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gun in a fashion making him an...effective killer
without teaching him any of the constraints or
responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing
capacity.” The suit was summarily dismissed in May
2000 by a federal court judge, but the scapegoating of
videogames continues.
Now it is true that videogames have had a
worryingly close relationship with the
technologies of killing. Remember the glowing
neoplatonism of Battlezone? It was a thing of
beauty, but it also became quite grimily implicated
in real-life destruction. Atari was commissioned to
build an enhanced version of Battlezone for the
American Defense Department’s Advanced
Research Project Agency (DARPA), as a simulator
for real tank drivers. This was only the start of a
growing symbiotic relationship between
videogames and the military. American warplane
company Lockheed-Martin invested in the
technology of arcade videogames, thus
accelerating their development. The U.S. Marines
have made their recruits practice Doom, as the
game’s codesigner Jon Romero acknowledged:
“Soldiers played Doom to feel like they were in a
war situation, where you have oneshot kills.” The
U.S. Navy now uses a custom hack of Microsoft’s
Flight Simulator to help pilots learn to fly
