Friday 19 February 2010

From GameBoy to Armageddon


My feature on the ‘military-entertainment complex’ goes out on BBC Radio 3 this Sunday, February 21, at 9.30 pm. From Gameboy to Armageddon features some amazing contributions from Tim Lenoir, Ed Halter and Tom Chatfield on the relationship of games and simulations to Past and Future War; P W Singer of the Brookings Institute on current deployments of UAVs and robots; some vintage archive material from RAND’s Tom Schelling on the Cuban Missile Crisis as a game; plus Michael Macedonia and Jim Korris on the founding of STRICOM and the Institute of Creative Technologies, the amazing Jim Dunnigan on Clausewitz and Kriegspiel, Skip Rizzo on ‘Virtual Iraq’ and a rare interview with the legendary Jack Thorpe – responsible while seconded to DARPA from the USAF for devising SIMNET, the first real-time, practical version of cyberspace. Acronyms totally rule on this one.

This has been a hell of show to put together, but it hasn’t left me a lot of time to post much on it – this is being written at dawn before I disappear into the Labyrinth for another day. I’ll come back later and put links in with some of these names, so you may want to check this entry again after the weekend.

Pictured above: Halo 3 gets physically busy, courtesy of Monstervine.

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