The paper is an exploration of the relationship between gaming and modern military intervention in developing areas, how the two interact and the social training we may be receiving through this form of media.

Paper: All your Insurgencies are belong to us

The following is an excerpt from the conclusion. It kind of sums up the paper.

Here’s the core of the problem, today’s military hands out aid with the left hand and shoots with the right. They are in the middle of a bunch of pissed off locals who are wondering why they are there and when they are going to improve their lives rather than just get in the way. They are in countries which are not always friendly and in which the ‘enemy’ is not always apparent. Games however, still portray the military as “your dads’ army” of young men “kicking ass” and saving the day. If we keep thinking of the military like this – and keep teaching 19 year old potential recruits that the military is this glorious realm of heroes rather than the tiring schizophrenia of humanitarian soldier, then we do our soldiers a disservice. By not emotionally or psychologically preparing our society for our role as peace makers in the transition and peace spaces required for meaningful development to happen, we do ourselves a disservice. As we run up budgets which would be better spent as development aid when we get bogged down, because we thought we were getting into something completely different, we do the entire exercise of intervention a disservice. The U.S. Military can “kick ass” better than any other, without a question. What they don’t yet do as well, is what comes after “kicking ass” and are hamperedfurther by a society not prepared to commit to the transition phase and peace building phase. Games can and do play a role in preparing or misleading the public, soldiers and international elements on what military intervention, by the U.S. or any other military, are about, how militaries should interact with local populations and how old school red vs. blue thinking is not only ineffective but down right dangerous.

We need to introduce to games, and the wider media, a more humanitarian, a more holistic approach to interventions that are necessary to win peace, not just win war. By training society to think more completely about peace-making rather than just war-making, we can begin to address the disservices we are currently doing to so many groups. This can be done through fun. This can be done through games. Game companies such as Kuma\War are explicitly attempting to start a dialog based in games. This paper is attempting to begin the pulling of that dialog into the development realm. We live in a world where the military process directly involves and impacts the development process in more subtle, more complex and more enduring ways than ever. Educating the public in how these two processes are intertwined is a key step in working with the military to provide meaningful development in hostile areas. I do not claim that all current games undermine developmental or military goals, nor that they are a magic bullet. Rather, I claim that we should be asking a few questions: In the gaming industry, are we giving all the issues “proportional and symmetrical” treatment? Is the industry bringing in all the facets and complexities that make military COIN ops so challenging? Is it possible to build a better, more fun game, based on these challenges which can spread constructive, rather than destructive messages?

I\ve been giving it a  test run and firt thingsyou will notice from my horrible typing is thatthe keyboardtkes a little getting usedto. but then,  it wasn’t designed for hands my size was it?

I had some troubles figuring out exactly where the connect section was for my home wi-fi (you have to go out to the neighbourhood view to find it, while there is an indicator of status on the desktop - would have made more sense to put a connect dialogue on the indicator as well as in the neighbourhood if you ask me) I’ve also managed to get the screen into fulll screen mode and am not 100% sure how to get it out of it (a warning or indicator of how to escape fullscreen would have been nice guys) .

The screen is sharp and easy to read (for something this small and at this price) . I have yet to try (find) the other mode for the screen so  I can’t comment on that yet.

The speakers and photo quality of the camera are pretty damn good, recording  for video  it relatively low quality. but that is probably to be expected.

There is an odd bug in the browser, right now there is no caret or cursor  to show me where I am typing and the right click context menu doesn’t work (but it does still tell me when my spelling is wrong, I just can’t correct it).

The construction seems fairly solid, I think I expected it to be more rubberized than it is to absorb shocks better, but will do. The buttons on the screen look a little cheap (they don\tfully line up with their holes in the casing) and it seems weird to have the keyboard be dust/spill resistant and covered in this slightly annoying rubber when the screen buttons are so open. It would fit much better if the buttons were more like the keyboard in my opinion.

On the topic of the buttons, having the left arrow keys work like a joystick when the screen is in “tablet” mode would add huge amounts of functionality in my opinion. right now you seem to only be able to scroll up and down, left and right,but not control the cursor (which is still visible, andif it was covering something you  would have to un-swivel the screen to move it)

There is no fan, woohoo.

More later. this thing is great

An Indian and a Mexican now claim the top two spots on the riches people in the world list.

Number 5 is an Indian as well…

When 3 of the top 5 richest people in the world are from developing countries (partly because the number 3 and 4 are giving a lot of their money away) it really says something about the powerhouses of the future.

It also says a lot about economic polarization in developing countries. That 60 some billion dollars comes from somewhere - $50 from each man woman and child in India roughly. And when a significant proportion of the population is living on $1-$2 a day, well, lets just say that’s a very strong polarization.

It will be interesting to see if these richest people leave their country, give back to their country, give to other countries or reverse the flow of investment from developing to developed countries. With so much money concentrated at the top of a very steep pyramid, it will be interesting to see what happens.

The world is a mess.

This is mostly just an emergency dump in case my hard disk dies or something goes horribly wrong - I havn’t even spell checked this version yet so don’t expect much

3/4 draft of thesis

I got distracted and the thesis was the first thing to suffer. I am going to make a concerted effort to churn out a very very rough first draft next week.

Watch this space

Over the next few days, weeks, months, who knows, I will be posting one BaM a day on days that I work. They may be site specific, mod specific or community specific but I will post them here word for word so that I dont forget them and anyone who knows more than me might be able to comment on them

So without further ado:

==============

Being a Mod 101 - Member First and Foremost

OK, so like I said, I’m wanting to change up the way we as a mod squad not only moderate, but how we think of ourselves as moderators and our role.

I am posting this here because there are lots of people who work for the site who are not moderators but for whom this may or may not be helpful or applicable.
This will be the first in a series of short posts (because nobody reads long ones) so keep your eyes on these threads.

Those of you who are old time mods will remember my number one rule of being a mod:

You are first and always a community member, second a player, and distant third, a moderator.
I cannot say this enough. But I will say it again:
You are first and always a community member, second a player, and distant third, a moderator.

You were picked, will be picked or might have been considered for a mod job because you are everywhere, you seem to genuinely enjoy the site, and in your general course of action you help other people, represent a certain group of people or displayed a quality which in some way contributes to the site - and you did/do it without any powers, titles or (usually) support.
Adding the moderator title and powers should not change that in any way. none. at all.

Coming to the site should never be work - leave the work stuff to admins, you are here, and should be here, to have fun - because you enjoy it. If being a mod ever gets in the way of your [i]having fun[/i], if you ever hesitate to click the forum button because you [i]should visit the forum[/i], if you ever wonder why you agreed to moderate in the first place - then stop (but tell me you are stopping please).
Your “job” is to keep people the community you love from going to hell. That is it. You get powers and knowledge about the site that helps you do that, but they are only secondary to words, reason and requests which you use in your usual course of being here:
As a mod, you should just keep doing what you were doing before you got mod powers, but now, if people just refuse to play nice, after you have talked to them, then you get to do something about it rather than being forced to accept it.

You are a member who has the power to help the community go in a certain direction, you are not a mod who plays at being a member and forgets why they come here.

OK, I think I have beaten that to death…but maybe not enough

You are first and always a community member, second a player, and distant third, a moderator.

I’ll post one of these a day until all my brain farts have farted. You have been warned

Let me delve for a second into a post just on a building block of my thesis - insights.

I think people would call this a meme - a basic building block of cultural knowledge:

A meme, (IPA: [mi:m]) as defined within memetic theory, comprises a unit of cultural information, the building block of cultural evolution or diffusion that propagates from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution. Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).

(ahhhh Wikipedia)

However, Rather than use the less common term of meme and all the explanatory extras that it might carry (the “discourse” which surrounds memes) that I dont understand and might mistakenly add to my argument, I am going to borrow a plain English word from commentry at Manifesto Games on Super Columbine Massacre RPG:

And a game such as Super Columbine Massacre can lend insight into the events of that terrible day that newspaper reports, or somber and thouthful essays, cannot. Not necessarily better insights–but different ones–precisely because it makes you complicit in recreating the events. [emphasis added]

I love that way of explaining it because it’s so simple and think it says most everything that it needs to, but let me try to expand on it just because I should bring it into my own realm of meaning.

Our knowledge and understanding of the world can be seen to be comprised of a collection of insights. These can take many different forms and come from many different sources, they can be contradictory or complimentary: an equation learned in physics class; being told about getting sunburned, then actually getting sunburned; being told Islam is a tollerant religion, or being told Muslims are terrorists, whilst having a Muslim friend, etc. Insights and how they combine, interact, reinforce or contradict each other are, like memes, the Lego blocks which build who we are and what we “know”. They create the chemistry which interacts to form our understanding of the world, they create a filter (let me call this filter common sense) through which all other information is first passed and scrutinized before ultimately being rejected, accepted or assimilated in a modified form.

Ever since human kind could pass on knowledge, we have been doing so through small building blocks (insights) like this. Perhaps the most common and simplest method of passing on these insights has traditionally been in the form of stories: cave paintings which pass on history, phables which pass on morals and ethics, fairy tales which serve to teach (or condition) children not to lie or to stay in bed etc. These stories all taught something, either overtly or covertly, and most people would probably be able to point to the “moral of the story”. These examples represent ways in which stories were used to intentionally pass on what I will call situational insights. In other words, parents, teachers, elders, or storytellers could pick these stories to provide insights on what they thought would be the right thing to do in a certain situation:
“The boy who cried wolf” provides insights into what happens in a situation where a child lies all the time - you get into big big trouble, like getting eaten.
“The Tortoise and the Hare” provides insights into what happens in a situation where someone/something is cocky vs. methodical - The cocky person loses while the methodical one wins.
“Snow White” (or was it Cinderella?) provides insights into what happens when you are in a really unhappy situation - you wait, do your chores, be a pure kind young lady and wait for Prince Charming to save you.

These are obviously all very simple and to the point insights because to a large extent that is the assumed purpose of these kinds of stories. They were overt attempts to suggest how people should think or act and are created very much inside the existing cultural, religious or social order (the examples above, for example come from a male dominated, “western” perspective). Today, the insights we get are much more well hidden and are usually much less intentional - today, we see and use stories primarily as modes of entertainment rather than the for the dissemination of knowledge, but that is perhaps a overly simple misconception.

Today, the stories we listen to are primarily formulaic with the intention of making someone money: movies sell an entertainment formula; news media, a sensationalism formula; novels, one which will keep people turning pages and create media hype. Today, we are bombarded by stories from a million different sources in ways which engage the sense very differently than simple fairy tales and people will struggle to point to the “moral of the story” of, say, The Bourne Ultimatum…but that does not mean there isn’t one - Narratology has for a long time told us that narrative and narrative structures can affect our perceptions for example.