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Games and the Military

Submitted by dr. b. on Mon, 03/21/2005 - 1:58pm. 4Cs | Conferences | Game Theory | Research and Writing
Cindy Selfe talked about violent video games being the product of a violent society rather than the other way around. During her talk she also talked about the games that were being used and or produced by the military for training and recruitment purposes. It makes perfect sense to distribute a military shooter for free and then "give gamers the opportunity" to report their scores back to the game site for posting. Shit, that way you have a running record of folks who might be prime candidates.

Mary Flanagan is guest blogging over at Grand Text Auto and blogged about games and the military. She is directing folks over to the Department of Defense Game Developers' Community to check out their articles and research section. There is some interesting stuff there.

Andrew Stern , regular over there at Grand Text, links to the blog of one of the developer's of America's Army (the game commissioned by the Army for recruitment), Scott Miller of Game Matters, and his discussion of the political madness that surrounded the game.

This is more stuff for me to read once I actually get caught up from Cs.

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what games do

Submitted by mre@kairosnews.org on Mon, 03/21/2005 - 5:40pm.
Interesting. I think it is a rather insidious practice, taking something that teenagers do for fun and using it to funnel them -- perhaps unreflectively -- into a vocation that will put their lives on the line and require them to kill living, breathing humans. I do worry -- as someone who served in the 24th Infantry Division -- that these games will, in fact, desensitize future soldiers; that they'll see a direct parallel between frags in first-person shooters and kills in combat -- and that would short-circuit the knowledge that I shared with my Army buddies, the knowledge that the guy on the other end of the battlefield is just like you; perhaps even more like you than the civilians who hold demonstrations on your behalf and claim to speak for your interests, because that guy on the other end of the battlefield carries a rifle just like you do, and has to deal with hierarchical military BS just like you do, and has a girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife just like you do, one who's worried about that guy's safety and waiting for him to come home just like yours is, and who's just as scared at the prospect as having to put rifle butt to shoulder and look through the sights at another human being and squeeze the trigger as you are. In short, I'm saying that rank-and-file soldiers know just how horrible war is far better than anyone else, and games like America's Army (which, yes, I've played) interrupt that knowledge. But as far as the "prime candidates" thing goes, I think the games serve to track motivation and interest far better than they track ability: low-crawling with your face in the sand to maintain cover while you're carrying a 60-pound ruck and an M16 and wearing a 25-pound flak jacket with a full load of seven 30-round magazines and two grenades plus smoke and flares and trying under those circumstances to actually execute your mission has absolutely nothing to do with pushing buttons in front of a video screen. Video games do nothing for directly improving skills in the actual practice of warfare, as any training NCO will tell you. Anyway -- thanks for the thoughts and links. The Scott Miller stuff rings particularly true, and brings back bad memories of all the political chain-of-command BS. There's an Army truism that the enthusiastic Army exclamation "Hooah!" ought to be spelled "HUA" and stand for Head Up @$$. -- Mike
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On soldier training

Submitted by dr. b. on Mon, 03/21/2005 - 6:00pm.
I agree that games don't indicate real ability in battle, by prime candidates I meant folks that may be inclined to want to participate in the sterilized view of war that games offer. What I do find interesting are studies like Nina Huntemann's Game Over : Gender, Race & Violence in Video Games , while I don't put much stock in some of the stuff in this piece I did find the historical stats pretty interesting, especially those that indicated that moving from bulls eyes in WWI to progressively more human/realistic simulations for soldier training in later wars increased the number of soldiers that will shoot at "enemy" soldiers without hesitation from 10-15% to 40-45%. Not that I see this as a skill, but I can see why the military might.
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