Couch warriors: how video games aren't helping the military win the war on terror.

• Author: Klein, Avi
• Position: From Sun Tzu to Xbox - Book review

From Sun Tzu to Xbox By Ed Halter $16.95, Thunder's Mouth Press

In 1973, a reporter for Rolling Stone visited the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab to check up on computer hackers--"a mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor." Although much of the nation's investment capital for computer science came from military and government sources, the reporter found the hackers--the term was not yet a pejorative--mainly counter-culture types, a clan of intellectual druggies staying up all night playing and coding primitive computer games. "These are heads, most of them," he wrote. "Half or more of computer science is heads."

The article gave the impression of a new counterculture that had somehow bridged the gap between dorks and dope-heads, playing video games on the military's dime. It's no wonder that some parents viewed the arcade as their own parents might have a pool hall. But the hackers' efforts were critical in laying a bridge between the number-crunching of the 1940s and 1950s and the video-game culture that took off in the 1980s and lasts to this day. During the day, they might have programmed a tank simulator for the army. But at night, they were tweaking it to enhance playability, and these efforts eventually ran downstream into the consumer market. It is no accident that most video games involve shooting ballistics.

The rise of video game and computer culture neatly tracked the martial and patriotic impulses of the Reagan years. Before, computer games were associated with the underground. Suddenly, however, it was the age of the nerd warrior, like Matthew Broderick in WarGames, outthinking renegade computer programs and the fogey military planners who didn't understand the dangerous power of technology. Drugs were out, America was in, and for the first time the pasty math-club president could see himself as the next Patton. Trolling through the arcades, Martin Amis thought gamers--"intense, thin-lipped characters, whose fantasy lives are dearly of martial bent"--were seeking more than a vicarious experience. They actually saw themselves on the front lines.

Amis could afford to be critical, but the President of the United States could not. Video games were the first popular technology that kids understood but their parents didn't. This ignorance led many to exaggerate their value. "Watch a 12-year-old take evasive action and score multiple hits while playing Space Invaders," Ronald Reagan...