You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Battlefield 3
My 14 year old son is playing a video game that is so realistic, it makes you think you are in Afghanistan. I am watching his war through a rifle scope, while inhaling a dust cloud of third world crazy.
From a drone radar grid over enemy territory, I see thermal readouts of bodies on roof tops. I see civilians in a market place. I see a man and a goat and it seems that sort of thing would constitute another type of video game rating.
“I have spotted a hostile soldier in your area.” someone on the Internet battlefield yells.
There is smoke and fire on the ground. There is the constant roar of sniper fire and explosions. Paratroopers are landing all around and virtual soldiers constantly yell for aid.
My son is wearing a head set and talking to his friends across the Internet. He looks like an operator for Time Life Books, but I don’t want to tell him this.
He is in his shorts and a t shirt. He is a scrawny white kid with a cocky stare and quick wit. He is curled up in a ball, like a cat on a warm sofa.
The boy’s hair is sticking straight up, frazzled by a night of tossing and turning on his pillow.
I want to ask if he brushed his teeth, but that seems insane since he is fighting for his life with an M9 sniper rifle.
“Hey Rambo, did you floss?” It just seems ridiculous doesn’t it?
“Boom. Head shot. Dos head shots,” he says with all the emotion of melting ice.
I watch him. He is barely breathing, hardly moving. He works his control stick like Julia Childs works a frying pan. He pushes buttons with both hands, angling his scope with an expertise that is impressive.
He is a natural, this kid who doesn’t even like to ride a bike.
I watch him guide his avatar through a virtual battlefield. His soldier is a tough brute armed to the teeth with explosives, grenades, guile and automatic weapons. At my son’s direction the commando races over walls, and dashes across this night vision induced city-scape.
I watch as he puts the cross hairs on an enemy combatant and pulls the cyber trigger
From 200 yards away, a white thermal icon with arms and legs crumples to the Earth. I think I see a splatter of blood.
Brutal reality? But how real is it when you can kill from the couch, Frosted Flakes still coating your unbrushed teeth.
I look at the boy. His face doesn’t change. He is a steely eyed assassin.
“everyone squad up,” he shouts into his mouth piece.
This is the boy that likes bunny rabbits and puppy dogs and kitty cats.
Now he is in charge of a platoon of zombie kids across the internet not afraid to jump out of planes and hit the ground blasting.
The kid telling me about the Civil War last night is now involved in a cyber war. This game has transformed him into a virtual killer, a mechanism of death.
I watch him and think that this is how wars could be fought in the future.
I imagine skinny couch potato kids with a game controller and quick trigger fingers. They are obdurate to the horrors of real pain and anguish. A man dying on screen is a flicker of light and then a slow fade to nothing. Real battlefield trauma is the bane of humanity. If you can sanitize war then governments can employ new recruits to fight anywhere, anytime, with hardly a negative thought.
If wars are fought on video screens, between bites of a ham sandwich, without emotion, without concern for human life and dignity, then in the not too distant future, perhaps thermonuclear oblivion is possible. If wars are waged by a new breed of humans who equate life to a numerical representation on a video board, then how hard would it be to push one more button.
Just one more button that says Thermonuclear Extermination. Is it that far off in the future? I wonder.
I am certain my son is not this clock tower killer that everyone playing Battlefield 3 seems to be. I am sure he likes sunny days and soccer games and puppy dogs.
But when he and his friends are “plugged in” it’s like watching a transformation that is eye opening. It’s startling and it makes me think about trench coat mafia induced teens filled with angst and armed with the anarchist’s cook book.
It’s no wonder people make pressure cooker bombs and open fire in crowded movie theaters. The training ground for these acts of barbarism are right here in our living rooms on our expensive Plasma television screens.
Could this be the future of war fare? Drones and surveillance satellites and battles fought on TV, where you can pause the carnage to get a grilled cheese sandwich?
Chilling. Sniping. Plausible Brutality.
Life’s Crazy™