The US military is using online gaming to recruit teens
thenation.com
thenation.com
The matches could be incredibly slow. You could start a match and go grab a snack and you'd still be alive. On the flip side if you died it could be 10+ minutes to respawn. Sound was really important. I think eventually you could tag enemies on a minimap, but we had a ton of abbreviations for calling out locations in chat. The weapons had their quirks too.
The training and qualifications were also hella tedious. Like to get medic qualified you had to sit through this classroom lecture and take a test. The special forces qualification (opened more levels and weapons) was also really tough.
I hopped on in a later update and it was just constant respawn like any modern FPS. Anyway, loved that game. Never joined the military but I thought about it.
Yeah, I think the thing that made it such a good recruitment tool at the beginning was that it wasn't like most video games. I wouldn't quite call it realistic, but if you were the type of person that liked AA, you were probably a good fit for the Army. The revisions gave it more mass appeal but probably lowered the hit rate as a recruitment tool.
A sizeable number of people that I played with went on to serve in the military, evidently due to their experience playing the game. So, anecdotally, it was effective.
Strangely, the one thing that sticks out to this day is they shunned the convention of using red and blue team indicators and instead chose red and green which made the game strangely difficult to get used to. I think I am remembering those little tick icons hovering above a player or maybe the reticle.
I guess the reason I'm pointing this out was because at the time I kept thinking if they can't get this one simple thing correct, what plethora of other things are they getting wrong.
edit: I have no idea how this adds to the conversation. Just thought vomit I guess.
>I had just reminded viewers of the United States’ history of atrocities around the globe, and helpfully provided a link to the Wikipedia page for US war crimes.
Can you name any military that hasn't done anything wrong? Not unique to any military
>The practices employed on Twitch by military e-sports teams are part of a system by which recruiters target children in unstable and/or disadvantaged situations. Recruiters take advantage of the poor seeking steady income, the vulnerable longing for stability, and the undocumented living in fear because of their citizenship status. Now, at a time when all those factors are magnified by a pandemic that has left half the country out of work and over 30 percent unable to afford their housing payments, conditions are ripe for recruiters to prey on anxious youth.
Prey on anxious youth? Seriously, it's like they assume nobody wants to join the military for any reason, if it wasn't for the pandemic. Giving young disadvantaged kids discipline when their parents don't isn't bad. The article brings up military sexual trauma and suicide as if that is not going to happen anywhere but the military, or if its a normal thing. I have family in the military, in fact that is how my family immigrated to the US due to a great uncle serving in the military.
>“Twitch is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my career, and it’s because you’re live for hours on end, talking to these people in the chat. You develop a community and know your individual chatters. There is an ecosystem in every Twitch channel,” Piker said. “Recruiting in this predatory way is a violation of [the users’] safety.”
Seriously? You can find that kind of community on chaturbate or any of the sex streaming sites.
If the Americans had even 10% of the imperialistic mentality of the Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Japanese Empire, Mughal Empire, etc., the entire world would be a single imperial state.
That certainly doesn't justify the numerous crimes that the American military has done, but context is key, and like should be compared with like.
The approach of the modern superpower is much more effective: decentralized power but overall alignment. There's no coincidence to America's approach. It isn't ideological. It's pragmatic.
1) Much of that expertise has come directly from US involvement. See: Western Europe, Japan, Korea.
2) Much of the other expertise developed specifically because of US non-involvement. See: the Soviet Union and the states it influenced and supported. There were even plans to attack/nuke the Soviets, who were the only real rival post-WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
Had the U.S. wished to, it could have easily formed an imperial state following WW2. That would have been in-line with essentially every large state in human history. Thankfully, they didn't, and the world is better off for it.
The tools of modern warfare are too widespread and easy to adopt. You can’t do it anymore, the old school empire is just as dead as old school fortresses. Technology has broken it.
I have friends who served in Afghanistan. I’m not unfamiliar with how powerful the US military is. But even that power is too weak.
America’s approach is way more resilient and the control exerted is much easier to retain.
Every empire since the year dot captured land, with peasants farming it, who could be taxed, to pay the soldiers, to capture land... that was the business model. A little profit was left over to pay for cities, palaces, pyramids, etc.
This flow of money from country to towns was reversed by the industrial revolution. Within almost every country now, the cities are taxed to pay the rural voter base (or to pay off the rural might-be-revolutionaries, in places with less voting).
Not the only thing going on, of course -- changes in weapons matter to the balance, as mentioned. So does the rise of literacy & nationalism, which made the idea of rulers who are too distant (by ethnicity, language, or religion) from the population base (as they were in empires, almost by definition) into a rallying point. And thus raised the cost of holding land.
Imagine, for a moment, that each one of these had nukes. What's the probability they'd use them to make a point as an aggressor/opressor? Even risking MAD?
Also: MAD only exists if you let your opponents acquire nukes too.
Given everything, I think the highest likelihood outcome is that they behave similarly.
You're right that you can't hold an empire with only force, but I would argue that was just as true during the days of the Roman empire as it is today.
Sure, the Romans used (for the time) overwhelmingly advanced technology and amazingly brutal tactics to conquer Gaul and Britain, but they maintained their hold over those territories by culturally assimilating the native populations. Gallic and Britanic Romans spoke Latin, wore Roman dress, and even followed Roman sanitary customs -- there's a reason there's a town called Bath in southwestern England.
That culture continued to exert influence long after Rome fell as a central military power.
Can you name a street gang that pays your college?
My intention was to draw attention to the ethics though.
That is because most popular depiction of military amount to propaganda and is designed to make you feel good about military. It does not show the ugly or boring or realistic parts of it.
You pretty much never see movie from point of view of civilians living in the place where military operates. Military would not be so cool looking there.
Even death in combat or mistreating civilians is depicted in a way that makes you want to join fight. More realistic (and less popular) depictions don't have thay effect.
What you wrote is just propaganda internalized.
There were those sad movies about kids in war time too.
No, the war was not unambiguous cool good as far as I remember. I never perceived it as cool technology only, it was never framed to me that way.
My grandma used to say that war is horrible. The grandparents generally did not liked it and did not liked movies with shooting and bombing. They added details only later, the stuff they personally seen, when I was adult, but when I was kid they would at least generally say it was bad.
Some things had a horrible magnificence like when the US bombed Los Alamo's US soldiers and the men in a documentary talked about how beautiful it was, or the terrifying effect of white phosphorus.
After writing this, I think I liked the idea of the power and leanness of the military ( wanted their gear because milspec means hardy), but also thought they had the coolest toys to play with.
And there is no war without massive suffering. Pretty much any of them displaces people, interrupts food distribution and generally makes people living in that area suffer.
Pick up the one you want, you find all that.
I have too, which is precisely why I'm greatly in favor of an extremely strong military. Sovereignty is a privilege enjoyed only by those with the means to enforce it.
I have an aversion to these tactics because I know I sure as hell wasn't mature enough at 18 or even a decade later to be in a position where I could be deciding to kill someone in combat and I don't like the idea of kids being recruited with some slimy tactics, but I do think Silicon Valley needs to do a better job of working with DoD and the US govt, I sure as hell would rather the US be the undisputed world leader than Russia or China
edit for misspelling
You could easily be a non combatant, and most are not combatants jobs. Its one of the greatest misconceptions of the military. Wars and battles only occur during a failure of diplomacy and negotiation.
I'm not sure I agree that those are the only situations where wars and battles occur - maybe in great power conflicts but was there really much diplomacy or negotiation before the U.S. invaded Iraq?
Turns out I'm color blind. I already had the top secret clearance, ended up as a quartermaster (QM) for Patrol Coastal Crew Charlie at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, under command of SOSCOM (Special Operations Support Command).
A lot of driving around spec ops units on a RHIB (Ridged Hull Inflatable Boat) up and down the Um Qasr river (which is actually more an estuary and canal system, and actually has a lot of different names as it shifts... but that's another story - everyone just calls it 'Um Qasr').
Bottom line, the military will put you where they need you most. Smart people get put into advanced training for very technical ratings. I would probably be working in a nuclear power plant today had I been born with normal color vision. Such is life. Smart people are too rare to waste on shit like infantry. There's plenty of people that can hold a rifle.
Nitpick: the infantry needs intelligent people too, especially in the officer ranks. McNamarra's Morons suffered massively-higher casualty rates than "normal" draftee infantry, for example.
In Ender's Game, the main character repeatedly tries to out smart the military and avoid his draft by becoming more and more brutal.
In this article, the military is portrayed as a group of pseudo drug dealers, seducing poor youths into a life of violence and war crimes.
Really, this article is fascinating in how it assumes that the reader will agree with it's unstated thesis that entering the military is the worst thing that could happen to a person.
They even have a hat-tip to Enders Game near the end.
But, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to recruit least disciplined people who love shooting more than everything else, and aren't even good at what they area doing in digital games (otherwise why would they leave it).
I still remember the Apache footage that WikiLeaks published. The gunner was so enthusiastic to shoot people. "c'mon let's shoot. let me shoot"
He thought he was playing CallofDuty.
Wow, baiting 13 year olds into signing up for the military via a fake contest is something straight out of Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers specifically discouraged people from joining the military.
The entire movie is supposed to be a pro-military propaganda film for that specific universe. One cannot be a citizen without military service. They even used child soldiers [0]
The movie was written post "failed military policy" from the perspective of dozens of minor conflicts, middle east interventions, and a few major ones like Vietnam. It explicitly satirizes "political exceptionalism", when they are anything but (utterly incapable intelligence leading to massive fleet loses to artillery, woefully under equipped soldiers, and even psychic abilities used to comical effect of "they're afraid"). While having a "social media reality" that lets the myth of exceptionalism flourish.
The books are essentially written as a love affair to cold war policy, and the concept of the "forever war" against an enemy (the bugs which are essentially the perfect red communists, led by a cabal of male psychic bugs). The soldiers are woefully over equipped to the point that they make master chief from Halo look wimpy, and put through training that makes them actually exceptional. And it is explicitly written through the lens of "this forever war is a just and good thing".
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They can also be read through the lens of "this is a drunken romp". The book an action combat read, and the movie a comedy. Assuming you don't have the patience to dig into the lessons they offer.
I actually enjoy both. And find the fact that they are nearly perfect foils of each other, even more enjoyable.
And the books did purposefully set recruitment up so that people entering the office would be forced to see grim realities of what they were signing up for, and that people joining would have multiple outs to get out.
Submitting this form is not "signing up for the military".
You should note when reading this article that it is written from a progressive/leftist perspective. The author isn't trying to hide it. I want to comment on some specific points just to offer a little balance and some inside knowledge from my experience being in the military (experience the author does not have). I'm not a recruiter and none of this represents an official stance from any organization, it's my personal views.
- "None of the military branches or Twitch would comment on paid promotion or how branches might qualify for prominent placement on Twitch’s homepage" It's money. Literally just money. There is nothing nefarious on Twitch's part about selling featured space.
- I'll admit that the whole promising a chance to win an Xbox controller and then redirecting to a recruiter is kind of scummy. But if you're going to get mad at recruiters, get mad at them for lying to recruits about their potential jobs based on their ASVAB scores. They will tell low scoring kids that they can do whatever job they desire just to get them to sign papers, when a lot of jobs have specific requirements that the recruiter knows they don't meet. This is a really bad thing that recruiters do and it's way worse than lying about an Xbox controller.
- But as scummy as recruiters sometimes are, let's acknowledge that the military can be beneficial to some people. It really does pay for college, both with tuition assistance while they are serving and with the GI bill after they get out. For me personally, I have received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a PhD all without taking a single loan because of the military. I have also helped tutor airmen taking college math classes while they were deployed. A lot of them would not have thrived in a traditional college environment, but while deployed they would work 50+ hours a week and also knocked out six credit hours of classes in six months. A lot of those airmen have now finished their bachelor's degrees with zero debt and are now stellar civilian employees with great lives.
- The military can help people raise their station in life. This phrasing "a system by which recruiters target children in unstable and/or disadvantaged situations. Recruiters take advantage of the poor seeking steady income, the vulnerable longing for stability, and the undocumented living in fear because of their citizenship status" screams that it was written by a privileged person that looks down on poor people but wants to look like they care. The reality is that a lot of people that came from poor families and broken homes really appreciate that the military gave them a new family, a good paycheck, secured their chance at citizenship, etc. No, the military isn't for everyone, but it's not a nefarious supervillian preying on the underclass of society.
- The anti-recruiter says "They don’t talk about military sexual trauma." I do want to acknowledge that this exists and is a problem. But every branch of the military is making serious attempts at getting better. There are pockets of absolute filth, but most people in the military want to fix the problem and do not tolerate sexual abuse or abusers in their units, and act swiftly and appropriately when it is discovered. I am confident saying that you are now at far greater risk of being sexually assaulted if you attend a college frat party than you are joining the military.
- This part "Despite being older than most of his young viewers, he speaks like them" is how you should communicate with people. Most groups/cultures appreciate it when an outsider speaks or makes an attempt to speak the native language. It's not a bad thing.
That's probably enough commentary. It's true, the military isn't perfect, and sometimes pulls some shady tricks when recruiting. But this article is slanted, so keep an open mind when forming an opinion. The truth probably lies somewhere between the radical left and the radical right, it's up to you to find it. There are a lot of proud veterans that appreciate their time in the military and the benefits it brought them. There are too many happy veterans for them to all be psychopaths or brainwashed or idiots, some of them have to be decent regular people. There are also a lot of veterans that regret their time in the military for various reasons. Many of them have real trauma and legitimate complaints. But I think overall, using Twitch to reach young people for recruitment isn't a bad thing.
"As a naval officer I abhor the implication that the Royal Navy is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we have the problem relatively under control, and that it is the R.A.F. who now suffer the largest casualties in this area"
It also might not be money. I follow a popular twitch streamer (averages 30k+ viewers) who is often featured on the front page. He says he just asks his contact at Twitch to be put on the front page, no money required. They do have additional rules though (he isn't allowed to swear too much or they will remove him from the front page).
edit: Oh this article is written by Jordan Uhl
We all had to do the pledge of allegiance in high school every day. You may see that as an adult, but after doing it for over a decade I was just saying we-puppet instead of republic and never understood what it meant or cared. It was just a habit, like saying death to america or something.
Think how Japan does calisthenics before work/school every morning. Not everyone does it, but enough do that it's kinda just part of Japan.
Local cultures in European countries seem to be doing fine.
This military is an all-volunteer force. This wasn't always the case, but we found out in the 70's that requiring people to join can get extremely contentious if the reasoning for a conflict isn't absolutely clear to the layman. This means there has to be massive recruitment drives to get the people required for the large military.
Early recruitment ensures indoctrination, which isn't evil, it just means instilling certain norms and cultures into someone so that they can cooporate and do their job in an environment that humans didn't evolve in.
The overt acts of patriotism and congratulatory acknowledgements of soldiers has certainly been ratcheted up over the last 40 years, but I think you can contribute that to guilt over how services members were treated during and shortly after the Vietnam War. I would liken it to “asking forgiveness”, which in some respects is shallow given that those that are most patriotic are likely to vote for politicians that will send the military into more needless wars.
My point is, the nature of our patriotism is complex and nuanced. You can be disgusted by it, but understand that there is a history behind it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887370.
> It's paid for by the military and not some spontaneous display of love for the country
Has the military really paid the audience here?
https://youtu.be/dll-gKgtBAM?t=108
There are dozens of such videos on Youtube, all the military-paid crowds singing the anthem.
You need to be in good shape to make the cut.
No gamer would call me gamer or accept me as gamer either. I would be "not a real gamer" in their eyes. And I don't want to be called gamer, because I don't like that culture either.
There are people who play games and there are people who call themselves gamers. Those are two different groups.
Also, I stopped playing games afre living with guy who changed into gamer. Seeng what the obession and irritability after playing does to others around made me understand the dislike and stereotype.
That "culture" is just the gamer stereotype. If you play games, you're a gamer. Whether you choose to self-describe that way is irrelevant. Whether people who self-describe that way also describe you that way is irrelevant.
You may as well claim to ride bicycles but not be "cyclist" because you don't own spandex. If you ride bicycles you're a cyclist, whether or not you self-describe as a cyclist, whether or not people who self-describe as cyclists consider you a cyclist, and whether or not you resemble the stereotype of cyclists. If you ride bicycles, you're a cyclist. If you play games, you're a gamer.
I agree completely. If anything they need to do what the deaf/Deaf community does and actually brand as a capital-g Gamer.
Remember the whole point of this post is that the military is using games to recruit kids.
It does not matter if they are a Gamer or a gamer in that case because it doesn't matter.
The military will be on Twitch or running real-life fire team tactics in COD Warzone and it doesn't matter anymore. Gamer or gamer they will reach some kids, some of which will be fit enough to join.
No cyclist ever told "she/he is not a real cyclist", so cyclist is descriptor for people who cycle enough. Cyclist is not identity.
Gamer is identity and subculture, because gamers use it as identity. You can't be like "she is not real gamer" and then turn around "everyone who occasionally play games is gamer" when it suddenly suits you.
The things gamers consider good, I don't. The shared values and culture of gamers makes them more then just stereotype.
And also, I am here talking about things and people I gave experience with, both online and in person. No, it is not media stereotype what I talk about. More of conclusions based on interacting with gamers.
And no, they're not interested in setting up a workout plan for the average recruit to get them boot-camp-ready. Its a waste of time. If they had the wherewithal to do that, they'd already be in good enough shape - his words, not mine.
As it turns out, the person who recruited me did have a workout plan, but only if you scored 90+ on the ASVAB, because those scores are so rare, its easier to delay entry into the Navy and shave 10-20 lbs. off someone and get them able to run 1.5 miles, do 50 sit-ups, and 50 push-ups than it is to find another person with a 90+.
https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-looming-national...
> Twitch viewers in the Army’s channel are repeatedly presented with an automated chat prompt that says they could win a Xbox Elite Series 2 controller—an enhanced controller with customizable options and extra paddles for advanced play that costs upward of $200—and a link where they can enter the “giveaway.” It, too, directs them to a recruiting form with no additional mention of a contest, odds, total number of winners, or when a drawing will occur.