US Army To Invest $50 Million In Game Development 68
$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."
What I want is a real military simulator (Score:5, Insightful)
One that lets you experience:
- the joys of running through snow and much with a 20kg backpack and a submachinegun
- the wait/RUN-RUN-RUN!/wait cycles of a standard soldier's day
- guard duties during which, if you fall asleep, your CO kicks your ass and throws your in jail for 5 days
- toilet and shower cleaning duties
- obeying to stupid conflicting orders without being able to respond anything but "yes Sir!" (failing this, see 2 previous sections, in that order)
- Binge drinking after service
etc...
That would give potential recruits a real taste of military life, something that romanticized war games don't exactly provide.
This will be great (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who plays counterstrike or any similar games, you know how important it is the know your terrain... B, A, middle, doors, etc.
If they would be able to train themselves on a portion of a city they need to raid or attack, they should do much better than looking at a map and photographs. They'd have spatial memory of wherever they needed to go. Just like the locals.
Still, someone or something would have to get in there for the initial data. I think I read a story about cameras on bug sized flying machines somewhere.
Re:Cheaters (Score:5, Insightful)
and yet they get their butts kicked.
Are they? From reading people who have first hand experience (military, serving or ex-) I got the opposite impression. They are suffering casualties, which is expected in war. But they are winning overall.
We all love to laugh at the TSA, and the fact is that an open society such as the US will always be vulnerable to terrorism. Yet we haven't seen any attacks since 9/11/01. Either we haven't made anybody mad enough to attack us (yeah, right), or we kept those who would attack us otherwise occupied. For example by making them attack US soldiers in Iraq instead of US civilians in here.
High-tech stuff and training doesn't quite cut it when you fight to pay for college studies when you get back home, but the enemy is fueled by a hysterical desire to see you die, preferably in horrible ways.
Anybody who enlisted or re-upped in 2002 or later just for college funds is stupid. Almost everybody who isn't an officer have to have enlisted or re-upped in the last six years because of the way the contract works.
Either the majority of our military is stupid (and they have tests to prevent that), or they are fighting for more than a college degree.
Re:Having played one of these "games"... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a really good point, the entire system they're building could probably be made obsolete by a fake city saturated with closed-circuit cameras and some good old-fashioned paintballs. That way you could still replay and review any event that you found interesting, and you also build the actions of taking cover and using terrain effectively into your muscle memory and not just your episodic memory.
Were the WLC games useful to you at all later?
Re:All's fair in love and war (Score:4, Insightful)
However, it doesn't always help, as the more assets of greater value you have in combat, the more committed you are to protecting those assets, even when it's disadvantageous for you to do so.
An important factor in spawning the Anbar Awakening was that while US Army "patrols" rode around Baghdad once a day in *heavy* APCs, the Marines were consantly pounding the streets, showing their faces, rebuilding water and electricity plants and schools. When locals *finally* tired of Al-Qaeda, they already had a face-to-face comfort with the Marines.
Re:Cheaters (Score:2, Insightful)
My personal experience:
I have three brothers in the National Guard, and I know three friends of my youngest brother who are also in the National Guard.
All three of my brothers joined because they had nothing better to do. The oldest joined before 9/11, the next joined before the war, and the last joined about 1.5 years ago. None of them were patriotic when joining and the youngest is almost assuredly a fucking idiot.
Of the youngest's friends, one of them seems somewhat intelligent, one seems somewhat vacant, and the other is a complete fuck-up with nothing better to do.
Just my experience.
Strict victory conditions (Score:3, Insightful)
"You have found a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Sorry, you lose!"