Speaking of AFV/miltech recognition....
I always get burned when I see the media talking about 'tanks' and realize it
is just an APC or AIFV that they are refering to (often not even tracked). And
you hear them talking
about 'machine-guns' - and I go looking for someone toting a MAG or RPK
and find out it is some fellow with an M4, AK or MP5.
I one took a local journalist to task on this (calling the C7 a machine gun).
His defence was that the paper shoots for about a grade eight audience and
saying 'assault rifle' wasn't meaningful to everyone. If he said 'machine gun'
then he communicated by way of the popular common knowledge that the machine
gun fires lots of bullets in quick succession (in other words, is capable of
burst or fully automatic fire). I still maintain that's doing the readers a
disservice and perpetuating and spreading misinformation, but I wasn't going
to win that battle....
The ones I worry about are pilots that can't tell Scimitars from BMPs or Hinds
from Blackhawks. Mistakes about the particular class of vehicle are bad, but
mistakes about nationality can be quite terminal. Even with the marking they
put on vehicles that are supposed to be very very obvious to pilots...
It's amazing how people learn to differentiate the vehicles though. My friend
the former AFV recognition instructor can look at types and patterns of bogey
wheels or road wheels on a tank and tell you the type of vehicle. He can look
at the presence of things like vision blocks, bore evacuators, and other such
minutae and distinguish between model variants. I find it quite uncanny, and I
have a fairly sizeable background in modern and WW2 AFVs from my gaming hobby
and former days in the CF infantry reserves. His ability to see a fragmentary
image of a vehicle and identify it from that is quite startling.
Yet, as pointed out, many folks can't even make critical friend-foe
designations. I remember members of our unit, deployed on excercise
(Reforger?) to Europe being told to take a large square of yellow cardboard
and go 'wave it at those stupid b@&tards in the town' (who happened to be
members of the Royal 22ieme Regiment) who were firing a recoilless rifle (Carl
Gustav) at us. And they were on *our* side. Eventually we convinced them to
stop before a ref noticed and marked our guys (and the EW vehicle we were
defending) very dead. I've also had friends in the unit relate stories of a
Grizzly 6x6
APC trying to force a barricade and they took it out - only to find out
it was one of ours (who was in a rush, didn't know the passwords, tried to
stupidly force the barricade to get somewhere.... so it wasn't our fault...).
Very few games really capture this inability to correctly identify the target.
I'm sure a conniving DS2 GM could come up with some nasty way to harness this
confusion... putting down the wrong minis... putting down the wrong number of
minis, etc.
Tomb
> On Monday 29 August 2005 21:49, Thomas Barclay wrote:
The same issue holds in pretty much any field of knowledge. The 'mistakes'
(all in the name of talking down to the lowest common denominator) journalists
make when talking about IT are just as annoying for those of us who work in
IT.
> I one took a local journalist to task on this (calling the C7 a
> quick succession
> maintain that's
The inference from this is that the average audience is slightly thicker
than tarmac or slower than glacial progression.
I saw a news report recently were armed police were arresting somebody (bank
robbers/terrorists/whatever) and the voice over was refering to the
PISTOL
armed police as HEAVILY ARMED S/F. Since when are pistols heavy
weaponry. Do they think the police were using the "Cricket" from "Men in
Black".
I have come to expect this though since they seem to act more like salesmen
(make it bigger, brighter and louder) than reporters. Their fascination
with "famous" people is irritating too.
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lMurphy's law 13,
"Freindly fire isn't, and is always accurate"
Thomas Barclay <kaladorn@magma.ca> wrote:Speaking of AFV/miltech
recognition....
I always get burned when I see the media talking about 'tanks' and realize it
is just an APC or AIFV that they are refering to (often not even tracked). And
you hear them talking
about 'machine-guns' - and I go looking for someone toting a MAG or RPK
and find out it is some fellow with an M4, AK or MP5.
I one took a local journalist to task on this (calling the C7 a machine gun).
His defence was that the paper shoots for about a grade eight audience and
saying 'assault rifle' wasn't meaningful to everyone. If he said 'machine gun'
then he communicated by way of the popular common knowledge that the machine
gun fires lots of bullets in quick succession (in other words, is capable of
burst or fully automatic fire). I still maintain that's doing the readers a
disservice and perpetuating and spreading misinformation, but I wasn't going
to win that battle....
The ones I worry about are pilots that can't tell Scimitars from BMPs or Hinds
from Blackhawks. Mistakes about the particular class of vehicle are bad, but
mistakes about nationality can be quite terminal. Even with the marking they
put on vehicles that are supposed to be very very obvious to pilots...
It's amazing how people learn to differentiate the vehicles though. My friend
the former AFV recognition instructor can look at types and patterns of bogey
wheels or road wheels on a tank and tell you the type of vehicle. He can look
at the presence of things like vision blocks, bore evacuators, and other such
minutae and distinguish between model variants. I find it quite uncanny, and I
have a fairly sizeable background in modern and WW2 AFVs from my gaming hobby
and former days in the CF infantry reserves. His ability to see a fragmentary
image of a vehicle and identify it from that is quite startling.
Yet, as pointed out, many folks can't even make critical friend-foe
designations. I remember members of our unit, deployed on excercise
(Reforger?) to Europe being told to take a large square of yellow cardboard
and go 'wave it at those stupid b@&tards in the town' (who happened to be
members of the Royal 22ieme Regiment) who were firing a recoilless rifle (Carl
Gustav) at us. And they were on *our* side. Eventually we convinced them to
stop before a ref noticed and marked our guys (and the EW vehicle we were
defending) very dead. I've also had friends in the unit relate stories of a
Grizzly 6x6
APC trying to force a barricade and they took it out - only to find out
it was one of ours (who was in a rush, didn't know the passwords, tried to
stupidly force the barricade to get somewhere.... so it wasn't our fault...).
Very few games really capture this inability to correctly identify the target.
I'm sure a conniving DS2 GM could come up with some nasty way to harness this
confusion... putting down the wrong minis... putting down the wrong number of
minis, etc.
Tomb
On 8/29/05, gzg-l-request@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
> Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 16:49:31 -0400
> I always get burned when I see the media talking about 'tanks' and
That bugs me, too.
> I one took a local journalist to task on this (calling the C7 a
Actually, he's right. He is only doing a disservice to the readers who would
mostly know better anyway. Newspapers have a limited amount of space, and they
have to peg their reading level at a certain segment of the population. It
would take a sentence or two, minimum, to explain what an assault rifle is.
That explanation would lose most of the audience who don't want to mess around
with details.
Seriously, folks don't want to know the details. I've discovered that while
teaching software. It's not a case of "lazy journalists" but a case of giving
the people what they want.
There's also the fact that a story only has so much space. Do you add a
sentence or two about the distinction of a "machine gun" and an "assault
rifle", or do you add more detail to the story?
I read an interesting article in the late, great magazine "Brill's Content"
about reporters and the military. It described the sad state of military
reporting. Part of the problem had to do with the journalists covering the
story having little experience with the military, while earlier in the 20th
century military journalists often came from a military background. There was
also the flip side: the military was often antagonistic against journalists,
who were seen as security leaks at best and enemies of the state at worst.
This set up an "us against them" mentality, with neither side trusting the
other side.
This isn't a new problem. There are some fascinating stories about journalists
during the American Civil War (probably the first major war where journalists
had widespread access and limited censorship). During that conflict
journalists were despised... unless they were being used. Since war is
politics by other means, there will always be
a love/hate relationship between the military and the media.
As for reading levels, I remember reading that Canada's Globe and Mail
newspaper pegs itself at a grade 9 reading level, the Toronto Star at a grade
7 reading level, and the Toronto Sun at a grade 5 level. It's one of the
reasons that nuance is often missing from media reports (and written media is
far better at it than television).
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 08:38:29AM -0500, Allan Goodall wrote:
> Actually, he's right. He is only doing a disservice to the readers who
Also, the smarter readers can work out what's being said by an article that's
aimed below their level; stupider readers can't work out an article above
their level. This is just where the term "lowest common denominator", as
applied to television and other media, comes from....
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 8/29/05, Thomas
> Barclay <kaladorn@magma.ca> wrote:
Very few games really capture this inability to correctly identify the
> target. I'm sure a
One of the things I like about the game Flames of War is that it actually
makes an attempt (albeit small) to address this issue wrt air strikes. If you
get an air strike to appear, there is a 1 in 6 chance that it will misidentify
the side it is supposed to be shooting at (then you have I think a 50% chance
of waving it off).
I haven't seen very many other games even make mention of misidentification
potentials.
Mk
> Roger Burton West wrote:
> Also, the smarter readers can work out what's being said by an article
I've always tried to appeal to the "greatest common denominator", but you'll
notice I'm not actually using my design degree,