US Army To Invest $50 Million In Game Development

$50 million in funding has been approved for the Army to establish a unit that will develop games. The purpose of the games will be to train soldiers for various tasks, and they say there is no intent to compete with commercial games. We've previously discussed other efforts by the Army to integrate games into their training programs. "Col. Mark McManigal, the capabilities manger for gaming under the Training and Doctrine Command, said the selected game must provide low-cost training and must not require large number of technicians to run. It must also have a play-back function for after-action reviews, he said. 'One of the major events for training is to be able to capture all these events, good or bad, throughout the entire scenario,' he said. Trainers must be able to edit the game during play to change the difficulty level or add complexity to an exercise. For example, they must also be able to edit terrain to replicate training areas or combat zones, he said."

Having played one of these "games"...

[n3tcat]

When I went through WLC (Warrior Leader Course [wikipedia.org]), we had some training in one of these games that was based on what appeared to be the Full Spectrum Warrior engine. The training was very "regimented", not because they were trying to teach us anything specific, but rather because they didn't want us to "break" the system. These contractors running the game obviously did not fully understand their own game, but acted more like substitute teachers. They were ex-military guys who understood tactics and whatnot but not the system itself. When things didn't go right, they would blame the soldiers and never the system, even though there were huge flaws within the game itself. There were 3 or 4 classrooms with around 14 soldiers per classroom playing this game on one game server per classroom. Only one guy was really "proficient" on the system though, and he ran back and forth between the classrooms fixing situations as they arose.

I guess my whole point in recounting my experience with this is just to say that this is going to work like every other government contract. It's a great theory that gets glossed over in politics and pro/buzzwords so as to make a great powerpoint brief for the general, but in the end the soldier gets nothing out of it that they couldn't get from taking the soldiers out to a small town built out of plywood with some paintball guns.

Re:quake?

[ericferris]

For the uninitiated, GPW is Great Patriotic War, Russian parlance for Word War II.