Military MMOG Experiments 25
Terra Nova is reporting on a 60 page DoD report on MMOGs and their military applications. The paper is a blueprint for using massive spaces as research tools. Some of the topics suggested include: "Impact of After Action Review (AAR) on MMOG, Performance and Decision Making Style, Impact of Addiction to MMOG, Sense of Community and Group Longevity or Persistence, Describe the Apprenticeship Process in MMOG, Game Authenticity and Constructivism"
Oh look...its back! (Score:1, Insightful)
Should I reply to this story this time, Zonk, or are you going to just yank it again?
Re:Oh look...its back! (Score:2)
Something every "first poster" should own.
Military MMO. (Score:5, Funny)
Mr. General Sir (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Mr. General Sir (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Mr. General Sir (Score:2)
Hurry up and wait... (Score:2, Funny)
Which is 90% of what the army does (Score:2)
Because a "realistic" war consists of far more sitting in a trench in the rain than in fighting. You occasionally get one bloody big bloodbath, like Kursk in WW2, but then it's preceded by months of preparing for it. The first war in Iraq was preceded by... a year of hauling troops to Saudi Arabia.
And even when you see action, it won't be like in Medal Of Honor.
E.g., most casualties in WW
Target Audience (Score:3, Insightful)
If nothing else it would help the DOD better understand how soldiers/sailors spend their time and if there was anything to be gained by creating something like America's Army [americasarmy.com]. I think it is interesting that the DOD is looking to use games for more than just entertainment. Full Spectrum Warrior was pretty fun. I would think that two competive privates would have fun going head to head with a realistic game like Full Spectrum Warrior.
Sound off! (Score:2, Funny)
This is my mouse!
On Ultima Online!
I place my house!
Sound off!
Ding! Ding!
Sound off!
Ding! Ding!
Sounds familiar... (Score:2)
Great combat simulator with electroshock added (Score:1)
fantasy game (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fantasy game (Score:2)
Basically, an MMO could show the participants true morality as opposed to their imposed morality.
I can see it now... (Score:1)
At least now when you say tank, you mean tank!
Interesting choice (Score:4, Insightful)
A) Academics are looking for the DoD to fund studies of some of the social principles behind MMOGs. The ADL, I think, is a government-academic-corporate initiative to apply "new learning techniques" to the military.
B) As many of us know, militaries are always eager to increase training time, and to inculcate the "military mindset" into soldiers 24/7. That's just common sense: the more the rank and file sees the world in the same way and understands events similarly ("Is on the same page"), the less friction there is.
C) MMOGs have some interesting phenomena: they are world-wide distributed environments where new players are socialized and "taught the ropes" by the old hands. Any environment where leaders naturally emerge, and people willingly provide training in complex activities automatically generates interest for the military.
D) Online shopping mall-cum-anemically performing-MMOG there [slashdot.org] has managed to team up with the army to build some sort of training environment. Expect hoverboard-riding soldiers wearing custom-designed hawaiian shirts to invade a country near you.
On the other hand, there are some problems with the scope and conception of the project.
First, the study focuses on MMORPGs. Massively multiplayer online simulations, such as the flight simulator Aces High [hitechcreations.com] and military-style "MMORPG"s, such as the persistent combined-arms battlefield World War II Online [wwiionline.com], or even the science-fiction combat game planetside [sony.com], while certainly not as popular as the "big boys", have tasks that are, relatively speaking, much more sophisticated technically, and have evolved social structures around achieving those tasks. Something like the AAR effectiveness experiment they propose would be much better suited to an environment like that then to say a mission in City of Heroes. In addition, the rhetorical gap between the reality to be described and the narrative the DoD would fund is much narrower. For that matter, the gap between the description of MMOG and the military's use of computer games would be narrower too.
Another issue skirted in the paper is the failure rate of individual subscribers. While certainly, MMOGs are very popular; I'd say a relatively minor percentage of players play any given MMOG for more than a few months. And many last shorter than that, and that is often precisely because of the social environment they create. The article mentions the Sims online as not being popular; There is another example: Their beta lasted the least amount of time of any game on my hard drive: I logged on to some stupid technicolor world, and as I tried to sort the counterintuitive interface, I discovered the place to be populated by poorly socialized adolescents. Given the choice between learning the interface and deleting the software, I chose the latter. The fact that these communities are self-selecting, and that some of these communities have broad reach, while others do not, separates them from military applications. Would a MMORPG used for military training work? Or would it be dominated by those guys who can't even scrub a latrine right?
Finally, I'm just not sure MMOGs should be considered independently of the current gaming environment as a whole; the article suggests this, but I think we can go further, and suggest that the social division between MMORPGs and regular games with significant online components is indeed an artificial division. If you look at the communities for online games that have direct applications as training tools, such as the R6/GR [redstorm.com] series, the mods to Falcon 4.0, Battlefront's whole product line [battlefront.com] and, of course, a href=www.flashpoint1985.com>Operation Flashpoint, and its military twin,
Re:Interesting choice (Score:1, Interesting)
But remember most MMORPGs or MMORFPSs have a very low ratio of GMs (who are basically customer severice and offical rule enforcers) to players. Technically the developers and other company employees can change the na