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Army to use MMOG for Simulation Training
Anonymous Coward writes "Military Training Technology (online edition) has an interesting article, 'The End Game', containing revelations about a Research, Development and Engineering Command project 'that is as timely as the nightly news' - a Massively Multiplayer Simulation for Asymmetric Warfare, or simply MMP: 'essentially a virtual world [developed by There Inc.] intended to train soldiers well beyond the goals of war gaming'."
"Man, this army thing is fun!"
Well, on one hand, this might be a really good idea: train people to think in new ways, provoke discussion and innovation, and generally have a place for people to make their dumb mistakes before they go out into the field.
On the other hand, let's not forget one of the big dangers of simulator training is that people often get very attuned to artefacts in the simulator, and then in the real world get their ass handed to them.
Great if it works. But if it turns out more over-enthusiastic rookies with unrealistic simulator expectations, people are going to get killed.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
From the article:
So those many, many hours I've spent on Doom, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, etc... can help make me a worthwhile soldier?
Hmm... having served in the military, I suppose it may be true.
The concepts of good cover, working as a team, knowing what your weapon can/can't do...
It makes sense. Aircraft pilots learn in a simulator, why not soldiers?
Maybe this is why my friends and I are good at paintball... cover me... go, go, go!
There's no quad-damage in the real world... bummer.
great, now we're gonna have every geek/nerd/whatever (i forgot the difference) signing up for the us military. the gamers corps
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
When I play Couter-Strike, or BattleField, I don't care if I die. I just spawn back in next round. I may try to take the game "seriously" for about 5 minutes, but then I just go komikaze into the field running and spraying. What happens when soilders don't take their lives seriously after battle "simulation" for 6 weeks straight? It goes the same for me when I play paintball... it's all serious, until I try and rambo it up a notch and end up with a new multi-colored ass. It's something for phsyciatric stundy, imho.
You talk better than you fool!
I'm to understand that in the initial simulations, the North Koreans totally overran the United States and emerged victorious -- not through the use of nukes but through millions of zerglings. The Prime Minister of North Korea had this to say:
"ZERG RUSH kekekekeke ^______^"
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
sorry, should have put this in the other post, but there's also ARTT - above real time training, where you run the sim 30% faster, people's reflexes speed up, and then in the real world they often have a 10% edge once they've reacclimatized to regular speed reality.
I really do worry about the simulator-shock aspect of this: both in terms of creating unrealistic expectations on the part of the soliders, but also in terms of people slipping into "gamespace" on the battle field.
ARRL (advanced robotics research limited) used to do a lot of VR work in Britain, and they wouldn't let people drive for about an hour or two after they'd been in the VR because people often drove in very odd ways, including being very agressive and taking foolish risks. They pinned it down to two things, if I remember correctly:
1> Simulator artefacts, as outlined in the other post.
2> The sense of "unreality" which pervaded the real world after having been inside for a while...
People didn't feel like the real world was real any more after even three hours in a VR system. Somehow the brain figures out "well, I can run into walls and I don't feel anything, I must be dreaming(?)" or something like that?
I don't know exactly, but stories like that give me a very, very bad feeling about extending the use of simulator based training even further. it might not be VR, but I won't be surprised if the problems are similar.
The psychological effects are so subtle, but potentially so important. I think we might do much, much better investing these resources in better real-world training for troops than sims.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Notice how a bunch of 12 year olds break bones because they think they can skateboard? I mean, they totally beat Tony Hawk in like, 2 days.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
It will be interesting to see how our troops will deal with real world combat when they don't have the same Ikthar's Ring of Thorns that gives them +2 to all skills, 40% more likely to find magic item, and 130% damage. u got SSoJ?
American military superiority is now so huge that nobody in their right minds is going to face us on an open battle field without air superiority, which basically ain't going to happen.
So at that point, people are adapting rapidly and finding ways to attack american political will and infrastructure: in Iraq, that's putting GIs in body bags and blowing up oil facilities.
It's not clear to anybody that an organized, hierarchical military force is capable of victory against guerillas, even in a desert environment. Nobody's going to come out and say that, but it's implicit in the work of John Boyd, a fighter pilot and philosopher who is widely hailed as the father of the F16 and it's entire school of fighter design, and the Air-Ground War doctrine which is the bedrock of military strategy for the USA.
Boyd basically suggests that hierarchies are inherently a bottleneck on the battlefield, and that the time it takes information to percolate to the level a decision can be made on is a critical point of attack for fast, light, independent forces.
So if you have cohesion and collective planning, you have slowness and are vulnerable. But if you have no central control, then you're not an army, you're a rabble.
That's why there's so much of a focus on netwar and similar concepts in current US military thought: we're trying to figure out how to beat sheep farmers with RPGs.
You can read a lot of Boyd's though online: check out Google's pages Boyd's OODA loop for more info.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Twice in the past 50 years, the American people have defeated monsterous regimes: Hitler, and Stalin. Yes, the cold war never came to blows, but if we had not comitted to contain the USSR at any cost, they would have expanded out of all recogniction.
Staling murdered nearly three times as many people as Hitler, and Hitler murdered 22 million people, by the estimates of Rudy Rummel of the University of Hawaii, who's extensively studied mass murders in recent history. (search for Democide) on Google.
We didn't have the choice of "not playing" on either of those occasions, and the reason there are free people left is that we won those wars.
Don't knock it. American military strength is a good thing. It's just that our current leaders are imperialist assholes.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
If you saw a platoon of lanky, pale, acne ridden zombie-creatures with calculators and rifles, backed up by a division of equally pale, huge amorphous blobs sporting over-stretched tux shirts and heavy weaponry, bearing down on you and screetching "OMFG U R LIEK GONNA B SO PWNED BITCHIZ!!!".... wouldn't you be terrified out of your mind?
I know I would.