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Cologne Declaration

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Anonymous

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A coalition of German citizens has published an anti-game violence position paper that is being referred to as the Cologne Declaration.

The news comes by way of David Ziegler, a longtime GamePolitics reader from Germany. Ziegler writes that the declaration was issued in response to the German Culture Council's recent recognition of video games as cultural assets.

The Cologne Declaration argues that violent games are harmful to children as well as to the building of a peaceful society. Several prominent German social scientists have signed on to the edict, which specifically refers to Counter-strike, DOOM 3, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV as "killer games" and "landmines for the soul."

The document revives the notion that shooting games were developed by the U.S. military in order to condition recruits to kill and asserts that violent games further the aims of the "military-industrial-media complex." Researchers who have defended games are labeled as "collaborators and accomplices" of the video game industry by the declaration, which calls for the government to end state support for game development and ban violent games. The document concludes with:

We won't allow our children to be turned into killing machines on real and virtual battlefields.

GP: The "landmines for the soul" line has been used before by the German Society for Scientific Person-Centred Psychotherapy (GwG). The Cologne Declaration appears on the GwG website.

The claim that violent games are used by the U.S. military to desensitize recruits to killing was originally put forth by violent game critic Lt. Col. (ret.) David Grossman. ABC newsman John Stossel disputed that notion in his 2006 book Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity.

The GwG's assertion that violent games are designed to further the aims of the "military-industrial-media complex" sounds similar to the views of fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche here in the United States.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/12/22/ ... es-germany

so they thingk theres a conspiracy between the video game industry and the u.s military. :roll:
 
Good!

Death (as violent as possible) to all such evil websites!

:twisted:
 
megadeth16 said:
...

so they thingk theres a conspiracy between the video game industry and the u.s military. :roll:
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The US army actually does give away at least one fairly high quality shoot-em-up, America's Army. Upgraded 25 times since it was it was originally released in 2002. It's a very popular PR and recruitment tool, apparently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Army

A lot of simulators probably started off as military projects, since way back in the days of the Manhattan Project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_simulation

More:
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/scivw/EVE/II.G.Military.html
http://www.mindef.gov.sg/safti/pointer/back/journals/1999/Vol25_2/5.htm
http://www.combatsim.com/

Whether it's really a conspiracy, or not, it's probably not so far fetched a notion.
 
im a gamer and i like heavy metal but im no mug theres no way id join the military and anyway thats no reason to ban video games.
 
lupinwick said:
And of course for recruitment there was a report out that they have found that gamers and heavy metal types make the best recruits.
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Gawd help us if there's a war... :roll:
 
WhistlingJack said:
lupinwick said:
And of course for recruitment there was a report out that they have found that gamers and heavy metal types make the best recruits.
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I actually am as bold as to say that Heavy Metal types are really bad recruits. Scientists have somewhere noticed that most HM-lers have a higher IQ than people who listen to Rap or other violent music. Now I have to agree in general, IN GENERAL, not all of them. But I used to hang out in the worst/best HM digs in London and the atmosphere was such that you could go as a lone girl and still get into no hassle. The majority was polite and funny or at least you could have decent conversations.
However the place I felt the most threatened ever was a "Lads & Tarts" pub in Stevenage. The whole atmosphere was scary and it felt as if a fight would break out at any moment. There was no respect for the girls etc etc etc.
What I'm saying is here that as a gamer and a total Metal-Head, I say it is the violent youth with no jobs and no brains that make the best soldiers and who are actually influenced by violent games.
Go and recruit in a Weatherspoon or a Smith & Jones pub on a Saturday night!


Tssss... :roll:
 
Given the level of technology employed by the modern soldier then I'd assume the army would much rather have a higher caliber of recruit, not a bunch of brain dead morons. Anyway here're a couple of interesting snippets.

At a time of falling military enlistment rates, it is becoming more difficult to reach the young. Slick advertisements with heavy metal music and shots of aircraft carriers are not enough to reverse the loss, and mothers are preventing recruiters from talking to their children. But the booming industry of video games provides convenient access to America's youth.

Video games as a whole have experienced a rapid growth in popularity. Seventy-five percent of American households play computer and video games. In 2005, 228 million computer and video games were sold: effectively two games for every American household. The earnings of blockbuster game titles often rival that of Hollywood films. "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" grossed an astonishing $236 million compared to the blockbuster movie "War of the Worlds," which grossed $234 million in the United States.

Consultants from the various branches of the armed forces are paying attention and have been involved in the production of these games. TomDispatch and USA Today reported that the officials from the Army's Infantry School in Fort Benning, in concert with a joint Army/USC project developed the Microsoft Xbox game "Full Spectrum Warrior."

The armed forces also employ simulators to train their soldiers, which according to National Defense Magazine can sometimes consist of modified versions of popular games. In the '80s, the tank simulation game "Battlezone" was altered by military programmers to train Bradley Fighting Vehicle drivers. In the mid-'90s, the military modified "Doom" for use in training Marines in squad combat. Since then, the Naval War College, in Newport, R.I., has worked with Sonalysts Inc. to create more than 500 games. Among them were three combat simulations that Sonalysts developed for commercial distribution by Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., including "Jane's Fleet Command," "688(I)," "Hunter/Killer" and "Sub Command."

The Army has also developed its own video game, "America's Army." According to TomDispatch, it was developed with the assistance of such entertainment and gaming industry stalwarts as Epic Games, the THX Division of Lucasfilm Ltd., Dolby Laboratories, Lucasfilm Skywalker Sound, GameSpy Industries and others. It is a free game, available for download on their website after bypassing many ads for enlistment. By making it free, the Army opened a second front in the recruitment wars, a beachhead in the home of the American teenage male. It can be legally downloaded by those as young as 13; it has been downloaded 16 million times, and there are more than four million current registered players. It is bundled with gaming magazines and given away at NASCAR events and state fairs. The Army spent a total of $7 million designing it, and maintaining the online play option costs it around $5 million per year.
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http://www.wiretapmag.org/warandpeace/35759/

And a snippet from an academic piece.
The representation and simulation of modern war in computer games shows that there is already a common understanding about (virtual) war (Nieborg, 2004). The war on terror is both explicitly and implicitly simulated in a wide range of FPS PC-games such as Battlefield 2, Kuma War, and Counter-Strike, and in budget action titles as Desert Fury, Airstrike II: Gulf Thunder and Terrorist Takedown. The ubiquitous availability of war-themed games is not solely industry-driven, nor can it be set aside as the result of a lack of imagination in game designers and publishers. Gamers themselves display an unequivocal need for the simulation of past, present and future military conflicts. Take the user-created total conversion modifications (mods) of the World War Two themed FPS PC-game Battlefield 1942. Every significant conflict involving a Western country has its own mod, from the Korean war to the Falklands war to the conflict in Somalia (Nieborg, 2005a). Similarly, only a month after the release of Battlefield 2 there were already over fifty military themed mods in some state of development. [1] If gamers do not like the original game's conflict, they simply recruit people that have a shared interest and develop a mod of their own. Therefore, most gamers will not be the least bit surprised by a military-themed game, even if it is developed by the military.

The demographic composition of FPS game culture matches the main pool of potential Army recruits. The militarized masculinity' of FPS games exhibits a strong gender bias where violent themes are ubiquitous (Hall, 2003; Kline et al, 2003: 246-68). And, almost as a natural progression of the military-entertainment complex, the U.S. Army ordered the development of the first publicly available, state-produced military entertainment game in 2001. The army's move to venture into games proved to be worthwhile when the game was eventually released. On July 4, 2002, the first version of America's Army was made available on the official website. [2] Within days, servers were swamped and the game proved to be an instant success. For over four years the game has ranked high in the list of most played FPSs, attracting and retaining a considerable group of a couple of hundred thousand dedicated players. Every couple of months the game is significantly updated, with bug fixes and the addition of new maps, weapons and training elements. America's Army is part of the sub-genre of the tactical FPS, which means that gamers in online multiplayer sessions fight each other in a setting modelled after a place in the real world. The inner workings of America's Army have been explained in detail elsewhere (Li, 2004; Nieborg, 2005b).
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http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue8/issue8_nieborg.html

And of course this little gem.

The UK Army is looking for teenagers who extensively play video games, as their hand-to-eye coordination and other abilities used while gaming apparently make them a perfect fit for piloting Apache helicopters.

Helicopters are extremely complicated vehicles to fly, and it often takes years for a pilot to master the controls. The Army has deployed the Apaches to Afghanistan where it says they have played "a crucial role," but more pilots are desperately needed.

A senior Army Air Corps source told the tabloid, "The skill in flying the aircraft is to absorb large amounts of information from different sources without becoming flustered. The new generation of computer-game-playing youngsters glued to their PlayStations, Xboxes and Game Boys already have some of those skills."
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http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6163836.html

Sadly the link to the original media report doesn't work.

Perhaps the portrayal of violence across the media needs to be examined not just games.

Sadly though, almost all the technology I'm using to write this has been produced on the back of military research.
 
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