When the Cold War abated, military budgets shrunk. Strapped for funds, the U.S. Marines licensed seminal first-person-shooter (FPS) Doom from id Software and built their own version for soldiers to play. Companies like Sega began designing simulation software for defense contractors, since they could do it more affordably. For a few years, FPS games were all called Doom clones since so many of them used Doom shareware (Voorhees 2012, 97). Part of the inspiration for the military’s collaboration with videogame producers was Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985), which depicts videogame interfaces for real military battles (Mead 2013, 58).
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Doom’s world was stripped down and streamlined for Marine Doom. Martian dungeons became “sparse, dust-colored plain punctuated by small brick bunkers, foxholes, and barbed-wired barriers” (Halter 2006, 167). Aliens and demons were replaced by “very human-looking opposing forces, clad in simple khaki military uniforms of a vaguely Communist/Nazi cut” (167). The game’s new purpose was teaching Marines “how to work together in teams and make split-second decisions in the midst of combat” (Mead 2013, 22). Doom served as a basis for further military use of first-person shooters (Stahl 2010, 96). Videogames and military training depended on the same basic logic: “what’s good for the Xbox is good for the combat simulator” (Miller 2011, 110). The U.S. military still depends on commercial companies for its training technology.
In 1993, the U.S. Senate convened a joint hearing of the judiciary and government affairs committees to work on a videogame ratings act, responding to complaints about the violence in Mortal Kombat (1993) and Night Trap (1992). In 1994, the electronic software ratings board was created, making the act unnecessary (Voorhees 2012, 97). In 1997, three students were killed at a high school in Kentucky. In response, activist Jack Thompson filed a lawsuit against the makers of the movie Basketball Diaries and against id Software, the makers of Doom, Quake, and Castle Wolfenstein (Voorhees 2012, 99). Thompson asserted videogame violence is causally related to real-life violence. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the concerns were not. Two years later the Columbine massacre happened, and Doom was implicated.
The cowboy apocalypse is at once a religious expression, a form of fan devotion, and an ideological platform with the potential for violent expression.
In an interview, games critic David Grossman argues FPS games are effective training modules for soldiers and for children:
[W]hen the children play the violent videogames, they’re drilling, drilling, drilling…every night, to kill every living creature in front of you, until…you run out of bullets. [W]e’re reasonably confident that in Pearl, Mississippi, and in Paducah, Kentucky, and in Jonesboro, Arkansas, these juvenile, adolescent killers set out to shoot just one person: usually their girlfriend, maybe a teacher. But, then, they kept on going! And, they gunned down every living creature in front of them, until they ran out of targets or ran out of bullets! (Steinberg 2000)
Grossman is confident he knows exactly why shooters target their friends and loved ones: because they had been playing violent videogames.
Some skills do transfer from simulations: “Soldiers shoot at targets shaped like people; this trains them to shoot real people. When pilots work in flight simulators, the skills they develop transfer to the real world” (Penny 2004, 80). Games, like simulations, can “build behaviors” (81). Educators have long recognized the ability of games to shape users. Some studies relate exposure to violent gaming content with “aggressive cognitions, aggressive feelings, and aggressive behaviors” (Gentile 2011, 77). Nonetheless, it becomes difficult to isolate what element of the gaming experience triggered which behaviors afterward (76). More interesting to me is why gun play is so central in the first place.
After training with a military simulation, soldiers go from holding a virtual weapon to holding a real weapon, though their behavior is expected to be the same. A mouse click causes an explosion. Pushing a button shoots a gun: “It requires very little imaginative effort to enter such a world because the sense of agency is so direct” (Murray 2017, 146). Real guns offer a similar sense of agency, with more boom.
The FPS’s popularity in the new millennium is not coincidental. As the “perfect platform for post-9/11 military power fantasies,” the FPS took an incomprehensible horror and offered an individualized ritual response. In these games, the player enters a war-ravaged world equipped with an arsenal of weapons. The player’s mission is to utilize “deadly force repeatedly without fear of moral or legal repercussions.” The military shooter is a “ludic antidote” to the shock of 9/11 (Payne 2016, 10). In the FPS fantasy, one soldier can fight back with enough force to make a difference. Videogames, especially FPS games, “promised Manichean moral universes and frontiersman heroes, which could reaffirm our national mythology as the world’s lone and righteous military superpower” (27). As forms of pre-mediation, military shooters “give players hope that these reimagined 9/11s can have different outcomes than their horrific ur-text.” Military shooters “give players ways of striking back” (29).
War is often viewed today through games. Conflict: Desert Storm (Pivotal Games 2002) reenacts events from the first Gulf War. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward 2007) puts players in spots of real-life military tension in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine. War is “digitally mediated through computerized targeting, mapping surveillance, and communication systems” revealing how closely aligned game design and military technology are (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, 98). A first-person shooter can be distinguished from a “high-end battle simulator” by “the location of one in an adolescent bedroom and the other in a military base” (Penny 2004, 76).
The army developed their own videogame, America’s Army, released in 2002, with 2.5 million downloads in two months (Mead 2013, 74). For six years it was one of the top online games (71). The game was based on meticulous research: photographs of actual weapons; real sound effects; filming of helicopter rides; realistic animations (like throwing a grenade); and detailed physics (91–93). There were both commercial and Army-only versions of the game (99).
The U.S. Army hosted a spectacle of military access outside the L.A. Convention Center’s South Hall, to promote the new Special Forces edition of their popular title America’s Army. As part of this spectacle, they offered passersby the opportunity to pose holding a large assault rifle next to a camouflaged Special Forces operative and a Humvee. In a nimble perversion of the tourist trap, the army even offered complimentary Polaroid photos of potential players (and recruits) posed for glorious combat. (Bogost 2011, 134)
The gun is a fully functional prop, an expansion of the America’s Army world and an invitation into that world. The gun invites accommodation between the real-life world of the military and the game’s invitation to gun play.
Full Spectrum Warrior (2004) was also designed for military training before being repackaged and released to the public. The game takes place in a fictional country called Zekistan with characters who look vaguely Middle Eastern. The game teaches soldiers to “defeat any adversary and control any situation, across the ‘full spectrum’ of possibilities, ranging from nuclear threats to terrorist activities to bands of low-tech tribal warriors” (Halter 2006, 230). The affinity is built in. Every commercial copy has a version of the original Army game hidden within it, accessible via a cheat code (234).
Medal of Honor: Operation Anaconda (2010) identifies the player as a Delta Force sniper and a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan: “running, crouching, jumping and shooting one’s way through huts, caves and pastures” (Mirrlees 2014, 96). Players direct missile strikes and drone attacks against ground targets, including Taliban encampments (97). The game promoted war in Afghanistan, attempting to “sell the real military violence of the U.S. state since 9/11” (98). Games like Medal of Honor make war seem enjoyable. Far from neutral representations of events, they instigate apocalyptic interpretations of military violence, with good guys fighting bad guys. They use the same logic as FPS games intended for entertainment, and why not? The games are built with similar engines.
The FPS supplements other forms of transmedia storytelling about guns. The gun is a privileged object, a ritual fetish, a prop, a paratext, a souvenir, inscribed within a violent ritual enacted in FPS games. The plot is not irrelevant, but subservient to the experience of shooting. FPS games can be viewed as flexible gun rituals for fans, transmedia extensions for preexisting storyworlds including the cowboy apocalypse.
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A set of action games with distinctive cowboy apocalypse features are Red Dead Revolver, Red Dead Redemption, and Red Dead Redemption 2. All three Red Dead games take place in a frontier environment that enables players to act out cowboy fantasies. The Red Dead games are built on a proprietary engine also used to make games in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. The games incorporate a “Dead Eye” mechanic that lets players slow the action down to aim at different parts of an enemy’s body, making shooting aesthetically pleasing. Of Red Dead Redemption 2, NPR’s Jason Sheehan gushes that the game is:
…too big, too sprawling, too full for taking on in a piece-by-piece look at the story. Enough, maybe, to say that it tells, over the course of 60-plus hours, an epic, bloody tale of betrayal and obsolescence. It is, in the universe of videogames, our Godfather, our Star Wars or Wild Bunch—the work that transcends its genre and, in this case, its medium. It is a film brought to life, a novel given legs, and to speak about any piece of it is to necessarily reduce it to a bunch of cogs and sprockets—how this piece fits with that one. And that’s a disservice, I think. (Sheehan 2019)
Red Dead Redemption 2 undermines presumptions of the cowboy apocalypse when it critiques violence as salvific. As the player’s avatar Morgan dies, he is unable to fight. Sheehan explains: “To live by the gun and die by it has a kind of internal poetry that we instinctively accept. But to live by the gun and die on the side of a mountain, coughing your lungs out as everything goes dark? That’s harsh judgment in a way that I’ve rarely seen before. It’s brilliant. It’s perfect” (Sheehan 2019). Unable to escape the illness programmed into the game, the player (as Morgan) comes to question the life of the cowboy hero. Without a noble death or shining triumph, the player is denied a sense of victory. By recognizing features of the cowboy apocalypse story and subverting them, the game can say something new.
Usually, though, the gun represents precision, prediction, and control. Speaking of a gun controller she used in an arcade, media scholar Janet Murray says:
[T]he six-shooter was an ideal threshold object, a physical device I could hold in my hand that was also an imaginary device in the world of the story. I only had to put my hands around it to enter the immersive trance. Ideally, every object in a digital narrative—should offer the interactor as clear a sense of agency and as direct a connection to the immersive world as I felt in the arcade holding a six-shooter-shaped laser gun and blasting away at the outlaws. (2017, 180–181)
The virtual gun is a special kind of object; an appendage, a means of expression. We do not see our mouth on the screen, and we rarely (if ever) speak as an avatar in an FPS game. But we do make noise:
We shoot. The gun calls to us because interfaces are discursive, in that their signifying elements are organized around a continuous hailing of the human beings who use them—a beckoning spatial representation marked by the cursor, the startup beep, the avatarial gun. This is the uncanny power of what we might call speaking technologies: the perception, produced even through mundane interaction, that we are the subject of their address, that we have been recognized. (Rehak 2003, 122)
Because the software cannot run without us, it summons us to make it whole. This is the same power held by the unplayed music score, the unperformed drama, and the unacted ritual. In an FPS game, the gun is the star of the show. It is not only used by the player; it becomes the player. Or does the player become the gun?
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Storytelling today is increasingly a form of transmedia worldbuilding. Books, novels, props, videogames, live events, and online presence mark fans as devoted while they explore multiple interrelated modes of engaging with their favorite storyworld. Although most of these forms of engagement are with media, fans can also engage with material props as they allow the world of their fandom to leak into their everyday lives. If we situate the FPS game within the context of the transmediated cowboy apocalypse, we find that its ritualized expression via its game engine marks it as a flexible add-on, able to operate effectively within the cowboy apocalypse no matter what thematic content the game draws on.
The theme of good-guy-shoots-bad-guy-in-a-violently-disrupted-world allows players to ritually act out themes more pronounced in other extensions of the cowboy apocalypse, like in books, films, and television shows. The material gun can serve as a prop for the FPS ritual of violence, encouraging the most devoted players to experience how the world of apocalyptic resolution might be instantiated in the real world, now. Such a virtual world can, troublingly, serve as a “refuge from the trials and troubles of the world” that some white supremacists, misogynists, and privileged but politically threatened people feel (Wolf 2019, 141).
Transmedia involves fictional extensions that are dispersed but which together comprise a unified entertainment experience (Jenkins 2007). However, transmedia worlds need not provide perfect narrative consistency. What seems to matter most is a sense of cohesion and investment. Players care less about the construction of “coherent universes and non-redundant content” and more about compelling experiences (Bertetti 2020, 265).
Even though the cowboy apocalypse can be delivered in a multitude of formats with distinctive characters and environments, the core story remains recognizable. The gun is its most vital prop. We could even view the gun as a transmedial hub, with narrative extensions flowing from its ordained place at the center of the good-guy story. The cowboy apocalypse is the center of gravity for all sorts of American media, but it presents a model that is less formal than Hollywood-controlled transmedia.
Hollywood transmedia functions according to the intellectual property (IP) model. Licenses are sold to creators who can then adapt the IP across different platforms (Atkinson 2019, 16). Many of these franchises have film as a central component, like Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Transformers. This “mothership” model presumes a single consistent narrative hub, while acknowledging that different fans may be drawn to different texts. This approach is “inclusive, centripetal, and marked by the need to balance unity and order…with users’ accessibility” (Boni 2017, 18). The Matrix, for example, has films, comic books, a series of short films, computer games, action figures, costumes, and fan-initiated forms of paratexts like sunglasses, boots, and rabbit tattoos. The Star Wars franchise has live action films, animated series, comic books, videogames, Lego building kits, toys, and other merchandise.
Likenesses are used in television ads, marketing campaigns, and event appearances (Wolf 2019, 143). Stories across media are compatible.
Thinking of the ways transmedia can be generated in a less systematic form, scholar and writer Paolo Bertetti says we need “a more flexible conception than the one originally described by Jenkins” (2020, 265). Transmedia storytelling is not always planned and strategized, especially when fans are involved in its production. The idea of a unified and coordinated core world is “rarer than one might expect” (375). Fictional worlds do not depend on a fixed set of events or characters (Juul 2005, 173). What is more, a videogame based in a fictional transmedia world (like the cowboy apocalypse) might “only give players access to certain parts of this world and only allow players to act on a certain level” (176). Transmediality has “messy objectives…tailored for messy, fragmentary, hard-to-pin-down audiences” (Freeman and Gambarato 2020, 5).
This second kind of transmedia is centrifugal, since it spins outward without a controlling mechanism. It is less rigid and “open to unpredictable results” (Boni 2017, 18). “In older times, proliferation was spontaneous, bottom-up, multi-authored. Stories sprouted branches in many directions, like a rhizome, and storyworlds grew organically. Popular stories inspired transmedia adaptations without having been conceived for this explicit purpose” (43). For example, biblical narratives are transmedia, “dispersed across the world, found in stained glass windows and frescoes, in paintings and performances” (16). Today, they are found in comic books, enacted with action figures, and performed in church plays. Religion has always exhibited a transmedia quality, characterized by fan devotion and creativity.
The power of the cowboy apocalypse is that so many people seem to tell it, perform it, consume it, and make it their own.
The cowboy apocalypse is a contemporary example of this rhizomatic model of transmedia. Transmediality “seeks to transform the world into a story and the story into a story world. It is a means of crafting immersion, it seems—and, specifically, offering storytellers creative, pervasive ways to engage audiences emotionally and experientially” (Freeman and Gambarato 2020, 6). Emerging out of frontier-driven and post-Civil War stories, the transmediated cowboy apocalypse succeeds because of fan enthusiasm. In this spontaneous, user-driven mode of transmediation, the storyworld may unfold across many different texts, including the platform of the real world. The cowboy apocalypse is akin to oral culture, grounded in American myths of white supremacy and redemptive violence. Not all oral culture is worth preserving.
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As an expression of white masculine nostalgia, the cowboy apocalypse is tainted with imperialism. The myth appears today as a repeatedly mediated performance of desire for a simpler time when white men defined American values and others knew their place. By positing an imagined world in the future, the cowboy apocalypse is at once a religious expression, a form of fan devotion, and an ideological platform with the potential for violent expression. The FPS shooter is one of the cowboy apocalypse’s favorite rituals, valuable for its implicit spillover into real life as people virtually enact violence in a safe space protected as a form of mere play.
Twentieth-century Dutch sociologist Johan Huizinga famously defined play as:
…a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being not serious, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. (1955, 13)
Play is “stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own” (8). Huizinga called this place a magic circle and notes its religious and ritual qualities:
All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the “consecrated spot” cannot be formally distinguished from the playground. (10)
Games offer a space in which players are protected from physical consequences of their gaming actions (Bogost 2006, 136). But there is no way to perfectly seal off a game; they leak. The magic circle “is not a metaphysical shield that insulates players from the world.” It is a “permeable social barrier that filters out certain elements, while allowing others through.” A game is more than the code that governs it because the players “breathe life into it” (Payne 2016, 22). Their real-life commitments are already there: “To play a game is in many ways an act of ‘faith’ that invests the game with its special meaning—without willing players, the game is a formal system waiting to be inhabited, a piece of sheet music waiting to be played” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003, 98). It is easy to see how gameplay can serve some of the same functions as ritual, which also is set outside ordinary life, proceeds according to generally fixed rules, and encourages commitment that bleeds into real life.
Videogames “cannot help but carry the baggage of ideology” (Bogost 2006, 135). Players enter games with their own opinions and exit the games impacted by scripted, virtual experiences of the game and its rules spill over into life. Players and their presumptions—good or bad—do too. There is a gap in the magic circle through which players move. They carry their own sense of subjectivity in and out of the game: “If the magic circle were really some kind of isolated antithesis to the world, it would never be possible to access it at all” (135). And for FPS players, the gun is central. Although a causal link between videogames and violence is unproven, “the link between videogames and guns is right there in front of us” (Hamilton 2018). David Trend, who is skeptical about the causative influence of media violence on real-life violence, nonetheless claims:
Many contemporary television shows, movies, and videogames tell a man he needs to be able to use force, to fight, and that fighting is a suitable way to solve problems or get what you want in certain situations. This is one of the areas where media violence really does shape people’s thinking in certain ways. It works in the background, and our unconscious minds, making subtle changes in our attitudes about the world and how we behave. (2007, 63)
Media can “replicate racial profiles and urban stereotypes,” and reinforce “inaccurate negative beliefs about immigrants, the poor, people with mental health problems, and anyone who falls outside conceptions of white, middle-class normalcy” (99). Rituals can work this way too, situating us in a larger world in which values (inclusive or exclusive) are reinforced across performative modes of mediation. Worlds do not exist without the people who inhabit them. We choose what we consume, and we choose the worlds with which we will engage. So it is no surprise that someone could participate in gun fandom and express it in a variety of ways. The power of the cowboy apocalypse is that so many people seem to tell it, perform it, consume it, and make it their own.
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Excerpted from Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion and the Myth of the Vigilante Messiah by Rachel Wagner. Copyright © 2025. Available from NYU Press.
