from “Meme”
Modern Warfare 2 has received very positive reviews from various gaming websites, attaining a 94% aggregate score on Metacritic, with praise stemming primarily from its in-depth multiplayer component. Upon its release, the game sold approximately 4.7 million copies worldwide in 24 hours. On June 15, 2010, Activision confirmed that the game had sold over 20 million copies worldwide and it is the best-selling game of all time in the UK, and the second best-selling game of all time in the U.S.—Wikipedia
Just as the physical or the screen of the psyche transforms every illness into a symptom . . . so war, when it is turned into information, ceases to be a realistic war and becomes a virtual war, in some way symptomatic. —Jean Baudrillard
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Wasteland
April is the cruelest girl in 8th grade, mixing Coke and Bacardi, stirring urges in PE. Territory scarce, the young male confronts himself. His naked body is a joke he tells his second skin. The heartbeat sensor detects enemies, and thereby blunts vision. As sniper he shies from desire, sees unseen through the scope of a Barrett .50. Flayed without hope, elusive targets haunt delay in the game’s genetic legacy of fuck it.
Karachi
Have you reckoned a thousand corpses much? I have seen them relayed “live” from the wars. The map pack details the city, whose northern section features a good size hotel, bus station, and café. HungLikeARaT scores again with a harrier’s deadly rain. Such prestige earns another call sign to replace his name. In this actual virtual world, seams disappear in a logic of deterrence. Share it, learn to melee beyond real time. Enter the game reborn.
Rundown
I heard my own dumb death-cry when I died: like Homer’s Doh! Some bored designer’s joke. Hurled blind by symtex through a concrete wall, where by some program glitch my corpse imbedded hung and twitched. That couldn’t really happen. It broke the structure of event, and for an instant, however small, my right thumb hovered over X. I was between. The medium concerned with what was there became preoccupied with space, with uncertainty, with displacement of forms. The way Francesca became the angel that she must have been as she fell.
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The poems in the Meme series grew out of my investigation into the blur between reality and virtual reality in the popular “first-person shooter” game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Watching my adolescent son and his friends play the game, and playing it myself, I was both fascinated and disturbed by the virtual immortality inherent in the game’s “respawn” function, the metaphorical overlap between the “rebirth” granted by the game and the rebirth promised by Christianity and Islam, and the overtly sexual nature of players’ game tags. Readers may draw from these phenomena what they will. MW2 (and its successors) seem to me a potent form of cultural transmission, one in a long line of memes which have supplanted literature, especially poetry, as an effective conduit for/in American culture. The poems in the meme series have two incongruous audiences: readers of poetry, who will recognize the literary allusions, and gamers, who will recognize the game-specific references and nomenclature. This tension drove the composition of these poems.
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Joshua McKinney is the author of two books of poetry: Saunter (University of Georgia) and The Novice Mourner (Bear Star). His recent work appears in the current or forthcoming issues of Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Phantom Drift, Ping Pong, VOLT, and other journals. He teaches literature and creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.