The Virtual Recruitment Office
December 6, 2009 
2 Comments
In a pledge to the United Nations, the U.S. Military and the Pentagon both promised that U.S. citizens under the age of 17 would not be targeted for military recruitment. Despite these promises, America continues to sell the highly profitable business of warfare to its youth. With President Obama having recently committed another 30,000 troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, the United States needs new soldiers. And it has been finding them using an unexpected source: video games.
Cover of Modern Warfare 2 released in North America
The video game industry is continually trying to find and replicate the real-life situations which its customers will find most engaging. The current favorite is war. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 holds the highest opening day sales tally of any video game ever made (over $310 million in sales in the U.S. and Great Britain alone). War is reaching the television screens of America’s youth, who are exposed to a virtual depiction of war that is alarmingly far from reality.
Video Game created for the U.S. Army
The U.S. Army has even sponsored a free game called America’s Army which not only teaches players military tactics, but is also tied to the Army’s main recruiting site. The game is only rated “T” for teen, meaning that anyone older than thirteen can purchase the game.
Two MIT researchers investigating the effects of video games on Americans found that 30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of gaming. The study also found that video games were more successful in recruiting new soldiers than all other recruitment efforts combined. While the Army might not be sponsoring the most popular war game, Call of Duty, it has certainly benefited tremendously from its success.
That said, parents are equally to blame for allowing their children to play such violent games. The ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) rates these games “M” for mature. The labels warn that content “may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older” and may contain ”intense violence, blood and gore.” Beyond that, war games misrepresent the true nature of battle; players recovering from being shot in seconds, friendly fire can be disabled, and death can be recovered from in a few clicks. The virtual battlefield hardly resembles the real one. When children see the war played out on their XBox, a message is conveyed to them that war is a competition, even a game. There are some things which parents have determined are too mature for a child to understand. War is one of them. Left to penetrate the malleable minds of youth, video games which glorify war have consequences beyond the TV screen.
Children and teenagers’ inability to make distinctions between what they see on TV and reality has been demonstrated before. In 1999, a Florida male killed his six-year-old sister, fracturing her skull and damaging her liver and brain while demonstrating wrestling moves he had seen on TV. In 2007, two teenagers, 16-year-old Heather Trujillo and 17-year-old Lamar Roberts, killed Trujillo’s seven-year-old sister while imitating moves from the video game Mortal Kombat. The effects of war games on teenagers nearing the age of seventeen, the age they become eligible for Army enlistment, is far less obvious. Once they’re in Afghanistan however, this new class of soldiers will soon realize that war is nothing like what they experienced sitting comfortably on a couch in front of an XBox.
No related posts.
Sources
The sources listings have been temporarily disabled due to a performance issued which caused major slowdowns. A fix is being worked on and we hope to reactivate the sources as soon as possible.
Author Info
I don’t know if you seen this or not but they actually have army recruitment centers in malls where they have tons of video games and virtual reality games that simulate battle situations.
It actually looks pretty cool lol http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/01/14/am.army.experience/index.html
I agree wholeheartedly that war-based video games can easily influence players to perceive the army or war in general as fun.
However, the last paragraph in which examples are given as to how children “mistake” the things that they see on television or in games as acceptable, alludes to a very tight debate on the psychological effects of video games to enhance aggression or desensitize children to violence. It is commonly assumed that violence in video games causes violence in real life because it makes a certain sort of sense and because there have been many wildly publicized accounts of accidents where children hurt one another through imitation. However, counter-research has also been shown that, when playing, we enter a “magic circle” in which we understand subconsciously that what we are doing is only play and has no real, permanent consequences. In fact, most studies merely correlate heightened responses in aggression centers to doing aggressive things in a video game, suggesting only that aggressive people like aggressive games.
In fact, seeing as how many people play video games we should expect that many, many more stories would surface of imitation violence if it were true that video games were the primary factor or even a minor factor in incidents, and that something more than a correlation existed.