I still remember the first time I picked up a first person shooter game was back when I was only 11 years old. It was the original Counter Strike (CS) game that reeled me in along with my brother's constant support to play. The thrill of being the hunter and the hunted was so exciting and was something no other type of genres could pull from me. However within 6 months my grades began to drop from pulling all nighters playing Counter Strike and thus I had to quit playing.To this day my brother on the other-hand continues to play first person shooters, and now plays it on a professional level for tournaments around the United States.
Just last weekend for the first time I went paintballing with 20 other students from Highline Community College. More than 3/4 of the people that went were going for the first time. The fields we played at were filled with foliage, small forts, wrecked cars, and debris to hide behind. Though paintballing was in my opinion more realistic than CS, I had the same adrenaline rush playing CS as I did paintballing, it was just more physically painful being hit.
From this very reason I have never been all that suprised that the military decided to go with video games as a method to promote interest as well as simulate training and being in the army. The same thing can be applied towards arcade racing games, Go-Karts and actual driving. Now driving schools use virtual driving for students to simulate driving before hopping into a real car. If anything it seemed like common sense for them to reach this generation of young adults, and teens. In 2008 NPD, a New York based market research firm revealed that 72% of the U.S. played video games, up 8% from 2006. Keeping the game America's Army free for download on the PC was an even more clever decision in order to reach as many people as possible.
As said in "Military Training is Just a Game" and "Wii All You Can Be? Why the Military Needs the Gaming Industry" it just makes sense for the Military to go ahead and use what the newest generation of recruits will probably already know before being recuited, a game controller. Doing so would build upon the foundation of what they are already are familiar with, expediating the learning while easily distributing the game to the online community through the internet if they release it to the public. If they do release it to the public, they would have the oppotunity to play and talk to real soldiers who play as well. The military is continuing to find ways to make the simulation games more immersive and realistic of war such as putting in the training aspects of the army and dealing with real situation scenarios soldiers has experienced previously in war.
"Atomic Games' Tamte Defends Six Days' Relevance" spoke of using games as a medium to make their game "Six Days in Fallujah". Where the point of the game is to re-tell the true stories of the marines who returned from Fallujah. Though it treads a thin line as propaganda to side on one opinion of the war. It's conflict like this that feed the ongoing controversy of using war or military in video games. Even though as discussed in "History of Military Gaming" war and military has been a concept used in games and for simulation long before the creation of video games. "US Military Recruits Children: "America's Army" Video Game Violates International Law" argued that the military is using video games knowingly as propaganda to recruit children by visualizing being in the army as only a "game". However the military has been using advertising for recruiting by means of television, billboards, magazines, radio, t.v. shows, and toys. All of which don't really make the negatives of being in the military prominient. But their purpose is to recruit and or promote interest in the military. So why would they advertise the negatives? Companies selling flouride toothpaste aren't going to say "Beware Buyers May Experience Stomach Discomfort If Swallowed" on a gigantic billboard.
If anything having played some of the games, the military are trying their best to simulate everything about war, including the pain and loss. They have generals die in the middle of scenarios as well as betrayers. There are civilians which can turn out to be not civilians at all and attack you. But nothing could ever adequately simulate the true war experience unless you see it first hand anyway. Though a person may watch movies likes "Black Hawk Down" and "Saving Private Ryan" through out their lives, it's certainly isn't the same as seeing real people die everyday. There is only so much we can simulate. Children everyday are being bombarded by the media to live up to certain expectations and setting scenarios as what is right and what is wrong when in real life there is alot of grey. Not to say that it's entirely okay for the military to just reinfoce that either. But there is only so much you simulate before it just simply that, a simulation. Simulations can only prepare you so far.
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