What a Soldier Can Learn from a Video Game

Modern war­fare often resem­bles play­ing a video game. You lock on an enemy, fire a mis­sile and wait for con­fir­ma­tion that it hit the tar­get. You do not meet your foe directly; it is not an eye-to-eye duel between two knights. You may even not be phys­i­cally present on the bat­tle­field, pilot­ing a remotely con­trolled mil­i­tary drone instead. This level of tech­no­log­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion may have a dehu­man­iz­ing effect on the way com­bat sit­u­a­tions are being per­ceived, mak­ing it easy to for­get about the actual human cost of what is going on dur­ing a battle.

But what if, para­dox­i­cally, engag­ing in a gam­ing ses­sion could make you think more about true con­se­quences of pulling the trig­ger? The fol­low­ing insight was shared with Kotaku by a mem­ber of the armed forces:

“Combat itself was some­what like a video game for me,” says Adam. “Our weapons can shoot over 1000m, accu­rately. I would see a dis­tant flash, sight in, press the trig­gers, and no more flash. I barely saw any­one from either side get injured or killed. Call of Duty 4 actu­ally had a more pro­found effect on me, because it made me stop and think about what hap­pened to those on the receiv­ing end of my weapons. I was not expect­ing that reac­tion at all and it wasn’t easy to deal with. It made play­ing any shooter hard, for a while.”

The arti­cle by Brian Ashcraft offers many more fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries told by ser­vice­men and women, for whom video games proved to be an effec­tive way to con­nect with other sol­diers and served as a cure for bore­dom that haunts them most of the time between extremely stress­ful but occa­sional com­bat engage­ments. One of them has even been given a copy of a video game by his wife so that he could feel like being home when play­ing it:

Some mil­i­tary wives send cook­ies, this one sends video games. She says she’s the one who turned her hus­band into a gamer. “When he left for deploy­ment this last round, there was a very silly –- but touch­ing –- moment that I will never for­get,” she says. “I let him take my copy of Fallout: New Vegas.” Her hus­band was shocked, and he asked her a mil­lion times if she was sure it was okay. He knew she hadn’t fin­ished it, but she assured him over and over again: I can fin­ish this when you get back home.

Very emo­tional. Make sure to read it all, it is a great piece.