What Would Matt Do

You remember the US Army, right? If you don't, here's a simple break down. Guys in the field? Don't ask questions, just do as your told and get it done fast and furious. Fair enough, that a bit too stupid for my taste, especially since you can be charged with war crimes if you commit them even under orders. Beside that though, you do need a force that will respond with hell going on around them. So that's what the Army is trained to do. They are direct and to the point.

Now, if you're recruiting guys you want to be able to follow orders without question and get it done even in the most dangerous of circumstances, do you want guys that will think on their feet or guys that love playing with really cool war machines? The army answered said they only care if the people like playing with high tech weaponry.

It's an impressive game, simulating weaponry the military is actually using or building, gamers say. But the gameplay is designed so it's hard to lose: The equipment holds up awfully well and the enemy doesn't learn from experience.

"They didn't ask for hole punchers," says Mark Long, co-CEO of Zombie, where the game was built under contract. "High tech has all kinds of low-tech vulnerabilities and they didn't want the vulnerabilities programmed in."

Now to be fair, hopefully this is something they would teach their guys before they sent them out in the field, but still, it does paint an awfully rosy pictures of how it works. It's pretty far from the real world if your weapons never misfire, jam, completely fail, get taken down by more mundane means or get messed up by the unexpected. Yes, it's just a propaganda tool and for that, it sounds pretty good.

But because this is a computer game, and they made it intentionally dumb, it annoys me. You do what you want with your website, your commercials, etc, but don't give me dumbed down games so you can present a rosier than true picture of warfare. That's insulting to me, the gamer, and to your potential recruit who you will be asking to risk his or her life with similar equipment. Don't send them in blind, for the love of all. 

What Would Matt Do: Make the US Army brass play games with really bad AI until they cried for mommy and promised to only commission realistic games in the future.