Ponchponcho said:
WanderingFool said:
Remember the talk about how violent videogames were "murder-simulators"... Maybe they were closer than we all thought...
My thoughts as well, all this video games being art talk, seems to slip peoples minds that they are also used by military and police groups as training tools.
There are interactive games and interactive tools. Some buildings are artistic, beauteous wonders of man's capacity to build and some are public toilets.
Having used the real 'murder simulators' you'd be hard pressed to call them a game and they certainly aren't sold as such to officials. Everything is behind the scenes, the presentation is either pretty ugly graphics well behind the commercial curve or using video and most essentially use a rifle with a laser pointer as a single button mouse. Pretty primitive sounding? well they certainly feel that way to the user I always wondered how they can cost so much until I actually got involved in procurements and realised that idiots and dodgy bastards are behind every deal.
The other kind are the war simulators that whole exercises are run against, now those are a giant more complex game of champ manager and are very much worth the pennies.
RandV80 said:
WanderingFool said:
Remember the talk about how violent videogames were "murder-simulators"... Maybe they were closer than we all thought...
During WW2, they found that a surprisingly large majority of their soldiers in combat never actually fired their rifles. So this was when they switched from round targets to human shaped ones.
video games, ease the mental block that would otherwise be in place making you think twice about taking a life.
The problem is far from gone, most of the military PSTD cases you see are simply because they shot someone not some hugely stressful battlefield situation you may be more likely to shoot than in WW2 but no better equipped to cope with it.
It doesn't seem that shooting video footage or little blocky computer soldiers makes much difference over a target shaped like a man, just the targets raised the odds of a soldier shooting significantly. What a sim does do is let soldiers train with more realistic scenarios than "look out, enemy sidestepping between two walls" while someone else pulls a chain that drags the target to the right.
It used to be about getting the soldier to shoot at all, now it's about getting better shots.
Personally I can't do it (another reason to be glad I left, I was a pretty crap soldier all round) and I've been shooting little computer soldiers regularly and in first person since wolf3d.
