Reality is not necessarily what you want to hear, but reality is...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/shootemups-are-good-for-you-say-researchers-2078435.html
In the earlier days of computing when the console games at arcades had the fastest, most capable microprocessors, Fort Knox, home of Army Armor, got the game manufacturers to create realistic games for armored combat for the EM clubs. How well it worked can be measured perhaps by Persian Gulf I: US Armor-all of 'em; Republican Guard 1.
Later, the Army invested heavily in simulation, so much so, a unit could train realistically against another armored unit located half-a-world away. It illustrates why we have not only the best equipment but the best trained, most capable warriors--ever! Kids coming in with the experience and capability of these games is perhaps the greatest underestimated reason we field the most capable military ever, from infantry to fighter pilot.
It supports the reason the United States has not only become the only remaining superpower, but something at least temporarily beyond that--a hyperpower, a world hegemony. Even more remarkable is that we use this power mostly for good, not taking and holding land and peoples.
It is reason the US is hated and loved, but please note, we are having to build fences to keep people out, not in as did the Soviets. Other countries take our example as lessons and thrive. The poverty class has been halved in Asia in the last thirty years because they mimic our organizational capability, spirit and industry. We deploy much more than jeans, McDonalds and Hollywood.
The shame is we seem embarrassed by our success and do self-detrimental things to destroy ourselves. We have grown out of truly distasteful things in our past such as slavery and treatment of native Americans, but we have also matured into perhaps the greatest thing to have happened in the history of mankind. And we don't seem to know it.
In some sense, it is not only because of the microprocessor, but in how we've used it. Gaming is what people do in graduate school and in bedrooms. It leads not only to staffing the greatest military, but the greatest economy ever-the one the rest are trying to emulate. China and India have discovered and now exploit the greatest asset they had all along--their people--the asset we've done so well at developing.
It's amazing that investing in people becomes so beneficial for the people, for the society, for the civilization, and the government.
