Video Gaming in Science Fiction by Jason Barr

Author:Jason Barr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Yet, in spite of the collective knowledge that video game military shooters do not necessarily make killers out of video gamers, the hysteria remains, and many remain concerned about how violence and video games are used in combination to train some sort of clandestine soldiers.

When one considers science fiction novels that combine the military and video gaming, there is a singular touchstone work: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. In the novel, young Ender moves from preternaturally gifted child who is a social outcast (thus fulfilling the role of “geek”) to a stoic commander of other children, to an unwitting and brutal savior of the universe. Upon being sent out for training, it is said that all of the boys recruited for Battle School “were all supposed to be heroes” (29), and, as such, the military can make them become heroes through training and then by facilitating their placement onto the battlefields where that individual can achieve hero status. The training Ender endures is the classic “break down and rebuild” of military belief—that one’s preexisting personality and moral structure cannot be reconciled with the requirements of being in the military—and, as a result, Ender moves on the spectrum from highly intelligent child to near-sociopath, and it is the walking of this tightrope that opens every chapter of Ender’s Game, as, unbeknownst to Elder (but clear to the readers), military leaders are working behind the scenes to make Ender more vicious, to rework his moral code on the fly. These efforts are a part of a larger moral conundrum, one that is easily placated by the threat to humanity by the buggers; Ender, unlike his brother Peter, has to maintain a small portion of his oneness with humanity in order to be successful. By simultaneously training Ender to care for his comrades, many of whom are also children, while also training him to be willing to send them to their deaths, the military quietly manipulates him and his actions, sometimes even forcing Ender into real-world situations in which he is confronted with violence. But the primary tool of choice for manipulating Ender’s moral code is not the battle rooms, in which he learns military tactics, but after the battle is over and he sits down in front of his computer. There, he plays a video game expressly designed to push his mental buttons, to get him to change how his very mind works, to manipulate his identity. The military indoctrination is ultimately successful, as Ender, while still believing he is in a simulation, orders a suicide mission among his friends that results in the near-genocide of the enemy. Just as in Yoon Ha Lee’s short story, “Gamer’s End,” in which the main character—the second-person “you” mimicking first-person reality—realizes that a supposed training drill is actually a live test, and the decisions the main character (again, ostensibly “you”) made leads to the “you” yelling at the instructor: “You had me kill people for a test. You killed people for a test” (442). Here,

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