Sam Malabre (they/them) is a UCLA Game Lab Staff Member and Lecturer in the Design Media Arts program. Their work contends with the intersection between US imperialism and escapist fantasy. Some Brief Thoughts On Warzone And The War In Donbas (2021) is an essay written prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that explores the commodification and rewriting of contemporaneous wars and war zones within US AAA video games, specifically Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) and its multiplayer battle-royale mode, Warzone (2020). Beyond citations and a short afterword being added, this writing has not since been edited. 

The essay was submitted as part of their MFA graduate thesis Modern Wargames (2022), which examines the creation of their game a Modern Wargame through an interrogation of United States military action and how warmongering narratives are developed in the text and paratext of Call of Duty. As the war in Ukraine rages on and politics around US military imperialism shift, Malabre’s dissection of propagandist popular war video games, regurgitating real war atrocities in the guise of fun, becomes more relevant than ever.