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Categories: Commentary
Tags: doom, holodeck, larouche, politics, violence, wikipedia
The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is the Devil in Your Laptop? was released on November 27, 2007 but it’s been making the rounds in the blogosphere, so I thought I’d take a look at it — especially since most of the gaming presses’ treatment of it has been simply pulling quotes and letting the commenters have at it (which isn’t a bad strategy, since the pamphlet lends itself to that kind of treatment).
First some background. The pamphlet was put out by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee. Typically I’d add a Wikipedia link to explain who LaRouche is and why he has a PAC, but that’s problematic since one of the pamphlet’s articles is Brent Bedford’s “What IS Wikipedia?” which includes bits like this, “In a world where ‘conspiracy theories’ are ruled out, you are not permitted to determine the reason for anything. All you can do is arrive at a conveniently arbitrary consensus, through submission to manipulation and persuasion. To ensure the ‘fast and powerful destruction’ of conspiracy theories, Wikipedia was created. Wikipedia is simply a conspiracy of anonymous editors who create and change Wikipedia entries.” Um… yeah.
The pamphlet is far too large to deal with in its entirety, but I do encourage people to read it — especially “Terrorism Comes to the West: The New Cult of the Teenage Suicide Bomber” by Nick Walsh wherein we learn that Clive Thompson is “degenerate,” “infantile,” and a “disgruntled family man.” I’ll be focusing my comments on Oyang Teng’s “Video Games and the Wars of the Future.” For convenience, I’ll frame my comments using Teng’s headings.
Introduction
Teng begins with a quote from Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter’s ad, “In 2013, the Army will unleash a new breed of soldier. A soldier whose lethality has been honed by the finest technologies. A soldier equipped to see first and strike decisively. Today, he’s yours to command,” and connects it to Dick Cheney and the current US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. To Teng, Ghost Recon and similar military shooters are propaganda tools which are preparing 14- to 25-year-olds for war. “The militarization of entertainment and the commercialization of war,” as Teng calls it, is a series of conscious decisions made to corrupt the core of the US military.
If Teng had framed his comments around America’s Army, I believe he’d have more legitimate complaints, but I don’t believe Ghost Recon is consciously brainwashing America’s teens — which seems to be central to Teng’s premise, that there is an active collaboration between the military and the gaming industry to program our youth, prescribe the way wars are being fought and to reinforce that wars should be fought that way. Instead of being prescriptive, I believe games are descriptive. Certainly if there was active collusion, video games wouldn’t be the popular political target they are. And games like Blacksite: Area 51 or the upcoming Frontlines: Fuel of War are skeptical of the current neocon warhawk mentality.
The Soldier and the State
In three paragraphs, Teng describes the nation’s “degeneration into a post-industrial state.” Teng does raise some interesting points about how the military has changed. Quoting Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Teng shows that there’s been a movement from citizen-soldiers to professional soldiers who fight when and where they’re told. Teng also decries the shift in West Point’s curriculum from an intuition which graduated leading engineers in the 19th century to one that turns out “trained killer[s] of today’s gaming world”
There’s actually not much to respond to in this section other than offering indignation at the coupling of “trained killer” with “gaming world.” I’m not sure how valid Teng’s criticism about West Point’s curriculum is, but if they aren’t turning out people who can design railroads like they used to, then we’ll have to rely on the Railroad Tycoons of today’s gaming world.
Is That a Joystick in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Glad To See Me?
And this is where things start to get weird. Tracing the Defense Department’s sponsorship of computer science research via ARPA, then DARPA (which is also where we got the intertubes), Teng sees a connection between cybernetic research in the 1960s and the video game industry. Specifically, the military’s research into the viability of combining human brains with computers — resulting in soldier-computers called dyads — “has spun off not only future battlefield technologies, but also much of today’s sociopath-creating video-game industry.”
Teng’s connection between cybernetics and gaming is interesting, especially in light of the recently announce Emotiv headset which, when worn, reads neural activity in such a way that gamers can interact with games by thought. I don’t follow the straight line Teng draws between the Defense Department and games — or other technologies which came out of ARPA.
Third Wave War
Early in this section Teng mentions that in WWII 15-20% of American soldiers were willing to “shoot their weapon at the enemy with the intent to kill.” By the end of Vietnam, this number was up to 95%. This statistic comes from Col. Dave Grossman, but there’s no explanation about what it means. Are they saying that when confronted with the enemy, 80% of American soldiers in WWII elected not to pull the trigger? Col. Grossman has an extensive military background so I’m not questioning this number, but I am interested to know how researchers arrived at it. I do question whether this increase came as a result of psychological conditioning.
I don’t think soldiers in WWII and Vietnam can be equally compared. The average age of a solider in WWII was 26. In Vietnam, it was down to 22. So just looking at those numbers, you can see that the average soldier was at a different point in their life and had different reaction speeds. Also, WWII and Vietnam were fought differently, with WWII pitting armies against each other and Vietnam being more guerrilla based. But also, I believe other factors played just as an important role as “conditioning.” Twenty years passed between WWI and WWII, a period in which American military levels and defense spending dropped. However, after WWII, America entered the Korean conflict, several Cold War skirmishes and then began their involvement with Vietnam. I believe 20 years of constant war would see more effective training and a similar increase in willingness to fire. Plus, the dominant weapon of WWII was the M1 Garand, a semi automatic weapon with a rate of fire of 16-24 rounds/min. Vietnam was the age of the M-16, an assault rifle with 650-700 rounds/min which would also influence that statistic. Beyond all this, I’m sure American soldiers were afraid of accidentally hitting Captain America or Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.
Col. Grossman is also the author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence and the person who popularized the term “murder-simulator” to describe first-person shooters. Teng echoes Grossman’s thought that this increase in firing rate came as a result of conditioning. Both Teng and Grossman believe that video games also supply this conditioning, specifically in “break[ing] down the natural psychological aversion to killing other human beings.” The American Sociological Association recently published a report which found no link between video games and homicidal behavior in kids, however I don’t expect this report to end the debate any more than similar, previous reports have.
The Military-Entertainment Complex
Quoting Teng, “It was also in 1980 that the military formed its first major partnership with a video-game company, when the Army contracted with Atari to modify its tank-shooter arcade game “Battlezone” for official training use. Video games had come into their own during the late 1970s, having been developed by veterans of early ARPA-funded defense projects.”
Teng’s construction of “The Military-Entertainment Complex” seems to rely on video games springing forth from ARPA’s forehead, but his examples show either the military using/exploiting video games or video games using/exploiting the military. Overall he doesn’t seem to understand the video game industry, citing examples like Kuma/War, which certainly fits his article’s requirements, but with a GameRankings score of 54% is a poorly received game that already is geared towards a niche audience.
‘All But War Is Simulation’
As Bill Gates would soon realize, the 1993 release of id Software’s “Doom” for the PC was something of an innovation. Although the first-person shooter genre had been introduced with the previous year’s “Wolfenstein 3d,” “Doom” had more violence and better graphics. Subsequent versions also included the source code, allowing players to modify the game to their personal specifications (like the “God mode” programmed by Columbine killers Harris and Klebold).
Teng’s ignorance of the gaming industry continues, but before that, Teng’s other concern here is the use of video game technology to power simulation software for military training. Except, instead of a modified Battlezone, he mentions Marine Doom. I’m not sure where the real issue here, since computer simulations save both lives and money.
Back to the quote above, first off I don’t see the relevance of dropping Bill Gates’ name, but Bill Gates is a favorite target of the LaRouche PAC (”International Fascism: Microsoft Will Kill More Youth than Hitler“). I’m also not sure that violence level in Doom made it more appealing than Wolfenstein 3D, but the better graphics Teng mentions were part of an all-around better engine which included texture mapping and better level design. Also, the Columbine killers did not program God Mode. This seems to be a misconception from a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center whose researchers weren’t able to separate the sinister levels created by Eric Harris from cheat codes built into the game.
Just Like the Holodeck
Teng lambastes the ICT’s virtual reality research mostly on philosophical issues. To Teng, the pinnacle of such technology is “when reality and simulation become indistinguishable in the mind of the human guinea pig,” which is, “based on nothing more than the reductionist belief that the human mind is a programmable system, not fundamentally different than an animal or machine.” Teng finds this premise “absurd,” but wasn’t he worried about violent video games programming kids earlier in this piece?
Killer Graphics
“Although players gun down “insurgents” and blow up buildings, cars, and people, developers emphasize that, more than anything else, these games teach “leadership skills” and teamwork.”
It’s obvious Teng hasn’t logged anytime in co-op or multiplayer.
Reality Check
Teng ends with a call to action. Mainly it’s up to young adults to make the world a better place. Right, I’ll get right on that.
On February 23rd, 2008 at 5:24 pm, Silvercube wrote:
“Teng ends with a call to action. Mainly it’s up to young adults to make the world a better place. Right, I’ll get right on that.”
We should - and unfortunately many don’t.
Time for someone to make:
Care Bears: Sharing and Caring, for xbox 360 : )
On February 23rd, 2008 at 7:55 pm, Terry wrote:
Based on the Michael Bay movie?
On February 26th, 2008 at 1:12 am, Silvercube wrote:
Ha ha! :)