![]() Iraq and Afghanistan, Mead reminds us, don’t resemble Band of Brothers today, wars look more like Generation Kill. But 21st-century warfare and the young people who volunteer for it were changing too. The symbiosis flourished after the Cold War, as budgetary constraints-the lead unnamed character in this book-privileged tactical games over costly field exercises. The arrangement has synergy: The Pentagon avoids pitiful, expensive efforts to create their own training simulators, and developers get fat government checks. Through commercial gaming technology, the armed forces could adapt soldiers to the tactics of team fighting and trigger-fast decision making, or conjure tailor-made battle environments for them. Later, the original first-person perspectives of 1980’s Battlezone and its successor, 1993’s Doom, showed the potential for 3-D piloting, multiplayer networking, and virtual reality-based training. With the help of clinicians in controlled settings, soldiers are able to confront traumatic memories in a process called exposure therapy. But SpaceWar! gave birth to the navigational controls and monitor-as-sight set-up that would influence all subsequent games. The PDP-1’s manufacturer didn’t have a faux space-battle program in mind-one in which “two players used switches and knobs to maneuver spaceships through the gravity field of a star while firing missiles at each other”-when the hardware was designed, surely. ![]() As Mead tells us, the 1962 side project was made on a Programmed Data Processor-1, an early microcomputer. It still lives: The military offers funding and technical expertise to game and computer developers, and, in exchange, they give it proprietary technology and technical consulting.īeginning in 1960 and ending in the 1990s, “the armed forces took the lead in financing, sponsoring, and inventing the specific technology used in video games.” Spacewar!, the title historians consider the first video game, was developed by graduate students at MIT who were funded by the Pentagon. That’s how it’s been since the years after World War II, when the army and commercialized gaming built a collaborative relationship, a kind of military-entertainment complex. The military has used video games “at every organizational level for a broad array of purposes,” he writes. It’s had three big aims in this: to recruit soldiers, to train them, and, most recently, to treat their psychological disorders, such as PTSD. How are video games, specifically designed for the armed forces, empowering soldiers? How do they influence civilian behavior? America’s Armyīut before Mead can conjure the ethical dilemmas of bloodless virtual realities, or plumb lionized state violence, he acts as a historian. Within the two themes’ intersection is the book’s creative tension. We can see evidence of the former in microwave ovens and semiconductors, GPS and jet engines there’s evidence of the latter in wide-scale standardized testing, distance education, and vocational learning. ![]() War Play moves forward along two intertwined themes. First, Mead says, throughout history, the intense needs of government-sanctioned combat have spurred technological innovation in society. Second, the military is a forerunner in original methods of education. military’s official deployment of video games.Ī professor of English at Baruch College CUNY, Mead has written a history, a book most interested in the machinations of military game development. But War Play, too, lays a solid foundation from which to launch more critical investigations-into soldier’s lives, into computerized combat, and into the most dynamic medium of our time. We get such an examination in War Play, Corey Mead’s important new study on the U.S. The way out of this constrained conversation is to bore down into specifics, to tease out various technologies, and to un-generalize the medium. We assume, unfairly, that the entire medium of video games shares inherent properties more important and defining than all the different ways games are applied and played. how can death be given more weight in first person shooters?).Īs Atlantic contributor Ian Bogost argues in his book, How to Do Things with Video Games, we’ve assigned value to games as if they all contain the same logic and agenda. Much like discussions surrounding the Internet, debates on video games carry the vague, scattershot chatter that says too much about the medium (e.g. do video games cause violence?) without saying much at all about the particulars of games or gaming conventions (e.g. According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry out all-too-real rampages.
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