Videogames and the Military: A Love Story

humble bundle managed to raise money for right wingers in ukraine could have done without that. Wonder if it was on purpose

lmao

https://twitter.com/eleevn/status/1524770415368802305?t=PknQTXOP3j0zU4tPEgUDZQ&s=19

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"It's kind of fun, to be honest"

WIRED has a new roundup of various Pentagon virtual- and augmented-reality projects.

https://www.wired.com/story/military-metaverse/

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Robinson adds that the company is now working on a platform that will allow many different scenarios to be represented in augmented or virtual reality. “What we’re building is really a military metaverse,” he says. “It’s like a multiplayer video game in the sky.”

This is the third or fourth time this has happened

The leakers felt that the in-game version of their countries tank was underpowered, so they leaked classified data about the actual capabilities of their tank shells, I guess in hopes balance changes would be made for "accuracy"?

https://twitter.com/boltactionbeaut/status/1532551150779518977?t=pYMZzDdaR33zesMAo1psuw&s=19

This substack is an interesting look at our world today through the prism of Tom Clancy and his career. This article is dead-on about the subject I'm interested in: where the edges of military simulations and civilian games run up against each other.

An excerpt:

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The next day we went in uniform to Playa Vista for a full day of briefings and demonstrations from civilians running the The Institute for Creative Technology. ICT is an Army lab administered by the University of Southern California. In 1999, ICT was created as a DoD-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), a place where the brightest minds in the military, academia and the entertainment industry—film and gaming—could gather to “study and develop immersive media for military training, health therapies, education and more.”

...

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Virtual small unit infantry simulations were developed here. These were used for military applications, shoot/no shoot scenarios, mission run-throughs and general small unit war-gaming. When no longer useful, these simulations were cleared for release into the civilian game market, their code powering the graphics and the artificial intelligence of the characters in Rainbow Six or Metal Gear Solid. The artificial intelligence computer breakthroughs that made each game play out differently were developed by scientists affiliated with this center.

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At one point I donned a headset and walked a virtual reality patrol; ICT was trying to repurpose and tweak the training technology to treat soldiers with PTSD through virtual exposure therapy, and they invited me to try and the format and graphics looked and felt remarkably like a well done Tom Clancy first person shooter.

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It wasn't until much later I understood why: they were both developed for the same purposes, and the military and civilian video game worlds were bleeding together.

The article is quite in depth and includes many salient points about how modern "Tom Clancy and Tom Clancy-esque video games formed an alternative education, training and communications nexus" and that "A simulation tool that then becomes a game remains a simulation tool." It even makes the case that Tom Clancy, in his pre-novelist career as an insurance salesman, might have used tabletop gaming to better understand the capabilities of the military.

The author was a guest on the TrueAnon podcast. Videogames are discussed from the 1:03:35 mark until about 1:20:00

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/fxXtX

https://twitter.com/BoltzmannBooty/status/1545897236353077248?t=K1pBQ6s0UC2si3YWA0P1ug&s=19

Pokémon GO was of course built from the crowdsourced data collected from Ingress, Niatic's first game. Many "gyms" in Pokémon GO started as user submitted "points of interest" in Ingress.

This is perhaps the only thread on the forum I don't like seeing pop back up……

Well actually in one sense I love it when it pops back up because @Moon is brilliant, but you know

@“Moon”#p77816 I am confused, this seems presented as some sort of insidious conspiracy. The Google search engine was entirely funded initially by grants from DARPA, the CIA and the NSA so their economic and politic ties have always been pretty close and out in the open. I remember the complaints back then in European tech circles when people were dropping Yahoo and Altavista for the massively more efficient but CIA-backed Google search engine.

That’s why Google could buy/absorb other CIA-funded start-ups so effortlessly, such as Keyhole a.k.a. "Google Earth". Literally all of Google’s technology and infrastructure is closely tied to the United States’ intelligence agencies and the company has never really attempted to hide it. There is a good reason why China has been so wary of Google (and [Pokémon Go](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2017/01/10/pokemon-go-isnt-coming-to-china-any-time-soon/amp/)).

This is my favorite thread on Insert Credit, by the way. But I am confused about this specific insight on Niantic using their tech for a commercial venture; it’s just another commercial application of outdated military/intelligence tech, which is pretty much the standard route for technological progress. The ubiquity of Google and Google Maps is way scarier and could be abused way more efficiently than some Saturday Morning Cartoon threat of crowd control through Lickitung.

Today I bring to you an article that touches on some of the things I've been talking about in this thread. In fact the very first paragraph echos what I said in this post:

@"Moon"#p45855

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Ladies and gentlemen: World War III will be fought with videogames.

Upthread I mentioned single player shooters where you star as a "hero" like Master Chief, and they made a further connection to talk about multi-player "hero shooters" like Overwatch.

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Now you can be a War Hero before you die, videogames are obsessed with them. Master Chief, Captain “Soap” Mctavish. Men who do what they need to to get the Job done. Every variety of hero a War Hero, from Commander Shephard to The Arisen in DragonAge – all heroes must toil under and raise a banner of war to be recognized. Suffer under these systems, but do not change them. Earn your place under a stone cross.

...

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There’s the Hero Shooter, now, a genre so defined in what it’s trying to tell you that it puts it right there in the name. Two groups of people, representing various walks of life in armed-conflict come together to Push a Cart or seize an objective. Both sides clearly represented, indistinguishable from each other. Games in this Genre will have Yakuza fight next to French Assassins, American Superheroes – all featured as the last holdout between society and total anarchy.

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Overwatch was the first one of these, catching paramilitary war-operators in superhero garb and exporting them to fantastic locales the American’s playing them might not ever be able to see. A broad cross culture of representation is always included, but that’s old hat. We know women can commit war crimes, but stripped from reality and handed over to fantasy: we want every person of color to fight, too, as long as the guns aren’t pointed at us.

About that last quoted paragraph: I would disagree that Overwatch was the first and instead say it was Team Fortress 2. Also the point about the racial/national diversity reminds me of the variety of forces that can join your extra-legal squad in the morally questionable "Tom Clancy: Elite Squad", which I talked about in this post.

@"Moon"#p51952

@“chazumaru”#p77826 I agree that tone of the tweet I linked to was a bit hyperbolic, but I would say that Google‘s deep ties to American Intelligence are an open secret. While they don’t do much to obfuscate that connection, I doubt it‘s something most of Google’s or Niatic's customers/users think about when using their products.

gamers are insane

https://youtu.be/fAWgfnVmsug

Another follow-up to the Unity story that was behind me starting this thread. They've signed a multimillion dollar deal “that will see [Unity] become the ”preferred real-time 3D platform“ for future systems design and simulation programs across the U.S. government.”

Apparently Unity's response to the questions raised by their employees that was reported on in the [Vice story from a few months ago ](https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3d4jy/unity-workers-question-company-ethics-as-it-expands-from-video-games-to-war)was to be more transparent about their deals with the military. These kinds of deals aren't new and I've seen some say they've been working on "GovTech" products since 2011, but in the past they have been more circumspect about it.

I'd also like to mention the Microsoft/Activision merger as a point of interest, as Microsoft has [its own interests](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-military-delays-22-billion-roll-out-of-hololens-equipment-to-soldiers/) in this sphere.

[In this blog post](https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/07/06/microsofts-commitment-to-the-dod-remains-steadfast/) there is a list of military projects that Microsoft has its fingers in, and it's amusing to me that Microsoft is also now going to be indirectly responsible for creating the kind of propaganda that will romanticize the armed forces in a way that will encourage some young people to enlist. I guess there were already doing that with the Halo series, but the Call Of Duty franchise is just more straightforward about it. The United States military is a big customer for Microsoft, in a number of ways, and I can't imagine Microsoft wanting to shit where it eats by funding a game that does anything less than hero worship of "our" troops.

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Black Mirror

“Men Against Fire”

Season 3 Episode 5

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Soldiers are exterminating mutated humans called "roaches" in a foreign country with the help of MASS, an augmented reality implant which gives them data.

https://www.twitter.com/RepJimBanks/status/1562820837140742144

@“chazumaru”#p82933 OOHHH. He‘s saying that’s a bad thing… Well then.

Earlier this year Russia stated its interests in creating a “national game engine”. Today PC Gamer reports that the idea has been shelved by the Russian government, but that an unamed private party has stepped in to continue financing.

What goes unsaid in these PC Gamer articles is what the engine would actually be used for, but if you've been following along with the Unity news in this thread, you can probably imagine there are more uses in mind than strictly the production of entertainment software. Unity works directly with the US military and I can imagine Russia wants its own arrangement with a home-grown engine.

While I'm on the subject of Russia, the Russia Game Center CX travel episode has a fascinating look at some Soviet arcade machines that were produced in the same factory as military equipment. It's interesting to draw a comparison with that and today's situation, where the tools that enable the production of entertainment software can also be used for military applications.

I find the idea of a "national game engine" fascinating, and it's weird that we exist in a world where such a thing is seen as nessacery.

https://youtu.be/AcQifPHcMLE

New Call of Duty looks great!

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https://twitter.com/ElParece/status/1583591881396867072?t=kV6UlNVVlk0p9r9wnz6jBQ&s=19

The above are not jokes, the following is

https://twitter.com/websiteidi0t/status/1322250295863349249?t=uOzXtuuVhNqGAiils5X4XA&s=19

lmao remembering this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM9B8ah5y4c