With the low number of people enlisting into the military is looking towards new methods of attracting new recruits. Propaganda has once again come into play in these new methods of recruiting.
America’s Army, an online multiplayer game, is one of the methods the United States Army came up in order to spark interest into the minds of the young. This game was released in July 2002 and is rated T for teens. Aimed towards boys 14 years old and older, the game was designed to be able to give young boys a taste of what it feels like to be a part of the Army. As the main function of the game is to get young boys to reach out to the Army, the game includes contact information for recruiters. Casey Wardynski came up with the idea to use a game to reach young boys when “Army officials were looking for a way to reach out to potential recruits with minimal cost”, as stated in the article “It’s a Video Game, and an Army
Recruiter” by Josh White.
The game starts off with basic obstacle courses, including learning how to fire weapons such as automatic rifles and grenade launchers. Wardynski was quoted saying America’s Army is “designed to give them (young boys) an inside view on the very fundamentals of being a soldier, and it's also designed to give them a sense of self-efficacy, that they can do it,” because "We want them to see that they can succeed in doing this. You don't have to think what it would look like -- you can see what it looks like."
I visited the website for the America’s Army game which can be found on the link http://www.americasarmy.com/. According to the website statistics there are 239,575 registered users and an average of 45 new users on a daily basis. Unfortunately this means that the there are people falling for the Army’s propaganda just like in WWI and WWII.
Sources:
Info:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/26/AR2005052601505.html
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