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More Than Just a Game, but How Close to
Reality? By AMY HARMON |
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AMP PENDLETON, Calif. --
THE noise level was rising, the body count was mounting and the 13 marines
sitting in front of computer screens in a dark room here seemed briefly to
have forgotten that the urban combat mission was just a video game. "Sniper on the roof!
Sniper on the roof!" shouted Justin J. Taylor, a corporal leading Fire
Team 2, half jumping out of his chair as his eyes stayed glued to the
monitor. "Where? Where?
Where?" demanded a comrade in Fire Team 3. "I'm shot,"
came the despairing reply. "I can't see anything." As the military embraces
electronic games as a training tool, a growing number of soldiers are
fighting in a virtual "It gives you a
sense of reality," Corporal Taylor said. "You get that nervous
feeling: do I really want to go around the corner or not? You want to
complete the job you've been assigned to do." Recent recruits who grew
up on popular commercial games like Half-Life, Counterstrike and Quake 3 have
a natural affinity for the training games, many of which are adapted by the
military from the retail versions. Some military officials are enthusiastic
about the benefits of running troops through the exercises at minimal
expense. But as video war games
gain popularity throughout the armed forces, some military trainers worry
that the more the games seem like war, the more war may start to seem like a
game. As the technology gets better, they say, it becomes a more powerful
tool and a more dangerous one. The debate over the use
of computer simulations large and small was sharpened when Lt. Gen. William
S. Wallace, the commander of the Army V Corps based in General Wallace's forces
directed a computerized dress rehearsal for the Iraqi invasion with several
hundred Army, Marine and Air Force officers last January in "You can get so
habituated to the gamed reality that the real reality, what's on the ground
now, is thought to be artificial," said James Der Derian, principal
investigator of the Information Technology War and Peace Project, a nonprofit
group that studies the impact of technology on global politics. "If the
war doesn't go according to the game, you just keep trying to make it
fit." Computer-simulated war
games, like the one hijacked by Matthew Broderick's hacker character in the
1983 film "WarGames," have long been used by high-ranking military
officers to test large-scale maneuvers that cannot easily be replicated in
the real world. What is new is both the
way the games are filtering down through the ranks to the lowest level of
infantry soldiers, and the broader vision that is being contemplated for them
at the highest levels of the Pentagon. "These kids have
grown up with this technology from birth," said Dan Gardner, director of
readiness and training policy and programs in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense. "If there are tools that are less painful than reading through
a book and can give them a better sense of what it might be like, we need to
use them." Mr. Gardner stresses that
nothing will ever replace "muddy boots" training. But he said the
adoption of the technology was accelerating partly for practical reasons:
real-life training is expensive, and it is hard to find a place for it. The
Millennium Challenge, a three-week real-life war game that took place in 17
locations simultaneously last summer, cost $250 million. "Back in the cold war,
with the threat of a potential adversary coming over the border, the Germans
were more amenable to having tanks running through their towns," Mr.
Gardner added. The possibilities of
networked computers, combined with an increasingly remote-controlled military
like the one Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has vowed to build, has
spurred interest in adapting the architecture of multiplayer games like
Everquest and Ultima to create a "persistent world" for training
and perhaps more. One notion involves a
scenario quite literally torn from the pages of a science fiction novel, in
which a virtual training system becomes the actual means of waging war.
"Ender's Game," a cult classic by Orson Scott Card, tells the story
of a group of young soldiers battling aliens in a video game. In the end,
they emerge to find that their victory has saved humankind, and that it was
not a game. " 'Ender's Game' has
had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia,
director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fl ,
[actually, Bob Sottilare is the director-- this is the reporters mistake ]
which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of
thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation
that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in
different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions." At the root of the
high-tech training enthusiasm are some sobering facts about how quickly even
the best-trained troops get rusty. A large proportion of casualties always
occurs in the first weeks of fighting, military experts say, because soldiers
are essentially brushing up on their skills while in combat. Computer systems like the
ones the marines here were training on could be taken on ships or even set up
in remote locations so troops could train while waiting to go into battle. "Anything but war is
simulation," says Ralph Chatham, the co-author of a recent Defense
Science Board report on training that recommended the adoption of virtual
technology. (Mr. Chatham attributes the quote to a retired general, Paul
Gorman). "Virtual games won't teach you how to walk through thick grass,
but they will teach you what to think about when you walk through thick
grass, and you'll be a lot better off when you get to that grass." Acutely aware of the
concerns over blending entertainment with war, some military trainers
experimenting with computer technology try to distance their software from
the favorite leisure time pursuit of male teenagers. "We don't use the
word 'game,' " said Ken Whitmore, chief executive of Coalescent
Technologies, the company that turned the popular commercial game Operation
Flashpoint into the more prosaic, if more sophisticated, Virtual Battlefield
System 1 used by the Marines. "It's a simulation." Capt. Donald J. Mathes,
who has set up four "virtual distributed training environments,"
including the one, here over the last year, said the Marine Corps had come a
long way from its early forays into games, which included adopting the
hyperviolent first-person-shooter game Doom. "Here it doesn't
hurt you to get shot," Captain Mathes told the marines in his standard
lecture here after their fourth run-through of an urban combat mission not
unlike what they might see in Baghdad. "Here you have to learn by dying.
But you have to remember, you can't get desensitized." The Army, in an alliance
with Hollywood, has embraced the idea that virtual training can be fun and
effective. Since February, students at the United States Army Infantry School
at Fort Benning, Ga., have been using a game called Full Spectrum Command,
which is aimed at teaching infantry captains how to make smart decisions
fast. For Maj. Brent Cummings,
who made several trips to Marina del Rey, Calif., to work with game designers
at the Institute for Creative
Technologies at the University of
Southern California (they wore sandals, he did not), the game has replaced
pieces of paper that he used to hand out describing missions for which his
students would need to map out plans. Psychologists at the Army
Research Institute are monitoring the game's use and tracking a control group
that is not using the game to try to measure its effectiveness, but Major
Cummings said the buzz in his classroom made him believe that people were
learning. "They're immersed
into the game,'' he said. "You don't command a company with a keyboard
and a mouse, but somehow the guy thinks he's in there. When that happens,
he's experiencing this different level of learning.'' But Capt. Jason Gentile,
who took the course over the last two months, said it was not necessarily so
much fun. "I got beat a lot,'' Captain Gentile said. "I had a
fratricide incident. But it's good to make those mistakes now so I don't make
them six or seven months from now in Baghdad.'' |