Fighting Last Month’s Battle

Fighting Last Month’s Battle

Many of those reading this are gamers. Generally, this doesn’t mean Scrabble.

Rather, people engage in digital genocide. This is not normally known as an educational pursuit.

It’s not too often that I find references to shoot-em-ups in political magazines, probably because doing things like shooting up demons on Mars isn’t too politically relevant (well, let’s hope shooting up demons doesn’t become a politically relevant skill in this year’s U.S. election. :))

Nonetheless, I found an article about games being made by a company called Kuma here (their website is over yonder.

What the company is out to do is put together “re-creations of real war news events weeks after they occur.”

Yes, there are games that let you refight battles (Battlefield Vietnam being a recent one), but this is the first time someone is trying to bring the battlefield to practically real-time.

(For those of you with Vietnam nostalgia, though, don’t fret. One game lets you be John Kerry fighting in a Swift boat.)

There’s a free trial, so you can see how good or bad these games are, but at least they ought to be more real-world informative than the typical shooter and give you a better idea of what real fighting is like.

Developments like this really make you wonder whether a few dozen years from now, we might not see a real-life equivalent of something like Ender’s Game.

Ed

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply