The United States Army came out with a game several years ago titled "America's Army", which is now in its 3rd edition. The game is meant as a pre-enlistment preparation tool that people thinking about joining can use to "prepare" themselves for combat situations, or it is just a fun, free game reminiscent of Call of Duty or Medal of Honor.
The website is laid out fairly well, as I was expecting a preponderance of military propaganda to assault my eyes before visiting, but when I visited there was very little that someone could call propaganda on the website. While there is a glaring large rectangle detailing the heroic antics of some of America's finest, it doesn't pop out as anything more than a side note to the overall professionalism of the site. "America's Army"'s site actually quite reminds me of classic gaming websites like Blue's News, the Warpcore, Gamespy, etc, that pander to the gamer in American children. While propaganda is noticeably missing, the appeal of subtle persuasion for adolescents seems obvious on 2nd viewing.
They splatter each of their pages with real military jargon, while also throwing in instances of "exciting" or "action" to entice the people who visit the website to delve deeper into its pages in search of adventure and glory. Each page is a recruiting poster waiting to happen. Other than that, they use some simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) tricks in order to make the pages interesting visually, like you are sitting at the controls of NORAD waiting for instructions from the President to implement DEFCON 1.
The target audience appears to be teenagers, as first person shooters appeal most to this generation of Americans. Teenagers happen to be the easiest target for recruitment, as many of them are looking for college scholarship money and a chance to get away from their parents upon completion of High School. Should the web page statistics ever be made available, I'm positive that most of the people who visit the site
fit in the 14-19 age range. The rhetoric of the website definitely works more to indoctrinate people susceptible to the types of language found there.
Noticeably missing from the pages of the website are the horror stories and realities of any war. Pictures of soldiers missing limbs or the lifeless bodies sitting in pools of blood do not coincide with the stories of heroism and the game's specifications. Also missing are the stories from soldiers over in Afghanistan or Iraq right now about the long periods of waiting they must do between assignments, followed by the brief moments of absolute terror they experience while orders are being yelled in their ears and bullets are whizzing past their heads. As such, I agree with Navy veteran Boyle in that this website glorifies what can subjectively be discerned as the good aspects of war while remaining silent on the reality of those who must fight in them.
My good friend Lance has been to Iraq twice, and each time he came back a different person. His stories detailed long droughts from fighting in which he had to find some way to keep himself occupied, where the others in his unit horsed around trying to stay entertained by pulling stupid stunts, the shortage of ready and willing women to play around with, and many times where they just sat around staring blankly at dirty walls rife with nude centerfolds that further desensitized them to reality. This, coupled with the hours of patrolling his unit had to go through where danger lurked around any corner, their sweeps of abandoned buildings in sectors heavily damaged by bombing and street fighting, and interviewing suspected insurgents or people who could be hiding them, the dismal experience he relayed to me tells a very different story from the one detailed on the America's Army website.
While the website may be a nest of misinformation and persuasion, I do not believe that video games or mere words written on a website will incite children to violence. Violent people are violent, regardless of where they were raised or what they are taught. The fact that some people play video games and then sack their schools with automatic weapons is not a testament to the influence of violent games, but instead a testament to the inadequacies of the human genome. People are violent, they have been for thousands of years, and they will be for thousands more. Video games certainly didn't make Hitler, Stalin, or Che Guevera kill thousands or millions of people, so I am sick of hearing this argument that video games created these monsters.
Until we begin to implant computer chips in baby's brains that control hormone levels, synaptic firing, and neuronal growth, and we can control them with a few strikes of a keypad, we are going to have people killing each other seemingly senselessly. As a species that has seen this play out over and over again, it is about time to accept it as a fact of life and stop blaming things that are only secondary factors.
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