CS and the Chinese Military

“CS” is the abbreviation Chinese teenagers use for Counter Strike (rather than the Chinese name 反恐精英), the world’s most popular FPS network computer game. When I taught college English at ZUCC in Hangzhou, there were quite a few boys in my classes that were crazy about the game and devoted almost all their free time to playing it in internet cafes. They even got Wilson (who was teaching there then) to play them.

Tian has a funny post (with pictures!) about the Chinese military using CS as training. Check it out.

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. Da Xiangchang Says: January 21, 2005 at 2:39 pm

    WHAT THE ^#$&#!@*??!! Is this a joke?

  2. Didn’t the US Marines do this with DOOM? Regardless, you’d think the PLA would come up with some more specialized maps, but no, they’re still playing the same two the net bars have been stuck on for years.

  3. Blasphemous zhwj, de_dust is a classic. Besides, you never know when the Chinese military will need to defuse bombs in a dusty labrynthine complex full of wooden crates.

    In any case, the photos are amusing, but unfortunately they are photoshops. (Ironic considering your next post) I’ve seen them passed around on a number of websites before but they are pretty obvious fraudulent. I’m not an image analyist expert in the least, but there are some discrepancies that are immediately noticeable to the human eye. The first thing that appears unnatural is the contrast between the monitor screens and the ambient light in the room. The room itself is highly lit, and it just feels wrong somehow to a close inspection. However, the most obvious reason that these pictures are fakes is that these images are stills from a video capture. Any images from a video feed recording of monitors will leave the tell tale stripes on the monitor as it refreshes. This isn’t normally noticeable to the human eye, however on video feeds, the different refresh rates between the monitor and the video camera will show horizontal bars that sppear to scroll. No such phenomenon is visible here, which leads me to believe that the images of the counterstrike game were screenshots taken in game, then edited and superimposed over the video stills.

    Besides, the lack of mountain dew and microphones for trash talking obviouslly gave it away 😛

  4. the link to tian’s post did not work for me. 🙁

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