Bullying In Armada

Armada

Ernest Cline; Novel; 2015

Armada by Ernest cline is a novel about a boy named Zack Lightman. Zack is a teenager who lost his dad when he was only a baby and shows extreme enthusiasm for a video game called “Armada”. Zack finds a journal of his dad's conspiracy that video games such as “Armada” are created as simulation training for real military purpose. Zack is later met by the Earth Defense Alliance which recruit him to help defend the earth and save it from the Europans.

I learnt allot about how harmful bullying can be in this text. One example of bullying occurred during one of Zacks classes. “Douglas Knotcher was currently engaged in his daily humiliation of Casey Cox”. Douglas spent majority of the class firing spit balls at

In the text, the first evidence of gaming being used to train up soldiers for war, was when Zack was looking through one of his father's old journals and finds a well built up conspiracy theory that the government is using video games and movies to prepare the planet for invasion. Some of the references made by his father include “starwars”, “space invaders” and more in a timeline which show evidence for Xavier Lightman’s (Zacks Father) suspicions. Later on in the text, Zack is at school, after just escaping a fight. and is met by a Earth Alliance ship in the middle of the school, they take him to the Crystal Palace, which is one of many Earth Alliance bases. We are later told that the EDA secretly was manipulating the economy with movies and games to help prepare us for alien war. I can relate to this, because i think that games are a great way for people to learn and become better at something. in this case, it was to train people to fly fighter drones. I did not like how it was designed to be secretly training people as while it's a smart idea, it's not really giving people a choice over whether they become a warrior or