Government Pushes Propaganda Through Video Games
by George Washington
Washington's
Blog
Military Recruits
Young People Through Misleading Games
We documented
yesterday that American movies,
television and news are dominated by the CIA and other government
agencies.
The government
also spreads propaganda through video games.
By way of example,
former CIA director William Colby went
to work for a video game company after he retired, and a former
United States marine allegedly confessed to working at a video game
company which was really a CIA front to create
a game to drum up support for war against Iran.
The Guardian
reports:
“For
decades the military has been using video-game technology,”
says Nina
Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism
at Suffolk University
in Boston and a computer games specialist. “Every branch
of the US armed forces and many, many police departments are using
retooled video games to train their personnel.”
Like much
of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military
spending. The prototype for the first home video games console,
the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, was developed by Sanders Associates,
a US defence contractor. Meanwhile, pre-digital electronic flight
simulators, for use in both military and civilian training, date
back to at least the second world war.
Later, the
games industry began to repay its debts. Many insiders note how
instruments in British Challenger 2 tanks, introduced in 1994,
look
uncannily like the PlayStation’s controllers, one of
the most popular consoles of that year. Indeed, warfare’s
use of digital war games soared towards the end of the 20th century.
“By
the late 1990s,” says Nick
Turse, an American journalist, historian and author of The
Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives,
“the [US] army was pouring tens of millions of dollars into
a centre at the University of Southern California – the
Institute of Creative Technologies – specifically to build
partnerships with the gaming industry and Hollywood.” [The
Washington Times reports
on the link as well.]
It’s
a toxic relationship in Turse’s opinion, since gaming leads
to a reliance on remote-controlled warfare, and this in turn makes
combat more palatable.
“Last
year,” says Turse, “the US conducted combat missions
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. There
are a great many factors that led to this astonishing number of
simultaneous wars, but the increasing use of drones, and thus
a lower number of US military casualties that result, no doubt
contributed to it.”
The Christian
Science Monitor noted
in 2009:
In 1999,
the military had its worst recruiting year in 30, and Congress
called for “aggressive, innovative” new approaches. Private-sector
specialists were brought in, including the top
advertising agency Leo
Burnett, and the Army Marketing Brand Group was formed. A
key aim of the new recruitment strategy was to ensure long-term
success by cultivating the allegiance of teenage Americans.
Part of the
new campaign, helping the post-9/11 recruiting bump, was the free
video game America’s Army. Since its release, different versions
of the war game have been downloaded more than 40 million times,
enough to put it in the Guinness book of world records.
According to a 2008 study by researchers at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, “the game had more impact
on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.”
***
That these
efforts are unfaithful to war’s reality has not gone unnoticed.
Protesting the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, Sgt.
Jesse Hamilton, who served two tours in Iraq
and nine total in the military, expressed disgust that the Army
has “resorted to such a deceiving recruitment strategy.”
It’s an approach
that could have detrimental long-term effects. “The video game
generation is worse at distorting the reality” of war, according
to one Air Force colonel. Although they may be more talented at
operating predator drones, the colonel told the Brookings
Institution, “They don’t have that sense of what [is] really
going on.”
Read
the rest of the article
January
19, 2013
George
Washington blogs at Washington's
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