War in 2007: From 2-D to 3-D

A few years ago I was waiting to see a movie at the tech-savvy popular Metreon in downtown San Francisco. What I found at the Metreon was an advanced insult to the notoriously politically correct city where this machine had planted its high tech brainwashing squirrelly self.

I saw children holding plastic machine guns and heard the words ‘shoot the terrorist’ echoing from the multi-media center. The screen was set to a desert backdrop and the enemies darting across it were wearing headscarves.  Needless to say I freaked out.  No, don’t do it, I told my 20-year old brother as he strode purposefully over to this soul- stealing machine. “But it has really cool high-tech laser beams,” he responded casually. I stood helplessly by and pondered the invisible arm turned machine that is/was Donald Rumsfeld.

In her post ‘Gaming as a Recruiting and Tracking Tool for the Army,’ Cullen writes “Using these tactics in recruiting people to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives when it might be hard to divorce the virtual world from reality is less than reputable.”

As 2007 turns to 2008 games become more high-tech and draw more audiences than can fit into a game room. Online, the army seduces a young, screen fixed audience to train for a war they are not made to see as real. This is done by making their virtual war game seem so real, that the real thing, (after being recruited according to game skill and sent to Iraq), seems like just another game over.