A violently true depiction of what war really is

There is no honor, no right way to fight and nothing good comes out of it except you surviving.

It's nothing like video games - martial arts won't help (well, beyond helping keep you in shape), a bullet will kill you in a horrible, slow way (dying instantly means you're lucky) or leave you with a disability for life, a simple knife slash will leave you in a hospital for a long time and a simple hit with fist can dislocate your jaw, which is really terrible (you can't eat, can't speak, your face is swollen, you drool all the time).

Sadly, kids don't seem to understand, and most people laugh when I tell them the best strategy is RRF - Reason (give them the wallet, try to solve it with words), Run (as fast as you can and don't look back), Fight (only if all else fails, and fight as if your life depends on it)...

"That's pretty realistic. Do they have a level where you have to go knock on somebody's door and tell them their son was killed in a training exercise?"

That said, I feel like this article, like the censors, gives video games much too much credit. Glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture and fiction; I'd imagine at least 95% of gamers understand intuitively that the games they play bear very slight likeness at best to the reality of war (although probably more in the sense that they might be killed themselves rather than that they might kill others.)

After all, one of the things (multiplayer) video games do teach you is that combat is seriously dangerous. Pop out of cover for one second and you can get shot in the head, bam, you're dead. In a game, that means respawning; nobody seriously believes that's how it works in real life. In that sense, I have to think that these games, as unrealistic as they are, are still the most realistic fictional depiction of war you can experience-- and the lessons you learn are much more valuable than those of, say, comic books.

Which is not to say that we don't have a bit of a violence problem in our culture (though I'm on the side of Steven Pinker in thinking that our violence problem is probably better than it ever has been). But the problem is not the kids running around playing cops and robbers. The problem is the kids who never properly learn the distinction between playing and hitting-- and worst of all, those who learn it by the maxim that "If you hit your brother, I'll hit you even harder."

That's what we should be talking about.

There are definitely a disproportionate amount of people who return from war with psychological issues, but sociopaths are pretty rare. Many people who have been in combat have a difficult time relating to the rest of the world, but it doesn't make them psychopaths.

There are probably a few people who choose to become military contractors because they are sick individuals that enjoy killing their fellow man, but I suspect that the majority of the people who go that route do so because they leave the military without any marketable skills and find it hard to pass up the six-figure incomes that are offered to military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Just to clarify a bit, I don't disagree with his assessment of the video game / movie industry, just his statements about soldiers being sadistic killing machines without a sense of morality.