Jeremy Hsu
Jeremy Hsu, “ For the U.S. Military, Video Games Get Serious,” LiveScience, August 19, 2010.
Today's U.S. military recruits enjoy an arsenal of simulators and video games that sharpen their fighting skills and may even protect them from the mental stresses of combat. But experts caution that virtual reality could also help mask the reality of war.
That has not stopped the military from embracing video games to recruit and train a young generation of gamers who typically play commercial games such as "Modern Warfare 2," which passed $1 billion in sales in January.
"The Army has really taken a hold of gaming technology," said Marsha Berry, executive producer for the game "America's Army 3."
"America's Army" represents the official U.S. Army game that competes with commercial offerings such as "Modern Warfare 2" by also featuring online multiplayer shootouts. The free-to-play game has become a more effective recruiting tool for the Army than all other Army advertisements combined, according to MIT researchers.
Such blurring between entertainment and war may have unwanted consequences, according to Peter Singer, a Brookings Institute defense expert. He argues in a Foreign Policy journal article that the "militainment" phenomenon can lead to greater distortions in how people view war.
In real life, "any military person will tell you that there's a blend of incredible intensity and stress combined with long years of boredom," Singer pointed out. "But is a game going to capture that?"
But such reality-based video games could help prepare recruits for the mental horrors of war, help train them for the real thing and even help prevent cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers. [Related: World of Warcraft Video Game Succeeds in School]
The virtual Army wants you
Very few games have the ambition to convey both the physical carnage and mental anguish of warfare, such as was shown in the recent Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker" or HBO's Emmy-nominated World War II series "The Pacific." Instead, they have more narrow goals, such as attracting today's recruits through familiar entertainment.
One Army recruitment station in the Philadelphia area featured war-themed video games and helicopter simulators aimed at attracting urban youth. It closed down last month, but the Army hinted that it might adopt a similar approach for future recruitment stations.
"America's Army" continues a strong run with more than 11 million registered users having played over 260 million total hours and counting since 2002, including enlisted soldiers who play under their real-life unit designations.
"The whole concept behind the game was that it was not going to be about scoring based on kills," Berry told LiveScience. "We wanted it to represent Army values and career options."
Gamers can undergo virtual Army training around barracks and shooting ranges, as well as fight in teams against opposing players in online multiplayer combat. Players who faithfully complete tasks, such as medic training, even get perks in multiplayer games, such as being able to revive wounded comrades during online battles.
The game does have some quirks that reveal how tricky it is to reproduce combat realities on an imaginary platform. In online games, players always view themselves as U.S. Army soldiers and see the opposing team of players as a fictional enemy. By contrast, an upcoming commercial game "Medal of Honor" allows players to fight one another as either U.S. Army or as the Taliban insurgents of Afghanistan.
Killing in "America's Army" also represents a fairly clean affair compared with the bloodier kills of "Modern Warfare 2." That allowed the game to earn a "T for teen" rating, as part of its recruitment tool value.
"We wanted kids to be able to start playing at 13," Berry explained. "If they haven't thought about the Army by the time they get to 17, it's probably not something they'll do."
Boot camp 2.0
The recruitment of young gamers has forced some changes in military training. Earlier this year, the Army announced that it would reshape basic training to accommodate a new generation of tech-savvy recruits who may have more gaming skills than physical fitness.
On the upside, specialized games and simulators have become cheap and effective virtual training grounds that supplement the usual physical drills.
The Army trains its soldiers on game-like simulations such as "Virtual Battlespace 2" or even noncommercial versions of "America's Army." Training versions of "America's Army" can integrate real military weapons or hardware with the game software, so soldiers can physically hold the launch tube of a Javelin antitank missile and practice firing it in a virtual setting.
By the time soldiers get to the live fire exercises with weapons, many are already fairly proficient from having trained on the simulators, Berry said.
The most futuristic example of game-like training comes from Raytheon, a giant in the defense industry, and Motion Reality, the company responsible for the 3-D technology behind the Hollywood blockbuster "Avatar."
The two companies developed a free-roaming simulator called VIRTSIM, which allows participants wearing full gear and virtual reality goggles to physically fight their way through a virtual setting. The participants can toss physical objects such as mock grenades that explode in the virtual setting, and even experience a low-level Taser-style shock when a virtual enemy manages to shoot them.
Preparing the mind for war
Such virtual training may go beyond training military recruits to operate weapons, spot roadside bombs, or clear rooms of enemies. It could also protect them from the mental horrors of war, according to Albert "Skip" Rizzo, a University of Southern California psychologist.
With funding from the U.S. military, Rizzo's team in the virtual reality lab at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies wants to prepare military recruits for mental trauma before they are ever deployed overseas. It is developing virtual re-creations based on the stories told by returning veterans.
"What we want to create is something that pulls at the hearts of people," Rizzo said. "Maybe there's a child lying there with the arms blown off, screaming and crying. Maybe your action kills an innocent civilian, or you see a guy next to you get shot in the eye with blood spurting out of his face."
At the most upsetting moment, the simulation would freeze and allow a virtual character to come out and walk the player through the situation. That character might look like a gunnery sergeant, a Buddhist monk, even a former schoolteacher – whatever helps the recruit think calmly after experiencing the virtual trauma.
"The rationale is you want to teach people this stuff when they're in a state of arousal so that they're more likely to access that learning when they're in a similar state" in real life, Rizzo said.
Such stress-resilience training, or emotional coping, has existed in U.S. military training for a couple of years. But there's a limit to how much time new recruits can spend in workshops or in the re-creation of an Iraqi village at the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Southern California. A virtual simulation or game could allow more recruits to train themselves in stress resilience during the many months leading up to actual combat.
Less is more for veterans
Ideally, the preparation would help prevent future cases of PTSD among veterans. As many as 20 percent of returning military personnel may suffer from the disorder or from major depression, according to a 2008 study by the RAND Corp.
For veterans with PTSD, even poor graphics in virtual reality simulators can trigger powerful memories. Psychologists have found that a crude visual representation allows the mind of the patient to fill in the details based on personal experience (similar to the notion popularized in the Hollywood blockbuster "Inception").
"If you leave it a little bit open, then you have more space for the patient's own imagination and their own insertion of experiences in the world," Rizzo said.
When Vietnam War veterans took part in virtual reality therapy for PTSD during the late 1990s, the simulation graphics "sucked," according to Rizzo.
Even so, "when the patients got out of the [virtual] copter, a couple of them were describing Vietcong shooting from the jungle and water buffaloes in the rice paddies. None of that was in the simulation – they had blended in their own experiences."
Rizzo hopes that the new stress-resilience training can trump the need for PTSD therapy and allow future military veterans to return to civilian life with fewer nightmares. He wants to convey a sense of reality closer to certain war films, such as "Platoon" or "Saving Private Ryan," rather than the films he watched as a kid, in which combat appeared as a sanitized black-and-white struggle.
"We're training people to cope with the jobs they've been asked to perform and come back intact," Rizzo said. "Nobody goes to war and comes back the same, but when they return, are they capable of holding a job and loving their wife and kids? That's what our aim is, to make the return home as smooth as possible."
Blurring the lines
Before that can happen, Rizzo and his colleagues must figure out how to strike a balance in the realism of their simulations. Too polished a presentation may lull recruits into thinking of the simulation as just another commercial game such as "Modern Warfare 2," where death only has the consequence of making players wait to reappear in the next match.
"We don't want it to look like a game [recruits] have already played and become habituated to," Rizzo said.
Brookings Institute defense expert, Singer wondered if militainment could also lead to a growing sense of detachment among military recruits during actual combat. He spoke with military officers who observed as much about some of the latest recruits.
"This might be the essence of this new era of militainment: a greater fidelity to detail, but perhaps a greater distortion in the end," Singer wrote in his Foreign Policy article.
That distortion could become magnified among the majority of gamers playing "America's Army" or "Modern Warfare 2," who only experience warfare as what appears on their computer and television screens. Few will end up deploying overseas to experience the reality of war in places such as Afghanistan for themselves, according to Singer.
"This is especially the case as you have now almost two generations (X and Millennials) for whom the draft is just some paper card you get when you are 18 and never ever hear about again," Singer said in an e-mail. "It completely changes the way they think about war."
The militainment trend also takes place during a time when those killed in the wear rarely show up in U.S. news, and only arrive home as flag-draped coffins. As a result, most gamers may only ever see the casualties of modern wars as pixels on a screen – there one moment, gone the next.
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When I read that their online shooter “American Army” has been a more effective recruiting tool for them than all their other advertisements combined, referring to all other types of media that have been in use before video games came into light. Made me think to that statstic that they in fact mention in this article as well, which is that Call of duty Black ops is the highest gross income medium made ever. This game alone has made more money that any other medium ever made which si a testment to the fact that video games as a media cannot be ignored. The army sees this and jumps on the train, but they think this one through. Their games is rated T for teens so that kids who are 13 can play it. A get it while they’re young campaign if you will. But the issues is American Army is no call of duty, and given the choice I’m sure you’r eeveryday gamer will take call of duty over American Army every time. So my question is whether it is smart for the Army to try to compete with these big name video game producers or should they take a different approach to reach the same radiance? If so, what would that approach look like?
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I don’t really think that America’s Army has a lot of real competition from Call of Duty. Mainly because America’s Army is free. This tactic helps get people from urban areas who may not have the money to pay for call of duty which is expensive. My aunt actually worked designing video game covers for activision and eventually the division was sold and formed Ignited Minds. She worked on the Americas Army advertising and graphics and targeting lower income areas that will likely produce more recruits is part of the strategy. This is disturbing and many members of her design team in California had a lot of issues with working on America’s Army.
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I also think that it’s unfair to really compare America’s Army to Call of Duty or Modern Warfare II. They’re not really the same type of game and really don’t belong in the same categories. From what I remember about playing the Modern Warfare games is half the fun, if not all of the fun, derives from the insanity and anarchy of a multiplayer game. However, the appeal that America’s Army has over other games is its supposed realism and the fact that the Army sponsors it. Even though they’re both “war video games” they’re not really appealing to precisely the same market. Even though the type of player they’re trying to reach may overlap, the America’s Army game is in a niche category of its own, which is Army sponsored games. The only other one I know of is “Full Spectrum Warrior,” which I played and loved.
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I’m not sure I can understand how video games can help prevent cases of PTSD. I think this is far reaching in what video games can do for soldiers. It seems like they’re losing sight of the reality of being a soldier, especially in regards to the trauma that comes with engaging in war. In a way I find it almost insulting to soldiers that people think video games could help prepare people for war. Regardless of how real programmers can make video games, they aren’t actually real.
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I think that the fact that sufferers of PTSD can play video games and experience “trauma” from virtual warfare could help them tremendously. Former soldiers would be experiencing the trauma in video game in a way that they would learn is not psychologically detrimental and emotionally haunting. This could then result in the sufferers to come to terms with their memories of real trauma.
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The article talks about how simulators are meant to sharpen the skills of their recruits. It also shield them from the reality of the war. I’m reminded a paper I wrote about how war movies are meant to be a representation of war for those who haven’t actually been to war. It is what people can imagine war to be, it is not the real thing because the only way to experience the real thing is to actually go to war. So if the military creates a hyper reality like a film does then it makes it easier for the new recruits to adjust to war and shields their minds from the reality of what is it they are really doing. Hsu mentions that “such blurring between entertainment and war may have unwanted consequences” but in a perfect world without variable this could help shield certain people from the mental assault war could have on them.
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I think this is definitely a double-edged sword. Yes video games probably desensitize soldiers to the horrors of war. They even help with PTSD. Is this wrong that we are desensitizing people to the horrors of war. Yes in some ways however human nature and history suggests that there will always be wars. If our country has to protect our people is really the worst thing if the soldiers come back without the same mental damage.
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Although the article focuses on the title ’America’s Army 3,’ back when I was in middle/high school I had the experience of playing America’s Army 2.
One part of the virtual boot camp I remember having to go through was first-aid training. If you wanted to play as a medic in the game, you had to complete a series of tasks in order to unlock that ability. The two tasks I can remember doing were a simulation of a written test (your avatar sits at a desk, there’s a pre-recorded lecture, and you take a multiple-choice test) and a ‘drill’ where you prioritized ‘casualties.’ Essentially, this was walking up to plain-clothes looking avatars who would tell you their ‘wounds’ and you would have to press keys that described the actions you would take, and if you did everything in the right order you passed. Both of these gave you a grade at the end, and if you got a high enough grade you could play as a medic in-game.
As much as these games promote enlistment and killing, they also helped me with a CPR/First Aid/AED course I was taking at the time because much of the information was taken straight from Red Cross and Army documents.
I have not played America’s Army 3, but I wonder if some of these features are still in the game. This article goes into depth about helping veterans and the stresses of war, but I can’t find any details about the other experiences that I’ve had with the previous iteration of the game.
I’m wondering if whatever realism the game has can teach about the whole of the war experience and what effect that may have. I’m also curious to see if the more ‘boring’ parts of medic training are still in the game, and what that says about the Army if they’ve been removed in an effort to increase ‘fun.’
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I found this aspect of America’s Army to be really interesting, and frankly troubling. War is hell, but when you turn around and try to present it as though it may be something less, don’t you also run the risk of facing the same “sanitized” criticism that is leveled at older John Wayne war movies? If America’s Army is meant to recruit children (because really, 13 is a really young age), shouldn’t the video game at the very least be somewhat honest about the representation of war so that these kids have some idea of what it may actually be like? I remember from the War in Media class that soldiers who watched John Wayne movies had a tendency to try and act like John Wayne in real-life combat. Won’t America’s Army essentially encourage the same behavior?
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I feel the same way and worry that these video games like America’s Army could produce soldiers that “have no fear”. Perhaps that is the goal of the program. It seems to me that training children at such a young age how to fight, especially the methods in video games, seems very dangerous to me.
I also don’t like how games like “America’s Army” are promoted by the military. I don’t really understand the politics behind it, when I see people blaming violent games for violent acts. Then the same people promote violence (perhaps controlled violence via the army) with violent video games.
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One thing about America’s Army, the developers did go quite a long way to make it very realistic. Now I don’t think it is really possible to show the true horrors of war through anything but actual experience, but America’s Army does a decent job of displaying the tactics and strategies used by the military. You can’t run around like a John Wayne movie or anything similar in the game and most of the strategy involved is teamwork based.
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As Thomas points out the target audience is really young, and I would wonder to what extent these war games adapt the younger generations notions of war and also very importantly their reasons for going to war. Should the people we have representing our country on the battle field be there because they found a video game, fun, entertaining, and they were good at it. Former generations went to war out of honor or duty for/to their country. I almost wonder if the fighting would have been more moral then. You don’t hear as much about US soldiers committing atrocities of war until Vietnam and of course again in Afghanistan. Is this because the nation didn’t formerly view them as war crimes, or the disconnect in information that came from the front back to the US was reduced, or because the ideas of war changed and people became separated from the idea of fighting and dying for a cause? Something that is certain is that as society values human life more, weaponry and wars in general are more effective at killing.
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I agree that this may desensitize people to the act of killing, especially when a video game is going out of its way to make something less realistic because they want the video game to be available to kids at a younger age. This brings up an excellent connection to the Singer article, in that people who have played games about killing may feel a decreasing emotional response to killing another human being. America’s Army may encourage some “John Wayne”-esque behavior because the people who have played the game may believe they can do the things they did in the game. Especially growing up with this sort of violence may prompt a decrease in sensitivity to killing.
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This is a really interesting section to me. Last semester, I was in Professor Williams’ class called “War and the Media” and we had a veteran named Brendan O’Boyle come and speak to us about his experience in Afghanistan and how it is portrayed in the documentary “Restrepo” (side note: AMAZING film. I would highly recommend it.) He talked about the need for mental preparation in Boot Camp not just physical. I wonder if virtual trauma simulators are the best way to do this. While many other parts of this article don’t sit well with me, this section seems like it contains some good ideas.
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My father worked as a psychotherapist for the Navy and I am learning about PTSD in Abnormal Psychology right now. Based on what I’ve learned, this concept doesn’t seem to necessarily have a psychological backing. It doesn’t matter how much training the person has had before, because (as a classmate has already mentioned) video games still seem fantastical. PTSD happens because of a traumatic event in your life, and possibly because of a predisposition to it (tough to test). When a soldier encounters something traumatic in the field, they’re not going to think “Oh, this is like the time I saw the baby with no arms in the simulator a few months back. Everything’s okay.” The trauma is still going to affect them! “Preparing the mind for war” could just as easily be done by teaching coping mechanisms for stressors in life. My question is this: how can they make games real enough to emulate real life traumas?
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No actually. One positive aspect of removing oneself from the physical fighting is that you probably won’t have PTSD. “It’s just like playing a video game.”
On the other hand, I’m curious how introducing future soldiers to intense situations in a video game earlier in life is supposed to make them see reality differently later…? Under current understandings, video games are still usually blatantly obviously not reality. This philosophy suggests that a more integrated and “real-feeling” game can more closely imitate reality, and thus better prepare a soldier.
My question then turns to media: is there something inherent to a digitally rendered world, “controlling” a character, and all the facets of games, that separates itself from reality? In the future, perhaps there will be less distinction, but isn’t the way that the medium presents its message different on some basic level? Or is it just a precession of simulacra now?
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I think what Rizzo is trying to do is create a world in which the players become emotionally and mentally invested—basically a synthetic world. I guess the logic is that forcing players to contend with the emotional trauma created within these synthetic worlds wil translate over to the real-world (because I guess the emotions generated will be roughly the same). There doesn’t seem to be an indication that emotional authenticity is any different between these virtual combat zones and the real combat zones, not from what Rizzo is saying at least. I’m not sure if I agree with this, but Castranova’s readings from last week present a compelling argument for the strong emotional connections players make with their synthetic worlds.
My issue is what next? If we can train soldier to kills without remorse, or to experience extreme emotional trauma and remain unphased, what does this mean for the gaming world? It would create a direct correlation between the skills learned in the gaming world and the skills being applied in the real world. Wouldn’t this strong connection show that there is a link between video games and violence? Especially when developers are trying to create games that effectively train soldiers on how to be the perfect soldier?
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You bring up an excellent point. If video games can be effectively used to train remorseless soldiers, it would imply a strong connection between video games are real violence. However, that first “If” is a very big one. Simply because these researchers are attempting to lessen the reaction to horrible violence does not mean they will be successful. I am personally very skeptical of the efficacy of such treatment (prevention?) approaches. It is also important to remember that these researchers have a strong incentive to overstate the results of their work.
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Something the author doesn’t mention directly in bringing up the term “militainment” is the notion that the US attempts to contain and separate war from society as a whole. The use of video games in recruiting and training could easily be one more attempt to contain war within a set of parameters and definitions that soldiers may be pre-familiarized with before entering battle.
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It seems to me like the idea of the army using video games as training material is very similar to what McGonigal was talking about in that article. It seems to me that, from our discussions in class, many of the students in our class don’t like the idea of video games being using to make a job “more enjoyable” or in this case, easier to cope with. Do people think its a good idea that the army takes advantage of video games as a means to promote joining the army, or do you have a problem with it? (I would like to see an answer without getting too political. For example, my answer would be that I think it partially sounds like these games send the wrong message about the army and war to younger players, but that may not be the case).
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With the emergence of these recruiting and preparation techniques it is difficult to predict the outcomes. The increase in military enrollment and possible decrease of PTSD I believe is worth trying out. Although these games may provide a very unrealistic version of warfare, I think it is better than the “non-action” forms of war simulation of the past.
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The military’s game plays on gaming archetypes that already exist. Adapting Call of Duty to fit the US Army doesn’t inherently change the game. If there was an extremely popular waiting tables game, I’m sure restaurants might adapt it to initially train their staff. Also, McGonigal was suggesting making work into a game, where this is adapting a game to train for a career. I think the dichotomy is a little different. Personally, though, I don’t have too much against making work a game either.
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Max you raised a good point. I don’t think the military should use video games as a recruiting tool because I disagree with the politics of who they recruit. The military strategically goes into low-income areas with certain video games that they use to recruit. I don’ t think we should tell kids that they should join the military because they have the top score on some FPS game. If they are going to use video games as a recruiting tool they should recruit people from all socio-economic backgrounds. I think using video games as a recruiting tool makes it easy for people to associate war with fun.
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Video games as a recruiting tool for many things, not just the military has shown effectiveness. One other large group that has been constantly using video games to recruit members are Christian youth groups. At many of these “cool” churches and youth group gatherings are rock band setups, madden, halo, you name it.There we have an example of starting a conversation because of how fun games are for kids. On the other side of things, we need to be very careful about making war appear fun. Our enemies use games to recruit constantly, but I believe that using unrealistic shooting games is a terrible way to recruit and should not be done.
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I see an association of video games with childhood. Even if you are an adult like Professor Williams who admittedly plays video games for hours, your relationship with video games began in your childhoood/teenage years. So to me, the army using video games as a means to promote joining the army runs the risk of making the military seem juvenile. I think people can take their video games seriously and seriously engage in them, but they are aware that they are not serious in themselves. The military is incredibly serious and requires a maturity and understanding, and I think that using video games to promote it may give a wrong portrayal of it.
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I think the main moral implication of using video games as a recruitment tool is that younger players are definitely more impressionable. When I sniped the russian guy in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, I felt like I was a total badass, and doing incredible feats in the military is really cool. However, in my older age and wiser years I realize the serious implications of war. It’s not fun, despite the fact it may be fun to play a war game. I think this moral implication makes it morally wrong to use a game to persuade impressionable youth.
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Research has suggested that violent video games desensitize players to real violence. According to studies, the violence present in video games can change the psychological responses in people that are exposed to violence in the real world. This is often taken in a negative light. Many argue that a desensitization to violence can also increase violent behavior in gamers. However, in the context of the military, desensitization to violence is an optimal consequence of these simulation games. I think that the moral issue is really whether or not they should be targeting young, impressionable gamers. In my opinion, I think the military should only use these games for those already enlisted in the military.
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That’s exactly what I thought of when reading this article. This also ties into our discussion in class about a certain mindset we have when we are playing a game that clouds our judgment and makes us believe that the only option we have is to shoot and kill. The attempt to persuade children at the age of 13 (par. 17) seems morally wrong to me since at this age, moral and psychological implications of war are not necessarily realized.
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Though its purpose is to prepare military recruit from mental trauma, I don’t really think that war and killing people are things for which one can actually mentally/emotionally prepare. Can a virtual death really be as close to emotionally/mentally impacting as a real death?
As far as boot camp 2.0, I wonder how well this game-like training of weapons or hardware translates into the live fire exercises. I think that virtual training isn’t as effective. This is seen through sports games (Wii), virtual pets, etc.
I’m also curious as to whether or not and how they incorporate mistakes (dropping grenades, low ammo, friendly fire, etc.) into the scenarios.
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In the readings for this week I was struck by the apparent extent of using video games as a recruitment technique. At first this seemed particularly insidious (particularly the desired targeting of people as young as 13). However, is this really significantly different than other methods to attract new recruits that have been around at least since WWII? Efforts like America’s Army certainly seem disingenuous, but perhaps this is just business as usual with a new facade.
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