This is going to be meta as fuck -- but the only preconcieved notions I brought to that post were; that the gist of his complaint(and thus post) applies to just about everything(which a later reply addressed) both on this site and within western cultur, that Iraq is a contentious topic(confirmed by some of the replies), that bringing up your own US military service invariably will send any conversation down certain lines(also confirmed by the replies - thank you for your service, what were you expecting, yada yada), and that as a poster with an ID that low, he knew all of these things and thus knew what he was doing. And of course what is implied by the fact that both darfur, and Rwanda 2, child of rwanda, aka the congo were brought into it as well.

It was utterly irrelevant to the article(or rather only as relevant to this topic as to any other topic), only sort of relevant to the person he was replying to, and not productive except to create a derail, which it did. That's a troll -- oh, and the purpose of a troll is to generate conversation, not necessarily in a bad way. I know that definition has gone out of vogue, but sorry it's the one drilled into my brain.

"Play with 24 players online in three beautiful and destructible locations...Whether you choose Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima or the classic Wake Island, you'll experience the best balance of infantry combat complemented by land, sea and air vehicles."

So really, they've taken the original BF1942, spruced up the graphics, made trees that fall over, reduced the player numbers and removed all but three of the levels. And they want people to pay more money for this and endure more or EA's dicking about with bugs, poor updates and maybe DRM?

Heh. No thanks.

Yea, it's pretty audacious.

I've come to realize that not being able to easily take on the suffering of other "third hand" like that is actually a human survival trait. People can only barely handle the tragedies in their own lives, much less bear the burden of every tragedy the damned news media pushes in their face. I say let them have their lives of quiet desperation if they choose.

There's an old(well, relatively) article that was published in the Chicago Reader and excerpted on "This American Life" a long time ago sort of about this as it relates to war called "Losing the War". Lee Sandlin tried to figure out what his father's actual war experience was like(in of course World War 2) and that chronicles it. It's not one of those "you had to be there" type things and it's pretty long, and touches on some other stuff(like propoganda usage, yada yada), but in short, you're right.

First off it's still a game, meaning entertainment, meaning it's supposed to be fun - and anyone who takes it that seriously is an incredibly sad individual.

Secondly, really, WoW isn't comparable. It's cute that you think WoW anecdotes are relevant, but they really aren't. The mechanics do not allow stuff on this scale(or even anything really directly comparable) because it is a player versus shell script game, not a sandbox game like EVE/old UO/etc.. The closest thing to an appropriate analogue I can think of is that this is like someone not only stealing everything from the guild bank, but also causing a situation that engenders a huge likelihood of all the people in the guild losing all of their personal epics and gold, setting them back to stock level 60s(70s/80s, whatever the cap is) with absolutely NO recourse available.

If things like Iraq were actually important to people, get this, we wouldn't be in Iraq and things like Iraq wouldn't happen.

Oh, and nice job pulling off the support are troops irrelevant segue troll.