Video Games. - Entertainment, History Tool or War Pornography?

Video games are crafted by their makers for profit.  This is the trunk of the tree, and its roots and branches spur in many and unpredictable sequences thereafter.

War video games with children as their “target market” are promoted using well-known names of Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc.  These names are merely the packaging to maximise the sale of their ersatz-ware, bearing very little relationship to what really happened on those famous battlefield sites.  No doubt the manufacturers would deem otherwise by dishonestly stating that useful history lessons are being conveyed in a manner which can be absorbed by young and enquiring minds.  What dangerous and perverse clap-trap.

Real battlefields are not seen through the eyes of an individual player seeking to score points by killing others.  The real soldier does not regenerate 100 times and whose arms and legs are robotically repaired by “medical packs.”  Enemy do not fall in droves each time the hero fires his inexhaustible weapon.

What really happens in battle is the same for each side.  It is a mayhem of slaughter and only finishes when one side is dead or has surrendered.  There is no glory for the individual locked in battle – he is just desperately afraid.  The odd exception is the true psychopath, but he is very much the exception rather than the rule.  The video game hero is the psychopath who does not have the imagination to consider that what he is dealing out could, in fact, happen to him.

General George S. Patton had a word for this.  L’audace.  Audacity. In his famous speech entitled L’audace, l’audace, toujour l’audace, General Patton reproduces a page from Georges Danton’s book upon how a great leader should always push his men boldly forward into the face of a great challenge.  However, the general is the leader, not the player.

A video game is merely the transformation of this noble concept into the embodiment of an irresponsible hero.  It is the crime without the punishment, the cake with no calories, the rape without consequence.  In other words, entirely make-believe and nothing better than a dangerous toy.

Young and impressionable minds are likely to be corrupted by this war pornography in the same way real pornography can drive men towards unwholesome thought and criminal acts.  It is a dangerous and irresponsible game easily leading impressionable minds to perpetrate horrific events such as the Hungerford Massacre, the Dunblane Massacre and more lately the Cumbrian shootings.

A war video game is the product from a juvenile mind for juvenile minds.  Only in this case the creator is the trunk that spawns many derivatives.  There are those who see it for what it is – a transitory pastime – and those who take it to heart.

One must ask the question – is it worth the price?