The U.S. Army Looks to Video Games to Help with Recruiting Youths

With the every growing challenge of recruiting America's youth, the U.S. Army is constantly on the lookout for new ways to reach out and connect with the young Americans. Recently, the Army has devised a way to mix video games and the mall to aid in the recruitment effort. The new facility is far from the traditional recruiting center that features uniformed soldiers in a traditional recruiting office.

The project, dubbed "The U.S. Army Experience Center", is located in the Franklin Mills Shopping Mall in Northeast Philadelphia. The $12 million center includes 60 personal computers (PCs) that are loaded with a series of military video games, 19 X-Box 360 controllers and interactive screens that describe in great detail some of the military bases and different jobs available in the military. The center resembles a hotel lobby more than it does an Army recruiting center (source: news.yahoo.com).

The center is the first of its kind and is said to replace five recruiting stations. The center is run by military officials that are dressed in slacks and polo shirts and offer a much more relaxed environment than that of the traditional centers. The center was opened last August and has so far produced 33 full-time soldiers and five reservists. Those numbers roughly match the expectations of the military for this experiment (source: news.yahoo.com).

But there are those that feel the center is glamorizing war and giving youths a false sense of what military life is all about. Jesse Hamilton, a former Army staff sergeant who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said "You can't simulate the loss when you see people getting killed." Hamilton, who left the Army after his Iraq tour and is now a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War went on to say "It's not very likely you are going to get into a firefight. The only way to simulate the heat is holding a blow dryer to your face." The Army said it is not intending to mislead youth but simply trying to appeal to the urban youth which has traditionally lagged the rural youth (source: news.yahoo.com).

The U.S. Army also admits that with the growing recession and better news coming out of Iraq that recruitment is expected to go up this year (source: news.yahoo.com). But make no mistake about it; the Army has come up with a way to reach the youth of America by using video games. It may be sad, but it is true, there are many youths in America today that you just can reach any other way.