Once upon a time, breadth of experience—both firsthand and through books, anecdotes, and institutional wisdom—was one of the things that separated the aristocracy from the peasantry. Peasants knew their daily lives and surroundings, but not much else. Only the nobility—and its hanger-on cultures of soldiers, scribes, clerics, and scholars—had experience in the broader world.
That’s not so true anymore. Mostly, of course, that’s because ordinary people travel more, meet more people, and accomplish more than any peasant (or king) could have imagined a few centuries ago.
But the virtual world promises to do even more to expand the range of human experience. Not everyone is happy about that, but it’s a trend that, in my opinion at least, can’t be stopped, and shouldn’t be stopped. Shaping it, on the other hand, may be worth some thought.
XBOX WARRIORS
Legislators around the country are trying to ban violent video games as immoral and dangerous in their effect on children. According to Wired News: “Lawmakers in at least seven states proposed bills during the most recent legislative session that would restrict the sale of games, part of a wave that began when the 1999 Columbine High School shootings sparked an outcry over games and violence.”1 The article notes that the bills are supported by “pediatricians and psychologists.”
Actually, other psychologists (including my wife, a specialist in violent kids2) disagree with this assessment regarding video games and violence. And why we should care what pediatricians think about video games is beyond me—what do they know about this stuff? (Most of the time they can’t diagnose my daughter’s strep throat correctly, which makes me doubt that their professional wisdom extends to complex social-psychological matters.)
But the move against violent video games strikes me as a bad idea for other reasons. Not only does it represent an unconstitutional infringement on free speech—as the Wired News story notes, “None of the measures that passed have survived legal challenge,”— but it may actually make America weaker.
American troops are already using video games in training. Some are fancy custom jobs, like the combat simulators described in this article by Jim Dunnigan at StrategyPage:
[The simulators] surround the trainees and replicate the sights and sounds of an attack. Weapons equipped with special sensors allow the troops to shoot back from mockups of vehicles, and they also receive feedback if they are hit. . . . One problem with the ambushes and roadside bombs is that not every soldier driving around Iraq will encounter one, but if you do, your chances of survival go up enormously if you quickly make the right moves. The troops know this, and realistic training via the simulators is expected to be popular.3
The Army has also developed a game called “America’s Army,” originally intended as a recruiting tool, that has turned out to be realistic enough that it’s used by the military for training purposes.4 These training games draw heavily on existing technology, most of it developed for consumer-market video games. (And, in fact, the military uses some consumer games in training too.) They also draw on troops’ skills at rapidly mastering such simulators, skills likely honed on consumer video games.
What’s more, civilians who play military video games may acquire useful knowledge. This knowledge may even have political ramifications. When television commentators second-guess things that happen in combat—often showing an astounding degree of military ignorance in the process—people who have played military video games are more likely to see through it. At the very least, they have some sense of how fast things can happen, and how confusing they can be.
(SIMULATED) WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
In fact, shortly after 9/11 Dave Kopel and I wondered if the spread of military knowledge via war-gaming might lead to changes in the way war is perceived by Americans. We also noted that war games have played an important educational role at all sorts of levels.5
As a population, the American public probably has greater expertise concerning serious military history than any previous society. This expertise has been acquired steadily over the past four decades, and it has happened largely without notice from the media, academics, or the punditocracy. What’s more, people have become more knowledgeable in spite of the removal of most military subjects from the mainstream educational curriculum, and despite the PC movement’s success in driving military history out of history departments.
One reason that this underground military education has gone unnoticed is that the people acquiring the expertise are mostly technogeeks, the very people that some commentators point to as evidence of our unmartial character. Yet to anyone who knows it, geek culture is full of military aspects.
Military history is a popular interest among geeks. So is skill with firearms. As an article in Salon noted awhile back, geeks tend to be strong gun-rights enthusiasts, regarding both computers and firearms as technologies that empower the individual.6 Geeks, knowing that they can program their VCR, also believe themselves capable of cleaning a gun safely.
Some geeks take their enthusiasm further, engaging in massed battles with broadswords and maces as part of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s popular rounds of medieval combat. Though the weapons are usually blunt or padded, injuries are about as common as in rugby and football, and the rules are far less refined. Geeks also read military science fiction by authors like David Drake, Jerry Pournelle, S. M. Stirling, Eric Flint, and Harry Turtledove, in which war is not glorified or simplified, but presented in surprisingly realistic fashion.
But the biggest source of geek military knowledge comes from that staple of geek culture, war-gaming. Ever since the introduction of war games in the early 1960s by companies like Avalon Hill and Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI), geeks have made war-gaming a major pastime. The games, once played on boards with cardboard counters, now often run on PCs and realistically reflect all sorts of concerns, from logistics, to morale, to the importance of troop training.
War-gaming, like chess, has always been an activity mainly for intelligent males. At the peak of board-based war-gaming, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most good high schools had a war-game club. And you can be sure that the average member of the war-game club ended up with a job and an income far ahead of the average student at the school.
Board-based military games attracted a smaller set of the geek population in subsequent decades, as computers became a new way for geeks to have fun, and as Dungeons & Dragons (originally just a small part of the war-gaming world) became enormously popular, spawning scores of imitators.
Avalon Hill, the founding father of the industry, has been taken over by Hasbro, which has junked most of AH’s once-formidable catalogue. Today, Decision Games is probably the leading war-game publisher, with the flagship magazine Strategy & Tactics (a military-history magazine with a game in every issue), and with a catalogue of board and computer games ranging from Megiddo (1479 BC, the epic chariot clash between Egypt’s Tuthmosis III and the King of Kadesh) all the way to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
Today’s computer format for games works better at creating “the fog of war,” since the computer can hide pieces. The computer also makes it easier to play Solitaire—and solitaire was always a major form of war-game play; the players were attracted by the ideas, not by the chance to chat while playing Bridge.
How well have war games taught war? Well enough that several war games have been used as instructional or analytical tools by the United States military.
Over the years, game designers learned how to playtest games before publication, so that players would be forced to address real strategy and tactics, as opposed to manipulating artifacts of the game system. No game could possibly simulate everything realistically, but the best games pick some key challenges faced by the real-world commanders and make the players deal with the same problems. For example, the many games depicting the 1941 German invasion of the U.S.S.R. find the German player with near total military superiority in any given battle—but always wondering whether to outrun his supply lines, and conquer as much ground as possible, before the winter sets in. Other games make the players work on the delicate balance of combined arms—learning how to make infantry, tanks, and artillery work together in diverse terrain, and learning what to do when your tanks are all destroyed but the enemy still has fifteen left.
Some war-gamers prefer purely tactical games, such as plane-to-plane or ship-to-ship combat. These players come away with amazing amounts of knowledge about submarines, or fighter planes, or Greek triremes, or dreadnaughts. And since real war-gamers like lots of different games, many learn, in-depth, about many different military subjects.
Even the least successful games teach a good deal of geography and history. And they always demonstrate how the “right” answer to a military strategy question is usually clear only in hindsight.
The war-gaming magazines are all about military history, naturally, and most war-gamers end up reading military history and strategy books too. If you ask, “Who was Heinz Guderian?” most people will guess, “Some sort of ketchup genius?” War gamers will be ones who answer: “The German general who invented modern tank warfare, and who wrote a famous memoir, Panzer Leader.”
Most people who war-game don’t become real warriors— although the games have always been especially popular at military academies. Anyone who spends a few hundred hours playing war-games (and many hobbyists put in thousands of hours) will soon know more about the nuts and bolts of warfare than most journalists who cover the subject or most politicians who vote on military matters.
So here’s the funny thing. While the official American culture around, say, 1977 was revolted by anything military, a bunch of the nation’s smartest young males—the “leaders of tomorrow”— were reading Panzer Leader and Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart’s Strategy,7 and, of course, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, long before it became a business-school cliché.
This was no accident. Many of those who founded the war-game publishing business feared that, with the antimilitarism caused by the Vietnam War and, later, with the adoption of the all-volunteer army, American society would become estranged from all things military, leaving ordinary citizens too ignorant to make meaningful democratic judgments about war. They hoped that realistic simulation games would teach important principles.
We’re only now testing the societal effect of having such a large number of knowledgeable citizens. The Gulf War was too short, and too much of a set piece, for public military knowledge to play a major role. But there’s reason to believe that it will be different this time—especially as the favored geek mode of communication, the Internet, is now pervasive. This means that geeks’ knowledge, and their knowledgeable opinions, will have substantial influence. They will be able to put the military events of any given day into a much broader perspective, and they may be opinion leaders who help their friends and neighbors avoid the error of thinking that the last fifteen minutes of television footage tell the conclusive story of the war’s progress. The role of warbloggers— and military bloggers—so far has certainly seemed to fit this bill.
The phenomenal educational effort of the war-game publishers has ensured that, despite the neglect of matters military by most educational institutions, important aspects of military knowledge were kept alive and taught to new generations of Americans, in a fashion so enjoyable that many didn’t even realize they were being educated.
VIRTUAL DATING AND OTHER VITAL
EDUCATIONAL TOOLS
Of course, the usefulness of computer games as an educational technique goes well beyond war, as I discovered recently firsthand when I heard my daughter and one of her friends having an earnest discussion: “You have to have a job to buy food and things, and if you don’t go to work, you get fired. And if you spend all your money buying stuff, you have to make more.”
All true enough, and worthy of Clark Howard or Dave Ramsey. And it’s certainly something my daughter has heard from me over the years. But rather than quoting paternal wisdom, they were talking about The Sims, a computer game that simulates ordinary American life, which swept through my patch of Little-Girl Land at breakneck speed. Thanks to The Sims, the girls know how to make a budget and how to read an income statement—and to be worried when cash flow goes negative. They understand comparison shopping. They’re also picking up some pointers on human interaction, though The Sims characters come up short in that department. (Then again, so do real people, now and then.)
Now The Sims 2 has upped the stakes. Among other things, as its label makes clear, it allows players to “Mix Genes: Your Sims have DNA and inherit physical and personality traits. Take your Sims through an infinite number of generations as you evolve their family tree.”
What more could a father want than a game that will teach his daughter that if you marry a loser, he’ll likely stay a loser, and if you have kids with him, they’ll have a good chance of being losers too? Thank God for technology.
All joking aside, I’m impressed with the things that these games teach. I’ve already mentioned the value of video games in teaching warlike skills, but of course those aren’t the only skills games can impart, just the ones for which there was a large and early market. But as the technology improves, and people get more and more used to computers, I think we’ll see a lot more games that teach as they entertain. SimWorld isn’t the real world, of course. But it’s a world in which actions have consequences, and not necessarily happy ones. (Your Sim characters can die, if you let them screw things up too much—and they can have extramarital affairs, which as in real life, usually turn out badly for all concerned.) It’s a world in which narcissism, hedonism, and impulsiveness are punished, and in which traditional middle-class virtues, like thrift and planning, generally pay off. In short, it’s a world that’s a lot more like the real world than the fantasy worlds of movies, popular songs, and novels—the places where children and adolescents have traditionally gotten their non-parental information on how life works.
And kids find this stuff more interesting than movies, popular songs, and novels, at least judging from the degree of addiction The Sims has produced among my daughter’s crowd. Which means that we have not only a powerful teaching tool, but a powerful teaching tool that people actually want to learn from. It’s not quite A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the computerized tutorial from Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, but you can see things moving in that direction.
What’s more, it’s a powerful teaching tool that people buy. The government does not decree the use of such a game from on high; instead it’s a creation of a free market that had entertainment, not instruction, as its primary goal. And it’s teaching something that most kids don’t get in school or at home. I don’t think that The Sims will replace schools, but it’s interesting to see a consumer product providing an education that is, in some ways, more rigorous than many schools provide.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
It may be making a difference. At the very least, the fears of the video-game critics seem to be stillborn. American teenagers are doing better than ever, and people are trying to figure out why. Games just might have something to do with it; at the very least, they don’t seem to be hurting.
Teen pregnancy is down, along with teen crime, drug use, and many other social ills. There’s also evidence that teenagers are more serious about life in general and are more determined to make something worthwhile of their lives. Where just a few years ago the “teenager problem” looked insoluble, it now seems well on the road to solving itself.8 But why?
Reading about this change, it suddenly occurred to me that I had the answer: porn and video games. That’s what’s making American teens healthier!
It should have been obvious. After all, one of the great changes in teenagers’ social environments over the past decade or so has been far greater exposure to explicit pornography, via the Internet; and violence, via video games. Where twenty or thirty years ago teenagers had to go to some effort to see pictures of people having sex, now those things are as close as a Google query. (In fact, on the Internet it takes some small effort to avoid such pictures.) Meanwhile, video games have gotten more violent, with efforts to limit their content failing on First Amendment grounds.
But, despite continued warnings from concerned mothers’ groups, teenagers are less violent, and—according to some, if not all, studies—they’re having less sex, notwithstanding the predictions of many concerned people that such exposure would have the opposite effect. More virtual sex and violence would seem to go along with less real sex and violence; certainly with less pregnancy and violence.9
The solution is clear—we need a massive government program to ensure that no American teenager goes without porn and video games. Let no child be left behind! Well, no. Not even I’m ready to argue for that kind of legislation, though I suppose candidates interested in the youth vote might want to give it a thought. But the real lesson is that complex social problems are, well, complex, and that the law of unintended consequences continues to apply.
When teen crime and pregnancy rates were going up, people looked at things that were going on—including increased availability of porn and violent imagery—and concluded that there might be something to that correlation. It turned out that there wasn’t. Porn and Duke Nukem took over the land, and yet teenagers became more responsible and less violent.
Maybe the porn and the video games provided catharsis, serving as substitutes for the real thing. Maybe. And maybe there’s no connection at all. (Or maybe it’s a different one—the research indicates that teenagers, though safer and healthier, are also fatter— so perhaps the other improvements are the result of teens sitting around looking at porn and video games until they’re too out-of-shape and unattractive for the real thing.) Most likely, the lesson is that—once again—correlation isn’t causation, despite policy entrepreneurs’ efforts to claim otherwise.
Regardless, the fears of the doomsayers have not come to pass. People can continue to claim that psychological research suggests that video games lead to violence and that porn leads to promiscuity, but in the real world the evidence suggests otherwise. So perhaps we should reconsider regulating video games. And we should definitely take claims of impending social doom with a grain of salt. (Hey, while we’re at it, why not encourage surfing porn and playing shoot-’em-up games? After all, as the activists say, if it saves just one child, it’s worth it!)
More seriously, such a lack of evidence is reason enough not to shut down the virtual worlds that kids are inhabiting. Instead, we may want to look at the lessons they learn. I don’t think that Duke Nukem or Grand Theft Auto are particularly harmful, but it would be useful for people to think about ways of making those games teach productive real-world lessons, and I think that can be done without making them uninteresting. The real world is interesting, after all, and it’s very, very good at teaching real-world lessons. The advantage of the virtual world is that those lessons can be learned without bloodshed, bankruptcy, or jail. Seems like a good thing to me.