http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/305 ... #post-2693
watwatsen wrote:Got pretty burned out on games over the past year, after wasting way too much of my life on them since the days of 386s. After reading the article "How the '80s programmed us for war" ( http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/ ... our_future ) after it was posted in the old LF, (props to whoever did so, I forget) about the synergistic relationship of the Pentagon with Hollywood and the games industry for the purposes of recruiting, indoctrination, and training, I got pretty fucking weirded out.
I realized that basically everything I, and most people our age, were playing was violent and imperialist and there was a serious lack of peaceful and constructive shit out there. Red Orchestra and various Paradox strategy games at the time, mostly. I suppose bayoneting fascists is constructive in one sense, but still. The military even one-upped themselves with their house-coded America's Army bullshit and opened million-dollar recruiting centers in suburban malls with rows and rows of x-boxes playing stupid shit like Call of Duty to train kids how cool and rad it is to call in drone strikes with hellfire missiles on houses full of women and children, so they can deploy to Central Asia and die to an IED while protecting the CIA's opium and the lithium and copper mining rights purchased by Chinese corporations. Shit, they make the controls on drones and say the 20mm autocannons on IFVs as similar as possible to the game controls their recruits grew up with.
I don't think the choice of unrealistic trash like Call of Duty was a coincidence beyond the popularity of the series. The more unrealistic and arcadey a game is, the more it personsifies the right-libertarian deleusion of utter control over one's fate with person skill in a vacuum being the determining factor of success of failure. The quicker one can sidestep and the faster one can snap headshots from the hip the longer one will live. Undoubtedly their recruiting numbers would drop if they had PCs playing something like Red Orchestra which generally gives the impression "wow, war is hell" and sheer random luck and teamwork are far more important factors in life and death. Doesn't matter how good you are, chances are you'll be gibbed by an unseen frag grenade, or cut in half by an emplaced machine gun while crossing a street.
Note that I am not endorsing his "burning out on games" and "anti-imperialist" fagotry, but, against all odds, the last four lines of the last paragraph of his post are quite insightful.
That entire thread is actually worth reading to see how weakling loser shut-ins feel about the highest artform, among other things.
