War, the Video Game

Abstract

I enter a dark room that feels like a tiny cinema with one wall lit with the visual of a brown, barren, mountainous landscape. I am bombarded by the sounds of shooting guns and helicopter blades. An average-height female active military recruiter tells me to “shoot at the enemy.” “How will I know who the enemy is?” I ask her (loudly). “You’ll know,” she says calmly. “Just shoot at all of them.” Then she walks away. I step up into a Black Hawk helicopter, sit on a stool in front of a gun perched on the side of the open aircraft. It’s like a scene from Black Hawk Down, with the multi-screen display moving so that I feel like I’m really up in the air in the helicopter, ready to shoot at “targets,” or get shot down. The terrain isn’t Somalia though. I try to figure it out – but there are no specifics – the landscape is generic, looking like everywhere and nowhere: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Nevada, Australia? I give up. I shoot at the moving images on the multi-screen display. I am stunned by the jolt and feel amazed at how “realistic” it feels. But then I catch myself: realistic? How would I know? I’ve never fired a machine gun before. I shot at the screen, but to be honest I could not tell whether the video was actually responding to the virtual shots or not as they were supposed to. At the end of what seemed like a long five minutes, a message appeared: “Mission Accomplished,” the screen told me. Then: “What is your mission?”