I'm not easily offended or upset. I'm not bragging when I say this. In fact, some might see it as a personality flaw, or a sign of social maladjustment. Whatever. Point is, when something does manage to offend me, its kind of a big deal. At least to me.
I've played war video games before. I've played video games where you killed people before. Shit, I just finished a game with the word "Assassin" in the title, where I spent a solid 50 hours of my Christmas vacation sneaking up behind guards and then stabbing them in the back of the neck and giggling as the blood spurted out. But that was just a game.
I started playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 last night. I think it crosses a big line. I think it crosses a million big lines. Let's follow the pattern:
The US invades Iraq in the early 90s, the Gulf War. The invasion starts at night; the early news footage is nothing more than lights streaking across a dark sky. Press conferences are held showing videos of smart bombs zooming in on targets without context. War, essentially, begins to look like a video game.
The advances in video game consoles make more and more realistic games possible. One of the new genres is the ultra-realistic war game. It starts with historic recreations of World War II (the only good war ever(tm)) but eventually works its way to titles like
Operation Desert Storm. The war that looked like a video game now is a video game.
Advances in war technology replace pilots and tanks with drones piloted from halfway around the world. Piloting a drone is virtually indistinguishable from
playing a video game - except the bombs you drop land on real people. The video game of war has now become actual war.
Meanwhile, the country wages wars that have no consequence to the average citizen. There is no draft; instead, we have a volunteer army made up many brave men and women, but also of too many that turned to the army because there was
nowhere else to turn for opportunity. We pay for the war with debt while
cutting taxes. Nothing is sacrificed. How can we be expected to judge the impact or justness of a war when to us it is nothing?
And now the final step. The very first level of Modern Warfare 2 takes place in the front lines in Afghanistan. I'm in an army unit that gets ambushed in a town by insurgents. Its very realistic - up until the part where I die. Or I accidentally kill another marine. Or I accidentally kill a civilian. I'm bad at the game, so I do all these things alot. But there are no consequences: I just get sent back to my last checkpoint. I'm playing a video game depicting a war that is actually going on now, where real people are dying, where we should be having a very serious and difficult discussion about the justness of the whole thing, and... what?
This is what we do for fun during wartime. We let the poor and the crazy do our fighting for us while we stay at home playing video game propaganda. It kind of made me hate myself for ordering the goddamn thing.
And where is all of this leading? Where else but here:
