America’s Army: Free Video Game, Social Engineering Tool, Surveillance Platform
July 27th, 2008This video game is nothing less than an automaton that shapes and then harvests teenage minds so that the U.S. Army can repurpose their bodies years later.
I’ve looked at a lot of evil in my days, but this is palpable, murmuring, inky black evil; complete with automated meme delivery and driving, metrics, surveillance. Out the other end drops some number of carbon based lifeforms, with brains at one end, assholes at the other, and trigger fingers usually attached to their right hands. The Army must lick its chops when these kids sign on the dotted line. Not only are the recruits already brainwashed, but they did it to themselves, on their own time.
All the Army has to do is grease the gears of their mechanical Turk and that thing puts the meat on the table.
How is this different from television or school?
The Army is recording everything that the potential recruit is doing in the virtual world, sometimes for years.
What becomes of that data, how is it used, once the person enlists? We don’t know. Maybe SEAS is running on the backend…
How lost must some of the parents be who allow their kids to “play” this… game? Maybe they think it’s just “good, clean fun,” when, in fact, it’s more like an Internet version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
As usual, it’s not that bad, it’s worse: How about the parents who encourage their little Christian Warriors to practice killing the infidels on the computer?
If you’re thinking, “No way,” see, Left Behind: Eternal Forces.
Via: TruthOut:
In May of 2002, the United States Army invaded E3, the annual video game convention held in Los Angeles. At the city’s Convention Center, young game enthusiasts mixed with camouflaged soldiers, Humvees and a small tank parked near the entrance. Thundering helicopter sound effects drew the curious to the Army’s interactive display, where a giant video screen flashed the words “Empower yourself. Defend America … You will be a soldier.”(1)
The Army was unveiling its latest recruitment tool, the “America’s Army” video game, free to download online or pick up at a recruiting station, and now available for purchase on the Xbox, PlayStation, cell phones and Gameboy game consoles. Since its release, the “game” has gone on to attain enormous popularity with over 30,000 players everyday, more than nine million registered users, and version 3.0 set for launch in September. “America’s Army” simulates the Army experience, immersing players in basic training before they can go on to play specialized combat roles. Most of the gameplay takes place in cyberspace where virtual Mideast cities, hospitals and oil rigs serve as backdrops for players to obliterate each other. As a “first person shooter,” the game allows players to “see what a soldier sees” in real combat situations – peek around corners, take fine aim, chose weapons that replicate those actually used by the US Army.
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Yet, far from providing realism, “America’s Army” offers a sanitized version of war to propagandize youth on the benefits of an Army career and prepare them for the battlefield. In the game, soldiers are not massacred in bloody fire typical of most video games, or for that matter, real combat. When hit, bullet wounds resemble puffs of red smoke, and players can take up to four hits before being killed. To further protect youth, concerned parents can turn on optional controls that sanitize the violence even more – shots produce no blood whatsoever and dead soldiers just sit down. This presentation of war contrasts to the much more grisly reality unfolding every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, like a June suicide attack on the Fallujah City Council in which three Marines, two interpreters and 20 Iraqis, including young children, were killed. Photos by American photojournalist Zoriah depict a horror scene in a small courtyard, dismembered body parts – ears, hands and pieces of skull – spot the ground; one Marine’s head looks smeared into the pavement. Zoriah writes of the scene, “There are dying people strewn around like limp dolls along with lifeless bodies of all ages. People are screaming and crying and running as if they have something important to do, only they can’t figure out what that important thing could possibly be … people are literally frantic removing the dead, as if their pace may bring some of them back.” It is this violent, realistic quality of combat that has been excised from the game.
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Recruiters stage area tournaments with free pizza and sodas; winners receive Xbox game consoles, free copies of “America’s Army” and iPods. Game centers are also set up at state fairs and public festivals with replica Humvees and .50 caliber machine guns, where children as young as 13 can test out the life-sized equipment.
When players walk into Army sponsored tournaments, the government knows more about them then they may suppose. The game records players’ data and statistics in a massive database called Andromeda, which records every move a player makes and links the information to their screen name. With this information tracking system, gameplay serves as a military aptitude tester, tracking overall kills, kills per hour, a player’s virtual career path, and other statistics. According to Colonel Wardynski, players who play for a long time and do extremely well may “just get an e-mail seeing if [they’d] like any additional information on the Army.”
America’s Army is pretty effective, Left Behind is just a re-skinning of a sloppy RTS dynamic, not exactly fierce procedural rhetoric. The issue of metric analysis in virtual spaces is a key one, and is probably a key lever of the future of socio-facism. Metrics can also promote transparency and efficiency in business processes, but why bother with that when you can train people to kill for oil?