Can you link the video where he shoots the family in front of reporters?
That’s dream 2.
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these are amazing, I love the shots of army guy seated in full gear and staring deadeyed past a large binder as the pages flip past automatically.
possibly of interest to anyone interested in 2004-era manifestations of the military-videogames-industrial complex: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0mmfk6o1jtb4mcd/Modeling%20-%202004%20-%20America’s%20Army%20PC%20Game%20-%20Vision%20and%20Realization.pdf?dl=0
apparently “America’s Army” was selected for inclusion in a videogames museum exhibit, and the military liason guys sent this on as a contextualising document. many gems.
that last one isn’t combining two different pages, the sidebar about recruitment success is literally adjacent to the paragraph about how calling these games propaganda is emotional flailing (this section written by an ex-games reviewer for Wired magazine who was previously an “embedded reporter for Second Life”, apparently). one of the most fascinating things about this stuff to me is how it sort of lights up in passing a whole vast adjacent network of contractors, academics, and assorted lickspittles, presumably all getting paid for this stuff.
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so glad that kids who don’t have ww2 vets for granddads can still learn about the “cool-factor” of dying in a war
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this is why i became uncomfortable with playing arma, even though we personally were always playing “the bad guys” and shit, a lot of people end up wanting to get into the milsim stuff because they see a video of a big like 80 man operation on youtube and the tone of all of that shit is inevitably The US Army is cool!!! because half those groups are run by guys who were in the army or desperately wish they were. its unpaid and unofficial yet still designed to get people to play army
intentional or not its still a weird pipeline for teenagers to get sucked into army shit or become weird far-right guys. theres so much casual racism in arma communities plus people design like elaborate vietnam or iraq scenarios that basically say “imperialism is good!” and reflect a lot of bad right-wing american shit around those wars. hearing your fake commanding officer use slurs for arabic people constantly for 4 hours straight and all the civilians are designed to try and suicide bomb you or shoot you is absolutely poison for your brain especially if youve spent all your life inundated in american imperial mass culture and dont know any better yet. i dont like it and im glad to be rid of it
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in a lot of other games your 16 year old teammate will only launch into a tirade at you if you lose a match or something.
in arma that same teammate has changed their username to “Sgt. Miller” to reflect the fake leadership role theyve been given in fake army and instead call you the f-slur for saying “reloading the 50” instead of “the 50 is down!” in reference to the .50 cal machineguns on the humvees. conversely you are not allowed to say “50 is up” when the gun is reloaded, you have to say “the 50 is hot” because the army is run by the most annoying people alive
its surreal having what is audibly a 14 year old boy scream at you in the middle of a virtual “leadership seminar” because you wont take his fake captains bars seriously and hes trying to teach you about reading a map after he called in an artillery strike on the wrong coordinates and getting a farmhouse full of civilians killed the session before. people take milsim shit in arma so deathly seriously that it almost transcends its “lets play pretend” quality and becomes this bizarre farce that is accidentally an incisive critique of the armys bullshit wars and its leadership structure. but then your virtual “battle buddy” expresses his glee at shooting a “raghead” or briefly laments an accident where civilians were killed before deciding it was acceptable because “less insurgents to deal with” and you realize it all means fucking nothing
coming to SB as the person with probably the most arma “expertise” feels like if i joined and established myself as the americas army guy. its kind of embarrassing and weird but like i made my bed by spending my entire teenage years learning this game and immersing myself in the awful community without becoming a neo-nazi army respecter so i guess i have to lie in it
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getting strong mdickie vibes off this somehow
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i love to have a dream, take notes on how i could do better, and then apply those notes in my dream the following night. this is a completely normal human thing to do.
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all I remember from america’s army is both sides look like they’re u.s. military to themselves and like terrorists to each other and, exactly like school, my mind kept wandering off during the classes that teach you cpr and stuff and I was wishing I had some paper and pen to doodle some satans and draculas
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I remember reading years ago that the military was using some kind of modification of Doom for training. Was that legit or was that a poor explanation for some kind of look alike engine based sim?
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the only good thing i have to say about america’s army is that putting you in virtual leavenworth for teamkilling rules
I played America’s Army for a minute because it was free. My name was Jesus_of_Nazareth. At the beginning of most matches, when I was on the defending team, I would try to take up a defensive position while everyone else invariably bunny-hopped forward to their inevitable deaths.
Then I’d be cat-and-mouse with half to all the attackers while my teammates spammed rage @ Jesus_of_Nazareth for playing the game Wrong.
You could pick up a fallen enemy’s weapon, and since they looked to you like Generic Middle Eastern Opponent, the guns–which were in their hands copies of your own that performed identically–became Soviet bloc selections with slightly different performance.
Fortunately type 1 diabetes means never being in any danger of joining an Army, America’s or other!
God bless this wonderful thread made just for me
A fun and non-embarrassing group that plays big Arma scenarios and uses just enough milspeak to be effective while not caring about LARPing and avoiding casual racism is ShackTac, I recommend checking out their channel if you wanna see the fun in Arma (which is mostly trying in vain to click on tiny dots in the distance)
the shacktac guys have a weird insistence on shit like “no optics if possible” which I guess is more interesting but also makes the game a complete nightmare to play for like 95% of people since most arma combat is bullshit pixel hunting (especially in PvP, which is why most people who played DayZ have a dozen stories where they bitch about getting shot from a mile away by a guy they couldnt see) or an insane clusterfuck in a house with fucked-up collision where people keep getting stuck on doorframes and furniture. they’re probably the most OK of any of the arma people who do this shit though. i’m sure hanging out with those guys for long enough will make that statement completely incorrect because playing army has a magic ability to corrupt men’s minds but yeah
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i’ve always been drawn into arma 3 but never got around to play it. i wouldn’t buy the game, but i remember when i played cod 4 on bootleg servers through gametracker or whatever and checking a handful of well-populated arma servers close by.
maybe one day i’ll grab a cracked version of the game (if that’s even possible), but then again i don’t know if it’s possible to have a good time in that game without a v specific type of group.
this thread prompted me to discover a youtuber guy who’s a literal military police officer who only plays online shooters w mods that make his characters look like cops; he’s got entire series in which he and his friends roleplay doing patrols and profiling people in gta online, raiding slums in arma and shit, hours and hours of it. bleak
arma has kind of hilarious copy protection that I don’t know if people have gotten around and yeah the appeal is playing with a decent group. the campaigns have never been anything special and public servers are either PvP nightmares or huge premade missions like domination or insurgency where you kind of get a sense of the scale of the game but it’s hard to feel like you’re really doing anything interesting or impactful to the trajectory of the mission. this is why the RP servers are the most popular public arma servers lol. the game is at its best when you’re in a tight knit group doing handcrafted missions, theres literally nothing else like it
starting in arma 2 i basically started to run missions i built by hand with custom scripts to dynamically change the weather and spawn civilians, etc, combined with an in-game mission editor mod (they started natively supporting this in arma 3 with the zeus modules) and that was kind of what cemented it as one of the best multiplayer co-op games ive ever played. i would play alongside my friends but also build the mission around them, so it basically turned the game into military themed D&D. many of the positive memories my friends have of arma are of encounters and battles i built for them to play through, which is kind of nice
one of the best campaigns we ever did was based around NATO occupation of the (fictional) island nation of Sahrani, where my friends started out dealing with bandits in the hills harassing the local populace and turned into this elaborate plan to defect from the imperialist NATO forces by crossing the DMZ. no shit, without my intervention, these guys cooked up this plan to steal the local news network’s van and don vests that said “PRESS” on them and have one of the players who was stationed on the border absolutely eviscerate the civilian convoy they were with a part of with a machinegun. they somehow managed to pull this off without anybody realizing and sparked a fucking humanitarian crisis that led to russian intervention and the communist guerillas up north pushing NATO off the island and liberating their country. people still mention this (and another incident where one of them assassinated a politician from the cargo bay of a mi-24 superhind with an anti-materiel rifle) every time we talk about arma as one of the most memorable things they’ve ever done in a game
our jagged alliance style mercenaries in the desert thing ended with them trying to make a deal because they had been playing both sides against each other and uncovered evidence that the CIA was up to some shit out in the oil fields, which made them marked men. the PMC guys who were doing security for the CIA agent who had the money told us to send the leader (me) in unarmed so i had one of my guys set up a sniper position with a clear line of sight to the courtyard in the village they told us to meet at and then had the rest of the team approach from the back of the village on foot. it turned into this huge CQC clusterfuck where they tried to double cross us and we had to go house by house clearing out the contractors and avoiding the civilians, and we chased the CIA agent across the desert on foot for like a mile before an enemy helicopter caught up with us to pick him up. the dude in our squad with a PKM hit the dirt and blasted the fucking rotors and sent the guy and his escape chopper crashing down into the desert
we also did a really memorable vietnam campaign which was a double-edged sword because oh boy do historical conflicts give people an excuse to be a huge fucking racist (the red orchestra 2 expansion rising storm is one of the worst offenders here) and so many arma players are really eager to commit war crimes for fun. we started with like, 8 people and ended up with maybe 3-4 by the end because i had to tell half of them they werent welcome anymore after killing civilians, using slurs, executing unarmed prisoners, just real fucked up shit because they were “getting into character” or whatever. arma’s a really intense game! it’s kind of fascinating how people lose their minds when they play it for an extended period of time, i guess
anyway the vietnam one was great because I was an asshole who would spawn vietcong guys in the jungle and have them take potshots at the squad before making them disappear, i was constantly adjusting and directing enemy activity to make the players feel like they could get attacked at any time. i would set mines and booby traps and place spider holes in logical spots around the perimeter of enemy encampments or villages. this led to a particularly memorable encounter where the team was sneaking through the jungle at night, making their way through tall grass, and only realized with horror at the end that they had just traversed the outer defensive line of a north vietnamese army camp when someone saw a guy sticking his rifle out of a hole behind them. it was really fucking cool and i have no idea how they pulled it off but i hear about that one a lot, too
the game was so unpredictable that even when i set stuff up i’d be totally shocked when shit got out of control, especially as i layered on more dynamic AI scripts and spawns and stuff. it got to the point where i’d set up encounters and the AI would just go out of their way to call reinforcements and flank and set up ambushes without me having to worry about it. this led to a mission in vietnam where my friends were trying to eliminate mobile AA guns that the vietnamese had moved into a nearby canyon and after completing their mission watched as their helicopter got fucking shot down by some random AA team that had been called in by the AI earlier. so they called for another extraction and had to march 3km through dense jungle infested by the enemy who was now actively looking for them in the hopes that they could find a safe LZ. there was this great moment where the team was laying down on the jungle floor and an entire column of hardened NVA regulars literally just walked past them unaware they were there. eventually my guys got cornered in a box canyon with an entire platoon of guys bearing down on them…only for their helicopter to take a hail of machinegun fire to the cockpit when it had landed to pick them up. they fought their way out and ended up having to traverse like 7km of jungle as it was getting dark. it had some of the best firefights ive ever seen in a videogame, just stopping and starting every time flare rounds the radio operator had to call for from the artillery at the firebase every minute or so. and then they got home, exhausted and wounded and having to scavenge for weapons and ammo off of bodies to find that the reason there were AA guns in the canyon in the first place was because the AI had planned an offensive and was currently besieging their base. so they spent all night in-game fighting off vietnamese soldiers who were fighting their way up the hill to the firebase at the top until the siege finally broke at dawn. the game was running at like 15fps because there were fucking bodies everywhere and burning wrecks of vehicles and shit. we spent about 6 actual hours playing through this. everybody was exhausted but it left a huge impact on the people who played it and i’ve always been proud of that
everything else in arma just feels so sterile and boring in comparison to these wild fucking missions where literally anything could happen and you felt like the stuff you were doing actually mattered. there were actual choices and consequences based on what they chose to do and what they fucked up, there was an overall war they felt like they could tangibly understand if they were winning or losing. i understood my players’ skill levels without putting them in situations where they were overwhelmed or didnt have the support they needed to pull off something huge and crazy and the problem with a lot of pre-made missions is you either never get the feeling of being part of an enormous battle or its you and 3 other guys fighting an entire battalion of soviet tanks and getting obliterated in 15 minutes. all the people from my old arma crew have stories that they will never forget that they couldnt have gotten from any other game
sometimes i think about getting a gaming PC and going back to it, getting the old crew together, and doing the shit we used to do. but arma was a lot of work. i would toil for hours to set up the missions and the scripts and test it and then having to DM the entire thing for 4-8 hours at a time when i was working 60-80 hours a week at my actual job on top of that. it was always people requesting new scenarios (shout out to the racist kid in high school who wanted me to make him a rhodesian bush war scenario!!) or new additions or having ideas for shit to do. it was always more of my time, more downloading mods, more setup, more server costs. its always bothered me that nobody ever understood the amount of effort i put into making what was literally the kind of unique videogame experience you just couldnt get anywhere else or said “thanks, i appreciate this” while i was putting the time in but hey what can you do
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If you did this for me and us
I would certainly tell you that I appreciated it
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for me to seriously consider it i need
- a bigger apartment so I have the space for a PC (which is something i have to figure out on my own unfortunately)
- a PC capable of running Arma 3 well and a monitor (i would need help with this and i’m not a PC gamer anymore so it’s not a great investment anyway)
- people being willing to pitch in on server costs/figure out a dedicated server situation unless you like playing games at a consistent 10-15 FPS (trust me you’ll get sick of how badly optimized arma is real fucking quick)
- patience because i still have to build the mission as we play and arma is quirky as fuck, patience because the game is a lot of waiting around and driving places, patience because it’s a high effort activity and i can’t do it all the time
i’ve written off going back to arma as a pipe dream honestly because it’s expensive and a fool’s game but if the stars ever align the right way i can’t really say i would be able to stay away from the fucker
