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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 5/10/2008 5:11:23 AM | Firstly as someone has already clearly pointed out violent video games have age ratings and shops are very strict now on who they sell games to and all shop employees are instructed to take age ratings on games as seriously as the legal ages required to be in order to buy drink and cigarettes, GTA4 is obviously the most recent game to have been released that is going to become the scapegoat for any violent act performed by anyone under 18 for the next few years, its a parents responsibility to take care of their children and if they choose to buy their children games that are clearly labeled with age restrictions then its soley the parents fault if it somehow results in the child going on a killing spree.
However i think its downright stupid that anyone can think such a scenario could and has happened, as a massive video game nut and also a massive fan of film epsecialy horror it really does get on my nerves when people try to find blame in the most ridiculous of places, video games is the newest and biggest mass media format that is taking over everyones living rooms, we were killing eachother before sound was even recordable and we will continue to do so until we cease to exist.
Bottom line is that if any person cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not then they are clearly already not sane and weather it be a game a song a film a book or even just someone looking at them in a funny way when passing in the street, if someone is going to flip and go psycho then short of noticing their issues before it happens their going to flip at some point.
Suggesting that using a mouse and keyboard or joypad to play first person shooters could teach a person how to use a gun is just daft, thats like saying teaching a child how to boil an egg the means they know how to drive a car, yes you can learn the model of weapons and how to work in a team with manouvers and flanking and the like but thats about it, it will help to better a person's hand to eye coordination yes but not much else, i have played countless racers and shooters and strategy games but that does not mean im now capable of racing a car into a battlefield and coordinate and effective strike then run in there myself and take everyone down singlehandidly.
If you want to be picky then you could argue that arcade machines that have a gun peripheral attached to them would improve your gun weilding abilitties but thats a very tiny part of the video game scene.
Looking for blame in any medium is wrong, we are a violent race with or without weaponary, censhorship is something i really have a problem with and every time theres a big deal made of some violent act being connected to a form of entertainment is one up for censorship board and another blow for the normal people who know that its just that....entertainment and nothing more.
Anyway with all that said im off the play some more GTA4, im considering stealing the car from my neighbour and taking it for a spin to the local back street gun shop to buy myself a bazooka and an AK47 so i can go blow stuff up, but i need to teach myself how to do all that first so i just got to go learn it on GTA first, have a nice day  | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/1/2008 8:39:32 AM | America's Army teaches teenagers/young adults to become better soldiers.
It was designed to. Also why it's free. And sponsored by the Army.
Join the army now!
http://www.americasarmy.com/
Actually quite true, and I was one of the people that signed up right at the start to play - until about four years ago - when my Edsel of a computer couldn't keep up with the graphics. 
One actually "takes courses" in things like first aid (to be a combat medic), and parachuting (to be ranked airborne) , and those aren't "easy" courses to pass. One literally has to do many of the same things that real soldiers do, in a virtual sense.
Even marksmanship on the range is included.
I still see these things as positive, however. They do give kids at least an idea of the core values expected in the military. Those are not bad things in any way.
Unit leaders are expected to stay close to their troops, and when they do they get a morale boost. What counts for a win is meeting the objective, not the number of kills recorded. These are all "real life" concepts, applied to a gaming world.
One can even use hand signals to communicate with, in game. When one plays with a top level player, especially ex or current military, this isn't uncommon.
Through my gaming time online with AAO, I actually got to meet some military and ex-military gamers from many countries Canada, England, the Netherlands, and the USA. One can see who is active US military by a special online ID, and when I was playing that was not uncommon.
Playing a round on a server with "real" military personnel was always a blast. Those games were among the most "realistic" combat experiences I've ever had in a computer game. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/1/2008 5:11:20 PM | This kind of thing has been going on for years. Anyone remember the "Back to the Future" movie where Marty McFly is asked "Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" His response.."7-11"..playing a game involving firing a 6 shooter at target in a game.
Also...new technology where "pilotless" craft are used. The kids do much the same with video games.
"Games and strategy" are recognized courses in universities and in the military. Better "gamesmen" make better soldiers. This has been known for centuries. One reason why chess was so well played by the military class.
War today also has rules...which need to be bent or broken as needed to engage any enemy, anytime on their own grounds. Does one bomb schools and hospitals? No. UNLESS...uh-huh...you guessed it....there is reason to do so. Example...enemy pacing anti-aircraft guns on the roofs. Well, then the rules change...don't they? Do you fire on tanks giving an internationally recognized symbol of surrender...turning their turrets backwards? No...UNLESS....and again...they turn and open fire on your positions and troops after being waved through your first line of defenses. Which has also happened.
Then agian...video games can also enhance kids ideas of different things. Like running a business. Seen that one where tables need to be waited on. Time is of the essence. Does this teach kids that they have to work fast and smart in order to progress? Perhaps. Do they need to save money to "upgrade" game items or do certain things to get that next level...kind of like the real world, huh?
Sure...maybe better soldiers...but perhaps better young people, able to make better choices in their lives. The "bad guys" always seme to get theirs...unless you are playing the bad guy..even then...you know damned well you'd never get away with all that crap in real life! | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/1/2008 8:27:51 PM |
I doubt it. I can see it making them actually perhaps worse soldiers, because in the games, you never really die.
I can't see how a soldier who never dies can be a bad soldier. I mean, the side that has a lot of dead soldiers loses, and the side that has a lot of soldiers standing after the battle wins.
I think the undying soldier only becomes a problem when he or she is honorably discharged. They collect pension for a long time. (Forever is a long time.) That and bad bankloans will finish us off quicker and much more painfully than any enemy ever even dreamed they could. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/2/2008 7:25:45 AM | People who blame video games TV or movies or music for their faults need to be protected from themselves and not allowed to use these things, until such tme as they start taking responsibility for their own actions. Tough to enforce. then again...they do have those ankle bracelets that show where a person is...why not ne that shuts down the TV or game console when they come within so many feet of it?
I've seen some games where you have to farm. Go and borrow inpliments off the neighbour, raise a crop, watch it wiped out by bad weather and start again deep in debt..just like real life! Bean Farmer Extreme! lol!
Technology of all kinds is used by the military, and always has been. Gunpowder was used as "toy" stuff..making loud bangs, then used to make fireworks displays, until some brightboy tried scaring the heck out of the enemies horses by tossing a bunch of firecrackers in front of them. Then, hey..launch a few fireworks right into them WOW....maybe we can get it to fire something heavier...?
Food preservation. An army travels on its stomach. Without food, it isn't going far. Napoleon had wine bottles filled with peas, etc and "canned" in this manner. These supplies would help his army move farther, faster and allow them to stay in the field longer. Quickly adopted by other countries and the whole "food logistics" area of an army is born.
Need I state the obvious wheel? As in chariots? Wagons? Tanks trucks, etc.
Video games are just another piece of technology the army is using to further its ends.
It will use more...and the further they go with such things, the better. Think about a virtual reality world of gamers out there just waiting to actually "get into" a game. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/2/2008 10:45:50 PM | I doubt it. I can see it making them actually perhaps worse soldiers, because in the games, you never really die.
This has other ramifications. The poster who made the above statement must agree that the curriculum of training soldiers must involve teaching them how to die. There is a test at the end. Bad soldiers cannot be allowed to graduate and become soldiers. I can hear the instructor of this class sometime in the middle of the term: "Now, privates, watch this carefully. I'm only going to show it to you once."
There is still one more ramification. If all countries exercised this philopophy in training recruits (a good soldier dies, and must prove he's a good soldier before graduation and before being sent into battle; much like bad students of medicine or engineering are not allowed to graduate, either) then all of a sudden there would be no more wars. World Peace!
I hear that's the purpose of all wars, anyway. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/2/2008 10:53:42 PM | "I was recently at a friends house and her kids were playing a game called " Blood" after you shot the guy in the head his head blew off and if you knew how to manipulate the contoller you could use the guys head like a soccer ball and kick it around the room "
Er... I hope they were playing a videogame, not a physical game. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/3/2008 4:49:25 AM |
I doubt it. I can see it making them actually perhaps worse soldiers, because in the games, you never really die.
If they're being trained to control unmanned robots and planes, then they won't really die when whatever they're controlling gets blown up. It's not a soldiers job to die anyway, it's to kill (or to offer support that helps other soldiers kill), dying is just an undesired side effect. Dying takes no training anyway, it's pretty easy to do, everyone figures it out eventually.
The poster who made the above statement must agree that the curriculum of training soldiers must involve teaching them how to die. There is a test at the end. Bad soldiers cannot be allowed to graduate and become soldiers. I can hear the instructor of this class sometime in the middle of the term: "Now, privates, watch this carefully. I'm only going to show it to you once."
So what you suggest is that all soldiers be forced to commit suicide? Nice, real nice.
There is still one more ramification. If all countries exercised this philopophy in training recruits (a good soldier dies, and must prove he's a good soldier before graduation and before being sent into battle; much like bad students of medicine or engineering are not allowed to graduate, either) then all of a sudden there would be no more wars. World Peace!
Yay, world peace that would cost more lives than any war in history. Hey, if everyone on earth dies then the peace will never end, you wanna show us how it's done? | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/3/2008 7:17:31 AM | Thanks AwP, for taking up on my thoughts. You're the first one on the forums who's ever acknowledged my posts.
Thanks.
"So what you suggest is that all soldiers be forced to commit suicide? Nice, real nice."
Actually, not. Not suicide. There are many other ways of dying. They teach you that sort of stuff in soldier school.
"Yay, world peace that would cost more lives than any war in history.
This is debatable. Once it gets out that army recruits must die before graduation, there will be much fewer people signing up, never mind the free education and good training.
Hey, if everyone on earth dies then the peace will never end, you wanna show us how it's done? "
I actually never said everyone must die. World peace could be achieved with just the soldiers dying, not everyone else. Peace as a concept is not imaginable without people, as it describes a relationship between people. When there are no people, there can't be any relationship between anyone, such as peace as the case might be. If all people die, there won't be wars, but there won't be peace, either. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/3/2008 8:22:49 AM |
Thanks AwP, for taking up on my thoughts. You're the first one on the forums who's ever acknowledged my posts.
Happy to help. 
World peace could be achieved with just the soldiers dying, not everyone else.
Concider some of the genocidal tribal wars going on in Africa right now. Concider the political riots that happen in many less than stable countries. Concider the sect violence in Iraq ,though I'll give you half credit on this one since the door was opened by war, Saddam may have been a bad man but he kept the smackdown on that kinda thing(with soldiers by the by). Violence happens even when it's not caused by professional soldiers. War is nothing more than organized violence, so war won't go away if the soldiers do, all it would do is make it less efficient and more bloody and terrible(since the kids in the school and folks in the hospital are theoretically just as much combatants as anyone else when there are no "designated combatants"). | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/3/2008 6:49:48 PM | This was a good answer, AwP. If all the soldiers die, killing won't stop. Unless we redefine the meaning of soldier to "A soldier is a person who kills humans."
This, combined with my original points, "Soldier training must include killing the student" and "...and not by suicide" would eventually lead on to your prediction, that the entire population would be killed.
Consider this: if the soldier students cannot kill themselves, somebody else must; but since "a person who kills" is a soldier, the killer of the student soldiers must be killed; and therefore this will propagate ad infinitum, and potentially (but not necessarily) wipe out the entire human race but one, the last person standing. Then again, the timing and the rate of killing may slow this down well enough so that the population regenerates itself faster than the soldiers-in-training kill each other in successive generations of soldier-students. By this I mean that one person can be in charge of wiping out an entire class of student soldiers, and only after the students had already gone through a lengthy time of training. Then they make a class of student soldiers with this guy in it together with other guys from other training camps who killed students there, and then put them through another lengthy training. This will cause a series of implosions of the student population, so we need not worry about killing too many people, even if we keep this up ad infinitum. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/4/2008 4:04:55 AM | The only people in the military that have jobs that are anything like these video games in question are those who are in control of firing missiles, long range howitzers, etc. These soldiers do not have to look into the faces of the men and women that they destroy, and I think that alone should be a crime.
When playing a video game, one doesn't feel any sense of remorse because there is nothing to feel remorse for. It's a video game. But in real life, it is much different. As Simmah pointed out, there is also the factor of no physical damage. In a video game, the player may be willing to sacrifice getting hit by a few bullets just to be able to achieve their goal. I can't say that their are many soldiers who are as cavalier about getting hit by a few rounds.
When it comes down to it, because of the distorted reality of it all, I really don't think that these video games make anyone a better soldier any more than watching violent war movies does. Then again, I don't think that the content is these games is appropriate for young children any more than violent war movies either. And neither do the game manufacturers. That's why they have game ratings. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/4/2008 10:14:10 PM | Dear RS, I think you hit the nail on the head with the remorse thing. As a child I used to play with toy soldiers. It was 15-20 years after the second world war, and every kid played with them. We played with cowboy and indian toy soldiers, with US army and German army guys, with mediaeval characters. If we got bored with this, we ran downstairs and played cowboys and Indians. And that was in communist Hungary.
Nobody thought twice about this. A decade later I met many pacifist mothers who forbade their male children to play with war toys, or to play war games. I thought to myself, I would have cried at the age 12 and thought I lost the world if anyone had taken my toy soldiers away. My playing with them was more a character building exercise and a school how to make up stories, than a tool to train me into a blood-thirsty warmonger. I grew up to be a pacifist, too. The difference between a pacifist and a warmonger is probably what you said: A lifetime history of killing without remorse does not make us killers when the remorse becomes a very real possibility. I can kill a centipede, and only with sprays, but I stop for squirrels and cats and raccoons crossing the road. There are a great number of Monarch butterfly caterpillars around this summer; I avoid rolling my bike tires over them. A guy who saw the fear in his mother's eyes as his dad went at her with a number ten tire iron, learned more about how to detatch himself from the terror of emotion that arises from seeing a fellow human suffer than I with my dozens of toy soldiers, because and despite my toy soldiers resurrected every time, and his mother, too. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/7/2008 9:29:47 AM | A video game, done properly, can be an effective way of virtually introducing someone to things. Simulators are used all the time, in the civilian and military worlds. These are used because they are effective, and allow participants to actually get a "feel" for things.
A game like AAO was carefully designed, and I have talked directly to one of the developers of that game, and appreciated his feedback.
It was designed to show the core values of Army life, and to be an enjoyable "ad" for recruiting. It did that job well, because I know a few kids that actually enrolled due to their experience with it.
Being in the military, serving your country, is an honorable job. It's a demanding one, too. Because of this war, and recent events, the military has become a pejorative thing for all too many people.
That's wrong.
I can remember many a night way back then playing with some US military people on some of my favorite maps, like Bridge SE. Objectives were there to be accomplished, and players could get wounded, and slowly bleed to death.
If you died, you were out of the game - no respawning allowed.
The key to success was teamwork, understanding your enemy, and working together to accomplish a goal - offense or defense.
Sure, we had our share of kiddies running around trying to get high frag rates. If you had the right gang, the hardcore players, it was much different.
The realism level was so high, in a virtual sense, that even a simple thing like breathing affected your marksmanship - like in real life.
You'd line up a shot with your M-82 sniper rifle, and see the effects of that hit in your scope. It gives you a faint, a very faint, idea of the positive and negative things that go through a soldiers mind when he drops an enemy soldier - sometimes at the same time.
In CQB, turning a corner and shooting a teammate ? "Blue on blue" ?
There it's only a game, but it again gives you that virtual experience of how easy it can be to make a mistake in combat - and makes you a bit more forgiving of those that make that error.
So yes, a game like this can "program" children to what the Army is like - again, in a small sense of the word.
And that isn't a bad thing, honestly. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/7/2008 11:36:24 AM |
I personally find this a bit disturbing how desentizing this must to these impressionable kids.
and movies have never, ever done this before....
Another thing is, children SHOULD NOT be playing video games like this until they are old enough to realize that it is JUST a video game.
So no, Video Games are of no harm whatsoever to anybody that is of appropriate mental capability and age. | |
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| Do you believe that Video games are programming children to be better soldiers ?
Posted: 6/7/2008 5:50:58 PM | Videogames dont make soldiers any better at all since a controller or mouse still isn't a gun. They dont learn how to use the weapons and chances are they wouldn't even be physically fit tp be a good soldier.
Shooting something in a videogame translates to reality how? I guess running around in these videogames for hours on end means that the person playing could run a marathon in real life because the videogame character does it.
Any normal person understands the difference between game and reality and if they don't or think they could kill better after playing a videogame they have bigger problems, that isn't the games fault. | |
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