ABSTRACT
The January 2008 edition of the popular Dutch game magazine Power Unlimited featured a two-page advertisement by the Koninklijke Landmacht (Royal Dutch Army). The full color advertisement on pages two and three carried the tagline: ‘Fine leadership comes naturally.’ The left page shows soldiers pointing at a map and discussing strategy, the right page packed a lot of reading. Interestingly, the ad shows no weaponry at all and is, compared to the showy marketing material for war games, quite considerate. The underlying recruiting motive here is professionalism – accepting a ranking job in the Royal Dutch Army primarily asks for management and leadership skills. Putting an ad in a game magazine is an obvious move, considering the shared target demographic (16- to 26-year-old boys) of both gaming magazines and army recruiters. Despite ‘a disappearing audience for war’ (Carruthers 2008), the First Person Shooter (FPS) game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare topped the all important 2008 holiday sales charts and has sold over nine million copies.
