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Army Opens New Office of Videogames
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time, the Army has set up a project office, just for building videogames. The military has been training troops with games for decades, of course. But this is the first wing of the armed forces dedicated exclusively for gaming. One of the first projects: a tool kit that would let soldiers "build and customize their own training scenarios — just like the Marines' did, adapting Armed Assault for military purposes."
So now that the government is making games, are we going to have to not compete with government games? Or can the government order people to give the government rights to use your FPS games? The government needs to step aside fom tech matters otherwise we will get the DMCA X 1,000.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Terrorists are easier to defeat if you make the game yourself.
... Before these young impressionable kids are turned into trained killers!
Customizing is good - when we went into the trainer, the first day was spent running canned scenarios mandated by COMSUBGOD to check us against deficiences recently noted in the fleet. The second was spent running custom scenarios to investigate weak spots we knew we had (like a new man at a given station).
Then the real training started.
"Oh my God, your tank just blew up my house! Why? In the name of Heaven, why???"
"Well, Mrs. Peterson, I'm afraid your little Johnny was spawn camping in America's Army III. We in the Army Office of Video Games take a might dim view of spawn camping, n00b-baiting, and all-around asshatery, and suppress such crimes by any means necessary..."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Is the Bradley Trainer they made from hacking an Atari Battlezone game.
Not a fantastic game of course, but it's old school and a neat hack.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Do they have a little "Mr General" that pops up?
It looks like you're trying to take that village. Instead of sending in troops on the ground, just call in an air strike to destroy everything. Don't worry about the civilians, their deaths are less politically costly than military deaths. If anyone complains, just say that it's the enemy's fault for hiding behind civilians.
Duke Numkem Forever is already installed in Area 51.
Remember though, Guns don't kill people. People, after years of careful molding using today's cutting edge technology, crisp HD graphics, motion sensing multi axis controls, high fedility sound, innovative gameplay, and a compelling story, kill people.
Previously they used VBS1 which also had a gamer oriented counterpart - operation flashpoint.
http://virtualbattlespace.vbs2.com/Isn't it ironic that the government ends up making the video games designed to train children to kill?
What is the difference between playing Microsoft Flight Simulator and piloting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) from Boeing for the Air Force?
Remember the opening sequence to the original Terminator movie? They weren't autonomous robots, they were radio-controlled Unmanned Fighting Units from the US of A.
For now, the games are being developed for training, but sooner or later, one's going to come out that will hit the mainstream... and that's when the shit hits the fan. Before we know it, they'll be making games as a form of "recruitment entertainment", trying to spread the good word of Uncle Sam through games. They're already doing it now through music, "3 Doors Down" has a new song specifically comissioned by the National Guard, and the music video is basically one big recruitment commercial, it's playing in theatres now.
Something about this kind of army prostheletizing just doesn't sit well with me. Granted, it hasn't happened yet, but the writing's on the wall.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
It's really hard to laugh dismiss Jack and his "FPS games are murder trainers" when the U.S. Government is using them exactly for that purpose. Even better they distribute it to impressionable young gamers at no cost (except your voluntary enlistment in their database).
While I'm not conceding that Jack isn't a certifiable nut, I'm simply seeing this as some degree of validation for some of his arguments.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Perhaps you missed this quote
"I haven't seen a game built for the entertainment industry that fills a training gap," said Col. Jack Millar, director of the service's Training and Doctrine Command's (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming, or TPO Gaming.
As in the army agrees with us that video game do not train, training simulations do.
Maybe this will set a trend in the industry and ensure games come out on schedule.
"Soldier, are done debugging that level yet? MOVE IT, MOVE IT MOVE IT!!!"
Several military R & R leave training simulators are under development at this time. One of my favorites: 'Weekend in Bangkok'.
Have gnu, will travel.
Which you won't be learning if you play by yourself. Exactly. I was involved in an early project with the Army Urban Warfare Center about that same time to modify the Quake engine for their use. It had nothing to do with combat training per se: you cannot learn how to fire a rifle from a game. What they wanted to do was to train fire teams in how to take enemy complexes in an efficient manner, play with scenarios and develop tactical doctrine that could then be played out in a live exercise.
One of the interesting aspects is that (former) Soviet block countries mostly used Soviet blueprints to design facilities. There were a very limited number of standard designs for say, barracks, headquarters buildings and so forth. A complex would be made up of some combination of these modular components. What they wanted to do was to be able to have the game be able to read in a design for a complex containing these standard building designs (OK, we have two of these, one of those, and five of these other things) and then (somewhat) dynamically throw together a computerized training sim that the fire teams could then work with. Besides developing some basic strategies (limited by the physics of the game), the soldiers were also absorbing the layouts of the facilities. Since the facilities layouts were standardized, these translated to valuable real world knowledge.
I basically acted as an adviser to the project for a bit alongside my regular work. I suggested they use the Quake engine and did a bit of research on how they could use a GIS (GRASS), an Oracle Database, some software to do the level generation, and the Quake engine to get where they wanted to go. It was a really interesting problem. I had a set of maps of the Pentagon at one point (just tourist stuff, not incredibly detailed) and wanted to do sections of it up as a Quake scenario (maybe giant transvestite hamsters take it over and have to be exterminated or something, who knows). Post 9/11, that might not go over well. People just aren't any fun these days.
Sometimes it's both? Military Recruiters Snag Underage Players at Halo 3 Launch Bash
I work on an image generator for military simulations. We call it an image generator because the way most simulations work is across several boxes, all talking military sim network protocols - so you have one box running the physics simulations, another controller determining who shot whom, and it gets piped out to several image generators so you can have a big monitor wall or projector wall showing you your simulation.
The whole construct is pretty high tech - think an ride like the Star Wars one in Orlando but where you have control over where your truck drives. We've actually got a game out at six flags based on the same premise.
The problem is that, in general, simulators are five years or more behind what is in any sort of modern game. They just have different priorities - the army doesn't tend to care about lighting, more about how many square miles you can show without a break. And the army doesn't own them - they pay some company (like us, or our competitors) a bunch of money for licenses (10k a seat is cheap) to set up even the simpler, normal-PC based training.
None of this is going to teach you how to shoot straight - but it is useful for cognitive training - what do I do in this situation, how should I respond, how should I work with my teammates. And it's a lot cheaper than (for example) driving around an actual humvee.
There have been a couple different groups working within the military on their own versions of these "video games" for a while - Navy Post Grad has a system they developed themselves, largely from open source components.
I was actually almost hired to modify America's Army for use as a trainer - for small scale stuff it would work fine, and the army already spent millions of dollars to license the version of the Unreal Engine it's using.
But the problem is that game engines don't really support what the army needs, either - they don't support the simulation protocols. They aren't used to passing off all of the game logic to another box, or patching multiple displays together, how many enemies are on the screen simultaneously, or even usually paging in a giant database (the good IG's can do the whole world, or at least the continental US, continuously).
For small time infantry simulations, though (especially the urban combat that they're most likely training on a sim for) a lot of that doesn't matter, and you can probably subvert a normal gaming engine to do it.
Heh, of course, the problem then is actually hiring enough artists to not make it look like crap anyway. You can have all the lighting and normal mapping and effects in the engine that you want, if the office still only hires one artist to do all of it, they aren't going to have time to make it look good.
If we were hell-bent on world domination, would we not simply have taken over Iraq? Seems like it would have taken a lot less time and been a lot simpler to just swoop in, sweep up, plant the flag and colonize with an American population. Lord knows we could use the space for overflow.
No, sadly, our intent was not to claim, but to free, which leaves us with little real control over the end-game.
We should have just taken the cue from the whining left's accusations of oil/land grabbing and swallowed the entire Middle-East.
America invaded Iraq under the lie that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Quada and had access to "weapons of mass destruction". Only after that turned out to be blatantly false did America begin waving the flag of freedom and democracy all over the poor, helpless people of Iraq. Americans were stupid for buying into the propaganda to begin with and people like you are stupid for buying into the revisionism now.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune