pwn3d
Glenn Reynolds has an article up over at Tech Central Station that talks about videogames, the violence they contain, and efforts to ban them. He takes an interesting position:
[C]ivilians who play military videogames, at least, may acquire useful knowledge. This may even have political ramifications. When television commentators second-guess things that happen in combat -- often showing an astounding degree of military ignorance in the process -- people who have played military videogames are more likely to see through it. At the very least, they have some sense of how fast things can happen, and how confusing they can be.
He then quotes a National Review article he coauthored:
The Gulf War was too short, and too much of a set piece, for public military knowledge to play a major role. But there's reason to believe that it will be different this time -- especially as the favored geek mode of communication, the Internet, is now pervasive, meaning that geeks' knowledge, and their knowledgeable opinions, will have substantial influence. They will be able to put the military events of any given day into a much broader perspective, and they may be opinion leaders who help their friends and neighbors avoid the error of thinking that the last 15 minutes of television footage tell the conclusive story of the war's progress.
Reynolds is making these arguments to build a case against banning videogames -- and while he's at it, against Democrats, who he brazenly tries to blame for the ban efforts, despite the lobbying efforts behind such bans almost universally coming from conservative values groups. Despite this transparent cheap shot, I am technically with Reynolds on this one: I don't think any games should be censored (although I'm all for keeping GTA and its ilk out of the hands of kids).
But what I find fascinating here is that Reynolds is claiming that videogames are conveying meaningful knowledge of warfare to children. That the phenomenon is occurring to some extent is undeniable: the recently released Full Spectrum Warrior is built from a codebase used in simulator training by the Army. Perhaps more disturbingly, the popular first person shooter America's Army is developed, maintained and distributed at no charge by the US Army explicitly for purposes of recruitment (fun fact: in multiplayer, no matter what side you're on the other guy appears as a terrorist). These are games that are quite overt in attempting to bring the experience of war to your XBox or PC.
But Reynolds is mistaken if he thinks these games are teaching anyone the truth about war. Now, of course I've never been a soldier or seen war. But as far as I know, neither has Reynolds. So that's a wash. I am prepared to go out on a limb, though, and say I could whip his ass at Quake. So allow me to opine for a moment:
How could these games possibly teach what war is like? There's no death -- you just respawn after a few seconds. There's no permanent injury -- at worst, your character just runs a little slower. When civilian casualties occur, you lose the mission -- the "acceptable losses" that accompany any real war aren't relevant; just restart the level. In fact, there isn't even much blood. Sure, there are geysers of red stuff, heads popping off, and ribcages exploding -- but this is all, believe it or not, for comic effect. There is no meaningful carnage.
Playing Rainbow 6 can teach someone a lot about things like military ordinance or the formations soldiers use to clear a room. Is this really the kind of stuff Reynolds thinks an informed citizen ought to know about war?
Comments
I am reminded of my attempts in Drivers' Ed to thwart tailgaters by throwing banana peels. It never worked as well as it did in MarioKart.
serious question:
are you positive that he is trying to ban those games?
reynolds is a constitutional law professor at my law school and although i didn't take him, and although he is known as more conservative than most others, he is also known as a libertarian who doesn't want government interference.
ok, disregard my comment. i clearly couldn't read last night and missed the whole "against" banning. but yeah, he teaches at my school.
I didn't read the article you referenced, but I did read the quote you cite from it. And, if he's trying to argue that you get a feel for the full flavor of battle by playing these games, then I think clearly he's wrong. But if he's saying that you can get a sense of some of the chaos that occurs on a battlefield, and the speed at which it occurs, then I think there may be some merit to that claim. I mean, try playing CTF where you can kill your teammates, only you and the other team are wearing similar colors. It sheds some light on how friendly fire is the cause of so many of the deaths of our soldiers (like, apparently, Pat Tillman).
You know, they always say the same thing about video games. They used to say this stuff about the NES. I was nearly not allowed to buy Ninja Gaiden after my mom got a peak of the amazing "cinema" sequences between levels in which Irene gets shot by the agents of Jaquio. (I'd like to think I learned a lot about what it would be like to fight Jaquio.)
I wonder if these viligant would look at, say, Mortal Kombat--the one I played in arcades or on SNES--and say that playing them would hurtle me into a world of unbridled chaos. I doubt it, because those graphics look like dick. Also, no one can really shoot lightning out of their hands.
Ban advocates are always wrestling with greater "realism" in video games, but I think they're proven wrong to some extent by not only the advance of technology but also changing aesthetic paradigms. I don't really buy that we're on this ascendant climb toward realism, and that will always be the order of the day, and at some point video games will become indistinguishable from reality and I will, indeed, become Ryu Hayabusa. My problem with the violence thesis is that it's rarely backed with reliable data, and almost never considers either the future or the past in video games. It's never the dystopian future, always apocalypse now.
Virtual hate, as with Grand Theft Auto's "kill all the haitians", should be labeled for age-appropriateness. Otherwise, I agree with you.--s
Mark, I agree you might be able to get a tiny, tiny taste of the franticness of battle (is that a word?). But so tiny as to be virtually meaningless. While these games can be fast-paced, frantic and brutal, you still tend to be able to take at least a couple of shots every time. So at best, the experience is several times less instantaneously final than the real deal.
If fast-paced action is your standard, I'd say playing football teaches more about war -- at least that way there's pain involved.
I agree these games can impart some truths about warfare -- if they didn't, why would the military use simulators that resemble them (albeit only faintly)? But that's truth without the capital T.
I read in the New Yorker that fewer than 15% of WWII infantry soldiers are estimated to have ever fired their weapons at enemy soldiers in combat. The FUBAR factor doesn't much make its way into video games (or, incidentally, military psychological training).
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