Amid a recruitment struggle, branches are using huge hits like Fortnite as marketing tools. Some veterans see the practice as unethical – especially given the age of the gaming audience
  • MentallyExhausted@reddthat.comEnglish
    321·
    9 months ago

    I wouldn’t mind as much if they made them realistic. “You’re now scared of fireworks and your wife fucked 13 dudes while you were deployed” kind of thing.

    • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      9 months ago

      I remember struggling to get the minimum marksmanship to be able to play the game because the targets were red and the background was green/brown. I had to memorize the position and timing of all 30(?) targets.

      Pretty realistic lol.

  • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    Army has given of the impression of being pretty desperate for some time now but what mentally stable person would want to join after seeing how veterans are treated?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    His esports team – navy personnel who compete with gamers online under the name Goats & Glory – consists of 12 enlisted sailors who used to work as flight officers, sonar techs and even a chaplain’s assistant.

    “I was in a country fighting a population that lives on less than $1 a day with gigantic weapons and armored vehicles,” says a former US army intelligence analyst, Jeremiah Knowles, “and if I’m patrolling in Afghanistan with my assault rifle and a kid gets too close …” He pauses.

    In 2018, the army formed the first military esports team but was accused of unethical recruitment practices in its Twitch stream, including censoring questions about war crimes in its chat and holding a fake Xbox controller giveaway.

    In a video posted to Instagram last fall, you can watch a navy esports team member slipping a Meta Quest VR headset on to a child’s head in an elementary school library in Utah.

    “Even if they’re not directly providing a link to join the army or whatever,” Cronin tells me from her dorm room at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “they are trying to appeal to the cool factor of ‘ooh, we do mid-air refueling’ and ‘we jump out of planes and shoot guns’.”

    Others attribute youth reluctance to recent publicity about a culture within the military that allows for racism, white supremacy and sexual violence; gaping holes in the US’s veteran support system; the legacies of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; and ideological opposition to war itself.

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