American Army commits a large wad of money towards FPS's

News from George - Tuesday, 02 December 2008 @ 4:36pm

And where will we see the American Army in 2010?

Playing FPS’s of course.

Of course yes, because that makes perfect sense.

Well considering the extremely life like situations you come across in games, particularly war based story lines, you would’ve expected some sort of training simulation similar to our beloved war based FPS’s to already be implemented.

Well no, not officially, not until now that is. In a statement from Lt Col. Gary Stephens, who is product manager for air and ground tactical trainers at Project Executive Office (looooong title) "The $50 million has been approved for a games and training program starting in 2010.” $50 million? $50 million!? Maybe they’ll consider buying the extended warranties with that much money. Hah, probably not actually.

And they take it very seriously, according to Stephens. With the gaming industry producing new technologies and banking a cool slice of the money pie, the Army is looking to take advantage of technology trends and adapt them towards military training. But they have also made it quite clear they have no intention to tap into the competitive gaming market.

The army already use the game DARWARS Ambush to successfully train soldiers in particular on field situations, but finds the lack of customisation of the in game environment vexing. Only being able to accommodate a limited amount of players, and compared to the army’s real world battle command system, and being unable to make certain in game situations harder or more complex to reflect upon real life situations, does make this game outdated. And does bring my attention towards me over using the comma, and almost forgetting the full stop does exist.

But taking away from my self-editorial judgement, what will the game they develop be like?

Game After Ambush, the very unimaginative title Stephens has given it, will make it possible for the Army to make any modification to missions, scenarios, terrain, weapons and outcomes. So think of it like playing Call of Duty, only you’re able to give every soldier in the Jap military a huge moustache, make their objective to rescue a cat out of a tree, but place the tree is a large open field surrounded by 400 English soldiers. Armed with a knife.

As well as being almost completely customisable the game has to be low cost to train with, easily portable and able to train a whole platoon at one time. Be it via lan or via internet playing with their army buddies stationed world wide.

This soldier cannot contain his overwhelming excitement

Almost not worth mentioning is all missions are saved and able to be watched at any time. IE- Replays.

Leslie Duvow, project director for gaming at PEO-STRI, disclosed there would be 70 gaming systems in 53 locations, located within The United States, Italy, Germany and South Korea. Each of those systems will consist of 52 computers, including headsets, keyboards, steering wheels and mice.

According to Lesie “Soldiers will be able to drive virtual vehicles, fire virtual weapons, pilot virtual unmanned aerial vehicles and do "Almost anything a soldier does" in a virtual battle space as large as 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers”

Which does sound pretty cool.

Conker's Bad Fur Day was unfortunately knocked back as a suitable training game.

This game will be made available commercially, but I assume slightly edited so as not to be an exact copy of what the Army themselves use to train with.

Also look out for Dismounted Soldier, another clever title by from the American Army. Hitting our stores in 2009, Dismounted Soldier allows you to don virtual reality goggles and walk around a virtual battle space with a, wait for it…. Virtual weapon.

It is smart that the American Army has grappled on to the idea of training their soldiers via a virtual world, but it seems they should’ve realised this a while ago. Using commercial games for training purposes for the last 5 years or so is great, but completely designing a game in which you’re able to edit situations to make them more life like, almost seems like an obvious idea that should’ve smacked them in face 1990ish.

But that’s me being quite critical, because they have in fact used advanced virtual training simulators since 1980. I know this, the Discovery Channel told me so.