Real Warriors Trained In Virtual Worlds

The Washington Post has a piece looking at the U.S. military's increased reliance on gaming for training the next generation of soldiers. From the article: "'The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of warfare,' says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training at the Pentagon. 'When the time came for [a solider in training] to fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that. His experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before -- or something like it up to that point.'"

Comments

So, on the one hand...

[kclittle]

So, on the one hand we have all the game makers vehemently denying that the violence of FPS's can be blamed for causing young people in the real world to go shoot up their schools, while on the other you have former high-ranking military officers declaring:

"The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of warfare," says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training at the Pentagon. "When the time came for him" -- meaning Swales -- "to fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that. His experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before -- or something like it up to that point."

So, which is it?

Enders Game

[WHAMP3]

FUNNY!!! Seems like Orson Scott Card had the right idea after all. Sounds to me like the defense department has started reading Enders Game instead of listening to Bush =)

Re:Hesitation

[cat6509]

"What computers cannot teach however, is the NOISE and physical presence of a firefight." Not that it is the same as combat, ( or anywhere near watching friends die / actually having to KILL someone ) but this is why I like paintball better than FPS games.

At what point do you draw the line?

[tacokill]

At what point do you draw the line (if there even is one) and restrict what a simulation can do? Hear me out on this one before you flame me for being a freedom hater...

We all know that "simulations" - be it games, VR, or whatever - are getting more and more realistic. And that trend will continue until things are VERY realistic. We all also know that many simulations are based on a wide variety of behaviors that society would not want to encourage. (ie: killing someone in Doom is fine, doing it in the real world is obviously bad)

So how do you draw a line between these two? Or is there even a line? Obviously a simulation is just that -- a fake environment that mimics a real environment. But from the sound of this article, simulations have a very REAL effect on those who are participating in them - at least according to the military. So their impact stretches beyond their own environment and "spills out" into real, quantifiable behaviors, actions, and feelings.

So, I guess my question is this: is there ever a point where we have to draw some lines about what is and is not allowed in simulations? Be it violence based. Or sexually based. Or behaviorally based. Is there ever a point where we have to say NO?

Re:Hesitation

[William Baric]

Sorry, but that's bullshit. I did two years of military services. From the beginning we shot on human looking targets and nobody had a problem with that. And a few days after our first target practice we went straight for exercises with practice ammo (not sure if it's called like that in english but, if not, you can guess what I'm talking about) and nobody had a problem with "shooting" other people. We even threw fake grenade (the kind that covers you with white stuff) and we had a lot of fun doing it.

From the beginning our training was about dying and killing. The songs we sang and a lot of what we learned in our training was about that. And you know what ? With sleep deprivation, this kind of training work pretty well. I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation. And except for a few who were against violence, everyone was like me.

So this "hardest thing was to get people to pull the trigger" is plain bullshit.

I wonder one thing... is this game thing really for training or simply to get people to join the army ?

On Killing

[alphafoo]

I never put much faith in the idea that voilent video games help make kids into killers until I read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book On Killing, which discusses in a systematic and well-referenced manner exactly what the armed forces have done since the Civil War to increase the firing rate of their infantrymen.

Firing rate? Contrary to what you may think of the typical Civil War battlefield, most soldiers did not fire their weapons. On a big field running with blood, cannons booming and everyone screaming, most soldiers would not fire a single shot. Battles would end with literally thousands upon thousands of loaded muskets on the ground. Fast forward to WWII, where we have the image of brave American soliders firing automatic weapons under terrible conditions. The nonfiring rate among infantrymen was 80-85%. Further, only 1% of airmen accounted for over 40% of all downed enemy aircraft. Most pilots did not shoot anyone down or even try to.

The Army decided to look into this. What they found out is that people generally don't want to kill anybody, and would often rather die themselves, even in battle when they are scared to death, than shoot someone. Not that the soldiers were cowards. On the contrary, the same soldiers that would not fire a shot would repeatedly take terrible risks to rescue a wounded comrad. But the Army wanted them to pull the trigger and hit something, and they figured out how. The only way someone that scared would be able to do anything in that situation is if they had been subject to operant conditioning. They would need to program the soldier's midbrain to fire the weapon, since the forebrain is no longer in use under that much stress. They began to make training as realistic as possible in terms of exposure to violence, and make the thought/action of killing part of a soldier's reflex, so that when the bullets started flying, the American soldier would respond.

It worked. During Korea the nonfiring rate among infantrymen rose to about 55%, and by Vietnam it was an amazing 90-95%. The American infantryman was a killer on the battlefield, and only later did the Army realize that fully 98% of soldiers who experience close combat and pull the trigger would be psychiatric casualties. The 2% that weren't mentally crippled are people who, outside the military, would be locked up.

The author makes an excellent study of how this sort of operant conditioning for violence exists outside the military, in movies and video games. Before you knee-jerk and say that violent video games have no impact on the children who play them hours and hours a day, and who then go watch violent movies and television, you should check out this book. It's hard to dismiss the data out of hand.