John Kerry: The video game

In "Battlefield Vietnam," a new version of one of the most popular games in the U.S., you too can try to win a Silver Star saving your buddies in the jungle.

By Wagner James Au

Apr 13, 2004 | The funny thing is, if John Forbes Kerry becomes the next president by winning a few key states with a few thousand votes, no one on his staff will know that the thing that helped put him over the top featured "Surfer Bird," AK-47 gunfire, and loud blasts of Viet Cong propaganda.

"Battlefield Vietnam," the new multiplayer tactical shooter from Electronic Arts (and a spinoff of the mammothly popular "Battlefield 1942," re-creates a dozen-plus decisive battles from the Southeast Asian conflict, from pitched, close-quarter combat in Hue, to fierce infantry skirmishes beneath the chopper- and fighter-infested skies of Khe San. Other shooters set in Nam will soon arrive, and maybe this is, as some have suggested, a sign that the game industry has matured, now that it is finally willing to depict divisive historical topics.

But none of the other Nam games will come with the promotion or the built-in audience of E.A.'s franchise title. So none of them will have any chance at all of potentially influencing an American presidential election.

Yes, influence the election. How? Chew on this: A marketing firm called i to i research recently completed a survey of American young people, asking them to cite the source for their favorable impression of the U.S. military. (And the young are overwhelmingly pro-military, in numbers that far outstrip their trust in any other institution, public or private -- one possible reason why Kerry's team keeps the text to his anti-military "Winter Soldier" testimony on Vietnam before Congress on the down low.) When i to i asked kids why they admired the military, 40 percent cited recent combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A full 30 percent of them, however, named the computer game "America's Army."

Let's restate that, to make sure it comes across in all its head-spinning dissonance: A third of the country's young people have an elevated view of the Army, not foremost for anything it's actually done lately, but because of the computer game they played, which just simulates it.

So there's that. And if we've already come to speculate how Howard Stern might turn the election in Kerry's favor, it's really not that far a leap to think that the sequel to a title that has sold over 3 million copies may do just that, as well.

Because with Iraq and Afghanistan still savagely blood-spattered and un-democratized, Vietnam really is the psychic battleground, come November. Roughly put, if you already believe Nam offers a relevant object lesson to the current war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, then you're likely to vote for Kerry. If you've already decided that Vietnam has little to teach us on either front, you're more likely to vote for Bush. But who wins the election really comes down to the one-third of the country who remain undecided, and here is where the Vietnam of their imagination becomes so key. Because the most prominent depiction of that war in the popular culture -- the only one out now, really -- is this computer game. In November, millions of undecided voters will make their own deliberation, on the role of Vietnam in our lives. And in the next few months, hundreds of thousands of them are going to be playing "Battlefield Vietnam."

Next Page: "Just what Vietnam needs -- a Democrat," mocks one game player

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