CONTEXT: Whilst slightly scary, this article popped up while our news gnomes where researching the ADHD story recently published | We’ve included it here mostly so we can be seen to be prescient when the next world war is fought online, but mostly because it’s interesting | Not at all scary….honest!
IMPACT: Glass half full, Low – Glass half empty – Very High.
READ TIME: 5 mins
Quality Level Mean [1 – 10]: 8
1. “The controversy about Six Days in Fallujah is really a larger story about video games, militarism in the media, and the expanding boundaries of politics.”
2. “A game about the Iraq War might not seem like it poses big questions about the politics of war, but as a hugely popular form of mass media, video games can influence people’s emotional states, thought patterns, and perceptions.”
3. “Despite its marketing as “realistic” and messaging that it was developed with input from the Pentagon, the game-world it creates removes the complexity of urban insurgency and substitutes simplified moral dilemmas that portray the military in unambiguously good terms—an enjoyable setting for a game, but hardly reflective of the reality of the war in Iraq.”
4. “The Pentagon scenario planner helped the game developers think through a realistic set of threats for a futuristic war scenario, which prompted them to select private military contractors as the most plausible enemy over their first choice, China’s People’s Liberation Army.”
5. “(It is notable that one of the game’s directors was later hired by the Atlantic Council think tank to advise the military on future warfare scenarios, cycling the same threat model from the Pentagon to video games, to think tanks, and back to the Pentagon.)”
Source URL: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/video-games-are-the-new-contested-space-for-public-policy/