Book: On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

[Stephen]

No video game requires actually aligning the three elements of rear sight, front sight, and target. Even the games that mime the use of iron sights simply require you to put a simulacrum of a pre-aligned sight picture on a pixel blob and mash "A" or the left mouse button or whatever.

How could you forget this classic?

[Rosco Benson]

Not a Grossman fan. His basic premise is pretty thin soup to start with and he tries to stretch it even farther.

I think Rory Miller has a much better understanding of aggressive human behavior and is better at sharing it in a written format.

Rosco

[Tamara]

Tam, everyone knows that putting a red dot on a dude and then slapping right trigger (on Xbox) a bunch while simultaneously throwing frag grenades and jumping is totally exactly just like real war and makes me a hardened serial killer in training because I have a decent KD ratio on BF4.

I can't let this pass without noting the disdain that the PC gaming Chosen People feel for console gaming untermenschen.

[jetfire]

I can't let this pass without noting the disdain that the PC gaming Chosen People feel for console gaming untermenschen.

Having to wait 2 years for games to get ported over would make me irritable to.

[AtomicToaster]

+1; meeses > sticks.

On a related note, I did notice my target (zombie) transitions in Left 4 Dead improve after practicing target transitions with a pistol in real life. Go figure.

[Tamara]

True Fact:

So, a couple guys travel to Nashville to teach Oleg Volk and his then-g/f the rudiments of two-person house clearing at her apartment 'way back sometime in '01. I drove over from Knoxville to be the volunteer Bad Person in a game of blue gun hide-and-go-seek.

The instructor is having a hard time getting his students to grasp the concept of slicing the pie at first, at which point I involuntarily blurt out "Good gawd, have y'all never played Rogue Spear?"

[TCinVA]

True Fact:

So, a couple guys travel to Nashville to teach Oleg Volk and his then-g/f the rudiments of two-person house clearing at her apartment 'way back sometime in '01. I drove over from Knoxville to be the volunteer Bad Person in a game of blue gun hide-and-go-seek.

The instructor is having a hard time getting his students to grasp the concept of slicing the pie at first, at which point I involuntarily blurt out "Good gawd, have y'all never played Rogue Spear?"

Two bucks on Steam a couple of weeks ago.

[Al T.]

The instructor is having a hard time getting his students to grasp the concept of slicing the pie

Old guys chime in: Star Wars, Death Star approaching some random mud sphere.

[1slow]

John Hearne did a stellar presentation on related subjects at Tom Given's Tactical Conference 2014, Hope he expands and publishes it.

[David Armstrong]

Not to discount anyone's expertise on video games that was carefully gleaned by entire minutes spent talking to an eight-year-old, but as one who has actually played some of these new-fangled nickelodeon entertainments I would like to point out two things:

• No video game requires actually aligning the three elements of rear sight, front sight, and target. Even the games that mime the use of iron sights simply require you to put a simulacrum of a pre-aligned sight picture on a pixel blob and mash "A" or the left mouse button or whatever.
• Further, even if you consider this an accurate reflection of operating an optical sight, where no sight alignment is involved, the fact that the video game rewards the practice of "There's the target the reticule's on it MASH THE BUTTON NOW!" one could say it was antithetical to best practices with a real firearm.

So, while it's good that nephews still like to impress their uncles with their bright-eyed sharpness, it pretty much has squat-all to do with running a gun.

I would certainly disagree. Learning things like sight alignment, when to press the trigger, and so on are certainly transferable across mediums in my experience. I've seen too many folks who have never shot a gun before that could and would do pretty good on their first experience and credited it to development of similar skills in other environments.