The Palace of Memory: Virtual Tourism and Tours of Duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq

This paper discusses two projects developed at the University of Southern California with funding from the U.S. military: Tactical Iraqi, a videogame that is designed to accelerate a learner’s acquisition of spoken Arabic to assist in the rapid deployment of soldiers into volatile tactical situations, and Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality simulation intended to lessen the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among combat veterans. Both programs specifically address issues of memory related to inhabiting these VR worlds and connect spatial experiences to acts of practices of recognition, recollection, and remembering: Tactical Iraqi is designed to prompt soldiers to remember specific Arabic words and phrases; Virtual Iraq is intended to trigger memories and appropriate coping mechanisms in combat veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper analyzes how the traditional “method of loci” or “art of memory” from classical rhetoric, which has been updated by Wong and Storkerson as a tool for hypertext theory, can also be applied to 3D graphical worlds with immersive multi-sensory environments. As Certeau argues, however, in his work on the “rhetoric of walking,” the architectures of these virtual worlds should properly offer possibilities for tactical resistance in order to be fully inhabited by their users.