From Sun Tzu to Xbox

Even without knowing it, you're being prepared for a new age. Many of you already understand better than my gen­c'ration ever will, the possibilities of computers. In some of your homes, the computer is as available as the televi­sion set. And I recently learned something quite inter­esting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The Air Force believes these kids will be outstanding pilots should they fly our jets. The comput­erized radar screen in the cockpit is not unlike the com­puterized video screen. Watch a 12-year-old take evasive action and score multiple hits while playing Spacr Invaders, and you will appreciate the skills of tomorrow's pilot. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't want the youth of this country to run home and tell their parents that the president of the United States says it's all right for them to go ahead and play video games all the time. Homework, sports, and friends still come first. What I am saying is that right now you're being prepared for tomorrow in many ways, and in ways that many of us who are older cannot fully comprehend."

Ronald Reagan, from a speech given at 'alt Disney World's EPCOT Center, March 8, 1983

In the Zone

The most famous arcade games of the genre's golden age bear the names of their clever little characters, be they protagonists or foes: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Centipede, Defender. The title of Atari's 1980 tank gunner Battlezone, however, is different. It describes not a character, but a field of action-a new kind of space that provided the game's novelty appeal.

Freed from the side-shuffling flatland that had heretofore defined video game design, Battlezone evokes a sparse three­dimensional world made from needle-thin neon-green lines. All items in view are decisively angled so as to appear to enlarge and recede as objects approach or grow distant, and the player has the ability to move not just right and left, but forward and backward as j11 For the first time, the arcade screen becomes an ersatz tndow, as the player peers into an illusory depth created via Battlezone's wire-framed graphical perspective. Like geometric Ii!lgrams made from nothing but beams of light, enemy tanks Itl owl through a boxy, minimalist realm that stretches all around III \60 degrees, seemingly to infinity; on the horizon, jagged I"."ks of pyramidal mountains loom at an eternally receding dis­t,lllce, punctuated by a lava-spewnngvo1cano.

In the arcade era, game graphics could be generated in one of IwO ways. Most games used raster displays. Like everyday tele­visions, a raster display creates visual patterns by assigning color to individual pixels, which are generated thirty (or more)

II mes a second by a horizontal scanning beam. But a few, like Blattlezone, used vector displays. Vector displays were the descendants of the Atomic-age CRTs, modified from radar oscil­loscopes for use by the SAGE Missile Defense System, and later employed to generate the first games of Spacewar!. Instead of scanning a succession of horizontal lines in order to cover the screen, a vector system sketched images in a more direct manner, shooting its light beam back and forth to draw dots and

I ines, while the rest of the screen remained black. As Spacewars developers knew, this default background meant that vector graphics were particularly suited for creating images of objects floating in the inky vacuum of outer space, an aesthetic that continued into the seventies and eighties. The classic 2-D space shooters Asteroids and Tempest were two

other well-known arcade titles that used vector display Though grounded, Battlezone's barren landscape and pitch-dark sky still evoked an otherworldly emptiness: one of its workin titles had been Moon Tank.

The means by which a Battlezone plaYer moves through th game's bare-bones 3-D world held their own revelations. Unlike most games of the time, the player does not manipulat a little "guy" through 2-D space, puppetmasterlike, as if moving a piece on a board game; rather, the player perceives the action through the perspect ive of the fictional tank gunner himself: you See what the1 gunner would see. And since the game world exteeInds lelft, right, and "in back" of you, it's possible to be shot at from outside your field of vision-from a tank attacking you from your blind spot, off-screen. This aspect makes Battlezone an ancestor of that now-ubiquitous video game genre, the first­person shooter-games, like Doom and Quake and all their gory offspring, that portray the action through a killer's-eye view.

Though moving-image media had existed for almost a cen­tury, the movies and television never had much success with the first-person narrative format-Bugs Bunny and George Burns's fourth-wall-violating asides to audiences notwithstanding. Only the most ardent cinephiles recall the minor 1947 film-noir The Lady in the Lake, which adapted a Raymond Chandler novel so that "you" were gumshoe Phillip Marlowe. Pre-Citizen Kane, Orson Welles was ready to shoot Joseph Conrad's Heart of Dark­ness entirely from (another) Marlow's literal point of view, but plans for the film collapsed during preproduction. Nor has tele­Vision memory been kind to Hugh Hefner's 1969 Playboy After Dark, a swanky first-person talk show that posited the viewer as yet another partygoer at Hef's. After Ref welcomed you through t he doors with a little chitchat, the camera tagged along with the smoke-jacketed publisher as he introduced you to guests like Roman Polanksi and Sharon Tate, Buffy Sainte-Marie or Don Rickles, and allowed you to sit down and listen in on their con­versations. The interactive nature of video games, however, made the first-person a more exciting choice, elevating it above a mere awkward gimmick. You were not just a ghost in the nar­rative machine: you had the power to move through the fictional world and alter it. Your actions made you an actor in the game.

Even Battlezone's cabinet and controllers were specially designed to enhance its realism. Instead of a normal TV-style screen, Battlezone boasted a tiny porthole that mimicked a periscope's viewfinder window: garners had to crouch down and press their faces against it, adding to its immersive feel. Stan­dard joysticks and buttons were replaced by a unique two-joystick system meant to mimic real tank controllers. Since its vector display was monochrome, the game's colors were provided by cellophane overlays: green for the terrain, and red for a top nav­igational panel that held a crudely rendered radar-style map and scoreboard.

Battlezone's success at evoking a virtual world inspired some fanciful tales. According to a spurious gamer legend of the time,

if a player's tank kept moving forward for at least an hour. it would finally reach these crystalline peaks, and within them find a fabled factory that was busy at work producing all those enemy tanks. In reality. any player who chose to drive away from battle in order to explore the zone would find himself zapped by a disciplinary missile, programmed for the express purpose of discouraging such a non-income-generating activity: after all, a pacifist player could potentially explore for hours on a single quarter. Atari game developer Lyle Rains reported another rumor, gleaned from a letter written to the company from a Bat. t/ezone fan, "who said that a friend of his had told him that if you drove far enough you finally got to the volcano, and if you d rove over t he top of the volcano, you could go down into the crater. And he said that inside the crater there was a castle, and that you could go inside and explore the castle. Of course, none of this was true."

While the immersive quality of Battlezone, enabled by its novel first-person perspective and the player's freedom of move­ment in a 3-D environment, may have seemed more strikingly realistic to players in 1980, such actions took place in a milieu that held some strangely unreal qualities. Batt/ezone evokes a world of tanks without drivers, an impossibly empty, clean, clear desert of cold geometric machines bereft of round, warm human bodies. When hit by an artillery shell, enemy tanks burst into a penumbra of isometric splinters, like a shattering pane of glass. The game is a vision of war without death, a purely mechanical hattIe, depicting nothing but a clash of data, creating the explo­sions of war without corporeal destruction.

Battlezone sparked literary imaginations as well. In 1982, British author Martin Amis-then an arcade-addicted laddie of barely thirty-two-published a now-obscure tome on coin-op games entitled Invasion of the Space Invaders. A colorful, large format guide to conquering the top games of the time, it is written in an uncharacteristically poppy, enthusiastic tone. Amis has since all but disavowed the book (according to one account, mere mention of it in his presence summons a with­ering scowl), but it nevertheless stands as one of the earliest and more erudite attempts to grapple with aesthetics of com­puter gaming. In it Amis confesses a love for Battlezone, describing it as a "futuristic tank game, with real tank con­trols, radar, enemy and terrain etched in diagrammatic silhou­ette, and wonderful accuracy of distance and perspective." According to Amis, its then-unique evocation of virtual space required a new way of thinking, of orienting one's self in its imaginary world. Battlezone. Amis writes, is "a game of special awareness.

"Admire, first, the cute controls," he suggests. "To begin with, I thought this was gimmickry-why not just a single joystick? But the double-fisted handlebars give a crucial sense of simul­taneous forward and sideways movement, and give extra drama to the backward lurch. The radar gizmo is pretty perfunctory, but the screen is a gem, combining the look of op or pop art with

the feel of a genuine battlezone: limited vision, nasty surpri panicky adjustments while the enemy tank wheels slowly round to get you in its sights." (Another game-loving Brit, Stev Poole, corrected Amis's art-historical comparisons in his well wrought 2000 study of game aesthetics, Trigger Happy. "Wher pop art glories in colorful flat shading and razored curves," Poole coolly counters, "Battlezone evinces contempt for color, for material, for substance itself. Such qualities, it murmur seductively, are illusory anyway: The edge is everything: the front ier where one plane meets another, where turret joins body, where, missile meets flank.")

According to Amis, Battlezone drew in a particular breed of garner, a I ittle different than the average Pac-Man-fevered teen. "It attracts a relatively middle-class and elderly audience," Amis reports. "Its patrons and admirers are intense, thin-lipped char­acters, whose fantasy lives are clearly of martial bent. They cer· tainly look like officer material to me." If this account can be read as more than mere parody, it would seem to match the stereotype of the hobby war gamer as a pasty, trembling milque­toast who nonetheless harbors an inner Napoleon, unleashed only through make-believe warfare-a character type perhaps even more well known in Britain than in the u.S. "These Rom­mels and Pattons of the arcades," Amis continues, "they seem to know exactly what is happening, they seem to know exactly where everything is. Enemy tanks fire at them, but they have judged the angle to perfection; the shells pass them by; they II'I reat, they manoeuvre, they come surging in again for their II II. They dream of North Africa, of carnage at Carthage, of Ther­mlopylae. I haven't got the stamina, or the officer qualities."

PLATO's Maze though frequently remembered as the progenitor of first-person shooters, Battlezone was not in fact the first game to use such a perspective. Racing games like Atari's 1976 Night Driver and Vectorbeam's 1979 Speed Freak had provided first-person views earlier, although neither of these allowed the player much leeway in maneuvering through their barely-there virtual envi­ronments-created through a few downward-moving dots meant to represent the merest outlines of a road in darkness. And they definitely did not involve any guns. But even earlier in that decade, two pioneering first-person games emerged independ­ently of one another, created within the online networks used predominantly by American research and educational facilities.

A game variously called MazeWar (named perhaps as a take­off on Spacewar!), Maze Wars, The Maze Game, or just Maze was invented in 1973 by two student programmers interning at Ames Research center. Operated by NASA, the Center was located at Moffet Field, then a major naval air base, nestled in Silicon Valley. In Maze Wars, a first-person protagonist wandered through the walls of a wire-framed labyrinth, shooting (or being shot by) a cadre of robot enemies. Constructed from bare-bones graphics, Maze War looks like a mouse's-eye view of a laboratory

experiment. By the mid-seventies, the game had spread through the academic programming world. It became such a craze that DARPA banned Maze War from its ARPAnet because more than half the monthly traffic on the Net was being eaten up by online MazeWarmatches.

A year after geeks first started blasting their way through Maze War, programmers at the University of Illinois concocted a different first-person game, created for play on the now largely forgotten PLATO Network. Initially funded by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the National Science Foundation, PLATO was a unique network, initiated in the 1960S and distinct from ARPAnct, devclopcd specifically for creating new possibilities in cducat ion and training. By the mid-seventies, the PLATO Net­work extended to over a thousand educational facilities around the U.S. The network's communications capabilities enabled the invention of a number of types of applications that wouldn't see widespread impact on the Internet until the 1980S and 1990s: in the early seventies, PLATO users were already using early ver­sions of instant messaging, bulletin board services, and chat rooms. Former PLATO users today fondly recall its distinctive orange-screened flat-panel "gas plasma" display monitors, which allowed a level of graphical sophistication which unmatched by the Internet until well into the 1990s.

Thanks to its advanced display capabilities, PLATO also became a fertile seedbed of early online, multiplayer games. Most of these were created and distributed in an unofficial manner, as university geeks explored the potential of PLATO's innovative, graphics-friendly programming language. In the PLATO environment, the sharing of information over a wide net­work engendered a quickly evolving ecosystem of ground­breaking software, and a subsequent community of committed garners, a number of whom would go on to populate the com­mercial i.ndustry.

While the Air Force was still blasting dots in Thailand, for example, PLATO users were playing an improved, networked version of Spacewar!. One of the earliest games native to PLATO was Empire, a team-based graphical game of intergalactic con­quest, initially programmed by John Daleske and Silas Warner and based loosely on Star Trek (the original teams were named Federation, Kazari lor Klingon], Romulan, and Orion). Pro­grammer Jim Bowery became inspired by Empire to code a 3-D version of the game in 1974, which he called Spasim, or SPASIM, in the all-caps nomenclature of early coders. The name was short for "Space Simulation," though its players ended up pro­nouncing it like "spasm." Created for a new kind of communica­tions network, Spasim in turn visualized a new kind of online phenomenon-a phantom 3-D world, an imagined but shared reality. It can be seen as the ancestor of massively multiplayer online games of today like Ultima OnLine, The Sims, or World of Warcraft. "To see a dynamic mathematical space open up in full perspective visuals for the first time was an intoxicating expe­rience," Bowery later recalled in his online account of Spasim's genesis. "As most authors must experience when they are po sessed of their muse, it felt like I was simultaneously creatin and discovering a new universe."

Spasim did indeed open up a new universe. Bowery argu that there is an "intellectual genealogy" running from Spasim to several other networked 3-D games on PLATO, which in turn would inspire some of the first well-known 3-D arcade titles. After studying the Spasim code, Warner modified it into Airace, a multiuser game that gave players a first-person view of an air craft cockpit, through which they could view a basic landscap and the planes of other players as they raced one another. Airace eevolveed into a game called Airflight. According to Bowery and oj hers, Airflight in turn inspired programmer Bruce Artwick to develop the 1979 game FLight Simulator, the first such product marketed for home computer use. After several successful ver­sions of Flight Simulator, it was redesigned for the first genera­tion of IBM PCs, becoming the massively popular Microsoft Flight Simulator series, one of the longest-running, most influ­ential, and successful game franchises of all time.

"White hat" hacker Carolyn Meinel describes the immersive, surreal experience of an early PLATO flight simulator game that was probably Airfight: "Cyberpilots all over the US pick out their crafts: Phantoms, MiGs, F-104S, the X-I5, Sopwith Camels. Vir­tual pilots fly out of digital airports and try to shoot each other down and bomb each others' airports. While flying a Phantom, I see a chat message on the bottom of my screen. 'I'm about to

hoot you down.' Oh, no, a MiG on my tail. I dive and turn hoping Itt get my tormentor into my sights. The screen goes black. My It'l minal displays the message 'You just pulled 37 Gs. You now look more like a pizza than a human being as you slowly flutter 10 earth.' " In another anecdote, Meinel remembers her surprise II seeing a model of the stars hip enterprise entering the war

pace, which destroyed all the other aircraft and then vanished. PLATO has been hacked!" she recalls thinking.

PLATO also provided an incubator for Battlezone's ancestor ,I tank simulator called Panther PLATO. In 1977, programmers at Ihe U.S. Army Armor School modified Panther PLATO into an obscure prototype training system for tank gunners called Panzer PLATO, which reportedly boasted highly accurate cannon ballistics. (It is not fully clear from the scant anecdotal records of PLATO'S game roster whether Panther PLATO was a modification of Panzer PLATO, or vice versa: a detailed history of this parallel Internet remains to be written.) According to Bowery, Panther PLATO was the direct inspiration for Battle­zone; he claims that Atari had PLATO accounts, and therefore its I'mployees would have experienced Panther PLATO prior to the brainstorming sessions that led to Battlezone's development.

Electric Youth

Martin Amis's sardoniC assessment of Battlezone's fan base

turned out to be more spot-on than he probably realized. In 19⁸⁰, representatives from the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (or TRADOC) approached Atari, expressing interest in having the company produce a modified, more realistic ver sion of Battlezone that could be used as a trainer for the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, a new tanklike armored transport and battle unit that had been introduced just that year. It was the first potential government job that Atari had been offered; after all, it was a worldwide, youth-oriented consumer brand, then operating at the peak of a cutting-edge industry, not one of the stodgy military contracting firms of the mainframe era. The olive-green uniforms of TRADOC's generals must have seemed II ke an unlikely match for the polo-shirt, jeans, and tennis-shoe sceell(' of Atari's offices. At many other technology companies, a potcnlially lucrative defense contract would be met with enthu­siasm. But at Atari, where many still held to the countercultural hacker ethic of the sixties and seventies, the prospect caused rifts between programmers and management.

Today, video games are produced on the collaborative model of Hollywood filmmaking, with numerous teams of individuals working together to create a single game. But in 1981, the sit­uation was far more auteurist: commercial games were typi­cally the creation of a lone programmer, or maybe a team of two or three, although the game's initial concept might have been hashed out in a larger brainstorming session. In Battle­zone's case, the auteur in question was hotshot designer Ed Rotberg, who was not happy about the idea of his innovative arcade hit becoming a military application. "I didn't think it was a business that we should be getting into," Rotberg later told games historian Steven L. Kent in The Ultimate History of Video Games. "You've got to remember what things were like in the late 1970s, and where those of us who were in the business came from-our cultural background. There were any number of jobs to be had by professional programmers in military industries or in military-related industries. Those of us who found our way to video games ... it was sort of a counter-culture thing. We didn't want anything to do with the military.l was doing games; I didn't want to train people to kill."

Nor did Rotberg want the baggage of government protocols and regulations entangling the California-style programmers' paradise atmosphere of Atari's heyday. He recalls that his protests led to a shouting match with his division's president, in front of some of Atari's highest-level executives. Nevertheless, the company remained adamant about going through with pro­ducing a prototype for the Army. Subsequently, Rotberg insisted that if his game was going to be recoded to fit the Army's speci­fications, he himself would have to be the one to do it-even though the Army's timetable demanded that he complete what became known as Army Battlezone (sometimes remembered as Military Battlezone or simply the Bradley Trainer) in a mere three months. According to Rotberg, the Army hoped to intro­duce a working model of Army Battlezone at an upcoming inter­national TRADOC conference, where it would be publicized by a global satellite broadcast. "Since Battlezone was my baby, and it

132,

From Sun Tzu to Xbox

was Battlezone that they wanted to convert, and there was a deadline to get it done, I agreed to do the prototype," Rotberg remembers. However, he stipulated that his bosses "promise that I would have nothing to do with any future plans to do any thing with the military. They gave that assurance to me, and I lost three months of my life working day and night and hardly ever seeing my wife." Soon after producing Army Battlezone, Rotberg left Atari and formed a new company with some other Atari alumni.

Mod i fyi ng the coin-op Battlezone into an accurate training system proved to be an extensive job, involving numerous intri­Caae alterations to both software and hardware. "First of all, we were not modeling some fantasy tank, we were modeling an infantry fighting vehicle that had a turret that could rotate inde­pendently of the tank," Rotberg told Kent. In Battlezone, the tank could only shoot in one direction: forward. In order to replicate the Bradley's true range, Army Battlezone needed to allow the player to aim within a much larger field of action. The game's new artillery were modeled on the actual weapons the Bradley carried, down to the number of rounds available before reloading. "It had a choice of guns to use," Rotberg recalls. "Instead of a gravity-free cannon, you had ballistics to configure. You had to have identifiable targets because they wanted to train gunners to recognize the difference between friendly and enemy vehicles. So, there were a whole slew of different types of enemy vehicles and friendly vehicles that had to be drawn and modeled. Then we had to model the physics of the different kinds of weapons." The opposing forces' tanks were designed to reflect the charac­teristics of Soviet-made tanks of the time. In the original game, fIying saucers occasionally buzzed into the frame and could be shot down. These were replaced with Soviet helicopters. Also added were U.S. and NATO tanks; prospective gunners had to learn to tell the difference between allies and enemies, avoiding friendly fire.

Army Battlezone also departed from the two-joystick console of the original. Replacing the arcade controllers, Rotberg and his team installed a strange H-shaped "yolk" controller that looked like a stripped-down steering wheel, modeled to replicate the actual controls of a Bradley in miniature, as well as a series of switches and buttons to control range, choose weapons sys­tems, and other functions-a far more complicated arrangement that anything found at the local pizza parlor. Though the gaming public would never have a chance to shoot down the Soviet menace in Army Battlezone, its unique controller did make its way out into the market. During Rotberg's final days, he worked on another first-person-perspective vector game, ten­tatively named Warp Speed, but left before completing it. Just around then, Atari finalized a deal to produce branded games with Lucasfilm, and so Warp Speed was finished as the 1983 arcade game Star Wars, using the Army Battlezone yolk con­troller. Little did young Star Wars fans know that as they zapped away at wire-framed TIE Fighters zooming past the Death Star, their hands were wrapped around a carefully constructed replica of a Bradley Infantry Vehicle's steering wheel.

What happened with the actual working models of Army Bat­tlezone, however, remains something of a mystery; it appears Atari produced no morethan a couple ofprototypes, and there is no indi­cation that the system was ever used for real training purposes. For dccades, the fate of these few consoles remained legendary within lihe I iny world of arcade game collectors; despite the testi­IIIOInie'S off HoI be'rg OIlnd ot Ihers, some game buffs weren't convinced 111011 the plotolypes Ihad e'ver been built, or had they been, specu­Iate,d 111111 tIIe'Y In,adbee'ln quickly dismantled.

OII"e AIIIIII BIIttle'zotne' console may have perhaps been in use , .. IIII!!" ... It)H \. wht'n H rcporter from the Christian ScienceMon­It,)/ altte'nded a confe'rence for the Association of the u.s. Army III Washington, D.C., which included what the paper called an ".II mS bazaar" of over two hundred booths showcasing the latest wares of major defense contractors. "Nearby, a young civilian executive concentrated fiercely on Atari's Battlezone video game set up by one arms merchant," wrote the reporter, who was harshly critical of this convocation of Cold War capitalists; the youthful exec at the video game seemed to sum up his senti­ments. "Somehow, as one surveyed this essence of national security at its most commercial," the reporter continued, "the words of Herman Melville came to mind: 'All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.'

However, in 2002, an arcade video game collector named Scott Evans obtained one of the original Army Battlezone sets, and posted images of it on his Web site, Atari Games Museum (atarigames.com). According to the photos, it looks like a typical Battlezone console, complete with porthole-style viewer and col­orful cabinet side-art depicting orange, purple, and blue stars streaking upward against a cartoon tank. A forward-facing panel of buttons, switches, and the Bradley yolk, however, had replaced its joystick shelf. Above the screen, its marquee title sign had been altered: where it usually reads BATTLEZONE, the horizontal display instead says BRADLEY TRAINER, in military­style block lettering above the cartoon of a shooting tank. An anonymous ex-employee of Atari e-mailed Evans about his find. "I am really curious where you got it," he writes. "As far as anyone knows (or is willing to admit) there were only two made. One went to a conference at Ft. Eustice [the Virginia site of TRADOC's Training Support Center] and was never seen again. The other is in my old boss's barn."

Pushbutton Warfare

By the early 1980s, video games had been around for over a decade, and had never strayed too far from the world of defense technologists. What, then, did the Army hope to achieve from Army Battlezone? According to Rotberg, its addictive game play was a major factor: valuable training could be embedded into a pleasant pastime that might actually encourage soldiers to hone their skills on their own. "The idea was that such a simulator

could be made into a game that would encourage the soldier use it," Rotberg told an interviewer in the mid-nineties. "Th would learn not only the basic operation of the JFV [Infant FightingVehicle] technology, but would also learn to distingui between the friendly and enemy vehicle silhouettes."

"The idea is to take an existing game system or 'device,e don't like the word 'game'-modify it as a modern weapon system and build necessary skills into the device," TRADO project manager Capt. Steven J. Cox told the Philadelp'" Inquirer in 1982. "If the trainee fires just as well on the real tank as Ihe did on tihe dc'vice, then we've acquired a device that pro duces tihe same result as training on the tank for considerably Iess cost," a1 device that could successfully "test psychomoto skills" before the student had even stepped inside a real tank.

General Donn A. Starry, TRADOC's commanding general In the early eighties, oversaw the Atari collaboration. A general who led combat operations in Vietnam and Korea, Starry heade TRADOC from 1977 to 1981, and in later years helped draft th plans for Operation Desert Storm. While at TRADOC, he per ceived a need for new methods of training that were more in step with experiences of soldiers who had grown up in an electroni age. "They've learned to learn in a different world," he stated in a lecture at TRADOC's 1981 commander's conference, "a world of television, electronic toys and games, computers and a host 0 other electronic devices. They belong to a TV and technology generation. In an era that has seen such fantastic technological achic'vements, how is it that our soldiers are still sitting in class- rooms still listening to lectures, still depending on books and III lier paper reading materials, when possibly new and better 111,',105 for training have been available for many years?" (In ltlcdition, Starry may have seen at least some of this electronic generation learning from computers via ARPAnet and the PlATO Network, both of which could be found at military educational facilities at the time.)

Starry's ideas sound more like Marshall McLuhan than Douglas MacArthur, then keep in mind a speculation made by Ihe former thinker. The Canadian critic argued in Under­ICnding Media; The Extensions of Man that while gunpowder II,Id been known about for centuries, the notion that the sub­tance could be used to propel a missile through space toward a 1.11get only came about once artists had mastered linear per­pce~ tive in painting. McLuhan's claim is in fact historically 1.1 be-firearms existed at least a century before the early 1500s, when Filippo Brunelleschi rediscovered the lost classical yt-.tcm of creating the illusion of depth through compositional li'neeS that converge in a vanishing point-but his larger message remains relevant. for although the Army Battlezone 1"'l!Cect would never see full fruition, the virtual 3-D space 1111I'ned up by Rotberg's Battlezone sparked a few military 11I1Inds at TRADOC to imagine a new kind of learning for battle. I\s In McLuhan's technofable, an artful representation influanceed the art of real war.

Some game histories have speculated that the Army intended to get around normal procural protocols by purchasing Army Battlezone units from Atari not officially as training system, but as just another time-killing distraction for Army commi saries, thus sneaking a bit of valuable education into the sol diers' recreation time. While this rumor remains unverifiable, it profile of early eighties training systems in the magazine Army mentions that "the Army plans both formal and informal use of specially programmed arcade-type games," further reporting that t he Army's Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, "plans to lUI nlsh day rooms and other off-duty gathering spots on the post with :tlcade games based on M60 and Mi tank trainers to provide' amusements that will have practical value and stimu­late competition in basic gunnery and command skills."

For Starry, Army Battlezone might have also pointed the way to the future of Army recruiting. After all, if operating a tank were really so much like playing a video game, then the malls of America were filled with prospective enlistees. "All of the people in those arcades are volunteers," said Starry. "In fact, they are paying for the use of the machines, and two-thirds of these games are military in nature-aircraft versus air defense, tank against antitank and so forth."

Starry's estimation of how many arcade games circa 1981 were military-themed is a bit high-players at that time were more likely to be jamming through the fantasy worlds of Cen­tipede, Frogger, or Donkey Kong. Nevertheless, there were indeed a significant number of titles that enacted military sce­IIIlrios, even if they were typically packaged within a science-fictional context. Researchers at TRADOC'S Training Support Center in Eustis, Virginia, thought that more than a few of these lind a potential for real defense training applications. In 1981, TRADOC told Army that they had conducted a wide-ranging study of the arcade game scene and concluded, "many of the popular arcade games already have features that would be useful for training purposes."

According to TRADOC, many of the same games that had been designed for the primary purpose of extracting quarters from teenagers' pockets held within them an unrealized potential for educating future generations of American soldiers. Red Baron, for example, was another first-person vector game that had been developed by Atari programmers, designed to run on Battle­zone's hardware. According to Army's report, this game, which placed the player in the cockpit of a WWI dog-fighting biwing plane, might have "something for helicopter gunners," while Atari's legendary Missile Command "has controls very similar to the Army's forward-area alerting radar (FAAR), the warning set for low-altitude air-defense systems." Another game that the article refers to as Ambush might "be used to teach junior non­commissioned officers squad tactics." (The writer may be refer­ring to either the arcade game M-79 Ambush or the home console game Armor Ambush, both 2-D, third-person tank shooters.)

Imagine the strangeness of the scenario: TRADOC'S generals trolling through the local arcades, clipboards in hand, peering over the shoulders of teenagers in order to observe the finer points of the latest joystick shoot-'em-up. But would that really have been so unusual? As video game history shows, the direc't ancestors of these bleeping eighties playthings had emerged from a main framed world whose existence directly depended on America's Cold War military needs. Even if games had been invented as a side effect of military research, it took barely a decade for them to end up back at the home base, so to speak. Army BattleZone was only one instance of this interplay be'twe'e'ln the zones of fun and war; as a pilot program, it pre saged 11Iany ideas about integrating video games into soldier training that would take hold in the 1990S with newer, more Ilexlblc technologies.

Quarter Masters General Starry's offhand depiction of arcade games as over­whelmingly war-themed may have been debatable, but was, in fact, in line with a growing popular sentiment-among con­cerned parents, at least-that the games were unnecessarilyvio­lent, even militaristic. As video games became fixtures in living rooms around the world, and children absconded to local arcades with rolls of quarters in hand, the first wave of now­familiar anti-video game backlash emerged. Frequent news­paper editorials of the time express such fears from parents' groups, and in 1985, media scholar Terri Toles ventured into a local arcade to see for herself. Though probably situated to Starry's political left, Toles nevertheless shares the general's outlook in her report "Video Games and Military Ideology."

"The connection is apparent to observers who merelywalk into an arcade," Toles writes. "Glancing at the names of the games­names like Missile Command, Battlezone and Space War-and the drawings of swooping fighter planes, imposing tanks and colorful explosions painted on the machines seem to prove the point. When the observer turns to see who challenges "Is there no warrior mightier than I?' in cultured tones only to discover that the voice emanates from a machine, her suspicions are confirmed. It's not even necessary to be near an arcade to uncover the trend. Merely reading newspaper articles about video games introduces one to the worlds of 'electronic sadism,' 'martial space arts,' and "space soldiers' that popu late the arcades."

Though perhaps not as flashy as their futuristic fantasy counterparts, real soldiers were to be found at some of these game parlors. Military recruiters began visiting arcades in search of fresh enlistees; a handful of newspaper articles from the time testify that Army, Navy, and Marine recruiters all claimed to target video game players, either as official policy or otherwise. A 1982 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer intro­duces us to one Marine recruiter who frequented the teen hangouts of Woodbury, New Jersey. Like a hunter stalking deer in a thicket of woods, John

Fisher entered the pinball arcade at the Deptford Mall. His spit-shined black shoes were as quiet as cats' paws as he weaved his way through a maze of video warriors, their lightning-fast teenage fingers zapping hordes of space invaders and homicidal robots with pulsating laser beams. Dressed in neatly pressed, buff-colored khakis, Fisher watched the action in silence, while the youngsters tested their reflexes. When there was a lull in the action, or when a youth ran out of quarters, he would move with th11' grac'e' and swiftness of a matador. With an engaging Mmile~ (/nd an open right hand, Fisher would introduce himse'f: "III. I'm US Marine Sgt. David Fisher. If you have (/ few minutes, I'd Like to tell you some of the things the Mamne Corps can offer a young man like yourself."

Another article from the same paper profiled Chief Petty Officer Julia Reed, the Navy's 1981 recruiter of the year, who was based in California. "When they play those games, they are thinking of defense and challenge," Reed claimed. "It's really no different than war. I hate to put it that way, but it's true .... A lot of these kids are technologically oriented, and a lot of them join up because they know the way of the world now is not a master's degree but solid training in data processing."

"I get to the arcade about 4 in the afternoon, warm up and watch them play," Reed told the reporter. "Then, maybe I'll play a game with them, and buy 'em a Coke. If I'm winning the sales job, I don't win at the game. If they're being a jerk and 1 can win, I try to overcome them. When we talk, I try to do 'blueprinting': find out what they are doing, what they'd like to do ... then ask them about the Navy and whether they've ever thought about sonar or radar. Sixty percent of them will take a test. Overall, they scored a lot higher than others."

In interviews, the recruiters cited the parallels between playing video games and operating weapons systems as prime reasons to target joystick warriors. "The multi-directional locater ball on the Missile Command game is pretty close to the system I use for air defense," an anonymous Navy weapons spe­cialist told the same reporter. "You have enemy aircraft defined on the screen by radar. You have your sight as an electronic cursor directed by the ball. You push a button, the missiles fire, and 'poof' no more aircraft."

Vincent MoscO'S Pushbutton Fantasies, a 1982 academic study of the social impact of emerging video technologies, offered an account of arcade recruitment from a young gamer's perspective. The statement is attributed to one of Mosco's own undergraduate students, who was evidently a bit of an arcade whiz.

Last year I worked in a pinball arcade. As an attendant I had access to aU the free pinball, in my case video games, I could play. Soon, with my combined previous skills and added accelerated skills, I have become an expert player. As a result, I have been approached on at least two separate occasions by military personnel giving me serious pitches to join the Armed Forces. My best offer came from a Major General while I was on vacation in Florida. He was Alo astounded by my play on the [sic] Missile Command that he offered to personally see that I would by-pass all the time-consuming preliminaries, such as boot camp, and insignificant, low-paying assignments, and start at a highLy-skilled, high-paying job in baLiistics. I was skep­ticaL so l questioned his presence in the arcade, but he produced proper identification and explained that he regularly brought his grandchildren to play.

TIll' dre'am of joystick jockeys becoming real warriors bubbled up into pop culture. No less an authority on 1980s adolescent entertainment than Steven Spielberg deployed this notion in his preface to Amis's Invasion of the Space Invaders. "The aliens have landed. and the world will never be the same again," the mogul-auteur writes. "You've got to believe it-there's a war on, and the strange thing about this war is if you should once make the mistake of volunteering, you'll find active service hopelessly habit-forming."

This fantasy of a secret, permeable membrane between war­themed video games and real war can also be seen in the 1983 thriller WarGames, in which a nerdy-cool young hacker taps into the Pentagon's missile command system via his home PC; thinking he has merely uncovered a mother lode of cool miltary-themed games, he starts playing one called "Global Thermonuclear War" and thereby unwittingly initiates a simulated attack, nearly triggering World War Ill.

A kiddie sci-fi movie from 1985, The Last Starfighter, bears a I ,eIated premise. Alex, a young arcade hotshot who lives in a Cal­IIornia trailer park, is visited by an emissary from another planet, who abducts him to help an alien race battle their ene­lilies in deep space. Turns out that the teen's favorite game was "ctually placed on Earth to train potential star fighter pilots; the ,II iens had been tipped off to Alex's skills by monitoring his high Scores. Soon Alex finds himself zapping a very real collection of Space invaders. Though it boasted some of the earliest uses of CGI in its battle sequences, The Last Starfighter remains a hokey Star Wars derivative, hitching its fortune on the video fame gimmick; but like some of the more famous teen comedies of the era, it poses Alex's challenge as an opportunity for self­I ealization. In ads for The Last Starfighter, Alex appears on the side of an empty highway at night, the road disappearing on the horizon behind him. "He didn't find his dreams," the film's tagline reads. "His dreams found him."

GraphicWar

TRACOC's souped-up Atari shooter has survived in gamer lore as an oddity; many remember it as a dead-end project whose legacy, at best, involves serving as an unwitting ancestor to con­temporary military video games like Americas Army. But in fact, the story of the Battlezone Bradley trainer is hardly sin gular. Ed Rotberg's hesitations notwithstanding, the video gam industry from its very beginnings had never been fully discret from the activities of military-sponsored computer research And even if Army Battlezone never saw full fruition, it existed aii part of a larger post-Vietnam shift within the u.s. military that emphasized a greater investment in peacetime training, espe' cially via simulation. The confluence of these tendencies would reach new levels of activity in the 1990s, as technological and commercial advancements in computing brought the u.s. and the world into the throes of what publicists trumpeted as the digital revolution. What had been sporadic, even chance inter· actions between military research and popular videogaming would strengthen substantially in a conscious effort to bring these two very different realms together for mutual benefit.

For many years generals had used games as tools for strategy, leadership skills building, and the analysis of past battles; but large-scale games could also be useful for training troops. As their ancestors had done with the tiny blue and red armies of kriegspeil, generals divided up their own soldiers into similarly named teams, set them into some artificial environment, and had them engage in mock battle, as if ordered into elaborate matches of human chess. In the early years of World War II, for example, a soldier in training before shipping off to Europe may have felt slightly ridiculous when he found himself brandishing a wooden gun and storming a supply truck that had been cheaply costumed with a canvas-and-frame to resemble a German tank. I'or most of the history of warfare, however, these kinds of edu­e,ltional theatrics were relatively rare. Until the late nineteenth ecentury, conventional military wisdom held that the only real classroom for a soldier was the live battlefield. The graduates of his deadly academy would be graded as much by fate as prowess; war was the ultimate immersive learning experience.

But in the early years of the twentieth century, a new idea began to emerge, better suited for the age of mechanized war­fare. It was the notion that a lone soldier might learn by inter­facing with a solo game or personalized electronic contrivance rather than a set of other soldiers; for the first time, a com­batant's relationship to his machine might prove as crucial as his relationship to his fellow soldiers. The advent of the air­plane-whose speedy militarization became widely known via the celebrated World War I dogfights of Eddie Rickenbacker and the Red Baron-brought with it a unique training problem: how could aerial pilots be taught quickly and efficiently without risking their lives? In 1934, for example, almost a dozen Army Air Corps pilots perished in crashes during a single week of training. The reason: the Air Corps (the ancestor of the modern Air Force) taught its pilots to fly by watching the ground, and that particular week had brought a bout of cloudy, vision­limiting weather. In response, the Air Corps contracted Edwin Link, an aeronautics aficionado and inventor, who had con­structed a novel means of teaching pilots how to fly not by orienting themselves to the ground, but instead by learnin interface intuitively with the airplane's control panels.

The son of a piano and organ manufacturer, Edwin Link up during aviation's pioneering days. Passionate about fl but unable to afford full flying lessons, the young Link pract It with a friend's airplane by taxiing it on the runway, trying to a feel for its controls with his hands and feet until the syst became second nature. Like other types of hacking, it was activity that must have seemed obsessive, if not slightly pathetic, to outside observers. But it was during these taU forays that. Link came upon the idea for a device called the e'av aa ion t rai ner," which he soon constructed. Made of blue-painted wood, t he aviation trainer looked like a miniature hobbyhors airplane with a wingspan of twelve feet, mounted on a shorte squat pedestal. The prospective pilot sat in its almost full-sizeed cockpit, which held a complete and realistic set of controls.

When operated like a real airplane, the "blue box" trainer's internal system of electrically powered vacuum pumps and bellows-jerry-rigged out of the guts of musical instrument.. from his father's Link Piano and Organ Company-moved th device around to simulate an airplane's pitch and roll. It was not essentially new-simpler models had been used as early as World War I-but it was the first to take into account the rapidly increasingly complexity of the modern airplane's controls, and the first to teach prospective pilots the skills to "fly blind," or operate the plane primarily through interacting and responding to the airplane itself, rather than orienting one's self with the land 11111 sky.ln a crude but effective manner, the Link trainer was also II It. n rst step toward training through a virtual environment.

Link's device caught on slowly. In the early 1930s, he operated a successful Link Flying School in upstate New York, but after the depression depleted his business, the blue box found a new role as a mere midway attraction at Coney Island's amusement park. It wouldn't remain a kiddie ride for long. Following the Air Corps' (I'll i ning disaster of 1934-and a virtuoso stunt by Link, who f1ew to meet them without incident through what seemed to be an impos­sibly blinding storm, according to his company's official history­the Army ordered six of Link's trainers for $3,500 apiece. Other requisitions soon followed, from both commercial and military sources. During World War II, Link Aviation Devices Inc. supplied blue boxes to every aviation facility operated by U.S. and Allied forces. Link's company reportedly produced over 10,000 trainers during the war years, pumping out one blue box every 45 seconds. Today, Link Simulation & Training exists as a division of L3 Com­munications, a major aerospace, surveillance, and communica­tions contractor to the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, national intelligence a gencies, and other entities.

After World War II and the birth of the modern computer, what would become known as "simulation training" would serve a growing role in American military culture, and consequently became an increasingly lucrative business for high-tech con­tracting firms. Certain elements of the wartime economy

became persistent business during the Cold War; as the emphasis switched from the engagement in active warfare to the cultivation of potential power-both through the arms race and the maintenance of gigantic, combat-ready standing armies­training took on a new prominence, especially since a dizzying array of new weapons systems required rapid reeducation, even if few of these nifty killing machines would never see battle.

The push to computerize simulation training came quickly.

While World War 11 raged on, the Navy approached MIT about using computers to build a more adaptable version of the Link trainer. The idea became Project Whirlwind, and its goal was to ("I patt' a compu·teri'7.ed control panel screen that responded inst nnt aneously t0 the pilot's input. Unlike the Link trainer, the Whirlwind trainer would be able to be reprogrammed to adapt to any number of different airplane configurations. But once MIT's researchers got deep into the project, the Whirlwind computer they created evolved far beyond its original purpose as a flight simulator. In the process, MIT's engineers ended up inventing most of the components of digital technology-including the dis­play screen, the light gun, networking, the transmission of data over phone lines, magnetic core memory, and numerous other components-and the project soon morphed into an even more ambitious attempt to create a global missile-defense system, code-named SAGE. The first real-time digital flight simulator would not be realized until the 1960s, with the advent of the Link Mark I computer, designed for this purpose.

In the subsequent decades, computerized training simula­tions proliferated through all ranks and branches of the mili­tary. The earliest, like flight simulators, were best suited to train for the operation of tanks and submarines-systems that already included a mediated interface with the outside world in their actual functioning. But as audiovisual technologies developed, a growing multitude of electronic devices were introduced for military training purposes, educating soldiers in everything from firing missiles to wiring electrical panels: the interactive, high-tech descendants of WwII instructional films. Videogame pioneer Ralph Baer, for example, developed a groundbreaking series of interactive video systems at Sanders Associates that used interactive videotape and, later, videodisc, to train soldier rifle marksmanship, antitank artillery, and even automotive repair, all employing a regular commercial television set as monitor.

Until the 1980s, these simulators were almost exclusively stand-alone systems, created to teach specific tasks and specific systems. And they were expensive. In the late 1970s, a single cut­ting-edge flight simulator could cost as much as $35 million, and a tank simulator $18 million. In some cases, simulators could cost more than twice as much as weapons systems they were simulating. As a result of this research, the Department of Defense was the largest underwriter of the development of com­puter graphics technologies until the 1990s.

Consensual Hallucination

The descendants of the Link trainers-up to and including the' Army Battlezone project-had a significant shortcoming: Holly wood conventions notwithstanding, wars aren't fought by lonee tank gunners or pilots flying solo. They're won by armies groups of individuals working together in a complex network of protocols and decision-making. While early simulators might have helped strengthen the man-machine interface, they didn't do much in the way of teaching the crucial man-to-man interface of real combat. Sure, group interactions might have been rela· t ively easy to teach in the days of foot soldiers, but in an age of mechanized infantry and air assaults, doing so became nearly i m poss i bIe; t he on Iy adequate means of training seemed to be actual warfare.

In 1983, Major Jack Thorpe began thinking about how to create a simulator that allowed individual trainees to work together inside a shared virtual environment. Thorpe had pro­posed a similar idea back in 1978, when he was developing flight simulator technology with the Air Force. At the time, such a system seemed prohibitively expensive, and would probably have required an impossible amount of computing power for the necessary graphic generation. But now Thorpe was working at DARPA, and the quickly growing ARPAnet seemed to hold a solu­tion. Why couldn't it be built as a distributed network, like ARPAnet then, or the Internet today? In this model, the intensive data processing would take place at each users' end, in individual consoles that would produce an image of that trainee's "per­spective" within a common imaginary space, rather than ema­nating from a single massive central computer. Thorpe caned the project SIMNET, for simulation network.

Working models were hashed out in the 19⁸0s, and SIMNET became fully operational in 1990. DARPA supplied 238 network simulator units to the Army. By then, SlMNET could handle hun­dreds of individual users at once, an operating in a real-time share environment, each representing any number of different vehicle types. "William Gibson didn't invent cyberspace," Wired magazine wrote in 1997, e'Air Force Captain Jack Thorpe did."

The Army put SIMNET to use as the Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT). From the outside, the CCTT resembles a series of large grayish-green fiberglass boxes, as featureless as sensory deprivation chambers. Inside, each is an elaborate life-size mock-up of the interior of a fighting vehicle-an Abrams tank, maybe a Bradley or even a Humvee-whose "windows" are screens looking on to the SIMNET world. Adding to the claus­trophobia of the unit's tiny interior is a series of sound effects to enhance the realism of the training: the faked noises of engines, guns, tank treads, or turrets rotating. The total experi­ence can be intense enough to engender "simulation sickness" in newbies-a nauseating variant of sea- or airsickness, caused when the brain becomes confused over what's really happening versus what's being simulated.

Some sources have suggested that SIMNET was influenced by the Army Battlezone project, even though the date of Thorpe~ original Air Force proposal predates this. Whether PLATO Panter or the networked games of the PLATO network in general inspireed Thorpe is unknown. Undoubtedly, the concept of a shared virtual world was one that emerged in multiple ways in the 1970S andi 80S. William Gibson's Neuromancer imagined a sustained, 3·1> world in 1985 (famously written on a manua 1 typewriter) and, as Wired notes, introduced the word cyberspace into the lexicon.

But another science-fiction novel of the 19805 became even more influential to the military's simulation visionaries, many of whom today cite it as an important inspiration. Orson Scott C,ar's 1985 Ender's Game posits a future Earth endangered by invasion by an insectoid alien race, the Buggers. In order to develop a strong class of warriors, the government sends its best and brightest children into space for battle training, which takes the form of video games, both two-dimensional and holo­graphic, as well as laser-tag style low-gravity faux-death matches. The protagonist, Ender, proves to be a minimaster at these games, and rises ever higher within the ranks of this com­plex academy, taking on increasingly elaborate simulations and tougher training regimens as he ascends. Eventually, after an enormously trying computer-generated battle, Ender discovers the secret of the system in which he has flourished. The most recent games were not simulations at all: he was in remote con­trol of real battalions of warships. Without realizing it, he had destroyed the entire race of Buggers and saved the earth.

Doom Generation

Back in the world of commercial video games, things had been changing, too. The rapid rise of personal computing and the development of CD-ROM storage brought PC games to a new level of popularity and design sophistication. Of course, games had always been an element of personal computing from its ear­liest days in the 1970s, when primitive versions of chess and Minesweeper were imported from ARPAnet and PLATO. But now a slew of more advanced titles were developed specifically for use on desktops and laptops. With PC games, the first-person shooter came home.

The genre's groundbreaker was Wolfenstein 3D, a 1994 military fantasy that popularized the first-person shooter, thereby providing a structure for video games that continues to domi­nate today and has pushed the form ever closer to the visual complexities of cinema. The wolfenstein franchise was not new; the first in the series, a 2-D adventure game called Castle Wolfenstein, had been released in 1981. for the Apple II, and was written by Silas Warner, who had created key games on the PLATO network, and was followed up in 19⁸4 by Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. Though popular in their day, these fairly simplistic affairs couldn't touch the impact of their ]994 grandchild, wolfenstein 3D, created by id Software.

Like Battlezone a decade earlier, wolfenstein 3^D gives the player the same perspective as the game's protagonist. In this case, though, the hero is not an anonymous tank gunner, but

American World War II seargeant William "B. J." Blazkowic1.e who must escape from the eponymous Nazi-infested stronghold, whose structure resembles a better-rendered the high-walled labyrinths of Mazewar. Several Wolfenstein 3D innovation. have become conventions of first-person shooters today: thee placement of the protagonist's gun or weapon in the bottom center of the frame; the use of the "heads-up display," a kind of console panel set apart from the 3-D virtual world of the game, indicating life force, score, and other data (a concept, not inci dentally, borrowed from flight and tank simulators); the inclu· sion of "medical kits" that can be picked up to renew Blazkowicz's life; and the progression of increasingly powerful opponents on new levels, each culminating with a particularly tough "boss" (on the finallevel, Adolf Hitler himself).

In keeping with the graphics capabilities of 1994, the Nazis of Wolfenstein 3D are literally cartoon baddies, 2-D figures in a simple 3-D architecture, with the short, chunky bodies and large heads of anime characters. There is something both creepy and funny about seeing the perpetrators of the Holocaust reduced to icons of near-cuteness: the walls of the castle are decorated with pokey bit mapped paintings of swastikas and eagles; attacking German shepherds seem almost cuddly; and Hitler appears out­fitted with a comic-book-worthy robotic attack suit. (Fanciful or no, the use of Nazi symbols and the real Nazi Party's anthemic Horst Wessel Leid as theme music resulted in the German gov­ernment banning the game within its borders.)

Though popular, wolfenstein 3D only paved the way for id's watershed 1993 title Doom, which brought the first-person shooter to a new level of complexity and popularity. In Doom, the player takes the role of a lone "Space Marine" exploring human outposts on Mars after they have been taken over by demonic alien creatures. The earliest versions of Doom may seem graphi­cally crude today, but they were revolutionary advancements over their predecessors. The architecture of the Mars outpost is rendered through better texture mapping, and the first-person perspective moves fluidly through its environment (even if oppo­nents sometimes appear as 2-D figures, like trompe l'oeil card­board cutouts). More powerful than this graphic sophistication is the player's ability to freely explore the spaces inside the game. Finish killing off the hissing demons and flying skulls, and your Space Marine can simply poke around the dungeons, trudge through underground rivers, and look around for previously unseen elements. In fact, "secret areas" hidden in each level encourage the player to do so. In this sense, the world of Doom allows for nearly as much freedom to explore as Grand Theft Auto or Halo today.

Mod World

Another innovative aspect of Doom was that it was released via an internet-savvy approach, long before such techniques became the norm. Samples of the game were posted online for free; once players got a taste, they could purchase the full version

to access all of the game's levels. As new versions of Doom WI'I created, id distributed the original version of Doom free onlin and made the unprecedented move of releasing its source code til free, allowing players to tinker with the game as they saw fit. AI the encouragement of Doom's publishers, players soon took advantage of the game's modifiable nature.

Within a couple of years, there were thousands of WAD fille (so called for their unique ".wad" file extensions), many ot which remain available today online. While most were simply added homemade, harder levels, some went farther to cus tomizc the look and content of the game, its architecture and characters. The cultural references embalmed in these home madc envi ron ments remain frozen in mid-nineties pop culture. You can download and playa Batman-themed Doom, or, of course, a Star Trek- or Star Wars-themed Doom. Or you can download a WAD that transforms the giant killer flesh-lumps into that jovial purple dinosaur Barney. There are Simp sons themes, Army of Darkness themes, and Pulp Fiction themes. There are even triple-X themes that switched out the normal walls for crude, pixelly hard core porn loops. Young guns could blast away bad guys with a rifle while wallpapers of porn stars undulated behind his kill. Experienced today, these porn Dooms feel like morbid folk art, depicting an ultimate death-fuck journey into the id.

Even creepier are the student-made mods that replaced Doom's Martian outposts with accurate layouts of real schools .lIld universities. Curious gamers can still point their browsers he archives on doomworld.com, and download decade-old WADs that allow the player to decimate demons while wandering hrough the medieval colleges at Cambridge and Oxford. Or they I'ould slaughter the denizens of certain obscure high schools:

II n ionville High School, outside of Toronto, remains available, as Idoes Yarmouth High School of Yarmouth, Maine, whose pro­grammer's commentary claims it is based on "original blue­prints" of his school. The more technically minded may wish to "frag" demons while patrollingthe virtual groundS of the Center lor the Study of Optics and Lasers at the University of Central Florida, or the Engineering campus at purdue University.

Doom's literally visceral quality, its splatterpunk gore, contributed greatlY to the powerful effects of the game. Shoot an opponent, and a gush of red spray blossoms out from his chest. Corpses accumulate on floors in crimson heaps. If a fallen alien happens to land inside a door's frame, the portal closes with a disgusting squish. One particularly nasty monster looks like a giant lumbering lump of naked pink flesh, and requires numerous shotgun blasts to exterminate. With all these bleeding bodies, the Doom series is a particularly morbid enterprise.

In a blunt sense, Doom is about a brutal mastery over flesh; the gamer, whose muscles atrophied slowly as he sat near motionless at his PC for hours on end, became a disembodied gun, floating through tombs and destroying every warm body encountered. Film critic Andre Bazin once noted that death is but the victory of time, but Doom makes time malleable. So th highly addictive game was not just about killing time; it also feelt like it killed death, at least momentarily. It was about stopping th flow of time, shutting out the rest of the world, in order to become enmeshed in the eternal, adrenaline-pumping Now of constant warfare. The death of enemies affirms one's own continued exis tence; even if defeated, the game can always start again.

In her 1965 essay "The lmagination of Disaster,~ Susan Sontag writes that atomic age sci-fi movies like Codzilla and This Island Earth provide "the immediate representation of the extraordi· nary: physica[ deformity and mutation, missile and rocket combat, loppling skyscrapers" and thereby invite viewers to "par­l'icipat'e in the fantasy of livingthrough one's death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.~ Thinking of Doom, it would be easy to argue that Sontag's observations are even truer for first-person video games. For here one may live through the fantasy of one's own death over and over again. Sci­ence fiction films attempt to absorb the viewer through a sense of awe-even if it is through the flawed sublime of giant monsters and otherworldly visitors. Doom does the same through first­person immersion, putting you in the action. The first time you find that seemingly unstoppable demon, you must experience death by its attack several times before you can determine how to survive. Each time you die, your character lets out a gurgled scream, and his point of view drops quickly to the ground.

Or maybe, Charles Bernstein suggests, "the death wish played out in these games is not a simulation at all." In "Play It Again Pac-Man," his prescient pre-Doom essay from 1.991, Bernstein offers, "maybe it's time that's being killed or absorbed-real-life productive time that could be better 'spent' elsewhere." While killing time, the player feels active: moving through corridors, exploring buildings, destroying enemies. But much of these actions are in fact reactions, and in a larger sense, the player is being trained according to a larger narrative already deter­mined by the game's programming. It feels like free play, but the story cannot change; in fact, the game trains you to desire its rewards, to move up its levels, to find its treasures. Your char­acter's self-actualization is contingent on your abilities to obey the directives of the game, and in a larger sense, to complete the program's circuit, to satisfy its algorithms. It is a bondage that feels \ike freedom; you must get with the program to survive.

The game's designers couldn't have chosen a better name: "doom" is a bone-chilling Anglo-Saxon word that in its very pro­nunciation recalls the clanging of a death knell. It's a very old word, stretching back well before A.D. 1000; originally meaning an act of legal decree or pronouncement, it took on more omi­nous eschatological connotations of divine reckoning and inescapable fate as the centuries progressed. "Doomsday," for example, began as the earthy English term for the Day of Judg­ment; Doom arrived in an era that many saw as no less apoca­lyptic, as }. C. Herz notes in her 1997 pop-Kulturschrift Joystick Nation. e'Even the word 'doom' is resonant," she writes, e'Especially

when you factor in all the scary technology lurking around th late twentieth century and the threat of rogue dictatorship" blowing up Seattle with surplus Soviet nukes. In Doom, you get to resolve that sense of moral decay, political instability, and technophobia. You get to be global supercop, Blade Runner, and Oral Roberts, all rolled into one."

"You, and only you, are the hero," Herz writes. "No teamwork, no delegation, no profit sharing ... We in America like this." And if Doom fans took on a role very much like the one-man vigilante badasses who busted their way through innumerable eighties action flicks, they were spurred on by an enemy that deserved certain death. Like the terrorists, Nazis, and KGB agents of other games and films, the alien enemies of Doom are incontro­vertibly extermination-worthy, freeing the trigger-puller from any moral compunction. "You get to visit a place where there is no way to humanize the enemy because the enemy is, by defini­tion, Evil," she offers. "Not just bad. Not misunderstood. Not the victim of childhood abuse, ethnic discrimination, faulty antide­pressants, or low self-esteem ... We all crave the perfect enemy. Political leaders employ squads of propagandists to create these monsters-the Evil Empire, Manuel Noriega, al-Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein-so that we can fly over and stomp on them. The makers of Doom understand how deeply satisfying this concept can be."

The perfect enemy is a component of the perfect war, or the Just War, the moral ideal that Herz alludes to in her litany of America's foreign bugaboos. The fact is that Doom and virtually all of its progeny fall into step with this framework, issuing forth an endless stream of zombies, robots, aliens, Nazis, robotic zom­bies, zombie aliens, and robot Nazis as oozing, creeping targets for righteous destruction. A few video games have played with reversing this notion, putting the player in the role of the bad guy. In Exidy's visually primitive 2-D arcade game from 1976 called Death Race (inspired by the premise of Roger Corman's 1975 exploitation classic Death Race 2000), players earned points by running over little stick-figure people; even though the company claimed the victims were supposed to be "ghouls," the game cause, the first widespread public outcry against violence in video games. (Interestingly, Atari during this same period is said to have had an explicit policy that none of their games would include the destruction of recognizably human characters.) More recently, Bungie's highly narrative first-person shooter Halo 2 (20⁰5) takes a surprising turn midway, when suddenly the gamer is playing missions from the perspective of one of Halo's main enemy race, the reptilian Covenant.

But Doom wasn't just about the lone hero, even if this is how many garners experienced its play. In fact, one of its most notable features was the option for networking; up to four indi­viduals could join forces, over a local area network or the higher­speed Internet connections available at colleges and institutions at the time, and blast the demonic forces using teamwork: the roots of the wildly popular practice of online gaming, via PC and console, available today. To win the game, players could think like police or soldiers, coordinating their efforts in ways that increased enemy death counts.

No wonder, then, that in 1997, a few Marines began to take Doom very seriously.

The Few, the Proud, the Networked

A decade after Battlezone, General Starry's vision of deploying video games proved remarkably prescient, if a little too ahead of its time; in the early 19805, building thousands of stand-up arcade syste'ms would have been exorbitantly expensive, even if I he'y 1,111 01 I 01 1\1,11 i's preexisting technology. Though theoreti· c,illy CIheapI'1 than conventional trainers, Army Battlezone stant! ups would have still cost around $500,000 each.

With the fall of Soviet communism and the abrupt end of the

old War, the Pentagon began to rethink the massive spending on essentially in-house technology development that it had pur· sued since the beginnings of World War II. New directives in the early 1990S stressed the need to run a more economically effi­cient military, a military that was run more along the lines of standard business practices, rather than the old reliance on Pentagon largess. Laws were passed that made it easier for pri­vate companies to sell supplies and goods to the military, encouraged competition for bidding, and reassigned lowest pri­ority to programs unique to anyone service branch. A more fi~· cally accountable military had all the more reason to interface with a global corporate culture.

Digital Defense

But the PC revolution offered some new opportunities for drastic cost reduction. Heretofore, military computer simula-

t ions employed for training were expensive, relatively clunky affairs, whose programming focused primarily on reproducing pinpoint fidelity to realistic situations. An Ml tank trainer in the early eighties, for example, as produced by Chrysler or Gen­eral Electric, would have run $6 to $7 million per unit. Running exclusively on high-priced, specialized graphics workstations, these ponderous tools were developed either in-house or by spe­cialized military contracting firms. SlMNET came with a lower per-unit price tag-around $100,000 for each subsystem-but by the time that thousands of SIMNET trainers were in place, the

whole program ran up to $850 million.

Another shortcoming with early military simulation was

their lack of user-friendly engagement and "playability." In a nutshell; they were no fun, and this shortcoming was seen as inhibiting their training potential, particularly for a new gener­ation who grew up with joysticks and controllers firmly in hand.

In the early nineties, the Marine Corps Modeling and Simula­tion Management office had been given a new budgetary direc­tive from the annual Marine Corps General officers Symposium: find ways to use commercial, off-the-shelf software for internal training purposes. Never the most lavishly funded of America's Armed Forces, the Marines had a long tradition of making do with little, and the U.S. military in general had been attempting to move toward more streamlined fiscal models.

Marine Corps commandant Gen. Charles Krulak saw this fiscal necessity could be dovetailed with an increased emphasis on critical thinking that he saw as the future of the corps. Krulak wanted to "reach the stage where Marines come to work and spend part of each day talking about warfighting: learning to think, making decisions, and being exposed to tactical and oper· ational issues," and he foresaw PC-based solutions for this goal. "The use of technological innovations," he wrote, "such as per­sonal computer (PC)-based wargames, provide great potential for Marines to develop decision making skills."

The men at MCMSMO hit software stores and developed a tudy called the Personal Computer Based Wargames CataLog, which analyzed and reviewed over thirty military-themed strategy PC titles like Operation Crusader, Patriot, Harpoon II, and Tigers on the ProwL for usability as training systems. "The intent of this effort," they wrote in the Catalog, "was to examine the available wargames that are on the market and determine if any have the potential to teach a better appreciation for the art and science of war straight out of the box, with no modifications required." These semper fi tech-heads, however, found that nearly all these titles held scant value for their purposes. Though popular in military and gaming circles at the time, these PC battlers were little more than electronically enhanced versions of old tabletop war games. Operation Cruas a der, for example, employed kriegspeil-style hexagonal maps; Harpoon II updated the idea with late-twentieth-century radar displays that were nonetheless just as abstract. At best, these were games suited for learning command-level strategy or air defense, not the leathemeck-with-a-rifle warfare that is the Marines' forte. They were pastimes best suited for armchair generals and His­tory Channel aficionados, not real-life Marines who needed practice working together, at ground level, on the battlefields of the future. "No wargame," the Catalog reports, "was capable of producing a robust simulated combat environment."

But one title in the Wargames Catalog proved fruitful. In 1997, Lieutenants Dan Snyder and Scott Barnett took advantage of Doom Irs modding capabilities to produce a new WAD with the needs of the Marines in mind. Doom's world was stripped down and streamlined. The labyrinthine Martian dungeons were transformed into a sparse, dust-colored plain punctuated by small brick bunkers, foxholes, and barbed-wire barriers. Gone were the otherworldly aliens and demons, replaced by very human-looking opposing forces, clad in simple khaki military uniforms of a vaguely Communist/Nazi cut (according to tech­nology historian Tim Lenoir, Marine Doom's enemies were fash­ioned from scans of GI Joe action figures). The players' artillery choice was reduced to realistic weaponry (out with the electric plasma guns, in with the M-16 AI assault rifle, the M-249 squad automatic weapon, and M-67 fragmentations grenades); life­refreshing power-ups disappeared. With lower life levels and no chance to raise them, the player died quickly, after only a couple of hits. Thus was born Marine Doom (also known as Marine Corps Doom or simply MCDoom). It was Army Battlezone for th PC generation, a boots-on-the-ground combat simulator.

With Marine Doom, two pairs of Marines could engage in net­worked play in order to practice teamwork operations as a stan­dard four-man fire team. Marine Doom didn't train for marksmanship; it trained for cooperation. The teams could set up fields of fire, conduct flanking maneuvers, and enact "leapfrog tactics" in which some team members pin down an enemy with gunfire while others advance ahead. "While weapons behavior is not extremely accurate," Marine Doom's We'h site, read, "sound tactical employment of these models should gIVe' the deSired effect." Old-style simulators had cost hundleeds of thousands of dollars to do similar things: Marine Doom cost a mere $49.95 for the original game, which was then altered with Snyder and Barnett's marinel.wad freeware file. The Marine Doom WAD was soon trading furiously through numerous Doom-dedicated BBSes and online forums, and quickly became in turn cannibalized for the fantastical WADs of other modders.

In early 1997, official word about Marine Doom went out in the January 27th ALMAR, a newswire sent by the commandant to all Marines worldwide, along with news that jarheads would soon be permitted to play the game on government computers, as long as they adhered to copyright restrictions. "As programs are developed, 1 challenge you to seek opportunities to include an element of stress," General Krulak recommended. "Decisions made in war must frequently be made under physical and emo­tional stress. Our mental exercises in peacetime should repli­cate some of the same conditions. Leaders can generate stress by placing time limits on decisions, by conducting games imme­diately following a strenuous PT session or forced march, or requiring decisions during a period of sleep deprivation."

For a brief moment, the Marine Doom teams were tech-world rock stars. Marine Doom racked up scads of attention, both within the military, where it was seen as an intriguing innova­tion, and in the mainstream press, who saw in it the seeds of some cyberpunked future. Wired Magazine gave the mod its April 1997 cover, with a headline that read "Doom Goes to War: the Marines are looking for a few good games," over an image of the scowling face of Doom's Space Marine, clad in twentieth­century brown camo helmet. But despite the hype and rock­bottom cost, Marine Doom was never an official part of training, and was never implemented on a widespread basis; its devel­opers eventually left active duty to pursue commercial software jobs. Snyder, for example, worked as a consultant on GT Interac­tive's 199⁸ game Nam, a Vietnam War-themed shooter that boasted realistic weaponry.

More importantly, Marine Doom signaled a new interest in the use of commercial games for official military training. A couple of years later, Spectrum Holobyte (best known for importing Tetris to the U.S.) modified the PC game Falcon 4.0, a networked flight simulator, for use in training real F-¹5 pilots.

The U.s. Naval Academy shanghaied Electronic Art's Jane A Command for training purposes; the game was develope'd Sonalysts, who in turn have a long history of military comrnl sions, and needed no modification for the Navy's purposes. later years, Novalogic modified Delta Force 2 to train for th Army's Land Warrior system, the Navy taught a modified v sion of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Ubisoft worked with th Army to redesign Tom Clancys Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear to urban combat training.

Mak Technologies, a defense contracted software film founded by former SIMNET designers, specialized in desktop based simulation trainers, producing two games for the Marines that were also released commercially: Spearhead, a multiplayer tank sim, and Marine Expeditionary Unit 2000, a strategy title. MEU 2000 "isn't about influencing young people's view of the military, but it can be helpful to people who want to learn more a bout the military," the game's lead designer, Patrick Brennan, told Gaming News Network in 1998. "We have dis­cussed the recruiting and public relations potential of a game like MeV 2000 with the Marines."

In 2000, the Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned Rival Inter­active to create a game called Joint Force employment, a turn­based strategy game to simulate how officers might react to a terrorist crisis. Its title references the modern military concept of "jointness," or cooperation across all military branches. A year later, Rival released the game to the public in two parts, Real War and Real War: Rogue States. In the game, players h1a1d lie a fictitious group caned the Independence Liberation A~ ny, a terrorist outfit who has obtained weapons of mass ,d,estruction. Its distributor, Simon &. Schuster, attempted to Idl urn u"p sales after the advent of September nth; free give-aways with the game included a co"Py of Sun TZU's The Art of War "~nd cell phone ringtones that bleeped "America the Beautiful." ,eIt's a very pro_American game that showS hoW powerful the U.S. ,military is," a Simon &. schuster Interactive spokesman told the Hollywood Reporter. "And it's cathartic to blow up terrorists." Trashed by gaming reviewers as clunky and outdated, the Real War series bombed. But by the time the War on Terror rolled around, both the military and the commercial sector were working on much bigger "projects together.

DMU Timestamp: February 01, 2013 22:13