The Army Experience Center

Last semester, I watched this documentary called Digital Media: New Learners of the21st Century. It talks about how media is now an essential part of school systems. Near the end of the documentary they focus on video game recruitment stations the military uses. The Army created an arcade that’s called The Army Experience Center. It looks similar to a video game café that exist in Korea or other Asian countries. Any one can go in and sit and play military simulation video games for free for as long as they like. While they are playing, Army recruits walk around the arcade and talk to the kids.

When I saw this in the documentary I was appalled. I couldn’t believe they were so blatantly using video games to recruit people into the Army. Although it is an extremely smart recruitment technique, I still don’t think it’s entirely ethical.

The whole time I was reading the article I just kept thinking about the free arcade the Army set up to recruit people. I also thought about how game designers were teaming up with the military to create war simulation games for training purposes. It makes sense that field experts would also be recruited to help make training purposes more realistic. I don’t disagree at all with the military asking for expert opinion and help when trying to create training facilities. I’m sure without these simulated experiences it would be difficult to train people. However, the game designers then went ahead and took these training techniques and their game developer skills to create this virtual citizen-soldier.

Once again, the common theme is that the media and commercial producers do in fact exploit movements for monetary gain. War was on the media and certainly a main topic of discussion so the companies made things that were already on the minds of people.

There’s nothing wrong with creating niche markets, but when products are made for children (as seen in the video in class) are so creepy and one sided it’s hard to believe that exploiting what’s popular at the time is OK.