Stahl's reading

I always knew video games were created realisticaly on purpose, so the player can feel like they've just entered the combat world, but I never really thought about using video games to actually train soldiers. I've really only thought of militarization as a one-way road. But now I see that it can go both ways. I never knew that Doom was made into a Marine version to train the soldiers. My best friend's brothers were obsessed with the game and literally would sometimes play for 24 hours. Actually, her oldest brother skipped his HS graduation to attend a Doom national tournament down in Texas. That is crazy to me! It makes me wonder if he had to go into war, would he have the basics down to fight? If they're using the game as military training, then why not?
The other part of the article that intrigued me was his part on Netwars and how the media has produced another kind of citizen, as the subject of Netwar. I am an aspiring journalist and it is really interesting to read about the reporting system of Iraqi Freedom positioned journalists. I am too young to remember any of the coverage of Desert Storm but I am old enough now to hear how journalists who covered both wars on the ground talk about the differences between the two wars and how they participated more covering the war in Iraq. I think that shift of constant TV news coverage of the wars has made it easier for companies to create realistic war video games because everyone can see the war being faught right in front of them. Just how television coverage brought to us the first time in Vietnam the "living room war," I think they too have brought to us these all too realistic war killing video games. The TV coverage of the Iraq War is unprecedented with hours of streaming video posted on the web and seen on 24-hour cable network news programs. It is so much easier for a company to create an eerily realistic video game to sell by the millions and further the playing of the game on terror.

False Witness

Karen Hall's paper False Witness: Combat Entertainment and Citizen Training in the United States brings up a lot of good points. For one, I always wondered at what point did toy companies use television and advertising companies to sell to young children. As she points out, during WWII Mattel manufactured the "Burp Gun" and spent half a million dollars for television spots advertising the gun to children. These war toys flew off the shelf and every young boy had to have one because they were "so real" and authentic. I can believe her point on combat entertainment being responsible for "training" our culture in how we should feel about war because in previous wars before television, it doesn't seem like there was a big war/military culture in our country. I just watched the movie Platoon and watched the scene she talks about on pages two and three and can know understand when she talks about revenge killing as a moral justification for the deaths of their deceased platoon members. It also makes me think why a film as gory and sad as Platoon would make anybody want to jump right up and join the army?! One of my good friends from home enlisted into the marines and when I asked him why he said, " because I want to kill some [arabs]" I wonder why he would say that because it's not like he has been in battle before over in the Middle East and feels like he needs some revenge? I think it must come from him growing up in our militarized culture with constant bombardment of ads, movies, tv shows and video games and him buying into combat entertainment. It just makes me sad.