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."
Re:quake? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about a nice game of chess?
That reminds me Chinese military leader Mao Zedong required his generals play chess game weiqi [wikipedia.org] with him. I'd mod him insightful if I've any mod point. ^^
Re:Having played one of these "games"... (Score:1, Interesting)
Welcome to military contracting.
Having both served in the military and have worked for a contractor in my experience this is the norm. You end up with a lot of prior military people in just about every job description except for that of hard-core engineer. It's kind of like welfare for prior service personnel. Unfortunately most of them don't know what the hell they're doing and on top of that cannot leave the military mindset in the past, and that's what you end up with: it's you soldier, not the system! Why, it couldn't be the system! After all, the system has to work, or I wouldn't be in here working for 70k a year with very few discernible skills!