Slashdot Mirror
On Training, Recruitment Uses For Army Games
wgrover writes "The New York Times Magazine (reg yada) has a new longform article exploring computer games funded for training/recruitment purposes by the U.S. military, as previously covered on Slashdot. 'For the past three years, the military has been entertaining the surprising idea that video games, even those that you play on a commercial system like Microsoft's Xbox, can be an effective way to train soldiers.' Aside from training, the games also improve young people's perceptions of the military: '30 percent of a group of young people with a favorable view of the military said they had developed that view from playing America's Army.'"
Americas army is too generic,ymra eht nioj would be much cooler! :)
[Aims M16] *BLAM*
First Blood. Haha.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Aside from training, the games also improve young people's perceptions of the military:
Yes, they get to play with cool weapons, kill people and all at no risk of injury or death to themselves. Isnt this the sort of image we should be getting away from, the old military is a fine career and war is a big glory opportunity?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The Making of an X Box Warrior
It was only a virtual Baghdad, baking under a virtual sun. As in real life, though, troops were dodging gunfire. I was at the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Rey, Calif., playing a new X box video game called Full Spectrum Warrior. Leading eight men in an Army squad on a patrol of the war-torn city, I got a taste, however approximate, of why Iraq is such a hard place to be a soldier these days. My job, as squad leader, was to order my soldiers where to go and what to do. First, I sent half of my men into an alleyway, where they immediately came under fire from insurgents hiding nearby. Scrambling for safety, I ordered us to duck into a building, pausing to marvel at the detail of the architecture. I then led us back out onto the street, directing my team to crouch behind a car while we tried to locate the snipers. This was a bad idea. Despite what you see in action movies and other video games, cars do not provide good cover from bullets. The snipers cut loose, and my troops crumpled to the ground. It was surprisingly distressing. In barely three minutes, I had led every single one of my soldiers to his death.
I play video games regularly and, modesty aside, usually do quite well. Though this was my first attempt at Full Spectrum Warrior, the reason that I played poorly was not that I was inexperienced but that the game was not designed solely for entertainment. Full Spectrum Warrior was created by the Institute for Creative Technologies, with help from the Army, to teach soldiers realistic strategies for surviving what the armed forces call ''military operations in urban terrain.'' As a result, the game is unforgivingly precise. The soldiers you command are programmed to respond the way a real soldier would. There are no magic weapons to bail you out. All you have going for you is the real world. ''This is what you'll really see when you're out there,'' said Maj. Brent Cummings, a soldier then stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., who worked as a consultant on the game and walked me through it.
For the past three years, the military has been entertaining the surprising idea that video games, even those that you play on a commerical system like Microsoft's Xbox, can be an effective way to train soldiers. In fact, the Army is now one of the industry's most innovative creators, hiring high-end programmers and designers from Silicon Valley and Hollywood to devise and refine its games. Some of these games are action-packed, like Full Spectrum Warrior. Others, like one that the military's Special Operations Command is currently designing to help recruits practice their Arabic, are less so. All the games, however, speak to the military's urgent need to train recruits for the new challenges of peacekeeping efforts in places like Iraq.
Teaching someone to be an accurate shot is not particularly hard to do. Military trainers have learned that if you put someone through a week of intensive work with a point-and-shoot simulator (not unlike today's commerically available shoot-'em-up video games), he will be reasonably good with a rifle. Teaching judgment, however, is much harder than teaching hand-eye coordination. Today's military is in the market for games that train soliders, in effect, how not to shoot -- how to avoid conflict whenever possible, to recognize danger and find a route around it. As a squad leader in Full Spectrum Warrior, you do not even carry a gun that fires, which makes it the first military-action video game in which the player never discharges a weapon.
Some skeptics worry that if the military's games are not realistic enough, they will encourage bad habits and incorrect strategy -- tactics that work on the screen but get soldiers killed on the battlefield. It is certainly true that many video games for sale in stores would be disastrous for training and would trivialize a task that is literally a matter of life and death. James Korris, the creative director of the Institute for Creative Technologies, said that he once anal
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Was Marine Doom the first example of using a video game as a military training tool or does something predate it?
Games do develope a lot of good skills, eye coordination, aiming, and so on and so forth. But nothing beats the real experience. You can have a soldier that's been training on games for a long time but the second he's on the battlefield, he could be the first to go because of lack of experience.
Solitare. Teaches a soldier how to hurry up and wait.
Like much else, brainwashing starts in the home.
I would tend to concur with this. Not only is the simple task of understanding resource management easily put forth in these games, but so far every RTS game I have played has held true with historical warfare in the fact that, whoever controls the primary trade routes, will eventually become the global superpower. In the context of history, this implies sea control. Things get a little more hairy when you add aviation to the picture, but contolling the skies also hold a powerful advantage.
FPS games are also very valuable in how they can put forward the very realistic dangers lurking en every corner in an urban combat environment.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
So if simulation hones skills and makes later real life training more effective, breeding filial feelings and approval, why would it only apply in ostensibly positive situations?
Why would this not apply just as much to Grand Theft Auto and its ilk?
Does this give ammunition to the argument that video games promote violence?
Naturally, for the recruitment part of it, they really only care if the interesting parts are represented well. If somebody designed a completely realistic game representation of the Vietnam war, people who played through it wouldn't want to go into the army at all. Shoot, kill, reload from last savepoint if you die.
This just in: Propaganda is effective. Now to Bill for the weather.
twitter.com/gravitronic
In a further attempt to pretend that war is easy and non-violent, the Army has finally done it! Make kids think that being in war is cool, just like a video game, that they can restart, people don't "really die," it's all about "eye-controller" coordination, etc. Give the recruits these superhuman expectations, and they will make wonderful soldiers- since all of their training is based on reality.
It's a cool game and pretty one of the most realistic FPS games I've seen. Some of the unique things about the game:
* There are official servers run by the Army where you gain "honor" for completing missions and killing people. Negative honor is given by shooting your teammates or civilians. This is a good way to see what kind of people you're playing against.
* In order to use special guns, or even to become "Special Forces" you must go through extensive training in single player mode and then sometimes even have a minimum honor to use X gun or Y skill. For instance, to become a medic you must sit in a virtual classroom and learn how to perform CPR, treat shock and bandage players. Once you have this certification you can then become a medic in game and stop people's bleeding (if you don't treat a player they sometimes bleed tod eath).
The AA team just released it's final update for the next year in June, and next year will support driving vehicles and more missions. Overall it's fun and exciting and I recommend it to anyone who likes to play modern day first person shooters. Sometimes it may seem a little slow but you just gotta be patient. Going through the training is boring but it actually does teach you stuff.
I can imagine the disappointment of anyone who enlists with the expectation that service in the armed forces is anything like a video game. Sorry, kid: no aimbots, no wall-hacks, not everyone gets a sniper rifle, and if you bunny-hop on a 30 mile march once more the drill sargeant will take you behind the barracks for some wall-to-wall discipline.
What we really need are some mods for America's Army, like AA: KP and Latrine Duty or AA: Abu Ghraib.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Hell, I spent 5 years in the Navy; I'd have been happier if I could have played it as a video game, too!
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
A soldier sees another soldier standing in one place behind some rocks, looking very tense and pointing a SAW into the distance.
Says one soldier to the other: "What the hell are you doing!?
The reply: "I'm camping their spawn point!"
oops...team kill! My bad!
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Does anyone remember that movie "toys" with Robin Williams? This sounds kind of like that if you ask me. I'm not the biggest fan of anything related to the army so meh to that whole recruitment through gaming idea.
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
As an ex-infantry soldier - who's actually been in combat in the Middle East - these games have no relation to reality. Combat is hell, it's not a game .
Some of my student employees - I work for a university - were playing America's Army. I watched them for a bit. Though they were not taken up by the adventure, I was still worried. You cannot simulate combat, you cannot simulate the smell, the fear. You can't even simulate basic training. These games are worse than a lie.
I realize that the authors of America's Army have tried not to create yet another Quake - but in the end, that is the result. A nice, quick, sanitary view of military service. All of the excitement, none of the tedium or risks. If you want a real simulation of war, visit a VA hospital.
But isn't this the whole point of the modern US military? Trying to convince the people back in the States that war is a distant, calculated situation, not something up close and dangerous. The Pentagon filters what people see on TV, refuses to show caskets coming home, refuses to discuss the wounded.
Moder warfare is not clean. It requires a degree of courage which playing a video game cannot teach you. To make war trivial and fun is an incredible disservice to all who actually have to fight. Serving in the military is more than being part of an army of one and going to college for free. Though I'm proud to have served, it was terrible. I can't say anything more.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
I can see the army's need for more and more young blood ready to fight for their lands. The situation with terrorists is worsening.
But its 2004, and we still require humans for these purposes. SIC! Guess all that sci-fi was waste of time. All those poster competitions children as well as adults used to take part in about "Earth in 2000", depicting flying cars, and robots, android soldiers, machinic interaction, etc went into dustin.
The faculties are busy researching for devices to aid fellow soldier, some even completely unmanned, but still we are stuck at a point where you would have to use musclepower sometime during the battle instead of technology. I'm still waiting for times when nanodust would give us info of hideouts, or those mechanical bugs giving us live feeds.
If, actually more funds are diverted to science, it would actually be helping the military immensly.
I hope this gets millions of kiddies to join the Army. I think everyone on Slashdot should sign up, too. Good luck!
*slaps you on ass as you board bus to training camp*
With a fully staffed Army, I can sit here and be a fat, happy American and watch you all fight wars on my Tee Vee, and not worry about a Draft. Have fun!
Whoa. Did they include the part about leading POWs around naked on a leash and falsifying death certificates to hush up torture? I mean, shouldn't a computer game give you the whole fun of being in uniform?
This is all fun and stuff, however i dont think sneaking up and chaseing an enemy down from behind for 2 minutes to knife them(and yell "pWN!~' is a good use of someones time :D
see for details/rumor
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
this distinction of military, "favorable vs. unfavorable", is kind of bullshit.
the military follows orders. it's the orders, from the pentagon and the white house, that roll downhill, that give the military such a reputation.
the people in the field rely on trust, teamwork and training--things that pretty much everyone depends on in their day-to-day life. the orders sometimes make them roll their eyes.
i'm gonna give you a long-winded example of what i'm talking about. in the news lately there has been a heated discussion about "atrocities committed in war" and whether "outing" tales of atrocities denigrates the warfighter.
my pop was a US WW2 carrier pilot around japan. as the war winded down, the "offical rules" from washington and the pentagon were "do not engage non-military targets unless fired upon" (i'm paraphrasing).
so my pop had to fly his plane down to fishing boats and stuff, overfly them, to see if they would shoot at him, before he would open up with his machine guns and kill them.
now, another pilot on the carrier got shot down doing this. immediately, the unspoken agreement among the pilots was "sink anything in your search area"--don't bother checking it out anymore.
this was an illegal act. not all fishing boats were armed resistance, but he and the other pilots stopped checking them out. they just started sinking them, in fact anything that moved in his search area was a fair target from that point forward. he wanted to live, not get killed from a "lucky" shot, from some guy hiding under a tarp on a fishing boat.
later, the same thing happened over land. he started strafing groups of civilians, because, early on, he would get shot at from the groups.
so now the questions are:
1) did same or similar things happen in vietnam?
2) do you really have to check out every boat, every crowd, putting your life on the line, when you damn well know what could be coming?
3) does washington and the pentagon make this shit up to cover their ass from a strictly legal point of view, while shifting the blame for anything that goes bad down to the fighters?
I already know the answers to these questions for myself (yes, no, yes).
A lot of people get pissed about number 2) saying you have to obey all orders and die on the field from a lucky shot, that's the way it goes in the military. it's called orders and discipline.
if you get caught, your career is shot; you probably go to military prison. if you keep checking out every boat and crowd up close, you die. the coice is simply one to be made. sometimes
sometimes i see news shots from iraq showing a gunbattle in the street, and kids and adults are standing outside, in the street, watching. ever hear of a ricochet? i wish i kept those pictures, just to send them to people who talk about the poor innocents dying in iraq. here's a lesson--when the shooting starts, get your ass inside!
in iraq, how would you like to be the guys going in an searching houses for suspects? total dependence on teamwork, training and trust. i suspect most of our dead in iraq are from "lucky" shots out of nowhere.
the army reports soldiers now routinely complain "teams" and "crappy map" and even sometimes complain about "lag" while in the field.
but mainly the use of the word? "pwned" is almost universal in combat.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
anyone remember ender's game? yeah, this is peanuts ...
doom as training was a joke, i now tons of people that could kick the army's collective butt in a game of deathmatch
As was said in an old Volkswagen commercial: life has no reset button.
I seem to remember Marine Doom coming out shortly before I enlisted. That was 1996.
LTG Peter Cuviello (Army G-6/CIO 2000-2003)
LTG Stephen Boutelle (Army G-6/CIO 2003-present)
These are a new generation of Army commander who have much more in common with today's geek than you would expect. Both are technology-centric men who are interested in the network and the applications we run on it, including games. I've had the opportunity to meet both men and I have to say that the generational issues regarding technology have been overcome with the arrival of men like this in command. Before them, perhaps the Army's senior leadership was brought up in an era before personal computing. That is no longer the case.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"You would prefer to send them into harm's way with no training or preparation for what they're going to encounter?"
This isn't an either/or situation.
A far better means of training is what we've been doing for years. One unit is assigned a task and another unit is assigned as OPFOR. That way, you don't get just what the programmer wrote.
The problem is the situation briefly described in the article. We don't even have ammo for training because it is all going to the mid-East.
The best way to train is to have combat units who have just rotated back be the OPFOR. The next best way is to have a unit that has played OPFOR regularly. Video game simulations are way, way down on the list.
Aside from training, the games also improve young people's perceptions of the military
How can one person's perception of the military be "better" than another's? Presumably if it's closer to reality, not necessarily more favourable. So I'm guessing the games do the exact opposite.
With drones such as the Predator seeing lots of action (which are now armed), and iRobots out in the field (not armed yet), it is only a matter of time before humans remotely control a significant portion of our military might. Sure, you have to worry about securing the control channels and there are lots of bits and pieces that need to get worked out.
Most of technology is already there, it just needs to mature a bit, let's say 5-10 years. DARPA should have set the Grand Challenge rules so that vehicles could be remotely controlled, with hundred of test targets all over that get tagged by lasers or something similar.
The army would be smart to collect gameplay data from America's Army, etc. I found it curious that I had to submit my training scores to the AA servers before I could even play the game, but maybe I'm just paranoid. It's doubtful that the Army has some grand plan here, but there are definately many who get it. Basically, the Army could recruit the most skilled operators/players, and lots of people would probably be more likely to serve their country in front of a virtual screen as opposed to seeing real combat.
Is it too out there to assume that the gamers who clean up in today's FPS and FSims may find yourself being drafted by the military one day...?
Of the obstacles to be overcome to make remote combat operations, it would seem most are straight-forward to overcome with time.
How do you go up stairs and handle rough terrain? How about a helibot? Take a remote controlled model helicopter, stick on a few cameras, various sensors, GPS, etc. Very much like today's FPS, it seems to me.
Maybe someone should write a find the mythical WMD game.
---
Rikku: How many people had I already killed? There was those 70,000 hit points worth that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an Al Bhed and an officer. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit... charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in Grand Turismo. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?
---
Paine: Zero through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't do hit point damage, you can't go out into the world map, you know, with, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to hit with - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Bevelle or something? That's integer RPG math.
---
Tidus: You smell that? Do you smell that?... Firaga spells, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of firaga spells in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill hit with Bahamut summons, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' fiend body. The smell, you know that brimstone smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... a level up. Someday this cut scene's gonna end...
--- Ban humanity.
how long before some kids try to pull another columbine-type thing, this time implementing the tactics they've learned by playing America's Army, or Full Spectrum Warrior, making their attack far more deadly?
Guess what! You do have to worry about a draft. There are a pair of bills (HR 163 and S 89) in congress now, which would require service from all young persons (18-26).
a ftstate.html ? billnum=H.R.163&congress=108&size=full
The bills are "languishing in committee" and appear unlikely to pass (and their existence has been used to stir up a lot of political noise by folks willing to exaggerate the facts), but they do exist, and if you want to express your opinion about them, now is the time..
http://www.theorator.com/bills108/hr163.html
http://www.house.gov/stark/documents/108th/univdr
http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/draft.asp
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/bills/
-Brian
Does the latest version include the Abu Ghraib expansion pack?
You can mod me as flame-bait but this is what new recruits need to know - the consequences of their actions, and indeed the decision to go to war itself, in the eyes of an international audience.
-Nano.
Unfortunately, US foreign policy in the era of preemptive invasions calls for attacking resource-rich nations that pose no threat to us. That's a different thing, morally, from blasting bugs. It's wrong, as 90% of the planet knows.
The mental candy of video games can help to sweeten this awful task. If you look even casually at the top-selling shooters, they're nearly all war games that put the white American soldier-player in the heroic role of killing black, brown and yellow-skinned peoples to "stop terrorism," or "fight for freedom," or any of the other popular cant that our drooling politicians preach. These games are rehearsal chambers for more than killing technique: they incubate a poisonous right wing sensibility, the stuff of America Uber Alles that has plunged us into a senseless and unwinnable war in Iraq.
From the White House to FOX TV to your X-Box: that is the new slipstream of fascism. Because there's money in it. Because it's fun--until, of course, the Wal-Mart job isn't cutting it and, with all the skills you've honed playing America's Army, you sign up for the National Guard gig to make ends meet, and sooner or later find yourself shooting women and children in a real desert.
Mommas (and daddies), don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
1. the US military has been using video games for a while to convince people to do things. When I was in high school 6 years ago my friends brother was recruited into the army with the promise that if he signed up five of his friends he'd get either a Playstation or a N64 (i forget which) and five games.
needless to say he couldn't sign up five friends, and got nothing but a few years of military service, and for all i know is in iraq now.
2. as the computer technology for all modern combat increases the ui changes; these games are a really great way to get kids used to the ui of some weapons systems; and also awesome market research on what the people playing their game find as intuitive.
this will all go into producing easier to use weapons; and a generation of soldiers who can't distinguish the ui if their simulations from the ones in the helicopters that actually kill people.
+2 Interesting? That's... interesting.
...how positive the result is if said game wounds/maims/kills the participant (yeah, I guess the later of the 3 kinda' skews the results....).
"You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada"
:-)
Prior art?
I can't help but think of the quote at the end of Starship troopers 2 (not discussing the quality of the movie) where the recruiter looks at the new mother and her child and says "Hurry and grow up little one, we need more meat for the grinder"
Scary...
The hardest thing was getting people to UNLEARN the bad habits they had acquired.
Practice does NOT make perfect.
Perfect practice makes perfect.
If you are practicing with a simulator, you will be practicing the flaws of that simulator. The "mechanics" of shooting are simple and can be taught in 5 minutes (correct position, aim, breathing, trigger squeeze).
But mastering them so that you do it correctly every time is what takes practice and REAL bullets.
"You can't be on the rifle range every night, but if you wanted you could take some down time and practice when you had a few minutes."
Why can't our troops be at the range every night? If I was focusing on military training, that is what I would have.
If in addition to remote-controlled systems, you include autonomous ones, we're halfway there. Think Tomahawk land-attack missiles. The MK 46/48/50 torpedoes. Phalanx Close-in Weapons Systems. All of these, to one extent or another, only require a human being to turn them on and (maybe) point them in the right direction.
People talk about the time when robots do our fighting for us... not realizing that they already do.
Sean
This was far from offtopic.
... to keep oil prices high to pay off Bush's oil buddies.
... that 3mpg would have saved THREE TIMES more oil than the USA imports from Iraq. But instead Bush fights to drill for oil in a world heritage park in Alaska which maybe in 10 years will produce the equivalent of half the oil imported from Iraq.
... ignoring all those constitutional rules that declare that ALL people in the US be they citizens or not are created equal.
BUSH has considered re-instating the draft to suck more of america's youth to their deaths to keep the oil industry 'unstable'
Bush got exactly what he wanted from Iraq. He destabilized the world oil markets, more than doubling the price. last month $90BILLION of your own money went to Bush's saudi oil friends simply because of the doubling of the oil price.
Bush fought hard against a 3mpg increase in fuel efficiency, he even sued California to force them to stop pressing for higher efficiencies
Even better, the new Patriot Act version 2 will allow the government to legally make any american citizen 'disappear' without any trace, where with the present patriot act its only right to make non-citizens 'disappear'
yay bush!
You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada...
All the worlds indeed a
I work at a server company, we have American and Euro locations. In America, 90% of our servers are CS, but in Europe, 25% of them are Americas Army. The game seems very popular in the Euro-Lan scene.
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
You end up playing a disabled veteran holding a cardboard sign on a street corner.
Or maybe they saw it!
.
Nice movie (at least when you are under 12 as I was in the moment it was shown). Was one or the first movies with CGI spaceships (done in SGI or Cray, don't remember).
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
They will let them hangout until after the election, or the attack on iran starts, one or the other.
We have other laws on the books, too, that "allow" basically full suspension of any born with rights, drafting of anyone regardless of age or sex,, forced relocation, forced labor, confiscation of anything, yada yada yada. All under various states of emergency, the emergency war powers act, FEMA statutues, the model states health emergency powers act, and probably a bunch more, who knows, half of them are secret anyway.
Joe Government's position right now is that they pwnz joo, top to bottom and sideways. We haven't had actual full "born-with rights" for quite a spell now.
The US has turned into a looter nation, it's the only way these cretinous goombahs at the top can stay fat and happy and in power now. They blow the economy out,destroying a lot of the blue collar work, now switching to white and pink collar,so all over the USA graduating kids are presented with a severe lack of jobs, the first generation to be stared in the face with a very real threat of having a lower quality of life than the preceding generation. Lovely. These kids look to college, eek! a zillion bucks, and not near as much guarantee of a good job from all that work and money as one generation ago. So now they offer a "video game" inducement, along with a "steady job with bennies" and cash bonuses and whatnot.
No, I ain't cynical about it.... ffffttttt
External "threats" combined with internal "threats", a common tactic used by many governments to keep their herds in line.
Well, my generation fought the draft and illegal wars, we had so-so success obviously. Too many sold out it appears, gave in, became blind consumers. Lost ethics, allowed themselves to get brainwashed. Sorry.
Good luck you young dudes. Best advice I got is don't wait to fight it, and if you do have to fight it, play hardball, because that's the only game in town.
Playing A Video Game Does Not Push A Nonviolent Person To Violence, Nor Can It Teach Anybody How To Operate A Firearm
Equating Columbine-style violence with video games or that evil rap music and that horrible shrieking harpy Marilyn Manson is merely a leftist copout, squealed by people who operate on an agenda of limited personal accountability so as to push their Huge World Government ploy.
So do us all a favor and shut the fuck up about how video games totally force shitheads to go out and commit acts of violence. The shitheads who shot up the joint were shitheads and they'd have perpetuated that act of violence, Doom or No Doom, Manson or No Manson. To say that anybody can be motivated to violence by the media is to greatly underestimate the intelligence of humanity as a whole.
Besides, having played the shit out of Full Spectrum Warrior, I can assure you that any tactics you learn from that game, will be easily defeated by anybody that's not a polygonal meshed AI-driven texture-mapped bad guy. In real life, you'd get yourself killed before you were even able to tell your Rifleman to like, totally look behind us and select the cone of fog and like, look over that way and OOPS HE DOESN'T DO IT ANYMORE WHEN YOU MOVE AND WHOOPS SHOT IN THE BACK BY SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY USES TACTICS !!!!!!!!!!!!
ALL HAIL THE BEAST THAT ASCENDETH FROM THE PIT WITH HIS CUTE WIDDLE NOSE =^o.o^=
That game sucked I play it once then the sergent tells me to get a rifle and shoot targets or some crap, so i turn around and shoot the sergent (of cource) and the son of a bitch puts me in jail. Dumass game.
I cleared all the mines in Minesweeper! Where can i sign up ?!
...is that 20 or 30 years ago, in the US Presidential election campaign, candidates will be accusing one another of failing to qualify for marksman in America's Army, or shooting computer generated civilians.
"Is it not true, Senator Jones, that you were nothing more than a n00b camper, and that you once even used wallhack?"
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
You do make the point that in real combat, "camping" is sometimes just good tactics. Alas, in AA you often hear complaints about campers. I never quite get this, unless the person is camping a remote corner of the map away from the action.
Freedom: "I won't!"
As for your father and his comrades, firing indiscriminately on all targets might have made them "safer" but it was technically a war crime. And I'm sure they weren't proud of it, but they stayed alive and were thankful for that. That's the real tragedy of war - that fucked-up things become ordinary to the ordinary people who feel they have to do them.
Freedom: "I won't!"
"That's not an either/or situation either - you've inserted your own false dichotomy now."
Incorrect. I was replying to this statement by the parent:
"You would prefer to send them into harm's way with no training or preparation for what they're going to encounter?"
That's phrased as an either/or statement. A "dichotomy".
Note where I identify at least two other options in addition to the video games / no training dichotomy.
"The best way to train is to have combat units who have just rotated back be the OPFOR. The next best way is to have a unit that has played OPFOR regularly. Video game simulations are way, way down on the list."
"best"
"next best"
"Obviously it's not a good idea to entirely replace live-fire exercises or OPFOR exercises in the field with simulations, but as a complement to such things, I don't see why it's a particularly bad idea."
So, exactly, how would this "complement" such training? And no generalities or fuzzy-feeling crap.
I'd put a squad that went through 10 FTX's together against a squad that's played 10,000 games and I'm sure the FTX squad would win.
In fact, 10 FTX's vs 5 FTX's + 10,000 games and I'd still say the 10 FTX squad would win.
There is no substitute for real training.
If you want to "complement" FTX's, then I'd recommend 24-hour firing ranges so the troops can practice their shooting skills whenever they want to and 24-hour paint ball arenas to practice squad tactics against other HUMANS.
Reminds me of the 80's movie The Last Starfighter (which I rather liked). A league of aliens seeded the habitized planets of the galaxy with video games to find potential candidates to pilot ships to defend the galaxy from a common enemy.
A rogue recruiter put the video games on Earth, which was not an active planetary member of the league (we're too primitive and all that). Yet a teen proved to be so good at the game (he "won" it) that he was drafted to help defend our galaxy.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Only Canada and Mexico can mount an easy invasion and that's rather unlikely.
Everyone else would have to LAND AN INVASION FORCE.
In which case, we don't need a "huge military". We just need the 2nd amendment.
The only reason we "need" a "huge military" is to enforce our policies on other countries.
...is that my life expectancy in combat is around a few minutes when the officers run off rampaging without giving anyone orders leaving me to get killed trying to follow them.
"Playing a game for a few hours a night doesn't teach you how to effectively handle anything but that game. Real Life is consisted of ever-changing rules and possibilities, and until I can find a game that has a perfect model of real life, with no constraints, scripting, and perfect A.I., nothing will come close to substituting it."
And the BIGGEST limitation is the programmer who wrote the code.
Scenario: Your squad is pinned down by a few snipers in a couple of apartment buildings up the street. What do you do?
In the game, the programmer only gives the snipers certain options.
In real life, the snipers fire a few shots, you take cover, they toss a grenade and go out the window across a board to a building on the next block, down the stairs and sit in their living room.
Again: "Playing a game for a few hours a night doesn't teach you how to effectively handle anything but that game."
Exactly. You are "training" against the pre-conceived notions of the programmer LIMITED by what he was able to make work.
Learning a game gives you a false sense of your own abilities. This will get you killed.
fortunately cubicle droids dont get bombed.
oh wait. 9/11.
well i guess al qaeda couldnt go around just killing 'bad' americans.
videogame folks seem to want to say videogames dont cause kids to 'be violent'. nor to choose violence in conflicts. nor to appreciate violence, or improve skills of violence.
then they want to say that videogames are a great way to train kids to support the military and to prepare people for combat.
wonderful. you morons cannot have it both ways
An Iraqi defending his or her own country from invasion by foreign forces is no terrorist.
In the Michael Moore movie, the military recruiters told the the kids who liked rap music hanging out at the mall they could do music in the military. This video game come-on will target another group of marginalized young people who can't get jobs and sit in their parents house playing video games.
These kind of kids seem to be the ones the military recruiters seek out.
Years ago my sister-in-law and mother of five was telling me how Doom (in the era of Quake 3) was Bad for kids BECAUSE the US Army used it to train it's soldiers.
Apparently some nut fancied himself an ex-Army Special Ranger Delta CIA spooky dude and came out against video games after Columbine and fed folks this bunk about the Army training soldiers with "Doom".
Anyway as a former soldier, I tried to explain the concept to my wonderful, if ignorant, sis-in-law that in video games you don't actually bleed, you don't sweat and pant and panic you don't hear things and shivver in the cold and sweat in the heat... and most importantly there's a reset button.
"But," she said, "the children..."
Here is the original apache video...
And another link.
Good video to watch when feeling too positive about the future of humanity.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
America's Army is not very realistic. Though that seems to be the premise of the game and an excuse the developers give for not adding features or current features. I do enjoy it, since I was an avid player until recently (I'm on a little break from it), but it just doesn't reflect real life. These 30% that have a better view of the army are probably naive little kids who had no other view of the army other than what they've seen on TV and in movies. I won't presume to know what the army is like, but I'm realistic enough to know it would be a lot harder than this game - especially the training vs the game's training. I know what the Army's intentions are with the game, but it has always been nothing more than a free game to me. In fact I didn't even like it until version 2.0 when they added Special Forces (I tried it every new version to see if I liked it). It was way too slow paced for a (now former for quite some time) CS player.
I'm not so sure this is a good thing for the video game industry in some aspects. There is always someone trying to put the blame on the video games whenever some kid commits a horrible crime. I can just see this kind of thing being used as ammo (no pun intended) to support the case that kids are influenced by video games when comitting certain types of crimes, especially violent ones. If 30% have a favorable view of the Army after playing Americas Army, then what view will they favor after playing something like Manhunt?
Yea but does your combat pay get reduced even as you are in combat?
It does IRL...
Wasn't the military war game part of the plot of that movie Toys?
Sources report that the decision to train new generations of soldiers on Xboxes (Xboxen?) was largely based on a survey conducted by The Yankee Group, and with the usual suspect providing financial sponsorship (read: paying the mercenaries' fees).
This is absolutely shameful; war is not a game. The recruting tactics of the United States military are absolutely abhorrent and remind me of Nazi propaganda. This game goes even further, nearly to the point of brainwashing. These egregious violations of our rights as human beings should not be tolerated. The military should stop their ad campaign and game now.
Every 10 hours or so, to make it realistic, the Solitaire game would have to get completely disrupted. You know, some kind of system event that totally changes what the user is doing, and makes it impossible for the user to keep playing Solitaire.
...
Maybe the screen could turn a different color to indicate the shift from "hours of boredom" to "sheer terror". I dunno, maybe purple or violet or something
Well, I am sure Microsoft can think of something!
Where you get to do an abreviated version of "America's Army"'s basic training, then spend the entire game sitting on your virtual ass pushing paper or listening to static.
>30 percent of a group of young people with a
>favorable view of the military said they had
>developed that view from playing America's Army
1. You like the military, right?
2. You play america's army, right?
Therefore, the NYT's has license to say that America's Army game is brainwashing young people to love the military.
= 9J =
I have been playing AA:O for about a year now and you have to submit your training scores so that the servers can know if you are qualified to get your sniper training, and you need the sniper training to be a sniper in the game.
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Registered .sig quotient : 1337
Use of games to train for war is as old as games.
In the orient, Go has been used to sharpen the mind for centuries.
In the early 1960s, my family was stationed at the US Air Force Base at Little Rock Arkansaw (Strategic Air Command - mission: in case of WWIII, win.) The flight line pilots and navigators played ping pong in serious tournaments sponsored by the Air Force - my Dad got very very good at ping pong.
"The false dichotomy you present is that we can either have computerized simulations, or we can have live-fire/OPFOR exercises, and that is precisely the false dichotomy you continue to pursue in your followup post."
That's very strange when I SPECIFICALLY included FTX's with games in my statement:
"In fact, 10 FTX's vs 5 FTX's + 10,000 games and I'd still say the 10 FTX squad would win."
"Going to build a twenty or thirty square-mile replica of a middle eastern city, complete with resident population for the troops to train in, are you?"
Hardly. 9 square blocks would be more than enough.
Yes they ARE cheap. (Whether they SHOULD be free to soldiers is another question altogether)
The doctors get additional surgical training, and are not paid a dime more. Same for the nurses etc. The military base hospital beds and operating rooms get used WHEN OTHERWISE EMPTY.
The only actual additional cost is for the implant itelf - easily worth the value obtained by additional training for the doctor.
My vascectomy was perfectly done by an ex-military doctor. I bet he got his training for that by free vascectomies for soldiers.
The Last Starfighter
Won't work. All simulator games are rather "unfashionable" (read: devs would like to make them but the marketing says they won't sell) these days, especially ultra-realistic hardcore military flight simulators. Good licensable engines can't be found either.
Even if it's just paper planes.
Last time I mentioned this was moderated down as "flamebait" ..
...
... no moderate me down again if you do not agree
I think here it is adequate to mention, that these games usually have low ratings such as "E" despite some of these games feature weapons and violence, blood and bad language is suppressed somewhat
for me it seems that whenever it is to recruit "family safe" entertainment is less important than making more people beleive that if you like adventure and fun the army is the best place for you to have some fun.
It is sad and unacceptable for my moral norms
I seem to think that Orson Scott Card described games as tools of military training quite well in "Ender's Game". Would it not be possible to, without the gamer's knowledge, conduct actual wars with this? Imagine a soldier who feels no guild because, quite simply, he doesn't know there's actual life being lost. But, if wars are conducted remotely will that finally bring an awareness to how futile they are? Personal wars, with soldiers on the battlefield have an emotional drive to them. A war conducted by remote would have such a distance from that.