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LEVEL THREE
Premiere: Wednesday, Dec. 5, at 8 p.m. ET/PT
With games like Castle Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, video games grew from their primitive 2-D roots into richly detailed 3-D worlds. These groundbreaking 3-D games led the industry down new paths, both thrilling and troubling. Designers now had the technology to create games that accurately simulated the real world. For the first time, game designers had to grapple with a difficult question — how long before a game was nearly indistinguishable from reality? For all the controversy surrounding the first-person shooter genre in video games, its popularity was undeniable. And in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the same government that fought to regulate video games quickly designed their own as a recruiting tool for the Army. America's Army was born and an even more sensitive debate arose as to the morality of recruiting young men for real war through the fun of a video game. Were games desensitizing us to the very real pain of violence and war? And more importantly, were video games leading us on a march towards virtual war? Some people interviewed in this episode include Colonel Casey Wardynski (director and project originator of America's Army) and Asi Burak (producer of Peacemaker — a computer game simulation of the Israeli-Arab conflict).