How many military consultants does it take to change a light bulb?
Not enough.
There's a disturbing undercurrent to 'modern' warfare games masked by a perennial pursuit of "authenticity" and "realism" which, for want of a better way of putting it, is "militarising" what is supposed to be entertainment, so much so in fact, that it now has its own euphemism, "Militainment".
The question is "authenticity" and "realism" relative to what exactly? Games are sanitised environments, paraphrased and loosely approximate realities where players are able to do things simply not possible in the real world - try running with a 50kg pack on your back for several miles, let alone bunny hop across the desert! Just how easy
is that "headshot!" in real life when bullets don't travel in infinitely straight lines to their targets. Games aren't
supposed to be 'simulators'. The military doesn't think that way and with their $$$ that's slowly what gamers are getting. This should be something of a worry.
It's widely known that the US military uses games for their own purposes, ones that have very little, if anything at all, to do with games as 'games'. They have a very different purpose in mind for the medium; to 'train' and to 'recruit' - games are not
passive-participation activities, users actively engage with their environment, which combined with the 'suspension of belief' make for a powerful tool to recondition or re-order the way a given subject is understood. This is why the military et-al are so interested in using games as a recruitment tool. To this end
millions have been invested in the creation of their own game development unit that not only develops games,
including their own internal ventures, and consults on commercial projects by outside third parties as part of their general mandate - Ghost Recon, Call of Duty, Rainbow Six, Medal of Honor - but it also watches for trends in the industry and technology it can use, to the extent that the
Pentagon itself realised quite early just how powerful the medium is, funding the development of America's Army to be used
specifically as a recruitment tool, and
mighty effective it was too according to a congressional commission on the results.
Quite cheaply as well considering.
It's no secret either that the US Government in particular, has no qualms about 'targeting' an increasing younger audience as potential recruits for military service,
State schools in particular; the
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001[
PDF] & {
Sec. 9528} & {
Sec. 1061, C (4) A (i)} has provisions that prevent schools receiving state funds from blocking access to student data when requested by military recruiters, not to mention the specific provisions for the "
Troops to Teachers" program. The Department of Defense has provisions in law available to it separately that exempt it from being similarly block from accessing information on students. See additional reading links below for the controversy this has caused in particular.
This is just the tip of the iceberg by the way, according to a
General Accounting Office report from Sept 2003 the Armed Services recruitment advertising budget at the time was $592 million, $1,900 per enlistment; video games as a recruitment platform is specifically (albeit briefly) mentioned. Movies, games, sports, it's all used to drive up the numbers. So next time you pick up a modern warfare game think of it not as a game, but as a recruitment poster and you'll understand better what it is and why the military is involved in its production. Quite frankly, to everyone except you, it's most certainly
not a game.
Additional reading:
[EDIT]Format updates, link checked and updated Nov 2012.
