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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! :)
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
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
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
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. */
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 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.
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
"You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada"
:-)
Prior art?
You end up playing a disabled veteran holding a cardboard sign on a street corner.
I cleared all the mines in Minesweeper! Where can i sign up ?!
I see your point, but I don't think it applies. You really oughta play Full Spectrum Warrior and see what it's really about.
The goal is to keep your peeps alive first and foremost, and ultimately to shoot the bad guys. Most of the game's tactics and mechanics revolve around surviving and evading fire. Most of the tactics used in the game are rendered entirely useless when your targets are unarmed and not trying to kill you, like in a mass murder situation you described.
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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.
...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.
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
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.
= 9J =