Stephanie

I'm not quite sure how I feel about the army making this game. My immediate reaction is pretty disgusted that they spent over $7 million on it and how cocky it all seems. I am interested in playing it though, I want to see what the big deal is. As a recruitment tactic it is quite brilliant on the army's part, to make the army cool is a time when a lot of people are super anti-military or don't really care. Something about the whole thing makes me feel kind of squeamish though, like it doesn't seem right somehow. I think it's the way in which they're trying to make the army seem SO cool, or likening it at all to a video game. It's like saying, see, fighting in a real war isn't so bad, it's actually fun and there aren't any real consequences. No matter how "realistic" a game is, it's still a game. There is no way that it can compare to the real experience of warfare. A quote from the reading that I really agree with is when Elaine Scarry writes, "The severe discrepancy in the scale of consequence makes the comparison of war and gaming nearly obscene, the analogy either trivializing the one or, conversely, attributing to the other a weight of motive and consequence it cannot bear." I think the whole idea of the army making a game because they "want the whole world to know how great the U.S. Army is," is a load of crap. First of all war isn't great and the people who follow orders and fight in it aren't particularly great either, in my opinion. What's so "great" about what the army is doing right now anyway?