http://www.newsreview.com/chico/content?oid=32361
From “The Killing Game” by Gary Webb:
As the number of people playing Counter-Strike soared into the millions, the U.S. Army could only watch wistfully. For years, Army recruiters had diligently pursued the very same demographic–middle-class male teenagers–with dwindling success.
In late 1999, after missing their recruiting goals that year, Army officials got together with the civilian directors of a Navy think tank at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey to discuss ways of luring computer gamers into the military.
Combat gamers not only happened to target the right age for the Army’s purposes but, more important, possessed exactly the kind of information-processing skills the Army needed: the ability to think quickly under fire.
“Our military information tends to arrive in a flood … and it’ll arrive in a flood under stressful conditions, and there’ll be a hell of a lot of noise,” said Col. Casey Wardynski, a military economist who came up with the idea for an official Army computer game. “How do you filter that? What are your tools? What is your facility in doing that? What is your level of comfort? How much load can you bear? Kids who are comfortable with that are going to be real comfortable … with the Army of the future.”
With the vast funding of the U.S. government behind them, the Army/Navy team began developing a game that it hoped would turn some of its players into real soldiers. “The overall mission statement … was to develop a game with appeal similar to the game Counter-Strike,” wrote Michael Zyda, the director of the Navy think tank. “We took Counter-Strike as our model, but with heavy emphasis on realism and Army values and training.”
After two years of development, America’s Army was released to the public on the first Fourth of July after 9/11. The gaming world gasped and then cheered. Contrary to expectations, the government-made shooter was every bit as good a $50 retail shooter and, in some ways, better. Plus, it was free–downloadable from the Internet at www.americasarmy.com. That, too, was a calculation, one the Army hoped would weed out people who didn’t know much about computers. The game and its distribution system were difficult by design, Zyda noted.
“That was a very key thing. First, they would have to be smart enough to download the game off the Internet. Then, they would have to become good at [the game], which isn’t easy. To attract those kinds of people, that was the mission.”
In the wake of 9/11, the public and media reactions were, in the Army’s words, “overwhelmingly positive.” Salon’s Wagner James Au, for example, gushed that the game would help “create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now.” Most media accounts focused on the novelty of using a video game to help find recruits and carried jocular headlines like “Uncle Sim Wants You.”
There are now more than 4 million registered users, more than half of whom have completed the required preliminary weapons training and gone online to play, making it the fourth most-played online shooter. The Army says there are 500 fan sites on the Web, and recruiters have been busy setting up local tournaments and cultivating an America’s Army “community” on the Internet, hoping to replicate the Counter-Strike phenomenon.
“With respect to recruitment, actual results won’t be known for four or five years, when the current raft of 13- and 14-year-olds will be old enough to join,” Zyda wrote.
But not everyone saw the game as a good thing. A Miami attorney named Jack Thompson went on ABC News and threatened to seek an injunction, saying it wasn’t the government’s job to provide kill ’em games to youngsters. He was deluged with angry e-mail and allegedly received death threats.
“The Army and the Defense Department have a very long history of conducting unethical, illegal experiments upon soldiers and civilians,” Thompson angrily reminded players in a posting to the official Army Web site. “This ‘game’ is yet another experiment upon the unsuspecting pawns who play it. You are the latest guinea pigs.”
Thompson was more right than he knew. Recruiting computer gamers was only one of the goals behind the creation of America’s Army. The other purpose, aptitude testing of potential recruits, has gotten virtually no publicity.
Currently, Army game developers are in the process of creating a statistics-tracking system that can tell how much time a player spends online, how many kills he’s made, which battlefields he’s best at, how many kills he averages an hour and similar minutiae.
Why would the Army spend tax dollars tracking and collecting arcane statistics about the players of its game? Because the data can be used to predict what kind of soldier they’d be.
“Suppose you played extremely well, and you stayed in the game an extremely long time,” Wardynski explained in an interview last year. “You might just get an e-mail seeing if you’d like any additional information on the Army.”
America’s Army isn’t merely a game, recruiting device or a public-relations tool, though it is certainly all of those things. It’s also a military aptitude tester. And it was designed that way from the start.
In a paper written while he was still developing the game, Navy computer expert Zyda noted that “the research focus is to determine if games can be instrumented to be able to determine the aptitude, leadership abilities and psychological profile of the game player.”
Wardynski confirmed that the aptitude testing research had been successful. “That’s as far as we’ve taken it. It’s something we’ll be moving ahead with in the coming year.”
The Army has been collecting player information in a vast relational database system called “Andromeda,” Wardynski said, that recruiters will be able to use to look up a player’s statistics if one of them shows up in a recruiting office. A version of America’s Army now in development will take that a step further, allowing players to create a “persistent” online alter ego, one that steadily progresses through the virtual ranks by taking additional training or specialized missions, generating valuable data along the way.
Recently, an updated version of the game called Special Forces was released, and there was a reason why that particular theme was chosen. “Specifically, the Department of Defense wants to double the number of Special Forces soldiers, so essential did they prove in Afghanistan and northern Iraq; consequently, orders have trickled down the chain of command and found application in the current release of America’s Army, which features Special Forces roles, missions, and equipment,” a Navy-produced booklet states.
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Officially, Gary Webb decided to put two .38 slugs into his own head just two months after publishing this prophetic, balls-out indictment of the Pentagon’s techno-seduction of children. So he did not live to see the Army Experience Center prototype become operational in Philadelphia.
http://www.thearmyexperience.com/virtual-tour
Those who remember Webb remember how he fought the spook-media Establishment to expose the dirty-war source of crack cocaine addiction for the kids of LA–an utter corruption gone global in the tsunami of Afghan heroin now battering another generation.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-heroin26dec26,0,7339972.story?coll=la-home-headlines
www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/243554
To the last Gary Webb was the real thing–a journalist, a hero, a defender of the least among us from the depredations of the Machine.
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In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn’t get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests.
So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as far as I could tell. It encouraged enterprise. It rewarded muckraking.
And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.
- Gary Webb, from Into the Buzzsaw
