![]() “When we have a new product that has elements that we’re not sure how people will respond to, what do we do as a corporation?” he asked. ![]() What made Anthony’s suggestion unique was his follow-up idea of how to deal with the inevitable public outcry that would greet such a policy: video game-style marketing. It’s a familiar argument – guarding schools from terror threats and, of course, shooting massacres, through the provision of weaponsised staff. soldiers who are in plainclothes, whose job is to protect schools.” His controversial proposition was the introduction of school marshals, “U.S. In late September, Anthony delivered one such suggestion during an Atlantic Council forum. “My job is to advise outside-the-box thinking on the nature of future threats, and propose proactive solutions to mitigate against them,” he says. Now, with Anthony’s appointment, the association is made clearer still.Īfter his appearance on the panel in Washington, the ex-game developer was offered an unpaid fellowship by Grundmen on the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank that advises on the future of unknown conflict. While there’s currently no public evidence that the US military helps to fund mainstream video games that double as propaganda, as routinely happens in Hollywood, the makers of military-themed games often pay a license fee to gun manufacturers to use representations of their weapons, drawing consumers unwittingly into the Military-Entertainment complex. It’s a scene as grimly and dispassionately realistic as any late night news report. Through the greenish wash of a night vision camera lens you watch the luminous shapes of men on the ground running at full pelt for cover. In one of Modern Warfare’s most memorable missions, “Death From Above”, you control the gun turrets of an AC-130 gunship as it attacks enemy targets in Western Russia. The change was in part to freshen the fiction, but it was also intended to allow for contemporary modes of combat. The early Call of Duty titles were set in the World War II era but, in 2007 the setting changed to contemporary conflict with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Even the peripherals are shared between games and the military: the US and British armies both use Xbox controllers as an interface to control attack drones in live combat. America’s Army is a freely available PC game, launched in 2002 but still available, that doubles as a military recruitment tool. Set in a fictional middle eastern country, the simulation was a comparatively inexpensive means of teaching marine tactics in military training, but was also launched as a consumer product. Later, the US Marine Corp famously used a modified version of Doom II to teach new recruits, with Lieutenant Colonel Rick Eisiminger, then team leader of the Modeling and Simulation Office, telling Wired, “We were tasked with looking at commercial off-the-shelf computer games that might teach an appreciation for the art and science of war.”įull Spectrum Warrior, an Xbox game released in 2004, was co-developed by a team at USC Institute for Creative Technologies which, in 1999, was established as an official US Army University Affiliated Research Center. ![]() Chuck Benton, the creator of racing classic BC’s Quest For Tires, was one coder who took up the challenge, eventually abandoning the games industry to concentrate on military simulations. During the 1980s, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) approached many developers with the idea of writing video games that could be used to train soldiers. Video games have always enjoyed a close association with the military. He invited the writer to visit the capital and join a panel of experts who were due to discuss the future of real-world modern warfare. Grundman believed that the game’s imagined conflict was unusually credible for a work of military fiction. In the latter scenario, the conflict is defined not by mutually assured destruction via nuclear missiles, but rather by system-crashing cyber-attacks, capable of toppling the Stock Exchange or turning a fleet of drones against their own country. ![]() The game, which has been played by more than 20 million people since its release in 2012, is split between two settings: the final years of the Cold War in the late 1980s and an imagined second Cold War conflict in 2025.
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