Blog 1 - America's Army

There is a lot of examples of rhetoric on this website which include the use of a gray color scheme for the background, a flash movie depicting upcoming events on the bottom right hand corner of the main page, multiple testimonies of the players in the game on the front page and in the second tab “Real Heroes”, use of acronyms on the web page to suggest a technological approach to the game on various sections, and an extensive database of information about the game which is in the first tab “Game Intel”. Based on the evidence given, the audience would be new players or also current players that are interested in participating in the game. Overall, the rhetoric appeals to its audience in an effective way based on the amount of people registered which would be close to ten million.

Compared to real life experiences as mentioned by Navy veteran Boyle, this website and thus the game differs greatly from real life experiences in many ways. These ways include the level of combat faced in games where everything is scripted as in it is already programmed into it versus random events happening in real life. Another fact is that there are real life consequences in the Iraq war versus minor ones in this game. One last thing is that the media portrays the Iraq war as more gritty and violent versus this game which is a simulation and the violence isn't real.

It all depends on the game and the type of environment the player was raised in to determine if the player will think the game promotes violence. For example, most first person shooters such as counterstrike, half life 2, doom, halo, and other games have violence but is limited because of the rating of the game. This means it cant reach everyone because some may not be allowed to purchase these games. On the other hand several other games like mortal kombat and the GTA, are more violent than other games. This means while some games do influence teens, some do it more than others.