by David Sirota
Common Dreams
Of late, the tv game world has been making headlines with the issue of two games - "Counter Strike" and "Kuma War" - themed to the cleanup of Osama bin Laden.
Cue the now-standard debates over the effects of such a pretence on young childrens' minds. "Is the bin Laden kill game cathartic, educational or just ghoulish?" asks Kokatu. "Are video game re-creations of bin Laden's compound in poor taste?" wonders U.S. News and World Report. No doubt, we may soon see a rehash of the never-ending back-and-forth over whether such video games makes kids more violent (data suggests they don't).A screenshot from the television game "Kuma War"
These are certainly important short-term questions - but they cut a far deeper scrutiny of the mobilization of video games in general, how the Pentagon has embedded itself into the video game industry, and whether that means video games are marketing a longer-term martial political ideology to the nation's youth. They ignore, in short, the far more important video-game story of the final few weeks - the one briefly reported on this weekend by the Washington Post:
This month, the Role of Naval Research will cast out the military's first-ever online war game spread to the public, crowd-sourcing the challenges of maritime security to thousands of "players" sitting in face of their computers. It aims to repeat a traditional military strategy session on an exponentially larger scale. Through virtual simulation and social media tools made popular on Twitter and Facebook, players will bring together to react to a serial of make- believe geopolitical scenarios set off when private ships are hijacked off Somalia's coast.
This is merely the latest chapter in the history of what Wired once called the Military-Entertainment Complex and how it underwrites the television game industry. It is a story traced by books like "From Sun Tzu to Xbox", "Smartbomb" and "All Your Home Are Belong to Us" - a report that started way back with the first video games being developed by national research labs and defense contractors, so with the Pentagon subsidizing Atari's Battlezone and then with the military's creation of the Institute for Creative Technologies.
Out of all this came not only military-themed games from commercial firms, but also programs developed and promoted by the Pentagon itself - projects like the Army Experience Center - a massive recruitment-themed video-game arcade embedded in a major suburban mall - and games like like America's Army, which according to its official product description, was developed by the military "as a global public relations initiative to assist with recruitment" via a "a virtual web-based environment in which [kids] can explore [an] Army career." Now we get the Navy's maritime security game looking to crowdsource the ins and outs of counter-piracy tactics. Next month, it'll inevitably be something else.
We can, of course, continue the use of pretending video games are just frivolous apolitical accoutrements of low culture - and indeed, that's what we do when we focus critical video game discussions exclusively on the force or obscenity debates.
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