Padden 1 Dan Padden Professor Dietel-McLaughlin Multimedia Writing and Rhetoric 2 November 2011 Uncle Sam Wants You!

(To Play These Games) Bang! There is a flurry of dust as a soldier is blown to the ground. Shots ring out across the sunscorched desert as an officer shouts commands to his squad. Rodriguez, Johnson, flank right around that building. Taylor and Hutchinson come with me to the left and provide covering fire! Move, move! As they take cover in a ditch now close to the building, a small metal ball is thrown out of the house, landing just feet away from them. Within the blink of an eye, the grenade detonates and the soldiers fates are sealed. One crumples into the dirt below, the sounds of the battle become more and more distant, while the world around him slowly fades to black. A small message now appears, LOADING CHECKPOINTAlways be alert for grenades thrown by the enemy. Suddenly, the soldier is back in combat, completely fine, and life rewound back to minutes before the blast. This time, when the grenade falls, he grabs it and hurls it back towards the enemy. As the team survives and takes the house, he is successful in his mission, and goes on to fight another day. This happens millions of times across the United States each day, for this is not a real man fighting for life, limb, and country, but a soldier controlled by a player in Call of Duty, an online video game shooter mimicking war. Realistic details such as high definition graphics and a reactive, physical environment provide a faux battle, where a player can take their turn at fighting in war, without ever stepping foot out of their house and without ever risking anything more than being late for dinner. This type of entertainment has grown in popularity over the years as well as grown in the realistic details of the environments. People born in the 1990s have grown up with this depiction of war through games

Padden 2 theyve played, and it has shaped the way my generation, or Generation Z, perceives the violence of war in the real world. All previous generations have held views on what war was and how it was to be approached. In the great Revolution, Americans went to war to fight for their freedom. When the country was split into north and south, those who fought did so to defend their ways of life. During the great trench battles of France in the First World War, families supported the war to keep our nation and her allies strong: the list goes on and on. Even to this day, the standard perception of war has stayed fairly consistent. Yet, the rise of realistic war-based video games may begin to change that. From the days of the medieval days of knights there has always been a sense of glory in battle, though the loss of life keeps war a somber event. Eternally, man has held the belief that war is a necessary evil, existing only to control and limit society. It is also not something to be discussed pleasantly, and should not be analyzed in every detail, for its darker sides are better left untouched. In the beginning of war, only the witnesses themselves knew the darkest parts, yet with the advent of technologies such as video recording and animated portrayals that allows us to gaze into the battlefield, we as people are beginning to see more and more of it every day. The switch in public attitude from World War Two to Vietnam shows just how much of a difference this visual impact due to technology made. Even though WW2 was much bloodier and there was much more loss of life, the fact was that as the public got a glimpse into what war was truly like, they realized it was much worse than they had perceived. Throughout the years, these same technologies have evolved to the point where we are able to now simulate a battle on our own television sets, and join the fight as a controllable player. With the down stroke of violent war images in the current media, and the upstroke in this type of video games, my generation has slowly adopted the notion that these realistic games portray war as it truly is.

Padden 3 Since the advent of video games, they have always strived to become more and more realistic in detail. Whether it was the 3D gaming levels of Donkey Kong, or the newest sports game, software developers over the years have become experts at more and more accurately portraying the amazing world around us. And with the dawn of the digital age, this progress has intensified to the point of disbelief. Even the most realistic and high quality games of ten years ago wouldnt stand a chance with the giants of todays gaming world. In the bigwig shooter and war games of today, realism is a top-notch priority. This realism has added a new dimension to these types of games in terms of creating a realistic combat environment. Now, players can feel as though they are actually there in a war, the ultimate experience. They feel as though they are actually controlling avoiding bullets and rockets, and that they are actually making it through dangerous combat scenarios. And of course, they feel as though they are the sole person responsible for making it through the mission alive. Another aspect of how these games have become ultra realistic is in their portrayal of guns and weapons. Almost all of the current era shooters have employed actual weapons for use in their games. This means, that the average gamer is given the ability to wield extremely powerful weaponry that would normally only be used in real combat. This opportunity gives people who may otherwise have no contact with weapons a chance to experiment with them and gain a liking towards them. The constant use of these weapons by thousands of inexperienced people promotes the idea that perhaps these weapons really arent that specialized, and that it would be possible for anyone to operate them. Finally, there comes the point of violence. In the game, killing most simply a way to gain experience or level-up your character. By scoring more and more kills, your character gains more and more abilities, equipment, power, and of course, prestige. Violence is also a standard part of any shooter video game, for example two cars may get shot and explode in the game, yet it happens all of the time and so no player even bats an eye. When it comes down to it, the game behind the screen is one of

Padden 4 cat and mouse: who can be the smarter hunter, and who will be the prey. It is a game of tag played with bullets. Yet, like in real war, these bullets still rip holes through the bodies, and there is no spared blood or gore. For the sake of realism, almost everything is left there, with the purpose of appealing to peoples senses of reality. Killing is such a standard part of these games; people become acclimated to all of the death fairly quickly. As unnatural as it would have originally seemed years ago, there is now an entire culture devoted to the virtual slaying of others. Realism, blood, gore, violenceall of these war torn subjects are now being seen as standard because of their daily occurrences in shooter video games. The people who are in contact with this are the millions of children, teen and young adults who play these games constantly. These are all very sensitive topics in real war, but because of the constant exposure to them through violent video games, my generation has become gradually desensitized to them. PH.D Jeanne B. Funk, the Department Head of Psychology at the University of Toledo ran a study in which children we subject to long and shortterm exposure to different video games. She states, the present findings suggest that, over the long term, exposure to violent video games may be associated with lower empathy in some children, a possible indication of desensitization (432). This means that we are less likely to become alarmed in real life situations that contain the same ideas and messages. Carolyn Kane, the Professor of Film and Media at New York University states that the graphic evidence of the violence has made the horrors of war common, banal, and everyday. This has given us a different outlook on war from previous generations. Unlike the baby boomers of Vietnam that were completely disgusted and shocked when they saw the first images of real life combat, we are less taken aback by these same images and videos because we have so often seen ultra-realistic footage from a game. Our entire outlook on war from this perspective is different than that of other generations. According to Marinella Garatti, a professor of childrens studies at SU New York, children from middle-income suburban white homes ranked

Padden 5 highest on a war acceptance scale. Because this generation has grown up alongside some of the most realistic games and the shock and awe of a wartime environment that they provide, it almost seems right at home for us to be in a war. To sum, my generation has become deeply desensitized to the violence of war through violent video games. Sadly as it is, desensitization to war and violence is not the only area of our psyche that has been warped by violent video games, our perception not just of the violence of war, but war itself has also changed. Lev Grossman of Time magazine quotes Samuel Johnson in his article on Call of Duty saying, every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. Now every man can be a soldier, if only virtually (72). He goes on to state that, the constraint of video games is that they have to be fun. Real war is hard, and it isnt fun. These games may have filled one of mans desires, yet they have also stripped from war its most important and intimate parts. As Mark Rubin, executive producer of Call of Duty said when interviewed in Time, the things that [military consultants] tell us are real, we could never put in video games (75). One of the most obvious examples of this is the fact that, when in war, people are under the constant emotional and mental stress caused by the chaos, confusion, and challenges of living in a warzone. It is for this reason that the military cycles people in and out in deployments. It is too emotionally overwhelming for many people to be in combat for more than a few months at a time: missing family and loved ones, as well as trying to do everything in their power to ensure that theyll make it home. As a player in any of these games, the only deployments one makes is from the kitchen to the couch. Because of this, people have developed an inaccurate view of how soldiers interact with the military and how wars are fought in general. Because there is no constant emotional and mental suffering from being in a virtual warzone, it becomes enjoyable to fight in war. Another major difference between war games and their real-life older brother are the nations, issues, and politics of war. In many video games developers choose a games enemies to be terrorists, or

Padden 6 other common threat characters with the intent of committing obvious harm to the United States. In this way, they can use the idea that the enemy is inherently bad to avoid the potentially unsettling real life fact that sometimes the United States has supported wars that turned out to have less than glorious beginnings, battles, endings or all three. Misunderstood, video game politics can have a real life effect on their users ideals. We are still attempting to understand these effects, as Mark B. Salter, professor of political sciences at the University of Ottawa, states, while films and to a certain extent literature have been analyzed, video games and other kinds of digital media are under-theorized and under-studied in critical geopolitics (383). War games do not often show the possible outcomes on society from specific actions, nor to they show how native people and countries are affected by the battles waged in their countryside. They do not show put into light the impact that killing unarmed civilians would have. There is also no right and wrong in these games, only objectives to complete. The possibility of fighting for the wrong reasons and against the wrong people is something that real troops are forced to live with, and because of this, players receive the wrong perception of how conflicts are resolved in real life. Of all the major differences between video games and a real representation of war, perhaps none is more apparent than the idea of the sacrificial body. Since the beginning of time, wars have been fought on the principal that the opposing sides would be willing to give up their lives for their causes. Yet, in a video game, the player takes on an invincible role, where they cannot die, and have no fear for death. Salter illustrates an insight into this phenomenon: Death both is and is not the end: Your enemies pass away, but your own death is rather a temporary absence. . . . You die, but you either resurrect at once or after a short while, or, in the worst case, after having re-entered the level, a process known as respawning. This is a privilege normally not extended to your enemies (when they die, that is it, and quite often, their extinction is accentuated by the total disappearance of their bodies) (381).

Padden 7 This shatters all classical ideas of the sacrificial body, and trivializes the extreme valor of dying in support of ones cause. By letting people spend lives so quickly and carelessly, it not only teaches them that lives are expendable and cheap, but it completely skews how battles are actually fought. Forces do not just commit lives left and right and push forward with the hope of eventually winning the mission. This is troubling because it makes people feel as though they could actually participate in war in this manner, an obvious fallacy. Apart from the body of self, however, the most difficult side of war for veterans is the remembrance of the bodies of those left behind. Like a debilitating mental disease, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is rampant among troops when they return home from the most difficult deployments. They remember the bodies of their friends and those of their enemies, lying there shuddering and writhing in agony after being struck down. Watching people die is perhaps the hardest mental and emotional experience, and it is this that makes war such a travesty. However, in games, death is not represented in this way. Instead, many games show just a splash of blood and the body falling down. In violent video games, violence is acceptable because it is not real; therefore, victims do not really suffer (Funk, 416). Games also clean battlefields by removing dead bodies to prevent the players from becoming disgusted. Overall, this trivialization of the human life and body results in almost no emotional connections between the true foundation of war and the average player. No matter how realistically video games attempt to portray war, if they are not fairly showing its most important concept of the sacrificial body and the emotional ramifications of the loss of human life, then they are far from true realism. The end result is gamers believing that war is much more lighthearted than it truly is. When looked at, it is fairly easy to see how shooter type games have affected the way my generation perceives war, yet what are the repercussions of this perception? Perhaps one of the easiest

Padden 8 effects to see has been the use of these types of games as tools of military recruitment. The fact that the U.S. Army frequently uses violent video games to desensitize soldiers during training (Funk, 416) shows that they understand how they can manipulate people to accept war using these types of games. Within the past few years, the Army has released its own shooter type game to the public, Americas Army, which is targeted to all people between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five. This game was an instant success, and the Army promoted it by saying how it was a realistic war simulator (Funk, 416). This game was soon downloaded and played by millions of people. While the game ran through what it was like to be a recruit in the U.S. Army and provided a look into what combat is like, it still refused to show the most important aspects of war, such as the politics, stress, and bodily and emotional harm (Funk, 416). This game is still being effectively used as a recruiting tool today around the country. Many these recruited must have felt cheated and used when they came to the eventual realization that war had much more serious implications than shooter video games depicted. Another serious issue is the way some young servicemen and women are treating war. Because they grew up playing violent video games, there is the possibility of them treating war as if it were itself a game. In this I am referring to members of the military acting foolish, careless, and immoral during war, as if their actions did not have serious consequences. Because violent video games condone, promote, and justify the use of violence while concealing realistic consequences, (Funk, 416) members of the military who have played these games may not fully comprehend the weight of their actions. One example of this could be the sport killings by a rouge army unit that staged a firefight in a village with the sole purpose of killing unarmed civilians for sport (Winner). Another example would be the mistreatment of prisoners by junior military members. Marcus Powers of the University of Durham states, Gulf War I veteran Mary Spio (now the editor of the US popular culture magazine One2one) has argued that what we saw in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was the tip of the iceberg it was a glimpse

Padden 9 of a generation of war gamers coming of age. There may be many repercussions to this generation we are just now becoming aware of. As of now, the oldest of Generation Z are still graduating college, and so they have not yet become the driving force of our nation. Looking into the future, how will the millions of people who have played these games and hold these views on issues such as war respond politically and as a nation? They may feel as though theyve been cheated by their past visions of war, and demand that all future games portray its full implications. In the future, veterans from this generation may feel as though they were tricked into going to war by the game companies and the government. Or possibly they may be so desensitized to violence from games that they dont even consider war that significant of a problem facing the nation. As stated by Virginia Chanley, a senior analyst in the Government Accountability Office, support for both general and militant internationalism has decreased when the public has been more preoccupied with domestic economic concerns as the most important problem facing the nation (39). This shows that it would be possible for the American public to become so desensitized to war they decide that it is no longer important compared to other issues. Overall, it is obvious that either way, whatever the future may have in store, we must be ready to deal with the repercussions of my Generation Zs views of war, and that we must further explore how they are currently being shaped by violent video games misrepresenting this sacred calamity.

Padden 10 Works Cited Chanley, Virginia. "U.S. Public Views of International Involvement from 1964 to 1993: Time-series Analyses of General and Militant Internationalism." Journal of Conflict Resolution, 43.1 (1999): 23. Print. Funk, JB, DD Buchman, J Jenks, and H Bechtoldt. "Playing Violent Video Games, Desensitization, and Moral Evaluation in Children." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 24.4 (2003): 413-436. Print. Garatti, Marinella, and Rose Rudnitski. "Adolescents' Views on War and Peace in the Early Phases of the Iraq Conflict." Adolescence, 42.167 (2007): 501. Print. Grossman, Lev, and Evan Narcisse. "Conflict of Interest." Time, 178.17 (2011): 70-75. Print. Kane, Carolyn. "Satiated and Denied: War and Visual Realism." Afterimage, 39.1/2 (2011): 46-49. Print. Power, Marcus. Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence. Security Dialogue 38.27 (2007): 271-288. Print. Salter, Mark. "The Geographical Imaginations of Video Games: Diplomacy, Civilization, America's Army and Grand Theft Auto IV." Geopolitics, 16.2 (2011): 359-388. Print. Winner, Andrew. US Soldier Found Guilty of Killing Afghans For Sport. The Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney Morning Herald 12 Nov. 2011. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. 2011. Activision Publishing. 13 Nov. 2011.