Corey Mead, WAR PLAY

Corey Mead's dry but serviceable overview of the use of video games in various aspects of military recruitment, training, and medical treatment is marred by a disinclination to engage in critical thinking about the consequences of these new trends. After reviewing the history of educational and technological innovation within the military, he turns to more recent developments, from the professionally-developed recruiting tool America's Army to increasingly elaborate training simulations to programs designed to help traumatized veterans come to terms with post-military life. At times the accounts are repetitive, a bombardment of Army acronyms and very similar quotes about the benefits of video game use, but the book is too slim for this to become a serious issue. The absence of any real analysis on Mead's part is more significant.

It's not so much that he's unwilling to question the military's use of video games (though tellingly the great success of America's Army gets a full chapter while the failure of Full Spectrum Warrior is relegated to a footnote) as that the issues he raises are all functional rather than moral. He'll ask whether certain training tools work in achieving military objectives, but not whether those objectives are justifiable. Unacknowledged questions abound. Is it acceptable to target adolescents for military service using a video game that, however superficially realistic, cannot capture the nature of actual military service? What does that do to their understanding of the nature of wartime violence, especially in an age when drone warfare kills people at the push of a button? Mead quotes a couple replies to such questions by military sources, but doesn't mention the obvious fact that they're dodging rather than answering. He's plainly more comfortable with the therapeutic games than with the violent ones, but rather than follow that discomfort and write a complicated, searching book, he's produced an account the military itself might have written. It's all true, and worth reading if you don't know the subject well, but it could have been so much more.