https://vimeo.com/48340352
Dust 2 Dust, 2013
Two teams of weapons battle for control of a small Middle Eastern town in Counter-Strike: Source.
In a modified version of a popular online wargame, two opposing teams of self-actuating firearms struggle for dominion over a dusty town somewhere in the Middle East.
The media presents war in simplistic terms: soldiers on either side of a conflict are either exalted as heroes or vilified as “the enemy.” Video games echo these harsh divisions in the way they differentiate between teams, allowing players to make split-second decisions about who they should be shooting.
When the uniforms and identifying features of combatants are stripped away, however, lines of division disappear, and determining the alignment of each combatant becomes impossible; the soldiers are reduced to weapons, wielded against one another.