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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!
"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.
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.
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.
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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.