Army Opens New Office of Videogames 174
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."
Bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite military trainer (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the Bradley Trainer they made from hacking an Atari Battlezone game. [atariage.com]
Not a fantastic game of course, but it's old school and a neat hack.
Let's Play "Predator!" (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Oh great... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Sadly, you've got a point (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
In the spirit of optimism then . . .
Maybe one positive result of the military utilizing "video games" as a training tool will be a more accurate, first-hand look at games for government officials. Perhaps they'll come to better understand what players can get out of them. Maybe they'll stop demonizing the entire industry because of a few bad apples.
(end optimism)
Or, maybe they'll just end up wasting a lot of money on a mediocre game to use as a recruiting tool.
Teamwork, tactical doctrine, learning territory (Score:3, Interesting)
Which you won't be learning if you play by yourself.
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.
Re: talking games or politics (Score:5, Interesting)
A view from inside the industry (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.