Navy looking for a few good … thumbs
In an outreach effort to reach out to potential gamer recruits, the Navy is actively seeking gamers to join its esports team.
Navy officials are hoping its esports team — Goats and Glory, a part of the service’s recruiting command — will be one small part of a solution to attract a younger audience.
“Centennials are moving into digital spaces for most of their content consumption and social interactions, and the [e]sports domain is one of the most popular and vibrant online arenas to date,” a NAVADMIN message said. “Connecting and attracting the best talent requires the Navy to be in the same spaces where those future Sailors reside.”
Selected sailors will receive three-year orders to the team’s facility in Memphis, Tennessee, naval flight officer Lt. Aaron Jones, the team’s captain, said during a Twitch livestream event last week.
Sounds like they are taking it seriously. Three year stabilized tours to play video games? Now, in fairness: the other services have esports teams as well (in a recent playoff Air Force beat the other services) and I guess in a world of remote controlled drones, that someone gifted at one kind of video-gaming may have a reflex or coordination advantage which could help us win.
Somehow, though, I keep hearing an echo in my head of Tom Cruise explaining how expertise in “Stocker” will soon be an essential military skill.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Navy
So the gaming industry revenue now is around $56B in size. This is more than the NFL (15B), NBA (6B), NHL (5B), MLB (10B) and every other professional sport in the USA combined.
If they want to find people to pass the ASVAB they are going to have to recruit come couch potatoes and hope to make them strong enough to march a few miles without getting too fatigued.
Big Navy may as well try to field a winning video game team. It’s obvious that they have difficulty fielding a winning gridiron team.
It’s tougher than football too so far as fielding a professional team of quality players. Normally gamers age out by 25 because they have lost their super fast reactions edge. This about the time that most pro football players are hitting their stride. There is a very small window from 17-21 when kids are at their peak and can go successfully pro.
E-sports monkeys age out faster than football players? What are you smoking?
They are not getting my Thumb!
Is this really necessary? There are a lot of people at the Five-Sided Circus who have their thumbs up their ass already.
anyone joining the “remote control military” to get paid for playing Call of Duty etc is probably going to be disappointed to learn about things like Field Day and many other non-remote control activities.
Oh I can see it now disability claims for carpal tunnel syndrome for taking the highway to the gaming zone.
Gamers, especially the “pros”, are constantly on the look out for exploits, bits of poor game design or programming that can be used to score easy points. They’re also always on prowl for ways to cheat, not to mention their usual emotional incontinence.
What I’m trying to say is, they’re so-called skills amount to dick when every other needed characteristic for a successful soldier is lacking.