Hey, the Stryker is a pretty nice ride! When I participated in Gulf Wars I: The Prequel all I had was a lousy non-armored HMMV! Anyway, digitizing equipment isn’t just so “the video game generation can use them”, its more about accuracy, technological advantage, ease of use, etc.
As far as all manned warplanes going the way of the Dodo, I’m torn. Part of me thinks “great, we’ll never lose another fighter pilot’s life again!” and the other part of me is extremely skeptical that UAV’s will ever exhibit the capabilities that manned warplanes have now. Perhaps bombers, but I don’t know about fighters.
Anyway, nothing will ever replace boots on the ground, for sure. Except maybe robot boots!
If he’s really only 28, I was playing Lemonade Stand on an Apple ][ before he was born.
That’s wholesome, right? Lemonade stand? Admittedly, the rest of the time I was gunning down Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein…
When I was the OPs age I heard the same complaint about TV. “Kids these days are useless because all they doi is sit around and stare at the TV.” Always from some grumpy old fart with an unusual amount of free time to sit around and bellyache.
There are certainly a lot more distractions for kids these days than in the past and their kids will have even more. This is a real concern. A lot of kids have a hard time finding a balance. But strangely, old folks gripping about how hard it was when we were younger doesn’t seem to make the kids want to put down their games.
I bet you and your friends brought all their computers to one house and stayed up all night playing lemonade stand! There’s got to be a name for that. Did you call it “Lemonade stand party”?
I recall an op-ed several years ago where a drill instructor said that, in the age of FPS, a lot of the work was done for them in teaching shooting: aiming for center mass, getting under cover, the uselessness of firing blindly, and whatnot. It scared him a bit, frankly, because he felt like a generation of killers was being raised without the military discipline that makes it safe for a civilian population.
We had dial up and wireless internet for a while, the wireless let us have a little faster internet, but not DSL till 07. And for the record, it’s you people that make me angry.
wow, and I get yelled at by the moderator twice since I’ve been on this forum and you went from calling me a “Terrorist” to now a “Lousy stinking anarchist manifesto-writer”. This is kind of one sided.
But your profile says all I need to know about you. You are from Canada, you are a liberal, and you are a lemon drinker. That is fact. I will speculate on the rest of what you are, but I will probably get yelled at again.
And for your info. I have 2 jobs. Both State Jobs, pays very well.
I kind of think like that sometimes, though without the concern for danger. Mainly, I grew up on strategy and tactical games. Chess, Risk, turn-based strategy video games and real-time strategy video games. Wargames provide a lot of education that typically only military officers received, and it kind of makes me sad that I’ll never get a chance to really use and build on that knowledge.
I think there’s little to worry about regarding the training FPSes provide. On the whole, I really doubt people try to translate those skills to the real world, or even give it a second thought. Skill at Halo is just skill at Halo.
As the moderator said, it’s a reference to Simpsons. I think it’s in poor taste for Bryan to keep making the joke, but you really do need to relax. It’s not personal.
That jibes with my experience when I was talking to the Army about licensing a videogame I worked on for training purposes. Playing videogames doesn’t teach you how to shoot or what its like psychologically to be under fire, but it does teach you a fair amount about small unit teamwork and situational awareness.
I refuse to take you seriously as long as you fail to distinguish between a nonexistent shack and yourself. Even less so if you think you can get a rise out of me by mentioning Canada in what (I assume) is meant to be a disparaging manner.
And if you have state jobs, could you head over to this thread and offer your insight?
I grew up in a farming and coal town of 215. I saw the last coal train leave when the strip mines died in, IIRC, 1986. 70 people in my high school class. Worked for my parents’ general store since I was old enough to run a price gun without supervision, managed the place while they took vacations at 16, could do all the butcher work at 18.
I am now 30. I probably spend 75% of my waking hours in front of a computer during the work week. It’s what I do for my daily bread as an IT guy. I go home, and I play video games with my wife, or whatever. No different from the plopping in front of the tube that most of my neighbors do. I also run a 5’30" mile several times a week, and I’m the terror of clay pigeons at several nearby ranges. And y’know what?
When I was 14, I played a damn lot of video games, thought I was a competent pilot because I played the shit out of Wing Commander (and as a matter of fact, told that to the guy about to give me a familiarization flight in a Cessna). You could not get me out of the house with a crowbar unless I was on schedule to work. Looking back on it from here, I was a little shit when I was teenager in pretty much the same way as your example, and now I’m not. It’s a hobby, it occupies its proper place, and without the biological and hormonal dumbassitude of the teenage years I have no problem telling fantasy from reality. To be honest, Tom Clancy and Dale Brown (both of whom occupy my shelf still, thanks :p)did more to screw with my sense of reality than any video game I’ve ever laid eyes on or played.
That kid is essentially using video games the way most teenagers used beer and unprotected sex when we were teenagers. Talk to him again when he’s 20 and I will bet you, well, $5 (I’m a cheapskate) that he’s not nearly as stupid about video game skill translating to the real world.
Basically I think you’re making some critical assumption errors about using the stuff that comes out of a teenager’s mouth to predict their future worth.
And can we drop the liberal thing already? People are going to say stupid crap but there’s no good reason to respond to it in kind. Besides, this first-video-game-generation liberal and his Mossberg would love to challenge you to a friendly shooting match sometime.
Am I the only one who wonders why somebody who (presumably) took his username from an incredibly violent comic book character is bitching about kids playing violent video games?
Look, Punisher, there is no reason to get upset here. No one is trying to insult you, your childhood, or your current lifestyle. I can understand why this thread would be frustrating, but maybe you should step back and consider why it is frustrating for you. Why are very few people responding seriously to the question in your OP? It isn’t that we thing there is something wrong with you, it is that for most of us, the question makes no sense. To us the video game generation started taking over when Bill Gates became the richest man on earth. Personally, as some one that has been gaming on and off since the Atari 2600 days, I don’t see the sea change that you do in immersive aspect of video games. The pictures are prettier and the controls fancier, but those aren’t the only factors that create a world you can enter and lose yourself in (if you doubt that than you have never seen anyone play NetHack for more than 8 hours straight).
Add to that the back story which present is out of the norm. Not wrong, not harmful, just not usual. There is nothing wrong with that either in general or as reference for a debate, but your argument seems to be positioning it as either an ideal or a norm and people are responding to that portion. Rural life has not been the norm for at least 3 generations. Being raised by people who lived during the depression, being expected to work as soon as physically able, being sent out to play in the world at large with no supervision all went out of the norm 1-3 generations ago, depending. All of this (except maybe being raised by people who lived through the depression) varies even now by where you live. Do you expect kids in living in Chicago to get up on Saturday morning and walk down to the crick and do a little fishing like my grandfather used to in rural California?
Your OP is also inconsistent in the same way many such “damn kids today” rants are. You criticize parents for using video games to keep kids out their hair, but boost that you were basically kicked out of your house during daylight hours. You worry about how harmful these violent video games are and yet your user name is Punisher.
Do know how much hand wringing there was over the violence in comics in the 50s and then the 80s? It is the same phenomenon. It happened with video games, comic books, role playing, TV, movies, rap, rock, women wearing pants, etc. It will happen when these young punks playing halo grow up and turn around and get worried about who will be in charge when they get to old.
