Zapping zombies: how the US military uses the entertainment industries as a recruitment tool

We hear a lot about gamification these days. As video games edge closer to simulating the real world, while Hollywood blockbusters seem to more and more resemble video games, it's little wonder that businesses are using the gaming concept as a learning tool. If anyone has noticed an eerie similarity between the plethora of military sci-fi movies, combat video games and the technology used by United States' armed forces, then you might be interested to learn that this is no coincidence.

Developed at MIT in 1962, Spacewar! is frequently cited as the earliest combat video game. Of course, it was developed for mainframe computers and so it took a long time before high enough quality visuals - with sound effects - could be installed in gaming arcades, followed in the early 1980s by games written for the first generation of ready-assembled home microcomputers.

Hollywood capitalised on the rapidly burgeoning video game market - both at home and in arcades - via movies such as 1984's The Last Starfighter, in which an expert arcade player finds himself recruited into an alien war. In other words, the game he excels at is really a simulator designed to discover and hone players who can then use their gaming skills in genuine space combat.

So how does this fiction compare to the real world? Specialist aviation publications have been full of articles with titles such as 'Do Gamers Make Better Drone Operators Than Pilots?' - the answer being that in addition to the obvious skills such as good hand-eye coordination, gamers are used to not being at personal risk from playing video games (except possibly RSI) and so remain calm under pressure. The conclusion is that they may give them an edge for controlling drones, although not it has to be said, larger, manually piloted aircraft.

The big question is how deep is the military involvement in the development, promotion and assessment of video games that contain combat skills? The relationship certainly appears to go back many decades, considering that the MIT graduate students who developed Space War! were funded by the Pentagon. With the development of much more lifelike virtual worlds, the US military has taken a front seat in both producing games that hone useful skills and creating realistic simulators for training its warfighters. 

There is complex feedback loop between these two spheres and in 1999 the Department of Defense set up the Institute for Creative Technologies to work across them. Games such as Full Spectrum Warrior (2003) and its non-commercial officer training stablemate Full Spectrum Command attempted to portray realistic combat scenarios, facing enemies who frequently resemble their real-life counterparts. 

America's Army (2002) was the first of a series of (initially free) video games that began as propaganda and recruitment tools and then became a widespread commercial franchise. Marines and Special Forces soldiers were amongst those combat veterans involved in the development of these games. In addition, the developers were allowed to scan weapons (in order to build realistic digital simulations) and even shoot them on a firing range so as to experience the physical attributes at first hand. Needless to say, the potential for glorification of violence led to opposition from various quarters.

It isn't just the software that has crossed over between the military and civilian life: weaponry and control systems also feedback between the real world and combat simulations, easing the move from game playing to the genuine article. Of course, skills such as leadership and team cooperation are also being honed by these games. The idea is that they reduce the cost of recruitment and training, leading to the realisation that the free version of America's Army, having had 1.5 million downloads in its first month (and a whopping 40 million downloads over the following six years), proved how effective they could be. 

Going in the other direction, US armed forces personnel have taken part in campaigns such as Operation Phantom Fury, which let's face it, has more than a touch of the Xbox or PlayStation about it. I assume this is also part of the process to ensure a smooth transition between young combat game players and activities in the real-world military. The channel is unlikely to diminish any time soon, seeing as China is now following America's lead; their Glorious Mission online video game, aimed at potential recruits as well as enlisted service personnel, already has over 300 million players.

The US military gaming sector has also started to diversify. To minimise complaints - already prevalent in the gaming sector, due to the implacable enemy often being a group of Muslim fundamentalists - there needed to be a new target that wouldn't raise the ire of any particular nation or ethnic group. To this end, the Call of Duty series of games has introduced reanimated dead soldiers, AKA zombies, as opponents. Bearing in mind that in the past ten years there have been over fifty video games featuring zombie antagonists, its clear that this theme is just as popular as invading aliens and terrorist zealots. Perhaps it's not surprising that doomsday preppers and survivalist groups are often said to be getting ready for the zombie apocalypse!

Recently released - although heavily-redacted - files suggest that as well as developing and promoting video games centred on combat simulation, the Department of Defense has also secretly collected players' data in order to understand their demographics. This is presumably in order to tailor recruitment and training programmes for recruits with a gaming background. The same information also hints that Hollywood too is being used by the military-industrial complex to promote its own agenda. It sounds a bit far-fetched, but the facts speak for themselves. 

The US military have long taken an interest in how Hollywood portrays them. Ronald Reagan's Whitehouse had screenings of Red Dawn (1984) and WarGames (1983) with the former gaining the Pentagon's approval while the latter was not well received (hardly surprising, if you know the plot). Gung-ho space marine movies started back in the mid-1980s with likes of Predator and Aliens, but really took off in mid-1990s with blockbusters such as Independence Day, Stargate and Starship Troopers. 

Hollywood hasn't looked back since, and as well as the US military fighting off hordes of alien invaders, there are plenty of zombie movies - over 170 worldwide over the past decade - along with numerous zombie-themed tv series. Of course, this genre usually features civilians fighting against the living dead, but nonetheless the firearm-laden format resembles its military counterparts. Critics have been keen to note that just as the alien invasion films of 1950s and 1960s were thinly-disguised Cold War allegories, so zombie movies contain subtext of the unpredictable nature of global terrorism - and imply readiness to engage the perceived enemy is a patriotic duty.

So what is the underlying connection between these genres and the Pentagon? Even a minimum of research will reveal that a fair number of the Department of Defense's advanced weaponry projects, from the F22 Raptor tactical fighter to the Global Hawk surveillance UAV (that's an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to you and me) have been truncated, in both these cases with only about half the number of units being built compared to the original proposals. The funding for those cancelled vehicles is being redirected elsewhere and Hollywood is the most likely recipient, the money being used for both movies and tv shows that follow the DoD agenda.

And how does the Pentagon know it's getting value for money? As more people book cinema tickets online and via their smartphones, the DoD is able to build frighteningly detailed profiles of those adolescents with the aptitude and skills they are looking for. Thanks to tv subscription services, it is also much easier to see exactly who is watching how much of what.

By immersing America's youth in popular entertainment across a variety of channels that both gives a homely familiarity to the military and allows niche targeting for potential recruits, the Pentagon is saving money on blanket advertising while promoting its own values as a mainstream cultural element. Thanks to a business culture that embeds military-derived phrases ('locked and loaded', 'SWAT team', 'strategic planning', etc) the distance between the armed forces and civilian life has been much reduced since the anti-war ethos of the 1970s. So if you're a teenager who plays certain types of video games and/or watches these sorts of movies and tv shows, don't be surprised if you start receiving recruitment adverts tailored closely to your personality profile. To paraphrase the Village People: they want you as a new recruit!

Distorted Darwin: common misconceptions about evolution and natural selection

A few months' ago, I discussed how disagreements with religious texts can lead the devout to disagree with key scientific theories; presumably this is a case of fundamentalists denying the fundamentals? Of all the areas of scientific research that cause issues today, it is evolutionary biology that generates the most opposition. This is interesting in so many ways, not least because the primary texts of the Abrahamic religions have little to say on the topic beyond the almost universal elements seen in creation myths, namely that one or more superior beings created all life on Earth and that He/They placed humanity at the zenith.

Thanks to opposition to the modern evolutionary synthesis, there is a plethora of misinformation, from material taken out of context to complete falsehoods, that is used to promote Creationist ideas rather than scientifically-gleaned knowledge. Even those with well-meaning intentions often make mistakes when condensing the complexity of the origin and history of life into easy-to-digest material. I've previously written about the concepts of evolutionary bushes rather than ladders, concurrent rather than consecutive radiation of sister species and speciation via punctuated equilibrium (i.e., the uneven pace of evolution) so here are a few other examples where the origin, implications and illustrations of natural selection has been distorted or overly simplified to the point of inaccuracy.

I've previously mentioned that Charles Darwin was the earliest discoverer - but only a decade or two ahead of Alfred Russel Wallace - of natural selection, and not as is often written, evolution per se. However, this is not completely accurate. Darwin's hypothesis was more complete than Wallace's, in the sense of being entirely scientific and therefore testable. Wallace on the other hand maintained there must have been divine intervention in the creation of our species, making us different from all other life forms.

In addition, there were several precursors who partially formulated ideas regarding natural selection, but who were unable to promote a consistent, evidence-based hypothesis to anywhere near the extent that Darwin achieved. For example, as early as 1831 the Scottish agriculturalist Patrick Matthew published some notes on what he termed 'new diverging ramifications of life' as he thought must occur after mass extinctions. Nevertheless, he failed to expand and fully explain his ideas, seemingly unaware of where they could lead. In this sense, he is a minor figure compared to the thorough research Darwin undertook to back up his hypothesis. 

Darwin appears to have been unaware of Matthew's ideas, although the same could not be said for Robert Chambers' (anonymous) 1844 publication Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which although highly speculative contained some kernels of truth about the mechanisms behind biological evolution. Just as Thomas Malthus' 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population inspired Darwin, so the mid-nineteenth century contained other combinations of ideas and real-world inspiration that provided,an ideal background for the formulation of natural selection. In other words, the conditions were ready for those with the correct mindset to uncover the mechanism behind evolution. What Darwin did was to combine the inspiration with an immense amount of rigour, including examples taken from selective breeding.

Another frequently quoted fallacy is that evolution always maintains a single direction from earlier, simpler organisms to later, more complex ones. I've covered this before in discussions of the evolution of our own species, as many popular biology accounts seek parallels between technological progress and a central branch of animal evolution leading ever upwards until it produced us. 

Modern techniques such as genetic analysis and sophisticated examination of fossils - including scanning their internal cavities – has negated this appealing but incorrect idea. For example, mammals evolved around the same time as the dinosaurs (and over one hundred million years before flowering plants) while parasitic species often have a far more rudimentary structure than their ancestors. 

Despite this, we still see countless illustrations showing a clear-cut path from primordial organisms 'up' to Homo sapiens. No-one who has seen the cranial endocast of a dinosaur would consider it to be superior to even the least intelligent of mammals, although the later medium-sized carnivorous species were on the way to developing a bird-like brain-to-body mass ratio. Yet throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, dinosaurs filled most ecological niches at the expense of the mammals; you would be hard-pressed to state that the latter were the dominant type of land organism during the Mesozoic!

Research published last year shows that New Zealand's unique tuatara, the sole remaining member of the Rhynchocephalia, is a reptile that shares some genetic similarities to the Monotremata, the egg-laying mammalian species known as platypus and echidna. In addition, a report from the beginning of this year states that the ancestors of today's five monotreme species diverged from all other mammals 187 million years ago; therefore, they have spent approximately three times as long on their own evolutionary journey as they did when part of all the other mammalian lineages. As a result of retaining many ancestral features, the platypus genome is in some ways more like that of birds and reptiles rather than placental and marsupial mammals. But we still include them amongst the mammals rather than as a hybrid or separate class; both platypus and echidna have fur, are warm-blooded and produce milk (although with a unique delivery system!) This allows their inclusion in Mammalia; does this mean we arbitrarily allow certain traits and discard others?

Would it be fair to say that the boundaries we make between organisms are more for our convenience than the underlying reality? Are you happy to label birds as 'avian dinosaurs' and if not, why not? If they had feathers, nests and even underground burrows, some dinosaurs were clearly part of the way there; physiologically, it was teeth, bony tail, and a crocodilian-type brain that provided the differentiation from birds. Scans of fossils show that dinosaur hearts may have been more like birds than other reptiles, which along with the possible discovery of bird-like air sacs, means that they could have had something of the former's more active lifestyle. 

This doesn't confirm that they were warm-blooded: today there are eight species, including leatherback turtles, that are mesothermic and therefore lie between warm- and cold-blooded metabolisms. Eggshell analysis suggests that some of the theropod (carnivorous) dinosaurs could have been warm-blooded, but as dinosaurs existed for around 165 million years it may be that some evolved to be mesothermic and others to be endothermic (i.e., fully warm-blooded). In this respect then, some meat-eating dinosaurs especially may have had more in common with us mammals than they did with other reptiles such as lizards and snakes.

All this only goes to show that there is far more to life's rich pageant than the just-so stories still used to illustrate the history of life. Science communication to the public is fundamental to our society but it needs to present the awkward complexities of evolution via all the tortured pathways of natural selection if it is not to fall victim to those who prefer myths of the last few thousand years to the history of countless millennia, as revealed in the genes and rocks waiting for us to explore.