Trigger Happy
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
359
