Stephanie

On Monday I had brought up wanting to know actual recruitment figures for the army after the game America's Army was released. I decided to look it up online for my show and tell article, and it was really, really hard to find statistics about the army and generally any website that gave army information or even talked about the army in a negative light. I thought that seemed pretty sketch because...there's way too much anti-military sentiment going around right now for there to be hardly ANY anti-army opinions floating around the internet. Or maybe there isn't? Maybe the rest of America thinks war is great? Anyway, on to my findings...
Like I said, there wasn't much in the way of hard numbers online, but in an article about America's Army on Wikipedia I found a couple of interesting things:

"At the United States Military Academy 19 percent of 2003's freshman class stated they had played the game. Enlistment quotas were met in the two years directly following the game's release. But another recruitment breakdown in April 2005 proves the game's recruitment power is still quite limited, in light of the recent casualties that American soldiers experienced in Iraq."

It's really hard to know how much the game, if at all, contributed to the dramatic increase in enrollment, but the fact that the army did so much to promote itself as being hip and cool probably was a large factor. I think that the army having to promote itself in such a gimmicky way in the first place is pretty pathetic anyway...