Lock 'n load, comrade!
Over the headphones, the self-confident, Aussie-accented
trainer is laying out the ground rules: "It's kill or be killed out there,
mate." In crisp militarese, he details my mission: "Stay alive!"
To that end, I've bought a weapon and ammo from the
storeroom. Now I've passed through steel doors and entered a grim, treeless
balcony. It's deathly quiet. My eyes are riveted on a row of windows to
the left.
At any moment, a gunman will poke through a window and try to kill me.
If I shoot him first, he'll be dead and I'll be alive. I will earn some money to buy a better gun.
Then, as regular as clockwork, orange, more gunmen will appear, and we'll repeat the shootout.
Having lost many virtual lives, I will eventually leave the training level of CounterStrike, the hottest video game in the ominously-named "first-person shooter" category. (You can identify these games because a gun will dominate your view of the screen. The gun will, in other words, be in your hands.)
In CounterStrike, you role-play terrorists or counterterrorists, depending on your mood. You can play in squads, over a local network or the Internet.
Armed and presumed dangerous
As I lug a nasty-looking fire stick through the ominous
premises, I use arrows and mouse to move and aim. In my peripheral vision,
a smattering of college students is doing the same thing -- with considerably
more skill.
It's Friday night. While some college students may be getting pickled in alcohol, nary a bottle is seen in this residence-hall game room at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For one thing, these students are too young to drink. For another, they know the cost of impaired alertness in this "game."
It's quiet enough to hear the bolt "snick" home on your rifle. There's little conversation. Everybody knows killing is the task of the hour.
But does playing a killer make you a killer? The few kids we could drag away from the action told us what all vidiots will tell you. "I can tell the difference between the screen and reality. I've never murdered anyone." Smirk, smirk, click, click.
And you have to admit that kids entranced by glowing monitors don't look like homicidal maniacs at they feverishly punch buttons.
It's game night. Lose yourself in a kill-or-be-killed video game.
Government issue!
You get a different take on whether video games can
motivate to kill from America's Army.
Expert gamers are impressed by the Pentagon-designed recruiting tool. "Big Brother did not let me down on this one," wrote www.gaminginvasion.com.
In a more, well, pretentious review, Salon compared this game to the Frank Capra "Why We Fight" movies from World War II. America's Army, Salon decided, could motivate Americans to fight terrorists.
In other words, video games could save the Republic.
Although Salon neglected to explain how a shoot-em-up electronic diversion could impugn the reputation of terrorists as Capra had the Nazis, the government may be succeeding at motivating recruits: A sizable percentage of visitors to the America's Army site click the "Go Army" recruitment button.
Can video games also do training? Perhaps. Salon quoted a recent West Point graduate who described video training as, well, training. "The Army taught me all the skills I have," said Capt. Jason Amerine (an experienced video-gamer), "but at the same time, a lot of these first-person shooters, I think that they do tend to kind of get you in the right mind-set for some of the situations you might encounter in real life.... When you are in some of these multiplayer shootouts, engaging your opposition, I think that it does kind of condition you a little bit to know what to look for."
We asked Dave Grossman, a retired military man who has taught psychology at West Point and writes about killing, whether a video game could indeed train a would-be soldier. In arcade-style games, where you hold a gun and shoot at targets, the gadget provides "obvious training in an actual physical skill," he said. But even other electronic games can work, he says. "Microsoft Flight Simulator is good enough with a joystick and keyboard that the Navy and Air Force use it to train fighter pilots. It's not a cockpit, not remotely like a plane, but it's a cheap, effective, mass-produced device to accelerate pilot training." He adds that the Marine Corps has licensed the right to use the video game Doom as tactical simulator.
In CounterStrike, the killing never ends -- nor does the effort to attain
realism.
The Army's gift to global terrorism
That got us thinking. If the Pentagon thinks
video games can train and motivate youths to kill, maybe there
is something to this claptrap about violent games causing real-world violence...
If that's true, here's a bizarre thought. Half-a-million people -- presumably from all over the globe -- downloaded America's Army during its first week on the web. So is the Pentagon motivating and training fighters who might join the bad guys?
If you can get recruited for the Army over the web or earn points for mafia hits -- for contract murder -- on the video game "Grand Theft Auto," maybe we better learn something about the effects of media on aggression.
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