ideological presuppositions, disseminating new configurations of power. The article argues that the latest installment of the game, America’s Army: Proving Grounds (2013), marks a paradigmatic shift from the post-9/11 discourse permeating most military-themed videogames. Taking past scholarship on geopolitics and multimodal legitimation as points of departure, the current study unfolds the militarized aesthetics and politics of gameplay unique to America’s Army: Proving Grounds in its capacity to promote redefined ideals of hegemonic masculinity, on the one hand, and substantiate US universal legitimacy, on the other. To this end, the research endeavor proposes a more nuanced multimodal legitimation analytical framework in an attempt to capture the full spectrum of the semiotic affordances instilled in the gaming space. Key convergent discourses and practices of hegemony emerge therein, fundamentally: proficiency, efficiency, virtuosity, agility, nobility, solidarity, precision, stoicism, and aggression. The spatio-temporal shift away from post-9/11 discourses reifies new militaristic representations of hegemonic masculinity symbiotically entangled with futuristic and non-contemporary ideological war narratives.

以军事为主题的视频游戏是重要的文化人工产物，它们塑造了流行的地缘政治叙述，并尊敬9/11后《反恐战争》的主流话语。这些文物与军事娱乐中心产生了压倒性的共鸣，但不排除美国陆军（2002-2013年）的影响，它们是通过西方视角来设想世界的。在过去的几十年中，美国陆军已经开始挑战占主导地位的正统观念和意识形态前提，传播新的权力配置。文章认为，该游戏的最新部分是《美国陆军：试验场》（2013），标志着从9/11以后的话语渗透到了大多数以军事为主题的视频游戏中。以过去对地缘政治学和多式联运合法性的研究为出发点，当前的研究展现了美国陆军独特的军事美学和游戏玩法：试验场一方面具有促进重新定义的霸权男性主义理想的能力，另一方面有力地证明了美国的普遍合法性。为此，研究工作提出了一种更加细微的多模式合法性分析框架，以试图捕获注入游戏空间的全范围的符号学能力。霸权主义的主要融合论述和实践从根本上出现：熟练，效率，技巧，敏捷，贵族，团结，精确，坚忍和侵略。时空偏离了9/11以后的论述，重新诠释了与未来主义和非当代意识形态战争叙事共生的霸权男性气质的新军事主义表现形式。