Customer Reviews

Peace Journalism in Times of War (Peace & Policy) (v. 13)

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Probably quite unintentionally, one chapter of this book reads as an antithesis of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. The latter is Card's most famous story, about a boy who enrolls in a school and plays a video competition, destroying alien opponents. At the end, it is revealed that they were real and that he was defending humanity. Whereas the current book has a chapter, Video Games as War Propaganda, that somberly dissects the gaming industry's products.

It looks at how the US military underwrote some of the early developments of battle simulations on custom hardware. These were very expensive at the time, but perhaps helped elide into some of the hardware and software that would form the early videogames of the 1980s. More recently, we see how the multiplayer Doom was adapted by the military for small unit combat training. (The chainsaws had to go!)

The book decries this, and hopes that others would develop more pacifistic games. In essence, the book challenges the very raison d'etre of most twitch video games.