(This appeared in Wired’s Geekdad blog in November, 2009)
I have a soft spot for the Call of Duty video games. I’m not a fanatical participant. (In fact, I’m an infrequent and pathetic player of COD 3 only.) I’m a fan because because video games like Call of Duty, the Medal of Honor series, and Battlefield: 1942 got my son interested in military history, which in turn got him interested in all kinds of history. In this particular case, video games made him smarter.
His education started in the 6th grade, with him digging online to learn more about the equipment that soldiers used in World War II. He wanted to know about the guns he was using in the games. Then he got interested in squad tactics and specific campaigns, like the Normandy invasion. He began reading Stephen Ambrose’s books about WWII, and eventually read most of them. He watched Band of Brothers on DVD. (The HBO series, based on an Ambrose bestseller and produced by Tom Hanks and 
Steven Spielberg, was a huge influence on the style of all the WWII first-person shooters, so it was natural that a game fan was led back to the original films.) To learn more about the battle of Stalingrad (which is featured in Battlefield: 1942 and the firstCall of Duty), he read Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, along with Vasily Grossman’s A Writer at War (that’s him in the photo). That led to a deeper interest in European and American history which is still blossoming. Suddenly, I had a kid who was devouring lengthy, adult-level books and had become interested in huge swathes of world history. All because of a bunch of video shoot-’em-ups!
We’re both looking forward to Call of Duty: World at War, the new installment out in November. I got a sneak peek recently, and I’m not revealing any state secrets by saying it features, among other things, a group of U.S. marines fighting in the Pacific in late ’44, and the Red Army taking Berlin in ’45. (Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945, which my son started reading recently, is a likely source.) It takes the basic COD formula and adds some new twists, including more explicit violence and some trickier moral issues, especially regarding the treatment of civilians and prisoners. So, not to worry! Google may be making us stupider, but first-person shooters are making up the deficit.
UPDATE: More good news. Gaming promotes civic virtue, too, according to this new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
UPDATE II: This article was cross-posted on GeekDad, wired.com’s parenting blog. It got a lot of interesting comments there.
Mark Horowitz 