JFK Reloaded
Lieberman: You can get arrested for threatening presidents and any behavior that suggests you are contemplating taking violent action against an elected official. The line between this and this `JFK: Reloaded’ game is, in my mind, close.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the target of this video game already [i]dead[/i]? Now I want to find Kennedy’s corpse and physically re-enact the famous Assassination scene.
Traffic is offering a $100,000 prize to the first player to “most accurately re-create the three shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald,” according to a news release issued Monday.
Traffic representatives didn’t respond to phone calls Tuesday, but the company’s release billed “JFK: Reloaded” as a “docu-game” with historical instruction as its main purpose. It’s available only by downloading from the Internet.
Yes. It’s a “docu-game”. Very educational. And it also helps us all with hand – eye coordination.
Like those video games the military puts out to train soldiers how to kill and stuff.
The U.S. military is by far the largest buyer of game simulations, accounting for roughly half of the $20 million to $40 million market.
Although this article suggests that the military has branched out beyond the “Killing Game” stage to other tactical games:
America’s Army harnesses state-of-the-art game play to win new recruits for the U.S. Army, taking players from the rifle range to bombed-out desert cities. It ranks as one of the most popular online games, with more than 4 million registered players.
Other military games focus on equally important survival skills, like Arabic language and etiquette. Users of the Rapid Tactical Language Training System can stumble through conversations with animated computer characters, rather than actual Iraqi citizens who might take offense at the wrong hand gesture.
Will Interactive’s releases focus on leadership skills, putting players in situations where there is no clear right or wrong answer. Players must decide what to do if they don’t have enough chemical suits for their troops, how to get a wounded soldier to safety, or how to defuse a tense hostage situation.
Can the player opt to not run the mission if such a situation as not having enough equipment arises, as that National Guard unit did last October?
Back to JFK:
The conspiracy theorists have it all wrong. If you listen to them, Kennedy was just about to do any number of things before he was shot dead. He saw where Vietnam was heading, and so was going to get us out of there. He was going to bring equality to the races. He was going to share the truth about the aliens. Whatever.
There isn’t much reason to think he was going to move outside the box in any way, shape, or form. Maybe he pushed space exploration heavily because it diverted money in the Military Industrial Complex; maybe he didn’t. But the 1960 election, the common complaint was “not much policy difference” — a difference in tone, not policy. The understudy of an Eisenhower president who was to the left of the national Republican party, who conservatively managed government programs and stepped out of the way where he could, versus a partician Northeastern centrist to the right of the National Democratic Party who campaigned soft-peddled civil rights.
Though “a difference in tone, not policy” is salient. Nixon versus Kennedy: really, now, who would you rather have as president?
Kennedy’s overrated. I say we oughta kill him.
No. Wait. I can’t say that. The civil service will come knocking at my door, because I threatened to kill a dead president. (Does Kennedy still have civil service protection, I wonder.)