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US Army To Invest $50 Million In Game Development
$50 million in funding has been approved for the Army to establish a unit that will develop games. The purpose of the games will be to train soldiers for various tasks, and they say there is no intent to compete with commercial games. We've previously discussed other efforts by the Army to integrate games into their training programs.
"Col. Mark McManigal, the capabilities manger for gaming under the Training and Doctrine Command, said the selected game must provide low-cost training and must not require large number of technicians to run. It must also have a play-back function for after-action reviews, he said. 'One of the major events for training is to be able to capture all these events, good or bad, throughout the entire scenario,' he said. Trainers must be able to edit the game during play to change the difficulty level or add complexity to an exercise. For example, they must also be able to edit terrain to replicate training areas or combat zones, he said."
Deja vu means the trainer changed something.
The hard-core difficulty level will result in actual death of the player.
There won't be any cheat codes.
How about a nice game of chess?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The thing you don't know is the US army has secretly perfected the art of robotics, and has done for sometime. Well, android would be a better term, as they look just like regular human marines. However Ai is somewhat lacking, hence the need for human operators to control them. This is where america's army comes in... (Im not mad you know).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
One that lets you experience:
- the joys of running through snow and much with a 20kg backpack and a submachinegun
- the wait/RUN-RUN-RUN!/wait cycles of a standard soldier's day
- guard duties during which, if you fall asleep, your CO kicks your ass and throws your in jail for 5 days
- toilet and shower cleaning duties
- obeying to stupid conflicting orders without being able to respond anything but "yes Sir!" (failing this, see 2 previous sections, in that order)
- Binge drinking after service
etc...
That would give potential recruits a real taste of military life, something that romanticized war games don't exactly provide.
Billy Mc Asshat was brought before a military court yesterday accused of team killing, he was summarily sentenced to death by firing squad.
For anyone who plays counterstrike or any similar games, you know how important it is the know your terrain... B, A, middle, doors, etc.
If they would be able to train themselves on a portion of a city they need to raid or attack, they should do much better than looking at a map and photographs. They'd have spatial memory of wherever they needed to go. Just like the locals.
Still, someone or something would have to get in there for the initial data. I think I read a story about cameras on bug sized flying machines somewhere.
Dunno, maybe it was originally marketed as a fast-paced shooter, but it sounds more like it's gonna be a MMORPG to me. You know, "Farmer Tariq cannot harvest his olive groves because they are overrun with insurgents. Bring the turbans of 12 Al Qaeda in Iraq members, 12 Shiite extremists, and 12 Iranian intelligence agents to Farmer Tariq for your reward." Or, "The Coalition cannot patrol Main Street because it is lined with improvised explosive devices. Find and disarm 20 IEDs and bring them back to Sarjeant Slothrop for your reward." Sounds like a lot of endless grinding to me.
and yet they get their butts kicked.
Are they? From reading people who have first hand experience (military, serving or ex-) I got the opposite impression. They are suffering casualties, which is expected in war. But they are winning overall.
We all love to laugh at the TSA, and the fact is that an open society such as the US will always be vulnerable to terrorism. Yet we haven't seen any attacks since 9/11/01. Either we haven't made anybody mad enough to attack us (yeah, right), or we kept those who would attack us otherwise occupied. For example by making them attack US soldiers in Iraq instead of US civilians in here.
High-tech stuff and training doesn't quite cut it when you fight to pay for college studies when you get back home, but the enemy is fueled by a hysterical desire to see you die, preferably in horrible ways.
Anybody who enlisted or re-upped in 2002 or later just for college funds is stupid. Almost everybody who isn't an officer have to have enlisted or re-upped in the last six years because of the way the contract works.
Either the majority of our military is stupid (and they have tests to prevent that), or they are fighting for more than a college degree.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
When I went through WLC (Warrior Leader Course), we had some training in one of these games that was based on what appeared to be the Full Spectrum Warrior engine. The training was very "regimented", not because they were trying to teach us anything specific, but rather because they didn't want us to "break" the system. These contractors running the game obviously did not fully understand their own game, but acted more like substitute teachers. They were ex-military guys who understood tactics and whatnot but not the system itself. When things didn't go right, they would blame the soldiers and never the system, even though there were huge flaws within the game itself. There were 3 or 4 classrooms with around 14 soldiers per classroom playing this game on one game server per classroom. Only one guy was really "proficient" on the system though, and he ran back and forth between the classrooms fixing situations as they arose.
I guess my whole point in recounting my experience with this is just to say that this is going to work like every other government contract. It's a great theory that gets glossed over in politics and pro/buzzwords so as to make a great powerpoint brief for the general, but in the end the soldier gets nothing out of it that they couldn't get from taking the soldiers out to a small town built out of plywood with some paintball guns.
However, it doesn't always help, as the more assets of greater value you have in combat, the more committed you are to protecting those assets, even when it's disadvantageous for you to do so.
An important factor in spawning the Anbar Awakening was that while US Army "patrols" rode around Baghdad once a day in *heavy* APCs, the Marines were consantly pounding the streets, showing their faces, rebuilding water and electricity plants and schools. When locals *finally* tired of Al-Qaeda, they already had a face-to-face comfort with the Marines.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1