thread for discussing the link between militarization & video games

don't think we have a thread about this and i think about it a lot

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78107000/jpg/_78107215_isis-call-of-duty-poster.jpg

iirc sanpaku posted this on a thread a few months ago:

https://sites.google.com/site/samsimulator1972/home

Systems included in the program:

SA-75M Dvina (SA-2F Guideline), S-75M3 Volhov (SA-2E Guideline), S-125M1 Neva (SA-3B Goa)

life as a US drone operator:

"It is a lot like playing a video game," a former Predator drone operator matter-of-factly admits to the artist Omer Fast. "But playing the same video game four years straight on the same level." His bombs kill real people though and, he admits, often not the people he is aiming at.

that first pic is from IS members in the UK promotional materials

bbc article here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29535343

counter video game propaganda:

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78110000/jpg/_78110217_grand-theft-innocence.jpg

i should read this

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Z04WHtCkL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

only if you want to know the future

kinda unrelated but apparently surgeons who play video games have better outcomes:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17309970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNYLZQ8l1eI

^ video game or wikileaks video?

"nail those guys. niiiiice."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhbX0Kt9s_I

would like to see militant propaganda video inspired by katamari

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04/13/icbm-simulator-free-game/

I can't decide whether it's endearing or embarrassing that the dev is replying to pretty much every comment anyone makes about his game.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/12/egyptian-tv-anchor-mistakes-video-game-footage-for-russian-airstrikes-in-syria/?tid=sm_fb

Шок и трепет

The dangers of treating military simulation as gospel are illustrated in an anecdote circulated at the end of the Vietnam War, which was intensively gamed between 1964 and 1969 (with even President Lyndon Johnson being photographed standing over a wargaming sand table at the time of Khe Sanh) in a series of simulations codenamed Sigma.[45] The period was one of great belief in the value of military simulations, riding on the back of the proven success of operations research (or OR) during World War II and the growing power of computers in handling large amounts of data.[46]

The story concerned a fictional aide in Richard Nixon's administration, who, when Nixon took over government in 1969, fed all the data held by the US pertaining to both nations into a computer model—population, gross national product, relative military strength, manufacturing capacity, numbers of tanks, aircraft and the like. The aide then asked the question of the model, "When will we win?" Apparently the computer replied, "You won in 1964!"

interesting story here: http://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/

As games become so realistic it's hard for me to imagine they don't have some desensitizing effect, which is of course useful for service in a military or insurgent force. I thought about this recently as I got obsessed with a 3D sniper game for iPhone -- one that is certainly not on the graphical level of Call of Duty but where you do watch bullets tear into and spatter blood from the heads and bodies of realistic enough looking people, often unarmed. I felt like this game actually wore on my mood and nerves in a way I didn't expect, and I wound up deleting it.