Training Games

The drill instructor kept saying it over and over again. If I didn't finish soon, he'd be old enough to retire. It grated on me. So I turned around, trained my M-249 squad automatic weapon on him and fired. It was a horrible decision, and I soon found myself in a tiny cell with nothing but my frustrations to ponder.

Thankfully, for both of us, my crime was only a virtual one, simulated by America's Army, the most intense, accurate video game about life in the Army that exists today. To be sure, it was tough going at times. In addition to spending time in jail, I accidentally blew myself up twice during training exercises with M-67 frag grenades. But most of my training was more instructive. I struggled through the obstacle course. I learned how much practice is necessary to become a good marksman, and the seriousness with which soldiers must treat their firearms. I learned about first aid, proudly earning three perfect scores for rescue breathing, serious bleeding and shock. I felt an adrenaline rush as I treated injured comrades. And I even got a chance to do some parachuting.

In 1999, after two straight years of missed recruiting targets, Col. Casey Wardynski, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, directed his staff to come up with ideas to boost the Army's attractiveness. America's Army came out of that brainstorming. Initially, it was not an easy sell. "The idea of building a game about the Army was pretty far out there," Wardynski recalls. "There were a lot of questions."

But he had compelling data from the Entertainment Software Association on his side. Video game sales have more than doubled in the past eight years. The average player is 29 years old. Fully 50 percent of all Americans play video games. Most of the serious players are young men-the Army's primary recruiting target-though 40 percent are women.

Wardynski believed that, despite Army advertising, movies and pop culture increasingly were the primary source of information about Army life for most young Americans, and much of that information was inaccurate or unflattering. He decided to build the game in house so the Army would retain complete creative control and could embed its values, procedures and rules of engagement. The game had to be different from commercial ones, where force usually is an end in itself, but it also had to be fun to play.

"We wanted to disabuse people of the idea that the Army is the low-tech choice in the military" by building a game as good as, if not better than, the best commercial ones, Wardynski says. He teamed with Michael Zyda, director of the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who oversaw the game's development. Zyda hired 26 programmers and purchased state-of-the-art technology developed by North Carolina-based Epic Games.

Since its 2002 release, 4 million people have registered to play America's Army, which is distributed online for free. The Army has spent virtually nothing on advertising or public relations. Even so, America's Army has become the third most popular online game in the world. An Army survey of potential recruits found that the game, which cost only $4 million to develop, had made a more positive impression than all the Army's other recruiting initiatives combined.

The military is the unrivaled leader among government agencies in using video games and simulations for recruitment. The success of America's Army has spurred their use in training, with several already in soldiers' hands and more on the way. But the Homeland Security Department also has gotten into the mix, and civilian agencies may not be far behind. That's because games offer a potential solution to a perennial problem: the lack of high quality, affordable training.

"Younger People Get It"

David Rejeski, director of the Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, has grand visions for what he calls "serious games." They have potential in the medical field for training nurses and doctors, he says. Call center employees or customer service workers could use them to prepare for myriad questions and encounters on the job. What the military has done with America's Army, he says, is only the beginning.

"Government needs to move from e-government to g-government," he says. Instead of creating another generation of "graphically bland Web sites," the government should move toward "sophisticated, interactive, immersive games," he says. Rejeski became interested in serious games during his tenure in the Clinton White House, where he worked at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. A friend forwarded him a Dutch computer model on global warming. The graphics were crude, but the model fascinated Rejeski. No matter what he did, the global warming problem proved largely intractable. There were no easy solutions, and that was exactly the point.

When he left the administration four years ago, Rejeski decided to throw himself into promoting serious gaming. About 40 people attended his first conference more than two years ago. In October 2004, the Serious Games Summit in Washington attracted more than 500. A recent conference on games in health care, held in Wisconsin, also was a hit. Rejeski agrees that the military is the clear leader in government game development. But Homeland Security has boosted its gaming research as well.

At the October conference, for example, Vienna, Va.-based ThoughtLink Inc. presented the findings of a research study commissioned by DHS' Office of State and Local Coordination and Preparedness, which provides grants to localities to help prepare first responders for a terrorist attack. Working with Homeland Security Associate Director Corey Gruber, ThoughtLink researched 100 government and commercial simulations and games and rated their efficacy for training. In the wake of the March 2004 report, DHS for the first time allowed localities the option of purchasing video games and simulations with federal grant money, provided they consult the report.

At the same time, the Justice Department is paying to develop a game to train first responders and federal employees in the new National Incident Management System, which is intended to standardize methods of responding to a terrorist attack or natural disaster. BreakAway Games, a Hunt Valley, Md.-based company, is developing the video, Incident Commander, which Justice then will distribute to local first responders. The game allows them to train on the system in a generic urban environment; for an extra fee, cities can pay to have the game customized to reflect their geography.

Also, in November 2004, Centreville, Va.-based UNITECH signed a deal with the Transportation Security Administration to create simulations for training security personnel at U.S. seaports. The Air and Marine Operations division of DHS' Customs and Border Protection bureau has since 2001 used Web-based training modules designed by Andover, Mass.-based Dynamics Research Corp. to teach pilots and vessel operators how to use the agency's technical equipment. For example, while pilots and ship captains know their own vehicles' equipment, they might need additional information about a particular radar or navigational system.

Slowly but surely, Rejeski says, government is coming to understand the pedagogical value of games. That's not to say that he wouldn't like to see further game development, particularly at civilian agencies. State governments, he points out, have been early innovators. A few states, for example, have used budget-related games to demonstrate to policymakers and the public the tough decisions that have to be made about cutting costs and raising taxes. As Gen-Xers begin to assume more prominent roles, Rejeski expects gaming will take off. "The younger people get it," he says. "But most people in high-level management, SES positions, they are still pushing paper and figuring out how to use e-mail."

The military long has used simulation for training. The first flight simulator-a stationary machine that looked like a plane-was designed by flight school owner Edward Link, who tried to sell his machine to amusement parks before the Army started using it in 1934. Simulation has been part of military training ever since. Still, a 1997 report by the National Research Council, a congressionally chartered nonprofit group in Washington, found that the Defense Department's simulators had fallen behind the state-of-the-art graphics and artificial intelligence in commercial games.

Without artificial intelligence, for example, the effective life span of a game is significantly reduced. A player quickly learns how to game the system, which can be expected to react the same way during each round of play. A major focus of today's game research, artificial intelligence, is rapidly improving, making games more complex and challenging.

The research council argued that new soldiers who had grown up playing video games would learn more information more quickly if the military adopted the best technology industry had to offer. "It was a very seductive feeling for DoD," says Zyda. "The idea was if we can do training in games, then when [soldiers] go home at night they'll have dinner and go back to training" because they enjoyed playing.

The power of America's Army as a recruiting tool quickly became apparent. Less clear was its potential for training. Zyda remembers how, early on, Army infantry trainers dismissed the game's training potential. But more recently, he says, a staff sergeant at Fort Benning, Ga., approached him at a conference to tell him how the game was helping new soldiers who struggled on the rifle range.

William Davis, manager of America's Army Future Applications at the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny, N.J., first saw the game in 2002 after a conversation with West Point faculty. "I was amazed by the fidelity of the visuals, the smoothness of the motion, the realism of the sounds. . . . I thought, 'Let's start working with them.' " Wardynski welcomed his enthusiasm and sponsored his research. Davis' team has done some virtual warfighting experiments with the XM25, an experimental rifle that delivers highly accurate 25 mm grenades, and they are doing it within the virtual realm of America's Army.

Davis admits these weap-ons also have to be tested in the real world, but he believes virtual simulation can benefit military decision-makers early on, when they are first thinking about spending big bucks on a new weapon but are struggling to picture it in use. "As far as using America's Army-having it accepted as an analytical tool-we are not there yet," he says, "but I'm working to make that happen."

Two other America's Army development teams, Public Applications in Monterey, Calif., and America's Army Government Applications in Cary, N.C., are working to extend use of the game into new areas of training and recruitment.

Full Spectrum Players

At the same time that Zyda and War-dynski were pushing ahead with America's Army, the Army already was working with the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the city at the center of the gaming industry. The plan was to take the National Research Council's advice and create a research center that would tap California's private sector expertise. Soon, the Institute for Creative Technologies was founded with Defense funding. Zyda wrote the new institute's operating plan and helped develop its research agenda.

Since its opening in 1999, the institute has brainstormed with the military on game ideas and then contracted out the development to private sector programmers. It also conducts research into graphics and sound and artificial intelligence. Jim Korris, a former Hollywood producer and writer who previously worked for Ron Howard's Imagine Films, is the institute's creative director. He was recently joined at USC by Zyda, who left the Naval Postgraduate School to start up the USC GamePipe Laboratory, a group separate from the institute that will research shortening the production time line for new games and bolstering their artificial intelligence.

Korris' first large-scale game, Full Spectrum Command, was released in 2003. Players take the role of a commander of an Army light infantry company. They must interpret the assigned mission, organize company units, plan strategically and coordinate the actions of about 120 soldiers. Full Spectrum Warrior followed last year. Developed for the Microsoft Xbox, the player is a light infantry squad leader, guiding nine soldiers through a series of combat missions. Full Spectrum Leader, due out next month, features new developments in artificial intelligence, so the behavior of the computer opponent can vary with each round of play. Using pattern recognition and automated planning, the computer can readjust its strategy based on what the player does.

In each game, the difference between life and death, victory and defeat, is determined by how well the player guides the squad. Ironically, the player can't even fire a bullet, since he doesn't have a gun. "We didn't want to turn it into a shooting game," says Korris. Instead, the goal is to capture the realism of modern commercial games while reshaping them for military use. "Entertainment games are first-person shooters where you run around and look for anything that moves and shoot at it," he says. "This is cognitive leadership training."

In Full Spectrum Leader, which was developed through a partnering agreement between Singapore and the U.S. government, Singapore insisted that the platoon leader have a weapon in its version of the game. But, Korris notes, "If you use it, you absolutely will fail." In other words, the game is about teaching soldiers to lead others, not to play Rambo.

An older game, Saving Sergeant Pabletti, devised by Potomac, Md.-based firm WILL Interactive, was used to train soldiers sent to Abu Ghraib prison after the abuse scandal surfaced there last summer. Similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books that many of today's soldiers read as children, the game takes players through a scenario where they have to work together to save their sergeant, who was accidentally shot by a hunter during a training exercise. Along the way, they confront ethical dilemmas and instances of sexual and racial harassment. The players must make choices on how to proceed, with each decision affecting future events.

Ultimately, even the strongest advocates of gaming acknowledge that there is no substitute for live training exercises. But games are catching on because they are relatively inexpensive and pose no risk of injury. Korris has produced simple Web-based games, such as one that puts the player on patrol in an environment inspired by Sadr City, Iraq, for less than $500,000. A more sophisticated game such as Full Spectrum Warrior ran about $6 million.

It's difficult and expensive to set up multiple rounds of live training, whereas soldiers can play training videos over and over again with no downtime. Games minimize the risk of trusting recruits with expensive equipment. And just as the cost of live training is going up, the need for training also is growing. Given the nature of today's asymmetrical urban warfare against terrorists, even the lowest-level soldier has to be prepared to step into a leadership role. "It's now obvious," says Korris, "that there is a need for this training for the lowest guy on the command."