This article examines the multiplayer environment that has become a central part of most competitive First Person Military Shooter (FMPS) franchises, including Battlefield and Call of Duty. While framed by a narrative, multiplayer games involve most directly a repeated negotiation of a particular space informed by certain rules. When narrative fades into the background the way that space is imagined and produced in the game becomes crucial. The ideological import of the game now relies on the nature of the ludic space where the gamer is placed and which he or she interacts with. With this in mind, the article explores the Battlefield 3 multiplayer map Grand Bazaar. Like some other Battlefield 3 maps, Grand Bazaar exists also as an actual place and is thus not only an imaginary ludic territory. To discuss the connection between this map, the real place and the way that the Middle East is often imagined in Western discourse, the investigation will make use of Sybille Lammes’ notion of “magic nodes” (Lammes, 2008) - a concept that stresses the ways in which ludic spaces are connected to the social and actual world - and Josh Smicker’s contention that First Person Military Shooter games increasingly produce “proleptic” or anticipatory warfare scenarios. The conclusion of the article is that the map Grand Bazaar is imagined as a permanent battleground and that the creation of such a ludic space is part of the “combat against futurity” that this genre of games often engages in.