https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-...
However if VR and haptics are able to perfectly recreate war in the next few decades, let's hope that psychology develops in pace. A generation of teenagers who have been exposed to perfect recreations of trench warfare and 9/11 is a generation that will have more PTSD than any other generation before it.
There's also the issue that such a realistic sim probably wouldn't be fun for a lot of people, and wouldn't get played that much.
Do you mean, like, is there an experience difference between "being there" and experiencing a highly realistic VR simulation?
Apologies if I'm misunderstanding because the questions seems to answer itself... "yes, of course!"
Besides the obvious fact wherein if you get shot you die for good, and if you don't die you'll feel tremendous pain and be potentially maimed for life, you've got other factors such as
-Friends you've developed closed bonds with being killed next to you
-A campaign lasting months or years that consumes your existence
-Terrible food
-No sleep
-Extraordinary boredom in downtime (which doesn't exist in videogames or nobody would buy them)
-The endless question of "why are we here" (which doesn't exist in videogames - we are here to have fun)
I was asking if this new experience of the atomic bomb in VR is different than the other WWII games we have, some in VR.
Basically, if war video games based on real wars are ok, are other games based on real, horrible, events ok?
Another issue is that a stronger reliance on "empathetic/emotional" learning experiences can delve too far from education and too much into propaganda. Group A can produce material that hits deep at our psyches and highlights the evils of Group B, and vice versa. Whose side wins the popular debate isn't from the facts on the ground, but from which group has the tech/production skills to make their story grip the heartstrings. In that way it's like any other over-produced documentary, but VR can have the seductive appeal that it's "more real" and thus more objective.
The issue of "experiential VR learning" becomes harder and harder to do right the further back in time you go, because of the mistake we moderns make when trying to "relate" to the past. We often imagine time-traveling and dropping ourselves in a past environment, thinking that's what it would be to be, say, a medieval peasant. We too easily forget that our own mindsets and approaches would be fundamentally different in some ways.
I'm still developing these thoughts, but I think the critical difference lays in the difference between "VR experience of Hiroshima bombing" and "watching Schindler's List."
A movie is a narrative. Otherwise it wouldn't be entertaining and nobody would watch it. Even documentaries have narratives. Narratives require good guys, bad guys, etc.
A VR "experience" is just that - one little slice of experience. I really don't think that can be biased (maybe, depending on the experience). It's just "putting yourself in someone's shoes." I don't see how anybody could be biased about how terrible a city being nuked was. It was terrible. Someone might argue that "it was for the greater good," but it was still terrible. Maybe it'll make it harder for a future (now child) president to make the decision to drop the bomb, good! Is that a biased viewpoint, to not want suffering of anybody? I guess maybe it is.
Some of the stories told at the museum are from school kids who were walking around the city during the blast. They walked through streets in intense pain, skin hanging in sheets off their bodies, trying to find their friends so they could pick them up and help them. Some of them were on fire. Some returned to their homes to find their families dead. Those same children grew up and lived full lives, and can be heard in recounted interviews at the museum.
Children are a lot stronger than many adults think.
I visited Yad Vashem when I was 16. I have been traumatized for the rest of my life. The Children's Memorial is not for children.