Weapons of mass distraction

A new breed of computer games is teaching today's teenagers how to wage, and win, the war against terror.

By Wagner James Au

Oct. 4, 2002 | You can never be the enemy, in America's Army. In this popular new game of multiplayer combat, you can log on as a U.S. soldier who must, say, invade a terrorist camp -- but if someone logs onto the opposing side, to fight you, he also plays as a U.S. soldier. It's just that from his point of view, he's defending a U.S. camp from terrorist invasion. You will always see yourself and your squad in U.S. Army uniforms, wielding U.S. weapons. Everyone who signs up to fight, then, fights as an American.

The game has become so popular with U.S. troops and Pentagon brass, says Lt. Colonel Wardynski, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis and the man who initially conceived it, that there's even talk of shipping computers to Afghanistan, so soldiers can play it from there.

"I had high hopes that it would be something pretty hot," says Capt. Jason Amerine, an Army officer who recently served in Afghanistan. A longtime gamer who counts Command & Conquer and Rainbow Six among his favorites, Amerine was not disappointed. America's Army was so realistic that for the first time, he says, "I was actually looking at it more as a soldier than even a gamer -- but it happened to be good in both ways."

But America's Army's real purpose is to be a recruiting tool, which is why the game has been made freely available since July, with new units and missions added on a regular basis. (It'll be out on CD in recruitment offices soon.) And while its impact on recruitment won't be evident until December, when July enlistees arrive for basic training, early signs, say Army spokesmen, are promising: 28 percent of Americasarmy.com visitors click through to goarmy.com, the government's official recruitment site.

The Army claims that 470,000 people have the game or are playing it now. But there is some skepticism as to whether such success will translate into more recruits. "I don't believe it is any more likely to do this than a good book or a good movie," says Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. But in terms of cost effectiveness, that might be enough. Compared to investment in traditional recruiting ads in other media, says Mike Zyda, director of the MOVES Institute, the Navy's Monterey, Calif., virtual-reality think tank that developed the project with Wardynski, the game is much cheaper.

America's Army is the first game to make recruitment an explicit goal, but it snugly fits into a subgenre of games already in vogue: the "tactical shooter," a first-person shooter that emphasizes realistic, squad-based combat. The realism factor means these games are often modeled on recent events. Next month comes NovaLogic's Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, adapted from journalist Mark Bowden's 1999 book and from Ridley Scott's film of the same name, which reenact the brutal firefight between U.S. soldiers and Somalia's bin Laden-funded militants in 1993. Before that, gamers will get to replay an earlier battle: SCi/Gotham Games' Conflict Desert Storm is loosely based on covert operations against the Iraqi defense infrastructure conducted by American Delta Force and British SAS commandos, in the days leading up to the Gulf War.

Given the warlike tenor of current events, it's not surprising that America's Army has taken fire from its left flank. An article on the liberal-left Web site Tompaine.com called it "propaganda," part of "America's escalating militarization -- designed by the Bush administration," while the Nation's Web site recently fretted over the "political implications" of its gameplay: "nonstop Army cheerleading, with frequent terrorist and Arab bashing ... What better way to reinforce [the war on terrorism's] legitimacy?"

But the squeamishness some lefty critics are expressing over America's Army only demonstrates how many people are still too incurious or too craven to acknowledge the brutal reality the terrorist threat currently poses. Even now, antiwar advocates prattle on about the "root causes of terrorism" -- when the only meaningful cause spurring on al-Qaida and their like is, in Christopher Hitchens' clumsily apt coinage, Islamofascism: a well-organized assault on Western democracy and values (and a close nephew to the original German variation).

Meanwhile, the spiritual sons of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who turned his hatred for American secularism, Jews and sexually liberated women into a galvanizing cry for totalitarian theocracy, are still active and influential, even now sending out calls for world domination.

During World War II, as the country girded for battle, director Frank Capra created a series of films to instruct the Army's soldiers. A classic of righteous propaganda, "Why We Fight" laid out for the greatest generation who the enemy was, and why they must be defeated. If the presentation was simplistic, its message was irrefutable, and comprehensible to the least literate recruit.

A contemporary version of "Why We Fight" seems unlikely to emerge from Hollywood, outside of a rush of thrillers with stock terrorist villains. But the need for one now is just as urgent, even as al-Qaida is whittled away by gun battles in Karachi or raids on a Buffalo suburb. The war on terror -- which, if we parse out the diplomatic niceties, really means a war on Islamist militants, and the nations who back them (beginning with Saddam's Iraq) -- must be fought, and over a campaign of many years, decisively won.

In that regard, America's Army and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down are the "Why We Fight" for the digital generation. Though not explicitly doctrinaire in an ideological sense, by showing the very young how we fight, applying the moral application of lethal force on behalf of liberal values, these games create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now. One hopes they'll inspire the best gamers to consider a career of military service, while preparing them for the battles to come. There are even indications that playing these games provide useful experience for when they do go into real-world combat. All to the good: it will aid them in the war to conclude what is truly the unfinished business of 1945.

Next page: We are at war, and have real enemies. So, point, click and fire!