After six months offline, the U.S. Navy has returned to streaming video games. On March 1, the Navy’s Twitch page streamed for a little more than an hour and it was a different kind of video than it had produced in the past. Emotes were allowed but chat was blocked, the feed was slickly produced and hosted by non-Navy personnel, and the team was all women.
We desperately need legislation that rethinks how exactly the military can recruit.
There’s something kind of sinister about having an interviewer with a room full of Pokemon stuffed animals decor doing a recruitment advert. I have to wonder if Nintendo/GameFreak/The Pokemon Company know that their IP is being used in this way? If it was me I would be outraged if I spent a lot of time building up a family friendly brand to then have the US military co-opt it.
the Soft Cute Gamer Zone aesthetic being used for military recruitment is certainly deeply insidious but unless the US military releases an official statement like “we’re proud to announce that Pikachu is the official mascot for We Did Nothing Wrong In Fallujah” then this will have a negligible effect on their image but more importantly their absolutely ridiculous profit margins
I feel Some Kind of Way about the military holding a esports/recruitment event with a $100,000 prize pool, also. There’s a lot of unethical packed into everything about all of it, but there’s something evil about the government giving out prizes for being good at their propaganda game. A little ‘healthcare pls’ and a little ‘how long before this is literally giving people a monetary incentive to be propagandised’.
So it turns out there is a US government website for public information of spending. You might be able to get itemized lists out of it but I’m not sure. However what I will say is I did a quick search for Pokemon and learned that
There was at one point research done into “Pro-oncogene Pokemon” and how it’s related to breast cancer.
Someone has a small business named “Pokemon Trader” on Dank Court Brooklyn NY which that sure sounds legit.
I’m really disappointed with this person. She is a regular on the competitive Pokemon circuit. She is basically a Pokemon employee since she does commentary for them at basically every event. I think a lot of young girls especially look up to her (she did commentary over that 7 year old girl who won the juniors championship) so her suddenly being the face of an imperial war machine really sucks.
women 
