Warfare isn't a game, but now recruiting is

The Chicago Tribune (May 23, 2004)

The U.S. Army is increasingly dependent on a video game to educate and recruit soldiers to be all they can be--digitally.

In April, the Army announced a partnership with the French game designer Ubisoft to expand the reach of America's Army from PC users to the big business of console gamers. Those gamers, who use game systems such as Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox, outnumber PC gamers nearly 4-1, according to industry surveys.

"The game has become a worldwide phenomenon and really exceeded all expectations," said Col. E. Casey Wardynski, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at the U.S. Military Academy and the head of the America's Army project.

More than 3 million people worldwide have registered to play America's Army online, with more than 150,000 new players in April, according to the site.

The game, designed and distributed by the U.S. Army, is a combination training and recruitment video game.

The game was conceived in 1999 by Wardynski, also an economics professor at the U.S. Military Academy, to help boost recruitment and to provide "accurate and easy-to-assimilate information" about the Army to young men who spend an increasing amount of their spare time playing video games.

Although the hundreds of military games available on the market illustrate the wide appeal of combat simulators, America's Army is the first government-sponsored program used for recruitment and training.

Straight from the source

"Instead of having young people get their information about the military from other sources, we decided that this was a way to do it directly," Wardynski said. "The gaming market is exactly the market recruiters were looking at, which is young males who were spending a lot of their time playing games anyway."

Wardynski said the game has been very successful as an informational and recruiting tool. There are no statistics on how many recruits the game has produced, but in a Defense Department survey conducted last year, America's Army was the most commonly cited informational resource used by recruits seeking information about the Army.

The game, a so-called first-person shooter, has two sections: training and missions.

Training requires players to complete rifle, medical and parachute training. During missions, players join online teams that complete combat operations. Also, unlike other games where players can assume the role of the enemy, America's Army players are always American soldiers.

Opponents, computerized or human, are always seen as terrorists clad in nondescript brown clothes and ski masks.

Designers have taken great pains to make the game realistic. Guns jam and misfire; the scenery is textured and realistic; drill sergeants shout as recruits scramble through obstacle courses. Players even adjust their aim as they draw a simulated breath on the firing line.

However, the effects of these weapons are not something America's Army depicts in great detail.

Victims of a gunshot wound are marked with a simple red dot instead of the graphic gore often used as selling points for first-person shooter games such as Doom or Wolfenstein 3D.

Indeed, the sanitized combat in America's Army earned a Teen rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, equivalent to a PG movie rating.

"The game is very engaging and realistic, but war is not a game," said Brad Bushman, a professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research who studies the effects of violent media, including video games. "Research shows that violent media increases aggression and anger in players.

Too sanitized

"I am sure this is a great recruiting tool, but it doesn't show the horrors of war," Bushman said.

"If the military wants to desensitize soldiers to killing, that's fine because it's their job. But they shouldn't be using taxpayer dollars to desensitize the general public to killing," he said.

Wardynski contends that the purpose of the game is to provide information in an environment often saturated with fictions about the military.

"The game is not the only thing that kids know, and they don't play it in a vacuum," he said.

"We want to accurately portray that the Army's purpose is winning the country's wars. We didn't want the violence to be a selling point because that's not what we are about."

The average cost of developing a first-person shooter game runs from $2 million to $3 million. The Army spent $5 million to develop the game and $20 million during the last four years to distribute and support it.

Although similar games cost upward of $75, America's Army is distributed free at local recruiting stations and via download at its Web site.

It is also being distributed free by hardware manufacturers and computer gaming magazines. The cost of the console game has not been announced, but comparable games cost $45.

Wardynski said there are plans to distribute the game free with new PCs in the next few years.

Designers also plan to expand the scope of the game to include flight simulators and other expansions in the coming years.

"The game turned out to have more applications than we anticipated when we began the project," Wardynski said.

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