alt Hacker NewsI had a coworker from the democratic republic of Congo who insisted that if he was back home he would do ok fighting because he played lots of first-person shooters. I mean he was 100% serious about this. We argued about it.
He got a commitment from our employer to pay his undergrad tuition. But he disappeared one day, probably went home to fight and die. I search for him every now and then but I think he's gone.
I think his naïveté is equal to this policy.
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I wonder if that happened to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Yezhov as well, FPS games represent you as a Superman, there's a big gap between games and reality. That being said I want my air traffic controller to be good at cooking mama.
The planes will just respawn after disappearing from the radar, right?
The US Army did a bunch of recruiting to teenagers like this, successfully. Work for us, it's just like Call of Duty! They had their own branded FPS even.
The types of skills from FPS games and real fighting are much further apart than gaming and ATC. A closer analogy would be a coworker who knows Judo is needed for Greco-Roman wrestling. Very different sports with different rules, but the skills in building and navigating a mental map of the environment carry over.
For anyone contemplating the same, go play paintball for half a day. You don't just get killed every other round like in Arma, the "death" it's somewhat painful, you get out of breath and start valuing any semblance of cover very much (and get killed from and unexpected direction anyway).
I think in both cases that while it's far from an equivalent experience, there are some attributes or skills that can transfer across. Not sure why anyone would be particularly keen to bet their life on just that, though.
It’s just a recruitment campaign. It’s not like they’re putting people straight into a control tower because they like to play Microsoft Flight Simulator or something. They still go through a whole training process.
Hm, on one level I'm confused. War seems to be either very stressful, very boring (hurry up and wait) or shit my pants level of terrifying. Video games are usually designed to be none of those? well except slightly stressful because that can be fun