While Super Tuesday is over, the roles and consequences of the US military’s involvement across the globe are left fresh in our mind. We’ll save you the patriotic one-liners and instead just point out that Cheap Ass Gamer (yeah, we just said “arse”) has organised a collection of used, current gen games for the troops in Iraq. The neat part is that after you mail the game(s), the troops will post a picture of themselves with the boxes. It’s a nice way that the troops say thanks for us saying thanks for not being the ones in constant danger of bullets, bombs and “sand to butt hole infiltration.” CAG’s “Donate Games to the Troops in Iraq” Campaign [CAG]
While a lot of us are safe at home playing Call of Duty 4 on our game consoles, a sizable portion of the US military is overseas right now living it – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t gamers. There are tons of video game addicts in the military, and now there’s an organisation dedicated to getting them their fix. Created by military wife Stephanie Doctor Shea, whose own husband was just redeployed to Iraq, Games For Fun is an organisation that plans on raising money to supply our troops with video game goodness. She and partner Dana Blackman Brady believe that the comfort of video games will do our forces a world of good. “What they really appreciate over there is the true comforts of home,” Blackman Brady said. “The stress relief and the escapism involved in these games, we really think could be beneficial.”
The New York Times has been running a series of opinion pieces under the “Home Fires” banner, in which U.S. military veterans of the Iraq War write of returning to their lives after serving overseas. While some lean toward the intense, including contributions from a soldier blinded in a roadside bomb attack and one from a vet who responded to a bloody police station bombing, the most recent from former Marine Jeffrey D. Barnett writes simply of his love of gaming. It’s not filled with earth-shattering revelations or the unique insight that only a Marine hardened by battle can provide, it’s simply a thoughtful, down to earth op-ed from a rational gamer, one who just happens to be a foreign war vet.
Best quote? Barnett’s conclusion that “steak knives and swimming pools pose a greater threat to children, but nobody is trying to restrict adult access to those tools”. Simply a nice, articulate response that attempts to address a “grossly outdated” American view on the evils of gaming.
Way Beyond Pong [New York Times] More »
