That Time a Punk Band Did Games Criticism

Potemkin City Limits (2005) is the fourth studio album from the Manitoba-based hardcore punk band Propagandhi, and their last on Fat Wreck Chords. It marked the solidification of their heavily melodic and much more metallic sound that first appeared on the now-iconic Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes, and it featured some of their strongest lyrics to date. The first track on the album, “A Speculative Fiction,” won the first-annual SOCAN ECHO Songwriting Prize; vocalist Chris Hannah’s cuts through the air on the track itself: “A new iron curtain drawn across the 49th parallel. Cut all diplomatic ties as we expel all American dignitaries and issue a nation-wide travel advisory for any others left inside. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.”

The album is chock-full of social and cultural criticisms, awash with anti-colonial, anti-war, anti-capitalist and anarchist language and imagery, infused with empathy. Songs like “Bringer of Greater Things” are sung and played like standard metal-tinged punk fare, but in Hannah’s voice as well is a great deal of pain. This is a through line you can follow onto their later albums, Supporting Caste (2009), Failed States (2012) and Victory Lap (2017).

But to my knowledge, none of their other albums, past or present, feature legit video game criticism like Potemkin City Limits does. Enter “America’s Army™ (Die Jugend Marschiert).”

The song starts with 30 seconds or so of a clip of Hitler Youth singing, well, “Die Jugend Marschiert,” and marching, ending the song with a “Sieg Heil” before the actual song busts in with an explosion of guitar and the introduction of our characters: Mindy, a representative of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, and Colonel Casey Wardynski, who from 1999 until 2010 oversaw development of the video game franchise America’s Army, among other things. He was also Trump’s Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs from 2019 to 2021. The song is framed as some kind of keynote address given to West Point students and their parents, and it begins like this:

“Welcome to the offices of Economic and Manpower Analyses here at our historic and sprawling West Point Academy campus! My name is Mindy! It is my distinct pleasure to introduce you to a loving father of three (and a champion of the sanctioned use of armed force in pursuit of policy objectives). Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the project director of our newest recruitment strategy; our mission to staff future combat systems through current technologies. Without any further ado, I give to you Colonel Casey Wardynski!”

Right away you understand – if you missed it from the inclusion of the nazi babies choir at the beginning – that this isn’t meant to be nice to the Colonel, West Point or anyone at the OEMA. Propagandhi’s position on the then-raging war in Iraq and Afghanistan was “fuck the United States and its imperialist attempt to annihilate people in the Middle East,” and in this context it’s specifically “fuck the United States – its army and its citizens – for so willingly accepting a military recruitment tool that is also a video game.” When Hannah inserts that parenthetical it’s meant to remind us of that as we’re bombarded by Mindy’s marketing-minded introduction.

The music is uptempo and upbeat in a major key, and even the lyrics (found on Propagandhi’s website) mark a break of “warm applause” as Wardynski takes the podium. But as Wardynski starts to speak, the tone subtly changes:

“Thank you! Let me begin with some sentimental appeals to our national myths; assorted clichés coined by the state; the ideological shorthand meant to sweep your private doubts [away] of this virtual training course. This portal; this Trojan Horse that you living idiots paid for and actually rolled into your own kids’ rooms.”

They just can’t keep up the satirical facade for long, because it isn’t really meant to be funny.

“(stunned silence)”

The music takes on a more foreboding sound now. The drums change their rhythm, gone are the driving more-typically-punk guitars, and we’re back in “A Speculative Fiction” territory. After an extended bridge, Hannah comes back in with “Did I just say that out loud? Oh, well, it’s not like it’s something new.” In the band’s eyes, America’s Army is simply the logical end-result of a society too eager to blur the line between state and civilian, and the parents of the generation who would grow up playing this game and its three sequels and four spinoffs (the latest one, America’s Army 5, was supposed to be out in 2021, but we couldn’t find anything on its ongoing development aside from a thread on the America’s Army forum from three years ago). The military-simulator/first-person shooter genre has only gotten more crowded in the ensuing 16 years, and now gamers can take their pick from several franchises devoted to displaying military force of some kind.

“In a post-9/11 cultural climate, however, media critics and ‘children’s rights’ advocates have shown little concern about the blurring of public (military; public policy) and private spaces (family; home entertainment), ostensibly rendering insignificant the discursive and representational intrusion of war into the previously insulated household space and to the once-protected constituency of middle-class children,” wrote C. Richard King and David J. Leonard in 2010. “This paradigmatic shift is readily apparent within the video games industry, which has seen a proliferation of war narratives in recent years. Somewhat surprisingly, little has been made of the proliferation of children’s wargames, concerning their promulgation of violence, their calls for U.S.-global supremacy, or the ways in which a vast majority of wargames consistently racialize and reduce to dangerous ‘others’.”^[1]King, C. Richard, and David J. Leonard. “Wargames as a New Frontier: Securing American Empire in Virtual Space.” Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, Routledge, … Continue reading

Hannah, continuing that thought, channeling Wardynski: “Deep down you’ve always known that your children already belong to us, so why don’t you cut the outraged parent routine, shut your mouth and get back in your seat. Your children already belong to us. What are you? You will pass on. And they won’t know a fucking thing but this ‘community,’ this real life Ender’s Game. Forget what you think you know.”

America’s Army may be little more than a ghost, barely kept alive by the PlayStation 4 and a military that refuses to give up on chances to ingratiate itself with youth much smarter than it, but it will never not be a recruiting tool for a dying, desperate empire. Even a Canadian punk band could see that in 2005.