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As I’ve already said, the emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving skills even among the lowest-ranking personnel represents a paradigm shift for the military. Gee points out that it also parallels new theories of the postindustrial workplace, which emphasize “collaborative teams and wanting workers to actually understand their work and apply their knowledge.” The difference with the military, however, is that it operates under a different incentive structure from industry and education. Unlike corporations, the military can’t fire its workers if they don’t succeed. Unlike schools, it can’t rely on standardized test scores as indicators of success; the military has to know that its soldiers have actually learned to use the skills it has taught them.
The Other Benefits of Gaming
Cognitive and educational benefits aside, the military’s embrace of video games also boils down to a more prosaic factor: money. “Live field training is very expensive in terms of time, support, ranges, fuel, ammunition, the whole gamut,” notes Michael Woodman, project manager for the Marine Corps Tactical Decision-Making Simulations. Because they employ commercial off-the-shelf technology, video games are exponentially cheaper than most alternative training options. One army instructor described the benefits to me as “no overhead, no costs, no possibility of getting hurt or getting equipment damaged.”
Virtual training sessions also help the military ration training grounds, which are in especially short supply today as troops return from their overseas deployments. At Fort Lewis, for example, there are seven times as many battalions as there are training grounds to accommodate them. The same goes for American bases in countries such as Germany and Korea, where, because of a lack of maneuvering space, most full-spectrum operations training is simulation-based.
Unit exercises that can be performed no more than once or twice in live training can be performed thirty to forty times on digital systems. As Lieutenant Colonel Newell told me, “When I was a company commander, for me to take a unit and go do an exercise that involved clearing two buildings on a street would have taken weeks to coordinate the range time—we would have had to do a walk-through with no weapons, no ammo, a run-through with blanks, and then finally a live-fire exercise. The whole process would take literally weeks and weeks and weeks. And it would still have some form of artificiality to it, because when you’re doing live fire, there’re only certain ways you’re allowed to do that. With [video games], I can generate the scenario and run the soldiers through it—and the scenario is all cognitive, it’s all thinking through what you are going to do, thinking through all the hazards—twenty times inside of a week.” As much as anything, Newell said, “gaming provides an ability to actually put yourself in the scenario, go through it and see it. Back up, change the scenario, go through it a different way. Back up, do it again. There are an infinite number of scenarios I can run soldiers through, because it’s not about doing it per se, it’s about having thought through it. So how much more experience can I give guys before we actually send them down range? When you actually get the dirt time, I can throw anything at you I want to, because you’ve seen it all already.”
Today’s military leaders are training on video games as well. For example, at the army’s School for Command Preparation and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, lieutenant colonels and other leaders use UrbanSim, a game referred to by its creator as “SimCity Baghdad.” Developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies, UrbanSim focuses on counterinsurgency; players are required to manage a complex mix of civil security and control, governance, and economic and infrastructure development. Unlike SimCity, however, “instead of tornadoes, earthquakes, and Godzilla running around your city, it’s insurgents.” Securing the local population’s support is crucial to success in UrbanSim, as is placating the host nation’s leaders, not to mention running traditional military operations. The game’s characters are built as autonomous agents, and they react as much to the larger environment created by the player’s actions as to individual events. Colonel Todd Ebel, who directs the School for Command Preparation, says the system is like chess: “You have to think through the cause and effect of your decisions . . . you have to look two or three turns down the road.”
Teaching for Real
Since 9/11, then, the military’s increased emphasis on gaming has been driven by a handful of key issues: the demands of contemporary warfare; the capabilities of technologies; the changing nature of literacy; and, crucially, economics. At the same time, the evolution of the military’s post-9/11 game use has reflected the Pentagon’s renewed focus on counterinsurgency.
Today, after years of efforts and advances, the military’s video games have finally reached a level of complexity that matches the real-world scenarios soldiers face. What’s more, years of research into the teaching properties of video games have shown how effective they can be as instructional tools. In the military’s most current video games, those two elements combine to create a learning experience that is sometimes profound, as we will see.
Colonel Casey Wardynski, whom we met earlier, once gave a bracingly direct assessment of the situation to a group of educators at a conference on learning. Audience members had accused him of using video games to teach people to kill. “You know,” he replied, “you should feel embarrassed that the military embraced this type of learning before you did. Our problem is that we end up with the seventeen-year-olds who failed in school, and if we teach them the way you do—that is, through skill-and-drill and standard methods—they’re going to die. Because they don’t learn that way. So we’ve got to teach them for real.”
Wardynski originally came to gaming not from a learning perspective but from a recruiting perspective. Since the switch to a volunteer military in the early 1970s, the cultural connection between the services and society has largely disappeared; the military has come to be seen as “other.” To attract the best recruits, the army in particular has to compete in a tight labor market for bright, technologically skilled young people who receive much of their information from online pop culture. In this environment, traditional recruiting methods, such as magazine ads, are increasingly ineffective. What’s more, the image of the army propagated within this popular culture is often inaccurate or out of date.
America’s Army, the video game conceived by Wardynski, is viewed as a way to redress that imbalance, albeit in a highly stylized, sanitized way. The game is a cost-effective “strategic communication tool” that not only capitalizes on a favorite pastime of the army’s target audience but updates and refurbishes the image of the army held by that audience. The game’s blockbuster status—from 2002 to 2008 it was one of the world’s top ten online video games—illustrates the close link between the military and popular first-person shooter video games. Yet as the next chapter shows, the story of the game’s development also reveals the gaps that remain in that relationship.
CHAPTER 4
America’s Army: The Game
EARLY ON THE MORNING of May 22, 2002, Lieutenant Colonel Casey Wardynski woke up feeling tense in his downtown Los Angeles hotel room. As director of the U.S. Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) at the United States Military Academy—in effect, the army’s top economist—Wardynski was more comfortable in the strait-laced environment of the military than he was in the entertainment capital of the world. Yet that day, running on three hours’ sleep, he faced one of the most important moments of his career: the launch of the world’s first military-developed video game, America’s Army, a project he had been directing from its inception in 1999. May 22 marked the opening of the 2002 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the video game industry’s enormous annual trade show, a yearly spectacle of game companies, developers, and fans convening within the glass-paneled walls of the Los Angeles Convention Center. When the center’s doors swung open, America’s Army would make its debut on the public stage. Eventually it would become one of the most popular online video games of all time, touted by th
e army as its most cost-effective recruitment tool ever. Lying in bed that morning, however, Wardynski felt deeply anxious about how the game would be received.
He was concerned specifically with the mainstream news media’s reaction. He felt fairly certain that the games media, and the video game industry as a whole, would applaud America’s Army, and why not? He and his team had built what they considered a first-rate game. What’s more, having the U.S. Army associated with a video game could bring a degree of respectability to the industry, which had been under fire from politicians and parents’ groups for years. But the major news outlets—would they pay any attention to the game? And if they did pay attention, what would the story be? “This is horrible”? After all, America’s Army was intended as a tool for recruiting tech-savvy teenagers into the military; it would be available for free online, and hard copies, also free, would be distributed at army recruiting stations nationwide. The whole project was bound to be controversial.
Haunting the game’s launch was the specter of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, in which two seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, shot and killed twelve students and one teacher. Harris and Klebold were widely reported to have been fans of first-person shooter video games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, and media speculation ran rampant that playing these games had desensitized them to violence and even contributed to their desire to kill. Always unpopular with parents, teachers, and policymakers, video games had after Columbine been more negatively portrayed by the news media than ever. Wardynski dreaded the possibility of the following headline greeting him in a major newspaper: “The army is using taxpayer funds to create another Columbine.” The games media might write, “The army has made a version of Grand Theft Auto” and mean it as a compliment, but even a hint of that story angle in the mainstream media would, from Wardynski’s perspective, sink the game. For political reasons, many in the Pentagon had been hostile to America’s Army from the start, and if the top brass caught the slightest hint that the game was causing PR problems, Wardynski would never hear the end of it. He badly needed positive press to push back against the Pentagon naysayers who had told him that the game would be a disaster and who had been trying to kill the project from the start.
He needn’t have worried. As he and his wife, Sue, walked the four blocks down Pico Boulevard from their hotel to the convention center, Wardynski got a message on his BlackBerry from Lori Mezoff, the game’s public affairs specialist: America’s Army had made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. “Is that good?” Wardynski nervously wrote back. “It’s great!” Mezoff assured him. And indeed, the article made no mention of anything controversial; it simply reported that the army had developed a cutting-edge action video game as a tool for recruiting media-savvy teenagers.
Shortly afterward, as Wardynski walked around the convention center, he received news that the Associated Press and Reuters had picked up the story and that the game had made the front pages of America Online and Yahoo! What’s more, he quickly determined that all the coverage was positive, as was a later report on the Los Angeles evening news. (In reality, the coverage was mostly neutral; from Wardynski’s viewpoint, though, “in the news media, neutral is positive.”) The gaming media came out strongly behind the game, just as Wardynski had predicted. One website, penny-arcade.com, even jokingly called it the “best misappropriation of tax dollars ever.”
After years of effort, America’s Army had been announced to the world, and the reaction was better than Wardynski had ever hoped for. Back in his hotel room that night, replaying the day’s events in his mind, he breathed a sigh of relief and told himself, “The army can’t back away from the game now.”
From the moment of its debut, America’s Army was an unqualified success. At the end of E3, eight gaming publications and websites declared it Best of Show. In the two months following the game’s official launch on July 4, 2002, it was downloaded from GoArmy.com, the army’s recruiting website, over two and a half million times, quickly becoming a phenomenon among hardcore gamers. America’s Army soon became the crown jewel of army recruiting. Barely a year after the game’s release, 20 percent of incoming West Point plebes reported having played it. By 2008, an MIT study noted that “30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.”
America’s Army now boasts more than 11 million registered users. The game was repurposed several years ago for use as a government training tool, and its platform is now used for dozens of training and simulation applications, including PackBot robots and nuclear, biological, and chemical reconnaissance vehicles. America’s Army has been the focus of literally thousands of TV, online, radio, and print stories, covered in all the major media outlets in the United States. It has been a cover story in AdWeek magazine, and in 2009 it won Guinness World Records for “Most Downloaded War Game” and “Largest Virtual Army.” Versions of America’s Army exist for the Xbox and Xbox 360, and a variety of mobile and arcade applications are available as well. Given its overwhelming success, the army views the game—which initially cost $7.5 million to produce, about one-third of 1 percent of the army’s overall marketing budget—as one of its most successful recruiting initiatives ever.
America’s Army was such a hit primarily because it’s what the game industry refers to as a “triple-A” first-person shooter game, meaning that it’s on a par with the best commercial examples of the genre. Even if players have no particular interest in the real-world military, America’s Army enables them to enjoy a topflight gaming experience—for free. For players who are interested in the United States military, America’s Army is attractive not only for the exciting game play but also for its claim to realism; one of the game’s taglines is “The most realistic army game ever!” This supposed accuracy derives in part from the spot-on depictions of weapons, uniforms, and missions in the game. The geographical backdrops in America’s Army only add to this sense of veracity. The game’s first version, released before much footage from the war in Afghanistan was available for public consumption, featured landscapes lifted directly from filmed sequences of that country, and later versions incorporate footage from Iraq and other actual theaters of war.
Also unique to the game is its focus on basic training. Before players can participate in a mission or play certain roles, such as sniper or medic, they must complete the appropriate training regimen. This requirement is coupled with the game’s focus on army values. For example, a key innovation of America’s Army is that one’s own team members are always depicted as Americans, while opposing team members are always depicted as enemies. In an unusual feature for a first-person shooter game, if a player does shoot one of his own team members, intentionally or not, he is immediately ejected from the game in progress and thrown into a virtual version of Fort Leavenworth prison, and his player rating is reduced by several points.
Wardynski was not an obvious choice to oversee the creation of the world’s first military-developed video game. Before the project began, he wasn’t particularly familiar with or interested in video games. His interest was in reforming the traditional recruiting paradigm, because many recruiters, he says, because of the incentives they face, “don’t care about kids—they only want kids to sign up for the army, they don’t care whether kids succeed in the army.” However, Wardynski was after the kinds of recruits who could succeed and even spend their entire careers in the military. As such, he thought the game should require investment before it yielded reward—specifically, basic training as the investment required for the reward of hitting the battlefield. (The thought that war should be a reward did not trouble him.) He felt that the motivating question guiding the design of America’s Army should therefore be, why does the army have basic training? He wanted to emphasize the army’s “seven core values,” which are listed on GoArmy.com: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, i
ntegrity, and personal courage. By focusing on basic training and army values, Wardynski thought he had found the right spin for justifying the game to the army’s leadership and to anti–video game crusaders such as Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl, who had headed a joint congressional investigation into the industry’s marketing of violent video games to minors.
In person, Wardynski comes across as simultaneously deferential and dominant, his voice gentle but insistent. Though he was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, his voice has a tinge of a southern accent. He is handsome and fit, of medium height and build, and his piercing gray-blue eyes are his most striking feature; when he is talking, his gaze remains locked on his listener. A single question is likely to send him spinning off on a half-hour spiel, one in which his sharp intelligence is readily apparent, as is his ability to guide any conversation, no matter the topic, back to the issue he wants to discuss. He is bracingly blunt, fiery in his opinions, and withering in his criticisms of the Pentagon. Yet few would deny that the strength of Wardynski’s personality, along with his intelligence, is what guided America’s Army to its ultimate success.
People can see what they want to see in America’s Army—it can properly be regarded as both teen-focused propaganda that militarizes young minds and a striking example of military innovation. It stems from and is a tool for war, and it represents a direct intrusion of the army’s hand into the homes (and minds) of children and teenagers. But as a government contracting model, it also represents a streamlined (and exponentially cheaper) improvement over decades of Pentagon waste. The game’s ability to transcend a simple narrative is part of what made it an object of interest and controversy from the start.