But what really got me thinking was that this frames the experience of how the vast majority of the American population experiences the war. As Andrew Exum has noted before:
"This is the thing,” he told me. “Point 5 percent of this country actually fights in these conflicts.” Nearly 80,000 Americans are deployed in Afghanistan, Exum said, while 2.2 million played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live during a single day last fall. “There’s something annoying that most of America experiences the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are actually taking place, through a video game,” he said."The problem is, I don't think America is actually experiencing the war. What they're experiencing is what they are told is the war. Both movies and video games are victim to this. Hurt Locker or the new Medal of Honor are both purported to be authentic depictions of war time experiences, yet they're not. When the discordant is labeled as genuine and it goes uncorrected, it gets used as a basis for forming opinions or framing the experiences of veterans. The Hurt Locker had factual errors and some ridiculous plotholes, yet managed to largely convey the personalities involved and their reactions to the world around them. But video games, even those based on real events, like Delta Force: Blackhawk Down or Medal of Honor, feature hours upon hours of unrelenting combat and little in the way of characters as people. Even when acknowledged to be the "for dramatic effect" changes necessary to make a game playable, it ends up leaving the impression that the common veteran's experience is wholesale slaughter.
So to return to Gourley, I end up wondering if, based on their "experiences" playing these games and watching these movies, these are the frames stateside uses to interact with soldiers. It makes me wonder if this is what underpins scenarios like this.
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