War Play Read online

  The actual game play resembles that of most first-person shooters—you shoot, you maneuver, you find re-ups (resupply packs, medic kits). The interface is also fairly traditional—an indicator in the bottom left corner of the screen shows your stamina level, ammunition supply, and so forth, and there is a map in the bottom right corner. In contrast to most first-person shooters, however, America’s Army is surprisingly text-heavy. In addition to the instructions, the manual features a large amount of text addressing players as potential recruits. Take the following paragraphs, all of which follow from Wardynski’s vision for the game:

  On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress created the Continental Army, which, after the Revolutionary War, became the United States Army. The U.S. Army and the millions of Soldiers who have served over the past two centuries have been guided by the core values of Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. These values have been the bedrock of the most critical component of the armed forces, responsible for defending U.S. interests worldwide and for winning the nation’s wars.

  As the largest of the four armed services in terms of personnel, state-of-the-art equipment, infrastructure, and training facilities, the U.S. Army brings talented Soldiers together with cutting-edge technology and training to produce the most capable and respected military organization in the world. The Army . . . operates more aircraft than the U.S. Air Force, owns more water vessels than the U.S. Navy, and has conducted more amphibious operations than the U.S. Marine Corps. More than 90% of the nation’s Special Operations Forces are in the U.S. Army. An Army so important, so large, and so high-tech invites the best and the brightest young people to strengthen their minds, bodies, and character through service to America.

  America’s Army: True Soldiers is the only official U.S. Army game on Xbox 360 and was built and tested with U.S. Army Soldiers at every level of production. No game can fully create the reality of serving in the U.S Army, but America’s Army: True Soldiers provides authentic insights into life and success as a Soldier . . . Throughout this experience, you will grow and improve as a person and a virtual Soldier. You will have the opportunity to earn Respect and gain Honor while serving as one of America’s Army: True Soldiers. Prepare for the challenge of this experience. Prepare to be a True Soldier.

  The game opens with the America’s Army logo paired with the sound of reveille. Beneath it, the sentences “Empower yourself. Defend freedom” appear to the sound of a shotgun being cocked. This is followed by the menu screen; click on Basic Combat Training and you are shown a scrolling list with a short description of each training mission, including the following:

  M9 Training

  Staff Sergeant Johnson will brief you on the operation and function of the M9 pistol. You will then practice with the weapon and then be tested for basic qualification.

  M24 Training

  Staff Sergeant Johnson will brief you on the functionality of the M24 Sniper Rifle. You will then practice with the weapon and then be tested for basic qualification.

  M203 Training

  Staff Sergeant Hernandez will brief you on the functionality of the M203 Grenade Launcher. You will then practice with the weapon and then be tested for basic qualification.

  M136 AT4 Training

  Staff Sergeant Hernandez will brief you on the functionality of the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. You will then practice with the weapon and then be tested for basic qualification.

  Obstacle Course

  Learn individual movement techniques (IMT) to combine moving with shooting.

  MOUT

  Learn the basics of team and squad movement on the Military Operations on Urban Terrain training course.

  All but the final two basic training exercises follow the same template: You are at an outdoor firing range surrounded by low hills and scrubby vegetation. You can hear birds chirping and the sound of rounds being fired at distant ranges. A sign reads military firing range: keep out.

  Standing in a sandy clearing, one of three ethnically various but uniformly brusque sergeants introduces a weapon, explains in detail how it is used in the army, and instructs you on its in-game use. You cannot move or engage in any activity when the sergeant is talking, and you cannot skip his speech even if you’ve already heard it. The vocals and the visuals are slightly out of sync.

  Following the sergeant’s introduction, you are directed to pick up your weapon from a table nearby and proceed to one of two firing ranges. In one range, you can practice shooting at targets, typically little green men who pop up and down at random. In another, you are tested on your rifle skills and knowledge. You cannot proceed to the next training level without passing this level’s test.

  If you wander away from the shooting range, your sergeant will bark, “Return to your training yard!” or “I gave you an order!” If you ignore the sergeant and continue exploring, you fail the mission, which immediately ends it, and lose Honor points, which lowers your overall score. For the most part, if you point your gun at your commanding officer, it will disappear from your hands. If you do manage to shoot him, however, you will fail the mission and lose Honor points.

  The final two training exercises, Obstacle Course and MOUT, break from the pattern of the previous ones. In the obstacle course, you run from station to station toward your supervisor, clambering over logs, sprinting over a rope bridge, maneuvering through a shoothouse (a live-fire, 360-degree training range), administering first aid to a colleague, crawling under low wires, and shooting various weapons.

  The MOUT is the final Basic Combat Training level, and the first level in which you play as part of a team. You run through an abandoned town with your team, shooting various enemies, who are marked as bad guys with red marks over their heads, in typical video game fashion. Since this is a training exercise and doesn’t use live fire, the men who’ve been hit (they’re all men) sit on the ground with a sulky look. The objective is to follow your sergeant to a bell tower, where you shoot a sniper and defend the structure against oncoming enemies.

  Once you have completed Basic Combat Training, you move on to the war games, of which there are eight. Each is designed to familiarize players with the roles of rifleman, automatic rifleman, sniper, and grenadier. Game play for each mission is capped at thirty minutes.

  The first mission, Operation Gray Wolf, takes place in a small village crisscrossed by dirt paths. You are in a team with four members, led by a sergeant, and your goal is to shoot enemies (again, no one dies; people just sit down) manning several machine-gun checkpoints in the area. There are no civilians.

  At various points in the mission, your sergeant will bark warnings, encouragement, or directions: “Don’t get cocky”; “Not bad, not bad at all”; “Something about this just doesn’t feel right”; “This is a soup sandwich”; “All right, everybody into position”; “Keep your eyes open for enemy activity”; “Find your area of responsibility”; “Take that target out.”

  If you are shot, you must sit down; you cannot move until a teammate gives you first aid. If you and all your teammates “die,” you fail the mission and have to start again.

  Aside from its focus on basic training and its discouragement of friendly fire, what most differentiates America’s Army: True Soldiers from its commercial rivals is its Extras feature, which is intended for recruiting. It includes sections on the army core values; a week-by-week description of the army’s basic training regimen; a set of enlistment requirements; a list of soldier and officer ranks; a collection of army trivia (“Soldiers can earn up to $72,900 to help pay for college”); full descriptions of dozens of jobs available in the army; descriptions of various weapons, including information on ammunition type, magazine capacity, and rate of fire; and twenty-eight video profiles of people serving in or affiliated with the army, including a sniper, a pilot, a physician, and an “army mom.”

  Diversifying the Product

  In the two years following the release of the first America’s Army in July
2002, relations between OEMA and MOVES continued to deteriorate, even as users were logging over one million hours of game play every day. In March 2004, tensions came to a head. Accusing MOVES of financial improprieties, Wardynski and OEMA ripped the game out of the school and moved it to two new army-controlled locations.

  Immediately after taking full control of the game, OEMA signed a licensing deal with the prominent game company Ubisoft to release commercial versions of America’s Army. (This is where America’s Army: True Soldiers comes from.) Shrewdly, OEMA had previously trademarked both the name America’s Army and the tagline “The official U.S. Army game: Empower yourself. Defend freedom.”

  At the same time, Wardynski and OEMA resolved to diversify their product in order to increase the game’s chances of long-term survival and gain economies of scale in use and development. Because America’s Army related solely to recruitment, OEMA had, in effect, only one customer. The key, then, was to expand the client base. OEMA decided to develop a private, government-oriented version of the game that could be used for training, military and otherwise. To do so, Wardynski turned to the Software Engineering Directorate (SED) at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The SED, a unit of the army’s Aviation and Missile Research Development Engineering Center, had a history of developing sophisticated weapons system trainers.

  As the private training version of the game took off, it began to feed the public recruiting one. As Wardynski explains, “Say we didn’t need a female soldier for the recruiting game bad enough to make one, but maybe the medical people needed a female soldier, or the Secret Service needed a female body type. We’d make it for them and then bring it into the public game. Our governing principle was, We own everything when we’re done—in other words, we can use it—and so it has to be of good enough quality to go back in the recruiting game.”

  For the past several years, the training version of America’s Army has been as popular as the recruitment one. It is the trainer of choice for dozens of military and government organizations, including U.S. Central Command, the United States Special Operations Command, the Secret Service, the Army Chief of Staff, the Association of the United States Army, the JFK Special Warfare Center and School, the Combating Terrorism Center, and the 7th Army. Customized versions of the game also provide training for such equipment as PackBot and Talon robots, the CROWS weapon system, the Javelin missile system, and the Improved Target Acquisition System. Affordability is a key element here; as defense expert Peter Singer points out, “The game’s training module cost just $60,000 to develop, but took training in how to operate robots in war to a whole new level.”

  Life After America’s Army

  These days, Wardynski has mellowed in his opinion of the MOVES team. “Game developers are a lot like artists,” he says. “You don’t tell them how to paint the painting. You can come to them with a painting of a waterfall and say, ‘We’re going to do a waterfall,’ but don’t tell them what kind of colors to use, how high to make the waterfall, any of that junk. It’s a different culture, with different objectives, functions, norms. They want to make the most kick-ass game in the world, or the one that has the best graphics, or the one that’s got the most realistic effects. We were just way more hands-on than a lot of producers would be.”

  America’s Army launched Mike Zyda out of the Naval Postgraduate School and into the game industry. He now runs his own research lab, Gamepipe, at the University of Southern California. “The things I’m most proud about regarding America’s Army,” he says, “are, one, it was the first significant serious game. There were plenty of educational games, but America’s Army was the first one where people said, ‘Wow, you can make a fun serious game that’s also a hit.’ America’s Army also led to the entire Department of Defense deciding to use game developers instead of contractors to make next-generation training and simulation systems. Plus, it was the most cost-effective thing the army’s ever built for recruiting.”

  Though extremely pleased with the game, Wardynski today has mixed emotions about his experience with the project. A few months before he retired from the army, he and I talked in the sunlit living room of his three-story red-brick house at the end of a quiet tree-lined street behind West Point’s Lusk Reservoir. As he looked out over the stone remains of the Colonial-era fort bordering his home, he estimated that 60 percent of his time between 2002 and 2009 was spent fighting with Pentagon officials to keep the game and its related properties alive. He blames a nearly fatal heart condition he developed in 2005 on the stress that running the game engendered. After all, he points out, running the game wasn’t even his regular job. He was already working sixty hours a week in his capacity as the director of OEMA; America’s Army was an unpaid assignment on top of that, one that added fifty more hours to his workweek.

  Following his 2009 retirement from the army, Wardynski began a new job as chief financial officer in the Aurora, Colorado, public school system. In fall 2011 he became superintendent of schools in Huntsville, Alabama, the city where the training version of America’s Army is currently managed. Nine months later, the Alabama Council of PTAs named Wardynski its “Outstanding School Superintendent of the Year.”

  CHAPTER 5

  All but War Is Simulation

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS EACH spring, an Orlando hotel packed with tourists bound for Disney World hosts an unusual combination of fit army types in forest-green camouflage uniforms and doughy, ponytailed computer geeks in wrinkled khaki pants. The hotel’s salmon-pink exterior, its myriad palm trees, its artificial waterfall spilling into a sizable wraparound pool, provide a curious setting for this annual gathering of the defense world’s technological elite. Walk through the glass doors of the hotel’s booming convention center, however, and familiar names greet you: Anteon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon. In conference rooms positioned off the main hall, military officials and defense industry representatives attend presentations and tutorials on the military’s most popular games and virtual training devices. In the cavernous exhibitors’ hall, defense contractors hawk their latest digital wares. Yet there are no booth babes at this particular conference, no sweeping spotlights or clashes of noise between competing exhibitors’ booths. By the standards of many military conferences, this one feels almost small-town. Speak with an éminence grise and the conversation will be interrupted by a constant flow of greetings from friendly passersby. This is hardly Mayberry, however: the attendees—whether from the military, industry, or academia—are leading the Pentagon’s shift to game-based training.

  Defense GameTech, the conference in question, is the brainchild of PEO STRI, the army’s gaming and simulation office. PEO STRI is an acquisition and contracting organization, whose mission is to guide product development to meet army requirements and to manage the deployment of training systems. It spends over $3.5 billion yearly on products and services, for the most part by contracting with commercial companies. In keeping with its commercial focus, PEO STRI’s current motto, “Putting the power of simulation into the hands of the Warfighter,” has the ring of corporate branding. Its previous motto, “All but war is simulation,” captures the organization’s military-corporate role. Given its location in central Florida’s expanding high-tech corridor, PEO STRI benefits from close contact with neighboring military contractors, not to mention such entertainment hot spots as Walt Disney World, Epcot, and Universal Studios. Virtual training and simulation offices for the navy, air force, and Marines are also located nearby.

  The stated purpose of Defense GameTech is to advocate the use of video games and video game technology within the Pentagon and to give DoD personnel hands-on learning in game-based training. When I attended a recent GameTech, the panels I observed and the officials I interviewed reinforced Ralph Chatham’s and Dan Kaufman’s earlier claims that the military had turned to gaming for help in dealing with the new, unexpected roles soldiers have to face. Wars always happen when you least want them to, a former Pentagon official told me, a
nd then militaries spend most of those wars playing catch-up. In the GameTech exhibitors’ hall, most contractors were featuring new and improved variations of Ralph Chatham’s Tactical Language and Culture Training Systems program: games for teaching soldiers how to interact with local populations. Colonel Franklin Espaillat, PEO STRI’s project manager for combined arms tactical trainers, described the change for me: “During the Cold War, the guys that were getting trained on how to interface with the local culture were the senior leaders, because it was part of the Cold War lockstep thing. But now the private, the corporal, who’s at the tip of the operation spear, is the one who might be engaging in that local province or with that local tribe. So we have to give him the right cultural training, the right civil affairs training, the right tactical training, which we didn’t necessarily do before. We’ve had to expand training to the lowest possible level. Gaming is what allows us to expand that training.”

  Currently PEO STRI’s acquisitions program, Games for Training, centers on Virtual Battlespace 2, or VBS2. Like the action sections of America’s Army, VBS2 is battlefield simulation, similar in look and feel to a commercial first-person shooter. VBS2 is an army “program of record,” meaning that it will be maintained by the army for as many years as possible before being replaced. (The Marine Corps is also using VBS2, primarily as a fire support team trainer.) While army programs of record usually last for twenty to twenty-five years, Games for Training programs last no longer than five years, owing to the speed of innovation in the video game industry. In fact, PEO STRI is currently soliciting bids for VBS3. “We’re continually inserting things in the current gaming engine to refresh it and make it current with technology,” Colonel Espaillat says, “but because gaming in general is a multibillion-dollar industry, we’re really just scratching the surface of the overall capability, and trying to leverage the little bit of dollars that we get from the army to get a lot of capability.” In keeping with this strategy, PEO STRI is also using VBS2—for which the army paid close to $10 million—for other initiatives. For example, the organization is launching a new product line called Dismounted Soldier, which is an attempt to build a 360-degree virtual trainer. Intelligent Designs, the company developing Dismounted Soldier, is relying on the VBS2 gaming engine to power the trainer.