Real Warriors Trained In Virtual Worlds 312
The Washington Post has a piece looking at the U.S. military's increased reliance on gaming for training the next generation of soldiers. From the article: "'The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of warfare,' says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training at the Pentagon. 'When the time came for [a solider in training] to fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that. His experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before -- or something like it up to that point.'"
wait (Score:5, Insightful)
What does Jack Thompson have to say about this?
Finishing the Quote (Score:4, Insightful)
"He was the perfect drone."
Well, that's how I imagine the next sentence to go. Talking seriously about war and somehow working in Halo doesn't give me the vote of confidence I would expect to get from the military. It simply conjures up images of kids playing FPS's and thinking that it's somehow even remotely close to the real thing.
Re:Hesitation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hesitation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finishing the Quote (Score:3, Insightful)
The average 18 year old is barely smart enough not to get (somebody) pregnant at prom. The last thing they need is to get desensitized to killing game-style and then released into regular society a few years later.
Re:Why just the soldiers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh, because my SUV doesn't use virtual oil!
Training isn't cause-and-effect; it's context (Score:4, Insightful)
Training in a video game prepares soldiers for firing on real humans in battle because they know that is what they are training for. A soldier is a professional killer. They have already signed up to kill people, and are being trained in how to do that. The simulator is just preparation, preparation for a real-life job. Mentally preparing soldiers for the difficult task of firing on another living human was done long before the video game, and this is nothing more than an extension of that training using technology.
This is nothing at all like playing a game casually at home. Could a student bent on shooting up his school use an FPS to mentally prepare themselves, like the soldier? Sure. Could a mentally unbalanced person try to carry over their virtual endeavors into the real world? Sure. But in both cases, whether deliberately or not, you have a person blurring the line between the game and reality. This person was already dangerous/i> and video games aren't doing anything that any number of movies, books, or just imagination couldn't do.
If you are capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy -- and any sane child over age 9 should easily be able to do this -- then there is no danger of video games causing you to shoot up a school. If you make the conscious decision to use video games to train yourself to kill, then you are either a soldier training for war, or a psychopath training for crime. In no case are video games to blame.
Re:Finishing the Quote (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hesitation (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. "The moment of truth" is a euphemism that is used as part of the training to further separate the soldier from the possible reality/finality. One of the major problems that any civilized society has however, is the re-indoctrination of soldiers back into civilian life after having those soldiers serve in combat. It is a real psychological/social/medical issue that many of our troops are having to face right now.
You give me the creeps. I hope I'm not the only one.
I am sorry you feel that way. I myself am not a soldier, but a scientist now and I would hope that you could reserve judgement for when you truly understand a person. Many of our soldiers are simply carrying out their jobs and doing what they are trained to do. It's a job. If you have a problem with their job, then talk to the people that direct soldiers and deliver the policy and strategy that sends soldiers to work.
Trigger Happy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Might this cause an entirely different problem -- Trigger happy soldiers?
Ultimately, success in almost any occupation situation depends on making the people accept the new government. If soldiers are too trigger-happy and don't mind shooting people, you can end up with more innocent 'collateral damage'.
Dead non-combatants can make the surviving members of the family more hateful of your army. Some of them will go into the resistance, and the army now has more people to worry about -- so they become more trigger-happy. It quickly becomes a death-spiral.
This would explain at least part of the problem that US soldiers are having.
Not true. this is what actually happens. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to confess this actually happened to ME, I witnessed a real robbery, one of the robbers was shot (in the leg) a few feet from me, I couldnt even MOVE. Let me get this straight: contrary to Jack Thompson's and Government theories I did not grabbed a gun from the robbers and blew them away while dropping catchy lines or checking some imaginary score, I was PARALYSED, convinced I was going to get killed any minute, and tried to stay as low as possible (just like any guy would) then as soon as things were calmed I almost puked in the bathroom.
Soldiers have to go trough basic training as always, games such as AA have been used for years only to teach soldiers to strategize during combat, and specifically AA teaches soldiers to play by the book other than going out solo, they have to comply every task they are commanded or lose.
Dont even try to get the "Murder simulator" on me you cant even save your OWN life with that "training".
Re:Finishing the Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
A few examples:
Fatigue: Physical stress is the one people always think of, but food/water/sleep deprivation are multiplying factors. The difference between a hero and a coward can be full belly and a good night's sleep. This element is often mixed heavily with the others.
Battle noise/Fog of war: Live ammo fire and manuever assaults with mortars/artillery (or artillery simulators), machineguns firing over your heads (usually from a hill that allows you to hear the crack of bullets), etc. This is often against plastic pop-up targets (a.k.a Crazy Ivan).
Enemy fire/cover: This is probably the hardest to simulate. Paintballs and Simunitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_bullets/ [wikipedia.org] are one strategy. Paintballs are undesirable because you want to use your actual weapons. Simunitions are undesirable because it requires expensive weapon parts and simunitions aren't even as accurate as paintballs. Of course, neither of them simulates a near death experience.
Rifle range - marksmanship: accuracy, speed, distance shooting (500 yards with no scope and a man-sized target)
Simulations - Inexpensive way to play out complex scenarios. This is newer, but it can be surprisingly creative. The digital portion is only one piece, many Slashdot readers are familiar with what you can do with that end. I've seen some complex scenarios that involved a four man simulation in one room playing military scenarios on a big screen, communicating via radio to a mortar team practicing in a field. This scenario also had a corpsman (medic), referees (point out casualties), and it involved physical training before and after you were in the simulation.
By the time you get behind your rifle to execute the scenario you are dripping sweat and breathing heavily. In the middle of the game you might have to fireman carry your buddy to the corpsman (medic) or call in fictitious artillery/air strikes.
It isn't combat, but it is good training.
Re:So, on the one hand... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a fundamental difference between using combat simulators for training, and combat simulators for casual entertainment. Proof? Military training is very effective at producing soldiers who are able to pull the trigger in the real situation, but isn't 100% as many soldiers still have problems firing on a real human. The desired goal is to blur the fantasy of the simulator with reality of the battlefield, but the soldier can still distinguish. Contrast with casual non-military gaming, where only a few out of millions of players actually go on to commit real-world violence similar to what occured in the game.
FPS games are only "murder trainers" if you want them to be, and that desire makes all the difference.
Maybe it's bullshit for you (Score:5, Insightful)
I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation.
For most armies, the most important and difficult task they face is in training their young soldiers to accurately and deliberately fire their weapons at enemy soldiers. S.L.A. Marshall's classic work "Men Against Fire" first addressed this issue over 50 years ago, and although the statistics he cites in the book have been vigorously disputed, the gist of his argument is still true. So modern armies spend an awful lot of time and energy doing the sort of training you mentioned - running around in the rain and dirt and snow and mud, creating situations that are as close as possible to real combat. If you want to talk about successful training, don't look to video games. Look instead at the NTC [army.mil] and JRTC [army.mil].
One of the things that no video game (in particular) or sterile target range training environment will ever reproduce is the uncertainty of combat. You are not operating in a pre-defined, bounded killing zone. Your squad leader is shouting something and you're trying to hear what he's saying. You hear the crack of an AK nearby, but your hearing is so screwed up that you can't tell where it came from. You're hot. You're tired. Sweat is running down into your eyes, forcing you to swipe at your face every few minutes with the back of your free hand. Your flak vest is trying to strangle you. There is dust all over the place, making it that much harder to see. There are friendlies nearby. They're supposed to be on your flank, but are they? There are enemy combatants to your front, but they've hidden in a crowd and they don't wear uniforms. Is than an AKS or just a big stick in that kid's hands? Your ears are ringing from the M60 being fired right next to you, and when you can't hear things, it takes one more of your sensory inputs away from you. Now you're relying purely on your vision. What if that guy waving at you at the intersection 100 meters away is a friendly, who lost his helmet somehow? Is he shouting? What is he shouting at you?
All of this business about virtual combat training is crap. There's a reason small unit combat courses aren't virtual. There's a reason Ranger School, BUD/S, and the Q Course aren't virutal. You train to fight. The closer you can replicate the real experience in training, the more likely you'll do the right thing reflexively in real combat.
Still, even with all that training, I find it difficult to believe that anyone truly "knows" what they will or will not do when forced to fire a weapon in combat. The military training makes it more likely that you will react as you have been trained, but there is only one way to find out for sure.
Can you say... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:At what point do you draw the line? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you kill someone with a gun in real life and they die, that's bad. But if you kill someone with a gun in a game, and they don't die in real life, that's okay.
If we need to draw a physical line, we can draw a nice outline around the chips in your computer. Until knives and bullets come flying out of your computer chips, the line has not been crossed.
Now as for the next question: "Is there ever a point where we have to say NO?"
You are free to limit your own mind, for the sake of protecting yourself from whatever horrible creatures of the imagination you want to avoid choosing for yourself. But that does not give you blanket authority to determine the operation of other people's imaginations, no matter how much you fear the creatures of their imagining.
Punish them for their actions, but not their drawings. I mean words.
Glad to be of service.
Re:Not true. this is what actually happens. (Score:3, Insightful)
One only needs to play a racing game and then take a cruze to get it.
Re:Hesitation (Score:3, Insightful)
Oooh, you're so tough. I'm so impressed.
I was a medic in Desert Storm (and a civilian ER tech at a hospital nicknamed "The Knife and Gun Club," which was in many ways a comparable experience) and I can tell you that if you'd ever seen the effect a bullet has on a human body up close and personal, you might not be so sure.
And before that, I was an infantryman, so I went through the same kill-kill-kill training you did, and generations of grunts before us went through it too
But that's fine: go ahead and treasure your untested machismo, and hope to God you never have to face the consequences in the real world.
Re:Hesitation (Score:3, Insightful)
Killing civilians gains the resistance recruits. Killing friendlies lowers moral and damages alliances.
The result is what you see in Iraq. A very quick and effective offensive in the first few weeks followed by a long, drawn out occupation, with a lot of unnecessary friendly fire and civilian deaths.
Columbine ... (Score:3, Insightful)
As I recall, the kids who did the Columbine massacre had a higher percentage of accuracy than many seasoned police officers.
At the time, I seem to recall that they were saying that the sheer number of FPS games they had played had contributed a large amount to their, er, effectivenes. Mostly because they had long since overcome any aversion to firing at human targets, and had a highly developed ability to do this.
I'm not saying FPS games caused this to happen, but if the military uses these things to desensitize people, then one has to wonder how much people are being trained for these things without knowing it.
It's quite scary to think that an entire generation of kids would be more skilled in combat situations than trained soldiers are -- for the simple fact that they've already shot at more human shaped targets. It reaffirms my discomfort with the kind of games my nephews play.
Kind of creepy when you think of it.
Re:Hesitation (Score:3, Insightful)
You may understand intellectually that you are tissue paper, but until you feel it via the shockwave of sound, it will never be entirely real to you emotionally.
All that said, videogames do a lot to help one understand one's mortality.
Re:On Killing (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice myth-spinning there. But ignoring your regurgitated lefty talking points, how would you like to send armed forces into a situation when they are likely to be under fire? You know, like when they're working with the UN to disarm a bunch of Serbs slaughtering Muslims in Bosnia? Or when you have armed UN peacekeepers protecting the progress of an election in east Africa? Or would you rather that there were no armed forces other than those armed by the thugs, killers, cleptocracies, and medieval-minded extremist theocratic movements? If you cannot imagine any circumstance when western democracies might need to field armed forces, then you're spectacularly naive. If you do recognize the need for armed forces, then you have to recognize the need for the people in that role to be able to act to defend themselves and accomplish what they're setting out to accomplish. And sometimes that means shooting someone before they shoot you.