Book Review: "War Play" by Corey Mead

War Play: "Video Games and the Future of Armed conflict"

by

Corey Mead (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , 2013)





War Play: "Video Games and the Future of Armed conflict"

by

Corey Mead (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , 2013) 

I chanced upon this book in the new book section at my local public library. It is a fascinating well written book that discusses the US American context of how video games and simulations are playing an increasing role in the US Army.

In one of the earlier chapters in the book, the author discusses the history of how this came to be, and how many technologies which are part of our daily lives now were originally developed for a military purpose. These technologies had received their initial funding from a defense source in the USA and were kept in production by the military even when they were not commercially viable. To quote from the book: "digital computers, first version of the Internet, semiconductors, radar, sonar, jet engines, portable phones, transistors, microwave ovens, GPS - the list goes on".

From other sources, I have read that chemical weapons which were developed for the Second World War effort by many countries-  morphed into pesticides after the war ended. For me the interesting thing to learn from this is that many technologies are hard to develop without having the money to investigate various options- and as can be expected most of the options explored will not result in a success. It also makes one realize why a country like India could not come up with these inventions- it is not that any people lack intelligence, but that one needs a lot of resources for doing research. In addition, many countries in the West and Japan were able to divert a lot of their resources to war efforts, which lead to the development of many different kinds of technologies. They also invested a lot of money in educating people so that they could both develop and use new technology.

For example, after World War II, India did not have a car industry, and it was not until the 1990s and 2000s that we started designing and producing our own modes of transportation. In the early 1990s, the only motorcycles we had in India were Japanese motorbikes produced under a license. Now, we have companies like Bajaj and TVS, which are no longer beholden to Japanese technology, and introduce new motorcycles in the market which have been designed in house. [How the Japanese copied technologies from cars to cameras was not unlike the more recent efforts of some Indian firms] Even in Japan, there are numerous cases of companies like Toyota which were propped up by the government- when they were not doing well financially. Compare India's case with German companies like BMW and Mercedes, which benefitted immensely from World War II- they were able to train people and learn about car technology because of the war effort. This lead they had in technology continues to this day. [Not that producing cars and motorbikes is good for the environment in the long run, - but that is a different story]

He cites a book which discusses this in more detail. "From Sun Tzu to Xbox" - by Ed Halter. (this book discusses how many of the games we play today have an origin in the culture of the military, to take chess for an example.)

"War Play" goes on to describe the first person shooter game called "America's Army", developed by the army in conjunction with the entertainment and the video game industry. He discusses the role played by key figures in bringing to the market- and  the surprising bureaucratic hurdles faced by many people in the Pentagon in this process. One of the reasons for the introduction of the game was that the US military (which no longer had the draft after the Vietnam War) was facing a shortage of military personnel, and traditional media like advertisements in newspapers and magazines were no longer working.

 A decision was made to not depict the bad guys simply as "Arab" looking- but to include different ethnicities from Europe, Africa and Asia. In his analysis, the author points out that "America's Army" is not a simple first person shooter game where one just goes out and kills people; one first has to undergo basic training, and only then can one advance to the next stages in the game, and that one loses points- or can even be kicked out for killing people on one's team. At the end of the book, the author mentions how the success of "America's Army" is being copied by countries all over the world: the UK, Iran, South Korea and China, all of which have developed similar video games. An interesting thing about the Chinese game called "Glorious Mission", is that in the game there is only one type of enemy- the US military!

Another interesting thing mentioned by the author is how things like standardized testing and even exams which survive to this day like GED (high-school diploma for students in the USA who do not finish high school ) and SAT (scores from this test are used for undergraduate admissions) have origins in the needs of the military during the first World War. The author cites the case of a SAT question which makes the link obvious, "A certain division contains 5,000 artillery, 15,000 infantry, and 1000 cavalry. If each branch is expanded proportionately until there are in all 23,100 men, how many men will be added to the artillery?"

The standardized test came about because during the draft years of the first World War, the army needed a way to quickly compute the intelligence of a person, and assign them to tasks based on their aptitude. The author quotes the work of the famous scientist Stephen Jay Gould from his book "The Mismeasure of Man". Gould points how the data analysis had concluded that whites were more intelligent than blacks, and that darker people of southern Europe were less intelligent than the fairer people of northern European. This continued to shape US immigration policies for decades, and led to the continuation of cultural and racial prejudices. More recently, people have shown that it is wrong to assume that a certain people are "primitive" and lack intelligence- there are many cultural and social factors, (like access to education), which influence the outcome of the test results.

There are many criticisms of standardized tests- but they are still pursued to this day- not just in the USA- but all over the world- just because they are cheap to administer- another logic from the military which has been imported wholesale into the corporate and education world!

The author discusses a lot of other fascinating details in the well written book about the history of the military and education ( how George Washington wanted his troops to be educated to read the Bible for greater spiritual awareness, how the GI Bill sent lower class people to college dispelling the notion that blue collar people were not intelligent, how the video games are being introduced in the class-rooms, the rise of the military-entertainment-education complex). He also discusses how video games are being used to not only train soldiers, but are also being used to treat returning veterans suffering from PTSD.

All in all it is a fascinating book that makes me re-think about the connections and availability of resources in the world, and how society chooses to go about things.

You can get a snapshot of the book by reading this article by the author Corey Mead in the USA magazine Time, titled "Military recruiters have gone too far" : http://ideas.time.com/contributor/corey-mead/