Video game tacticians could save a lot of lives

by Ludwig Kietzmann on Nov 26th 2009 7:00PM

From the medium that taught us a console is just a "hard drive with games on it" comes a new episode of NCIS (not to be confused with CSI FYI or CSI NY) that highlights the significant military advantage of employing a video game tactician. But don't even think about deploying them! As the episode's summary reveals, "a government think-tank filled with child prodigies" may be the only safe refuge for the killer's next victim.

You know what else could save a life? Not being so smug.

[Thanks, Danny]

Tags: call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2, culture, modern-warfare-2, ncis, television

Reader Comments (65)

In the context of the show, they never mentioned this was a video game, and I don't think it was supposed to be. It sounded to me like the child genius was analyzing the performance of someone else's combat simulator run. I didn't see this as yet another stupid portrayal of video games at all.

No one is even holding a video game controller (so, no frantic button pushing like you only see when clueless actors are pretending to play a game). She's holding the same kind of remote control they're always using on NCIS when controlling video playback or some sort of powerpoint presentation.

Her tactics are full of crap. Personally, I subscribe to the Theory of Direct Attack, as put forward by the military genius, Leroy Jenkins.

she didnt even have chicken

Wasn't there a famous sci-fi novel based on this premise?...

HMMMMM....

What displeases me most is when they exclaim something seemingly known amongst the gaming community I.E. Gamer, the movie (yes, I watched it) had to explain the occurrence of ping in video-games Needless to say they had it (ping, or input and output delay) integrated in one of the most retarded plot-point methods of all time. In yet the way they brought it about in discussion during the movie was in one of the most dramatic moments in the whole game, as if ping was some original finding no one knew about that Davinci and Einstein somehow worked in different time-periods together to keep a secret. Of course with the demographic attentive toward television and movies today, I wouldn't be surprised to see that the majority of them not know that both Einstein and Davinci are dead. Or are they? I'm going to continue to eat this rather large ass piece of bread, while writers scramble to tell persons in the most dramatic manner ever that both of these people have died. Tupac and Elvis had something to do with it too, throw that in there.

I didn't see the movie, so I can't comment if it was overdramatic.

But I've found a lot of gamers who don't know what ping is. I've even found PC gamers who don't know what ping is. They may have heard of it, but still don't realize that it's delay measured in milliseconds.

And considering the need of IT jobs in this country, explaining ping in a movie sounds reasonable. There's no reason any normal person to know what ping is if they've never found the need to ping a server. A ton of people really don't understand computers that well, look above in the comments for the reference to the "Visual Basic, IP-tracking GUI." The writers of these things aren't exactly literate to lower levels of computer operation.

This shit happens all the time. In one of the Resident Evil movies (I watched them on TV) some guy runs over a zombie and then says: "haha, 10 points bitch." I doubt they were talking about GTA 1, or 2. All it did was reinforce the stereotype of games giving points for killing civilians.