Army teaching kids to be killers?

[Entropy]

I can't say I particularly like this piece of journalism, especially the last line:

"Thirteen year-old David Petruzzi just came here to play the game, but if he's hooked, someday the Army could order him to pull the trigger for real."

[Stan]

I can't say I particularly like this piece of journalism, especially the last line:

"Thirteen year-old David Petruzzi just came here to play the game, but if he's hooked, someday the Army could order him to pull the trigger for real."

Andy, I concur; very poor ad lib journalism.

This July 2008 article from Truthout dot org at least puts a favorable spin on the Army and video game.

What the game's "realism" is attempting to do is to mask the violent reality of combat, and military experience in general, for very specific purposes. At a minimum, the Army hopes "America's Army" will act as "strategic communication" to expose "kids who are college bound and technologically savvy" to positive messaging about the Army.

[ODB]

http://www.truthout.org/article/us-m...ruits-children

The posts after the article are an insightful read to say the least. I especially like how many try to link it to PTSD and everything else under the sun.

[Schmedlap]

I once attempted to have a conversation with a graduate student who was wasting his time getting riled up about such endeavors that he deemed to be unacceptable "militaristic" influences upon our youths. He was convinced that violent video games were helping to cultivate a future generation of cold-blooded killers who would be ideal for the military killing machine.

I asked him, "have you ever played the Madden football video game?"

"Yes," he answered.

"Do you think that if you played that often enough that you would become a better football player?"

Incidentally, this young idealist, who had never seen the world beyond his hometown or the edges of his college campus, had no problems with the smut influences of Hollywood, pornography, pop culture, fringe political movements, or other nonsense. He just didn't like the military.

[Uboat509]

I've got to hand it to CNN. That was yellow journalism and they clearly have no problem with that. The link that ODB posted, though, was awesome, one of the best examples of the use of sophistry and specious logic I have ever seen I have personally ever seen.

SFC W

[ODB]

Be teaching my 10 year old daughter ready up drills, I should wait until she is at least 17. I guess I'll need to wait a few years before I teach mag change drills.

[AmericanPride]

I think the argument has some merit -- it's similar to when the military changed the shape of its range targets from bullseyes to human silhouettes and found that infantrymen were thus more likely to fire their weapons during combat. Madden 09 might not make someone a better individual football player, but an accurate simulation of the sport (whether Madden provides it or not) will at the minimum expose the player to the sport's fundamental dynamics. Isn't that the whole aim of the military's own simulations? I'm not particularly convinced that the normative arguments are relevant. Whether the supposed consequences of America's Army are true, I can't say, though I think that should be the central component of the discussion.