Internal Discrepancies
So the last post was on how this paper will look at FPS games as a genre rather than individual games. The next few posts will look at the 4 categories (genres) of people involved in this paper and see if I can group them or if they should be looked at as individuals. The four groups are:
- Military Leadership - those reading and writing FM3-24 type documents.
- Boots on the ground - those who are not so concerned with the over-arching “plan” or creating doctrine, but following orders and accomplishing a mission.
- Game Designers - those creating games and setting precedents in pop-culture.
- Game Players - those playing computer games and gaining “insights” from them.
Obviously I’m attempting to draw parallels between Military Leadership and Game Designers on one hand and Boots on the Ground and Players on the other. There will no doubt be a lot of crossover between these two, and no doubt be huge discrepancies within and between them, but it’s somewhere to start. Some primary research would be interesting here - to see what actual soldiers define COIN as compared to their leadership, see what designers think their games are defining it as vs what their players see it as and how the two groups differ on basic definition. That aside…
ok, before I start, this is going to be confusing for me because Boots are often Players too (most boots have probably played a FPS, but FPS players do not all become boots) so there might be 3 sections to this:
- Leadership - Boots
- Boot - Players
- Players - Developers
I dont see the connection right now between Developers and Leadership except in funding and in anomalous cases such as full spectrum warrior or http://www.dodgamecommunity.com/ (the military branch responsible for creating or modifying computer games for training). I’m not sure that dev-leadership connection is there, and perhaps it should be so that games can provide more, different, insights. Not that I want MORE military influence over games, there are far too many military games and too much military funding into a specific kind of gaming technology which propogates FPS and single goal storyline graphically intensive action games…but that is another thing all together, read Ed Halter’s “From SunTzu to Xbox” for a great and very readable look at the connection between military, computer games, academics and industry. OK, that was a tangent.
Let me start then with if there is a fundamental divide in the
desires of the commanders and the perceptions of the “Trigger Pullers”
- if the boots on the ground were brought up with FPS, what does that
mean.
If the “steel on target” doesnt see the target as anything
but an immediate ends rather than a means to a larger thing, does this
come from, or lead to, a larger problem with the discrepancy between reality and desire on the part of leadership?