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Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
As far as video games go, Operation Overmatch is rather unremarkable. Players command military vehicles in eight-on-eight matches against the backdrop of rendered cityscapes -- a common setup of games that sometimes have the added advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars in development budgets. Overmatch does have something unique, though: its mission. The game's developers believe it will change how the U.S. Army fights wars. Overmatch's players are nearly all soldiers in real life. As they develop tactics around futuristic weapons and use them in digital battle against peers, the game monitors their actions.
Each shot fired and decision made, in addition to messages the players write in private forums, is a bit of information soaked up with a frequency not found in actual combat, or even in high-powered simulations without a wide network of players. The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force... While the game currently has about 1,000 players recruited by word of mouth and outreach from the Overmatch team, the developers eventually want to involve tens of thousands of soldiers. This milestone would allow for millions of hours of game play per year, according to project estimates, enough to generate rigorous data sets and test hypotheses.
Each shot fired and decision made, in addition to messages the players write in private forums, is a bit of information soaked up with a frequency not found in actual combat, or even in high-powered simulations without a wide network of players. The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force... While the game currently has about 1,000 players recruited by word of mouth and outreach from the Overmatch team, the developers eventually want to involve tens of thousands of soldiers. This milestone would allow for millions of hours of game play per year, according to project estimates, enough to generate rigorous data sets and test hypotheses.
I wish there was a game, that did the oppisite of traditional shooters: Not show any of the "fun" of serial murder, but show all of the pain and suffering caused.
Semi-dead people, bleeding like pigs, begging like children to save them. The horrible screams. So much blood and torn flesh. Your closest pals with everything below the hip ripped off. Children running screaming through the street. People snapping and getting crazy. Having to look everyone and their relatives in the face! Flashbacks for decades.
Or just huddling in a half-bombed building, with snipers everywhere around, and no bullets or radio left, deciding whether to starve to death or run into certain death.
It should be illegal, to show something without its real consequences. These kids have no fuckin clue what awaits them if real combat happens. So in a way, making such a game, is at least partially responsible for their deaths and the deaths of those they murder. It is not so much better than that 70 virgins in heaven fairy tale, is it?
The Future of War should be an absence of it. Greed will never allow that to happen.
We pretend replacing humans with bots on a 21st century battlefield is "progress". It's not. We've won a battle, but we're still waging war for profits sake.
I suppose you can only die once in the game and never play again in your life, otherwise their behavioural data would be worthless.
Thousands of Videogame-Playing Soldiers Could Shape the Future of War
There was a LOT of discussion about the "Nintendo Warriors" and the precision ordnance guided by soldiers with years of training in their parents' basements. Operation Desert Strike, and then later Desert Storm.
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Are we finally reaching "Enders Game" age? Or have we already?
...apparently, there's a boy named Ender who is really good at this sort of thing....
The data is logged, sorted, and then analyzed, using insights from sports and commercial video games. Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them, all with the aim of building a more forward-thinking, prepared force...
We have analyzed the data from over 2.4M games and the results are clear - we need:
1) wall hacks
2) aim bots
And
3)185k cases of RedBull
Overmatch's team hopes this data will inform the Army's decisions about which technologies to purchase and how to develop tactics using them
As German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke noted “No battle plan, survives contact with the enemy.” [ Wiki ]
And this sort of "strategy" seems to make the basic error: that the enemy is playing by the same rules, or has had the same training that these soldiers - on either side - are employing.
I fear this will go badly and catastrophically wrong. Probably the first time it's tried.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons