http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html
Quote:
Was an elite congressional intelligence committee shown video footage from an off-the-shelf retail game and told by the Pentagon and a highly-paid defense contractor that it was a jihadist creation designed to recruit and indoctrinate terrorists?
It's looking more and more like that is the case.
The bizarre story began to unfold last week when Reuters reported that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was shown video footage of combat action which was represented as a user-modified version (or "mod") of Electronic Art's best-selling Battlefield 2, a modern-day military simulation which features combat between U.S. forces and those of the fictitious Middle East Coalition (MEC) as well as the People's Republic of China.
Reuters quoted a Pentagon official, Dan Devlin, as saying, "What we have seen is that any video game that comes out... (al Qaeda will) modify it and change the game for their needs."
The influential committee, chaired by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), watched footage of animated combat in which characters depicted as Islamic insurgents killed U.S. troops in battle. The video began with the voice of a male narrator saying, "I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters..."
Several GP readers immediately noticed that the voice-over was actually lifted from Team America: World Police, an outrageous 2004 satirical film produced by the creators of the popular South Park comedy series. At about the same time, gamers involved in the online Battlefield 2 community were pointing out the video footage shown to Congress was not a mod of BF2 at all, but standard game footage from EA's Special Forces BF2 add-on module, a retail product widely available in the United States and elsewhere.
GamePolitics has been seeking comment on the video from the Pentagon and Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), a defense contractor based in San Diego. Committee chair Hoekstra's office referred GP back to the committee for comment. A call there had not been returned by press time.
According to Reuters, the U.S. government is paying SAIC $7 million to monitor Islamist web sites, which is where they apparently discovered a copy of the footage. However, the video can also readily be accessed via links found in the user forums of the popular Planet Battlefield site, operated by IGN Entertainment of Brisbane, California.
It is unclear whether SAIC vetted the origin of the video before showing it to key members of Congress and representing it as a terrorist recruiting tool.
|
In other idiotic news, Congress is to change the way they rate games in what appears to be a delayed knee-jerk reaction to the Hot Coffee mod.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...gn_id=rss_tech
It is no longer a generation gap, it is an information gap. There are those who get it and understand gaming/computers/internet/information age, and there are those who don't. The world has moved much faster than government systems can keep up with and legislators are left legislating something they don't understand and their staff don't understand - but a good majority of younger people do. They either do nothing and watch the public outcry (at things the general public doesn't understand) or they blindly poke around in the dark coming up with legislation that makes no sense.
I work with new technology. I find it very difficult sometimes to do my job because of the information overload - its really difficult to process it all and realign yourself to new ideas all the time. But it is my impression that these guys are so far behind me that they will never catch up. Shame on them for keeping up this charade.