'Moral Dilemma: Army Recruitment and Video Games\r'

'Moral Dilemma: forces resumement and video recording Games spell watching the documentary film â€Å"Digital Nation,” produced by Rachel Dretzin, I became interest by a section title â€Å"The multitude learn Center. ” The documentary shows clips of teenagers as young as thirteen vie lashing tv sets pluckys in an arcade guide on by the military. The whole goal is to devolve on these teenagers’ interest so they enlist. Having strong prejudicious feelings to wards war and teenage leavenment to bugger turned with, I obstinate to research this progeny further.Let me take you with my ruling fulfil while I struggle with the marvel; Is the phalanx nonplus Center’s (AEC) subprogram up of war television receiver posts a moral way to recruit teenagers? My set take away source, a radio program call â€Å"War Games Lure for ‘ literal social occasion” laid the background. Host Jacki Lyden explains how the AEC had closed on July 30, 2010 after being in a Philadelphia shopping mall. It was only open for cardinal age in order to â€Å" baffle the most effective machines for public sur spunk domain” ( phalanx).The shopping center’s spokesman, Captain John Kirchgessner, say the center was successful and had been a â€Å" soften way to shargon our Army invention than to simply smile and dial and affect or sobody if they thought most connexion lately” (War). Brian Lepley adds to this by saying, â€Å"We befool got to reach them the way that they entertain themselves” (Joel). I frame these statements to be true. subsequently all, before create the AEC, the Army had shut down quintuplet recruiting offices nearby. With half the staff, the Army was able to recruit the similar amount of people and quieten save bills (War).This saving of money was honorable business practices and sluice eudaimonias value payers. My perception of the AEC was already looking bett er. though Kirshgessner is confident that these recruits were aw atomic number 18 of the difference betwixt war and tv set lame, Staff Sergeant Jesse Hamilton has a unlike perspective. He worries that the office of photograph games as a enlisting excessivelyl takes away from the real numberity of war. He goes on to say, â€Å"People screaming, blood, f double-dealings, horrible smells †the list goes on and on. And they’ve taken all of that extinct, and what they’ve effectively leftfield is the portion which they consider to be the shimmer part” (War).Reading this statement reminded me of why I felt ashamed of the AEC to begin with. It gives kids, who father’t know any better, a foolish idea of all the different aspects of war. I found myself back to my initial, ostracize perception of the AEC. At this point, I k vernal I filled to a greater extent than first-hand information some the AEC. Keeping with radio programs, I stumbled crosswi se one hosted by Rebecca Roberts who goes into more stage or so the center as she takes a tour. She describes it as â€Å"slick and gadget-heavy as an apple store” (Army).There are two simulators: a Humvee and two Blackhawk helicopter, a career navigator, a global-base locator, and rows of Xbox game counsels. E rightfullything is free, as long as you are thirteen or elderer. It seems so innocent, like a teenage boy’s dream mystify true. While have in minding more close the record of boys, I reminded myself that boys substantiate been known through all generations to play war games. withstand it is Cowboys and Indians, Battleship, or the latest picture show game. It’s in their nature. The more I thought intimately godforsaken video games, the more I accepted it as a modern day babehood game.Maybe the AEC is more innocent then I thought. Yet, even with an acceptance of tempestuous videos games, I console had not applied that to the Army’ s enjoyment of video games to persuade teenagers into war. Roberts mentions that some arouse criticized the AEC â€Å"for bait-and-switch tactics, masquerading as an arcade when it’s real an Army recruiting station” (Army). The Army calling itself an arcade when it’s rightfully a enlisting center brings a whole rising problem to the subject. The Army is not allowed to recruit teenagers who are underage.This makes the Army look untruthful. Though the AEC isn’t called a recruitment center, it is. They shut down those cardinal nearby recruitment centers because they planned to recruit teenagers, instead, at the AEC. Staff denies that the AEC is a recruitment center, but then turn virtually and boast about how numerous kids they have recruited (War). Bill Deckhart describes it as, â€Å"The Army people would berate about it and say, ‘Oh its not a recruiting center,’ [and] at the end of their statement, they would talk about how recruiti ng was doing.To me, it was very dishonest” (Joel). The dishonesty of the Army became my major turnoff. After all, if the Army was not doing anything premature then why would they have to lie? In â€Å"performing War,” Ian Graham and Ronald Shaw contest for a more innocent turn oer of war video games. Their term ‘transitional space’ (790) for video games suggests that they are utilize to help ready soldiers and recruit new ones (796). Video games, in Graham and Shaw’s minds, are purely tools to help soldiers stupefy war and help civilians understand it.The Army Experience Center’s use of video games is not a new concept in Ameri spate Army history. In situation, the Army’s use of digital media dates all the back to the seventies and from 1996 when the video game Doom II: Hell on Earth came out for training purposes (794). I asked myself, â€Å"Why was in that location so much contr every postsy over the AEC when the Army has bee n using video games for years? ” Perhaps it has something to do with all the ostracize science floating around out, claiming violent video games have disastrous effectuate on young minds. I decided to research this further in my fore source.In the presence of so many studies about the correlation between video games and violent behavior, Author Christopher Ferguson begs to differ. He claims that â€Å"measures use in video game studies claiming to represent ‘hostility’ in fact don’t correlate will with actual real- heart self-assertive acts or violent behaviors” (79). This is clear and can be proven by the fact that the number of violent crimes from youth and adults have decreased while video game sales have risen (Ulanoff). beingness intrigued by this new idea that violent video games are safe for society, I ventured on with my research.Lance Ulanoff has a son who loves video games, especially violent ones. He has seen no difference in his sonà ¢â‚¬â„¢s behavior since he has started playacting video games and trusts that his son knows fact from fiction. When lecture about forthwith’s youth, Ulanoff says, â€Å"when they turn off those games, they go back to being the homogeneous teen they were before they turned it on” (Ulanoff). In his writing, Ulanoff stresses that evokes should be responsible over what their kids do. This made me realize something so elemental about the fight against the AEC. If parents don’t like it, then they have the proper(a) to tell their kids not to go.If parents are pertain their kid is too naive about the dangers of war, they can educate their kids. If a child enlists in the Army because they developed a false sense of war from playing video games at the AEC, whose fault is that? At this point of my research, I now believed that this is the parent’s responsibility, not the Army’s. In the article titled â€Å"I attentiveness I were a Warrior,” au thors Konijam, Bijvank, and Bushman state that video games are harmful to adolescence boy minds. They are too influential to have agency models who â€Å"show no remorse for their assertive actions, and are rarely punished for behaving sharply” (Konijam).The authors, also, relates lower education with vulnerability, which made me come to my own expla state of matter as to why in that location are disproportionately more African Americans in the Army. In many ways, this article is true. We should be mindful of the personal effects that violent media has on us. Maybe we win’t go out putting to death people, but we are becoming less(prenominal) sensitive of the horrors of war because of it. A life is too precious to take a chance. While on the subject of desensitisation, I came across an article published in the journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The bug out of war video games and desensitization took a spin.The authors admit that video games blur the lines between reality and fiction, and that this can be tough for children civilians. Yet, while reading, I realized not all desensitization was bad. The article points out that clean as medical students need to be desensitized from blood, so do soldiers when it comes to cleaning and facing tragedy (Carnagey 490). The video games are the bridge between civilian and soldier life and troops benefit from that ho-hum transition into war that video games provide. After reading this article, I had a completely new perspective on what desensitization is.Yet, this article continues to say that desensitization, while good for people planning to go into war, isn’t good for the regular, thirteen year old civilian. Though this article had valid points, the second-rate kid visiting the AEC wouldn’t benefit from desensitization. With my views about the AEC going back and forward between good and bad, I move to research on. I came to the article â€Å" action of Interest,” w ritten by Lev Grossman and Evan Narcisse. The article describes our nation’s high demand for video games. It, also, describes the realness so many of today’s games have.Talk about video game’s strong influence on our society had me thinking. We have seen people provide to reenact graphic movies such as the â€Å"Dark Knight” movie theatre shooting in Colorado, but we have never seen such reenactments based off of video games. If video games are so influential and detrimental, there are no facts to proof it. I began to think that the AEC’s use of video games wasn’t really that big of a deal. As I read on, I found a quote by Hirshberg that reads, â€Å"I think there will be a time when we look back and call up it quaint that video games were so disputable” (Grossman).By this time in my research, this quote summed up my thinking, though I still was indeterminate about where I stood on the roll in the hay of the AEC. My last source was an interview with a World War II veteran, Rudy White. The act I mentioned video games with recruitment he shook his head and give tongue to â€Å"no” (White). White reiterated my very first thoughts about how videogames the AEC desensitized people and put falsehoods into the realities of war. He say there are no consequences to face in games, while real war is filled with consequences. White gives an example that a man killed is a son, a brother, and father, and a friend who is now dead forever.There is no reset button in real life (White). After hearing White, I felt that all the research I did trying to justify the AEC was almost useless. I realized that it was better to trust my instincts that said war video games have their place in society, but not in Army recruitment. by all my research, I have had a lot of confused feelings. My initial thinking was that the AEC’s use of video games as a recruitment tool was destructive. It was a dishonest tools used by the Army that gives a false idea about war. It, also, desensitizes kids to the horrors and consequences of war.Yet through my research, I have seen valid counter parametric quantity to my own thinking. Some of these arguments are really quite simple, like the Army is just trying to connect with what kids like to do. Others are that the AEC gives people a more comprehensive idea of the Army than if they were playing the same video games alone in their rooms. Through it all, my final perception of the AEC came after talking to veteran Rudy White. I realized that there are many good things about the AEC, but the negatives outweigh them all. War is too serious to be a game and thirteen is too young to recruit.The AEC and its use of violent video games is not a moral way to recruit teens to the Army. whole works Cited â€Å"Army Complex †Arcade Or Recruiting Center? ” Weekend All Things Considered 17 Jan. 2009. Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. Carnag ey, Nicholas L. , Craig A. Anderson, and fasten J. Bushman. â€Å"The Effects of Video Games Violence on Physiological Desensitization on Real-Life Violence. ” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43. 3 (2006): 489-496. Print. Ferguson, Christopher J. â€Å"Blazing Angels Or Resident hellish? Can Violent Video Games Be A Force For Good?. ” freshen Of General Psychology 14. (2010): 68-81. PsycARTICLES. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. Graham, Ian, and Ronald Shaw. â€Å"Playing War. ” Social and Cultural Geography 11. 8 (2010): 789, 803. Print. Grossman, Lev, and Evan Narcisse. â€Å"Conflict Of Interest. ” Time 178. 17 (2011): 70-75. pedantic depend Complete. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. Joel, R. (2012). The Army Experience Center. On Marketplace [Record]. Philadelphia: American cosmos Media Konijn, Elly A. , Marije Nije Bijvank, and Brad J. Bushman. â€Å"I Wish I Were A Warrior: The Role Of Wishful credit In The Effects Of Violent Video Games On Aggression In tee nage Boys. Developmental Psychology 43. 4 (2007): 1038-1044. PsycARTICLES. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. Swanson, David. â€Å"The Army Experience Centers Bad Experience: Turns Out Training Kids To Kill not Popular With Public. ” Humanist 69. 6 (2009): 5. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. Ulanoff, Lance. â€Å"Violent Video Games: Our Responsibility, Not The Courts. ” PC Magazine 29. 12 (2010): 1. Academic Search Complete. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. â€Å"War Games Lure Recruits For ‘Real Thing’” Weekend Edition 31, Jul. 2010. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. White, Rudy. Personal interview. 31 Oct. 2012.\r\n'