CBC Arts46%
What tactics are the Canadian Armed Forces using to recruit gamers? 50%
By Nathan Chizen0%
6/3/2026, 8:53:42 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Anecdotal, and Appeal to Emotion, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 33.9% saturation with 276 hits. Analysis detected 1,725 faulty-reasoning hits from 814 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.2% and a BS Rank of 50% (10,361 of 20,368 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 50.90% of the article peer group.
Recruitment in the Canadian Armed Forces is at a 30-year high.
That could be because of a new sense of nationalism, the economy or perhaps new recruitment videos on social media.
Fast-paced and action-packed, the Forces’ current campaign is heavily coded with references to gaming culture and Hollywood movies, ripping music from blockbuster video games like Battlefield 4 and evoking the camaraderie that emerges when you play Call of Duty alongside your squadmates.
But, the ad campaign also projects a certain image of Canada that many of its inhabitants may not agree with.
Today on Commotion, writer Kawika Guillermo talks to host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about what these clips pull from pop culture — and how the real-life call of duty has always been intertwined with video games.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity.
For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
Elamin: Along with this video, the Canadian Armed Forces writes, “Looks like a cutscene.
Feels like a calling.”
Talk to me about what that means in video game language.
Kawika: I don't know if they're actually gamers themselves — whoever wrote this — because the cutscenes in video games, especially in shooting games, are when the action usually stops and you watch people talk to each other about the plot.
Sometimes you see cool stuff happen, but usually the cool stuff is happening while you're playing [the game].
And I think especially with the graphics today, you don't need a cutscene to show something cool, it just happens in the game.
But I could see the desire to appeal to gamers that they're trying to do with that word.
“Calling,” though, actually makes it feel more gamer-like in some ways to me.
Because, whether it's role-playing or shooting or whatever, so much of it is about you — the player — having some calling and responding to it.
It's almost a spiritual dimension [that] a lot of games [have] that keep people — me as well — playing them.
You could be whatever in real life, but then in this game, you have this calling, [like being] a wizard who has to save the universe, and that's part of your identity.
I think superhero movies do the same thing, so it is a blending of these two artforms, both of which — the shooter video game and Marvel movies — are so enmeshed in what we in academia call “The Militainment Complex.”
The Pentagon, for example, can literally censor certain plot elements in a Marvel movie because they have consultants working on those movies.
Similar stuff happens in video games.
And so there's so much crossover between the military in Canada and the U.S. and these games.
I think that it's been like that basically since the beginning of video games, so it's not really that surprising that this is continuing in this way.
Elamin: I just got to ask you, by using images pulled from gaming culture, what kind of image of Canada do you think shows up in that recruitment video?
Kawika: I'd love to speak about this, because I just became a Canadian citizen last year, and so I did feel the visceral effect when I watched this video, which was like, “Oh my God.
What is this?
This is not my Canada.”
Even though it's been “my” Canada for less than a year, I thought of that.
And I mostly thought of Indigenous claims, and the way Indigenous people see land and how this video was kind of taking the worst tendencies of gaming and gamer culture.
A lot of gaming is about taking over land and being violent to the land — testing [and] using atomic weaponry and things like that.
And of course, militaries around the world have that history of doing stuff like that.
There's been this big problem and discussion in gaming and how [the] land is represented.
It's bulleted through.
The land is there for you to reform — like in Minecraft — to completely take over and colonize.
And I think a lot of games have really had to reckon with that.
A lot of game makers — Indigenous game makers as well — have tried to really push back in the way that we relate to land in games.
So to see it regress back — to the way that games would express that 20 years ago — [and] trudged through in that way was hard, because I've really come to learn to love the land in Canada.
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Kawika Guillermo produced by John Perry.
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97%flagged-word coverageKawika Guillermo
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