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I have to agree with Mark Prokop’s letter…this is a stupid subject for an article. One “artist” getting online to make a protest to a bunch of gamers is ridiculous. Why is this news-worthy? Why is “America’s Army” news-worthy? It has been out since 2002 or so. The military wastes its money on all sorts of stupid things…this is nothing.
The military spends $200 million a year to create transparently dumb propaganda. At least the investment in America’s Army produced something that some people enjoy.
No one has said that this performance artist cannot do what he does. But it’s not an effective way to protest the war. Now…if this guy makes an artistic video out of this project and promoted that…well…that’s something else. (forgot the name for that...using video games to create movies) Logging on to a FPS to say war is bad...just pointless. Trite. Someone else said that streaking across a field naked at a sports event would be a better protest. That’s true. More people would see it. That also takes some guts …making a statement in front of thousands of people. This “artist” is logging on to a game to protest "in-front" of 16-32 gamers. Who probably don't even notice or care about his protest. In part because they have so much other information that they are paying attention too when they play a game like this.
The only real important issue in this article, as I see it, is when is it OK to bother people -to shake people out of their daily routines-in order to make a political statement or help them on the path towards enlightenment…if you will. An anti-war protest in San Francisco may (and probably will) block traffic, causing tired people sitting in cars a long delay to get to work / get home. But it is a highly visible protest that people will remember. This online protest bothers a few kids playing a videogame. No great loss. But not something to be proud of either.
BTW, on 9/11, I was playing a Counter-Strike game (not the CS, but a clone). I was out-of-work at the time. I played the game late the night before and left it running on my computer. In the morning, I sat at the desk about to continue my pointless, depressing job search. The game was still on and I saw an enemy right in front of me, so I decided to play the game for 5 minutes. And I went around “killing” everyone. No one was really trying to defend themselves…people were too busy chatting. I then noticed that a lot of people were having a serious discussion, and some people seemed really mad, but they were not mad at the usual (bad team-members, trash talk, etc). I finally asked what was going on and they all started to yell at me “TURN ON THE TV!!!”
I wish I kept a log of those in-game discussions from that day. Some people were saying they wanted to join right up with the army. A lot of people were angry. Some non-Americans were saying they support US. Some non-Americans were saying that the US deserved this. Some people were yelling and cursing back at those foreigners. There was a military guy online who was trying to ask the anti-US foreigners why he (I assume it was a he BTW) thought the US deserved this. There was one guy who said “I’m going to stop playing this game for a while…I sort of feel today that there are more important things I need to do with my life.”
