"Consider Full Spectrum Warrior, a 2004 game that began development as a training simulator for U.S. Army soldiers. The company behind it, Pandemic, modified the game into a commercial release that so the Army could send the game downrange for soldiers to play while deployed. Set in a fictionalized version of Iraq, the game features an empty, crumbling urban landscape coded to be obviously Middle Eastern, filled only with Arab men to shoot. The strongest incentive not to engage in [combat isn’t to safeguard civilians, but to avoid personal injury to your squad mates. Despite its marketing as “realistic” and messaging that it was developed with input from the Pentagon, the game-world it creates removes the complexity of urban insurgency and substitutes simplified moral dilemmas that portray the military in unambiguously good terms—an enjoyable setting for a game, but hardly reflective of the reality of the war in Iraq."
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Joshua Foust, “Video games are the new contested space for public policy“, Brookings Institute, (March 25, 2021)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Iraq_War
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Iraq War
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