Listen
For fifteen months we’ve been fighting a war in which, so far, almost 900 Americans have died.
And for much longer than that, since World War II, we’ve been seeing the melding of real, bloody, sometimes tragic American war with American entertainment. In these days it’s not just depictions of war in movies and on TV that shape our ideas and feelings about real war…Hollywood and the armed forces are sharing tricks and technologies with each other….
A few years ago this show sent a reporter to the new Institute for Creative Technology that the Army had set up at USC in Los Angeles to devise ways for Hollywood make-believe to train soldiers for real combat.
Well, the Institute for Creative Technology has now spawned a huge commercial hit - a new videogame called “Full Spectrum Warrior,” released just this month, that has already sold a quarter-million copies.
According to the chief scientist in the Army's simulation and training department, quote, "We have simulators for generals and colonels and captains and majors, but [until now] never anything specifically for the squad leader. Every 18-year-old in the world knows how to use a game console.”
In the game, the soldiers-as-players and players-as- soldiers make their way through a TV-screen combat zone of narrow urban streets with Arabic graffiti …past minarets and arched windows and tiled walls. Enemy fighters have beards and cloths wrapped around their heads.
That’s right, Full Spectrum Warrior is an official combat simulation technology funded by the Army to train its teenaged recruits for the life-and-death business of war in places like Faluja and Najaf… And it’s also a game for $49.99 that teenagers are now playing in their bedrooms and dens at home in Dorchester and Lubbock.
Now I’ve tended to be skeptical of the idea that violent movies or violent TV cause viewers to commit violence…or even that violent video games like Grand Theft Auto or Doom do the same thing.
But when I read that one of the Columbine killers envisioned their massacre specifically as, quote, “like…Duke [Nukem] and Dooom,” it became a lot harder for me to keep to the strict libertarian line that killing video people has nothing to do with killing…people.
It became harder still when I read that the 17-year-old Beltway sniper trained for his killings with a video game set on “sniper” mode.
As it does now that the Army itself has gotten into the violent fantasy-killing videogame business.
And as it did, finally and irrevocably, when I read last week about combat in Iraq, real combat. In his new book about the war called "Generation Kill,” the journalist Evan Wright writes about a 19-year old Marine with the First Reconnaissance Battalion. This corporal is depicted hunched over a machine gun, blasting away at Iraqis attacking his unit. And he says the following: "I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it."
Now, I am not ready to say that videogames should be censored or banned.
I’m just suggesting that all of us - including laissez faire parents, entertainment companies, civil libertarians - should stop refusing to admit the connections between fantasy and reality. If we want a culture where violent video games exist, OK, fine, but that doesn’t mean we should look away from the disturbing consequences of that choice. We ought to admit that life - and death - can imitate art.
I am Kurt Andersen.
