Virtually a Warrior

One of the questions I'm most commonly asked is: "If you're in the military, and you've gone to combat, how can you enjoy war-based video games so much?"

I've read a lot of blogs and letters written by both civilian and military patrons of the gaming arts, in which the contrasts between life and art in the realm of war are well presented and debated. This has always been an interesting field to me, which has provoked another double entendre in my title. (I'm going to try to keep those up) I consider myself a virtual warrior not only in the sense that I play many war-based video games, but that my position in the Army has fallen to a support role, a far cry from the combat I experienced in my first few years; I've become a trained warrior without a warrior's role: a virtual warrior.

The main argument I've heard on the negative side, is that war-based video games, though they are improving all the time in realism, can never truly portray the nature of war. It's true, they romanticize it. In a video game, war is an adventure. It's a rush of adrenaline, far removed from the emotions and terrors that truly manifest in the depths of its darkest hours. As a veteran of the War in Iraq myself, I can see why this is a very valid and justified fact. I agree that a young generation playing these games will adapt a misconception about war.

What I do not believe, however, is that this will create a generation of soulless, murderous automatons. We, as a species, have an uncanny ability to learn and adapt to not only our environment, but also separate logic from instinct and emotion. A competent human will be able to play a video game based on war, and realize that it is a work of fantasy, romanticizing the nobler aspects of such a terrible thing.

So what makes a competent human?

Parenting, of course. Environment, education, and in some part, community. Monetary status can definitely have an impact, but I believe it's tertiary at best to many of the other aforementioned factors. I'm digressing, this blog post isn't about parenting or my opinions about the lack thereof, it's about video games, so let me reel this back in.

I've been to war. I've walked the streets of Baghdad, I've survived vehicle combat, numerous house raids, a number of firefights, and came to a close on the wrong side of a hand grenade's 'bad' radius. I was an artilleryman, a surveyor. A 'combat support' occupation that 'isn't supposed' to be on the front lines. Every day in Baghdad I was on the front lines. There is a lot of trauma and fallout from the experiences I had during that deployment that challenge my daily life. Oddly enough, what do I do for escapism?

I play Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

You see, those experiences in war have ingrained themselves in my mind and personality. The comrades I fought alongside were my brothers. I'd die for every one of those men, and I still keep in touch with many of them to this day, seven years after we parted ways. That bond is something I treasure, something that keeps me going every day. I'm alive because they took care of me, they're alive because I took care of them. How does this relate to video games, you ask? Thanks for hanging in there, this is the meat of my point:

Games DO romanticize the noble aspects of war. THOSE are the aspects I choose to hold on to. To remember. When I revive a squadmate in Bad Company 2, I relive the moment I helped patch up a friend who was thrown into a wall by a mortar. When I drive a humvee into a base to capture the point, I relive the heroic incident in which I chased an insurgent truck over 6 miles of Baghdad traffic to save a 14 year old hostage, which we accomplished with no harm to the boy. Those memories of war will never go away, but I can choose how they manifest. By channeling my experiences in a fantasy setting, with close friends, completing a mutual objective and watching out for each other on a virtual medium, I can focus on the positive emotions I carried out of that experience.

-TehKnuck out.