the united states department of defense presents: shenmue

[eat_it_vid_boi]

so something people may not know is that the arma games are essentially a consumer version of a product bohemia interactive’s sister company develops for use by western mlitaries. it didnt start that way but in part government contracts are what allowed them to continue to independently develop games (dayz getting popular also helped lol and game sales are definitely the biggest part of their business now.) this is partially why i dont play them anymore, because i dont feel like going out of my way to support a company that makes shit for the us military, and partially because arma is unfortunately full of psychopath americans who love using racial slurs and doing war crimes to make it more “real”

trust me, getting on my soapbox here is relevant, i promise

the product the us army uses is called VIRTUAL BATTLESPACE and it harkens back to the operation flashpoint days, where a company was spun-off to develop the tech from that game into having military applications. a lot of hardcore arma players desperately want a VBS license because it has an insane asset library of like 17,000 models for worldwide militaries to use for training because they think it’ll be cool. this isn’t relevant by the way you might find it mildly interesting though. anyway theres several govenment contractors whose job is to pump out training scenarios for VBS or make “exciting” versions of glorified powerpoints where a badly animated drill instructor model tells you how not to die of heatstroke

this is one of those training exercises

according to the army the basic premise of this series is that its about LIEUTENANT CONNERS who is some complete fucking idiot going to iraq during the surge and falls asleep on the C-130 to kuwait and gets trapped inside a silent hill game where hes forced to relive the same nightmare over and over again to correct the absurdly horrible mistakes he makes in each cycle. its one of the funniest premises for a SUPER SERIOUS SECRET ARMY TRAINING VIDEO (they remind you that this had to be declassified at the beginning of every video!!!) ive ever seen and it really goes places. by the end of dream 2 conners has gotten his entire platoon killed at least once and machinegunned down an entire fucking iraqi family in front of CNN reporters

but i know, youre wondering what the thread title is about. let me tell you about dream 3, friend. i have so many wonders to show you.

this one is almost the funniest to me because the army man protagonist spends most of it wandering up to iraqi guys like ryo shenmue and saying “Excuse me. Have you seen any terrorists?” and then gets pissed off when nobody speaks fucking english in IRAQ!!! and that his approach isnt working. the guy voicing him has like, the same perfect bad voice acting quality as the guy who voices ryo somehow??

theres just something beautiful and shenmue-like about a stilted conversation between these men


where the main character walks up to two foreigners and says “I’m Lieutenant Conners. I’m here to help. Have you seen any terrorists?” in the flattest tone possible that i cant help but appreciate the dreamcastness of it all

of course like 5 minutes after this conners gets owned because an entire squad of his guys gets killed by an ambush laid by an iraqi man who looks like Ricky from Trailer Park Boys since hes spent 3 cycles refusing to get someone who speaks arabic so he can talk to the townsfolk about their problems and where Sailors Terrorists hang out more effectively

dream 4 starts with a fucking mao quote of all things

he also finally gets a translator in dream 4 who defects to the insurgency after conners spends the entire video being racist to the mayor and local imam and talking shit on chai, so he definitely deserved it

you get occasional glimpses of these amazing posters in the otherwise incredibly sparse interiors

AMERICAN JIHAD

its just such an incredibly bizarre thing, its probably only really funny if you are a true doom armahead, like theres something so funny about seeing this busted ass videogame youve spent all this time learning to deal with contorted into an awkward instructional video about how to avoid the perils of accidentally blowing up old men with breaching charges where everybody looks like a walking LOD model and has a goofy grin on their face half the time. unwarranted hostility towards foreigners, getting everyone killed and committing war crimes are the bread and butter of any self-important arma super serious milsim guy worth his salt so that part translates over from the consumer product at least

i hope you all learned a valuable lesson about COUNTER-INSURGENCY OPERATIONS

Good morning. Do you know where I can find terrorists?

[Geoff]

“but do you know where the bad-guys are?”

[dedede69]

wow

[boojiboy7]

I love the “operator” speak language. It’s so funny. They want to be sure there aren’t any IEDs “emplaced” on this one city block once they have “traversed” it. It’s like that freshman comp paper from the kid that figured out Word has a thesaurus function, so he picks words he thinks sound better because they are longer.

[disestablished]

You should watch Restrepo.

*Here’s a summary if you don’t want to bother

Restrepo is the nickname for a hilside/valley which was hotly contested in Afghanistan. I guess due to its relative proximity to a roadway. However, by the end up the video, you have the strong feeling that roadway was a VERY minor convenience and we didn’t need to be sending troops to die on that hill.

Anyway, much of the video shows the group leader trying to negotiate with local people. Stuff like “Well if you’d tell us where the bad guys are, your friends and family wouldn’t die in the crossfire”. At one point, a dirtbag soldier decides to kill a local farmer’s cow, for steaks. He and several troops enjoy the steaks. The farmer is very upset and demands something be done about it. We basically offer him rice and grain equal to the weight of the cow or something like that. and the guy who killed the cow gets a stern talkin’ to.

[disestablished]

Can you link the video where he shoots the family in front of reporters?

[Geoff]

That’s dream 2.

[thecatamites]

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.

[u_u]

so glad that kids who don’t have ww2 vets for granddads can still learn about the “cool-factor” of dying in a war

[eat_it_vid_boi]

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

[eat_it_vid_boi]

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

[idiot]

getting strong mdickie vibes off this somehow

[Tegiminis]

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.

[parker]

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

[LaurelSoup]

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?

[Mr_Mechanical]

Marine Doom

[eat_it_vid_boi]

the only good thing i have to say about america’s army is that putting you in virtual leavenworth for teamkilling rules

[shrug]

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.

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

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!

[Father.Torque]

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)

Dslyecxi

[eat_it_vid_boi]

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