Videogames Are Far More Than Play

USA Today has a piece up talking with the writers of Smartbomb about the greater significance of gaming in the here and now. From the article: "In 2002, the military released America's Army, a game designed to inspire young men and women gamers to join the army. Within one year, it was registered by 2.4 million people and nominated for an award by a top gaming organization. It was a blockbuster. America's Army, along with a game used to train recruits and a sci-fi, holodeck knockoff (a room that allows the participant to see, feel and smell a virtual environment), will be used to 'train soldiers for the emotional experience' of war, making up a part of the U.S. military's new DNA, according to Chaplin and Ruby."

Comments

I've tried playing this recently

[sgant]

There is hardly anyone playing America's Army anymore. At least I couldn't find any servers playing it. VERY small numbers. And it's a great game too.

Same with UT2004. Hardly anyone playing that either. It's either the morons over playing Battlefield 2 (which I've taken off my HD in frustration to the rampant tardism there), or one of the newer games. Some of these things just fall through the cracks and you never see them again. Yet there's still people playing Team Fortress Classic on the old Half-Life.

Oh well...

Re:I've tried playing this recently

[Sierpinski]

There is hardly anyone playing America's Army anymore. At least I couldn't find any servers playing it. VERY small numbers. And it's a great game too.

This is probably because you are lacking one more more patches. I was playing AA not 2 weeks ago, and there were hundreds of servers, more than half of them were full. AA is still alive and well, but if you aren't patched up, you will only see servers that match your current patch level, which probably are few. Download all the latest patches and see if you can see any more servers than before.

You might also want to check your filters to make sure you aren't looking for some old map that nobody likes anymore, or have turned off some of the other filter options. There were lots of the US West/East "official" servers, and even more leased ones just recently.

Re:I've tried playing this recently

[quantax]

I am going to have to disagree with your assessment of no-one playing America's Army or UT2004. I just really quickly loaded up a server browser to see how many people were playing, and currently (at 4:30pm EST):

UT2004: there are 212 servers and 1526 players spread between those servers, though notably, few are filled to the max and only 2 dozen or so support 32 players.

America's Army: there are 621 servers with 8102 players currently playing, and unlike UT2k4, it seems to enjoy a large share of of 28 to 26 player servers some of which are maxed out with players.

Team Fortress Classic: 197 servers, 1588 players spread between them, only 3 servers are max filled and only a dozen or so support more 32 players.

TFC is still being played cause very simply, if you are addicted to TFC, you arent getting that fix anywhere else at the moment; believe it or not, theres still about 60 Quakeworld TF servers running with a couple hundred players.

I have to agree about BF2 to a degree, lots of asshat-ism and the server browser is frankly a piece of crap, but its not a bad game in of itself. But your point is taken; theres a lot of great MP games that just die as far as their MP goes since people stop playing and move onto newer shit, but I mean, thats kinda the nature of things. Things change, we move on to newer things; besides LANs or bots, you have little choice but to move on with everyone else regardless. But I won't deny that looking at the Quake1 cd in my cd-case often brings a mild feeling of nostalgic depression from seeing something that once was great and pretty much no longer is beyond talking of it as a classic and the memories. Those are probably what matter in the end.

FREE

[SafteyMan]

I think the biggest reason America's Army was so popular was because it was a decent first person shooter - THAT WAS FREE.