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USA
TODAY
January 2, 2008
By Michael Peck
Armies fight as they train. From Caesar's legionnaires to
Patton's GIs, soldiers have learned their trade by sweating
and straining on muddy drill fields.
But the Nintendo Generation will learn to fight by playing
the Pentagon's equivalent of Halo 3. The future of military
training became clear recently in Orlando at I/ITSEC, the
annual trade show for what the National Training and Simulation
Association estimates is a $35 billion industry. The highlight
of this year's show was "Serious Games," the growing movement
to harness games for military training and education.
The video games resembled the ones teenagers found under their
Christmas trees this year. There were games where soldiers
learned to patrol Baghdad neighborhoods or perform first
aid on digital casualties. Amid the big, expensive flight
simulators and urban combat mock-ups on the convention floor, simple
laptops flickered with digital Iraqis teaching soldiers
how to speak Arabic.
The new rage
Across the USA and Europe, military researchers are busily
exploring the potential of video games. Not because the
Joint Chiefs of Staff are Grand Theft Auto addicts, but
because there are other values the military can find with
video games.
For one, live training wears out equipment and stretches training
resources. The Army National Guard is resorting to portable
live training centers because there isn't enough space at
the training ranges for all its brigades. Then there is
simple economics. When a ride in an F-15 costs more than
$14,000 per flying hour, simulations look cheap. But the
multimillion dollar price tags of traditional flight simulators
and other elaborate training systems make them too expensive
for general use.
So what's left? Serious Games. Simulations with lifelike,
immersive 3-D graphics that can be played on a $700 Dell
laptop with a $90 video card. They cannot completely replace
live training, but they can teach tasks from disarming an
IED to fixing an Abrams tank. Soldiers can use them in barracks.
It's no coincidence the budget-challenged Marine Corps has
been the most aggressive and innovative in taking advantage
of video games. Their highly regarded Virtual Battlespace
II tactical simulation is derived from a similar video game
that retails for $37.99. Nor is it coincidence that the
Army recently launched a project office for games that will
transplant cutting-edge graphics to Army training systems.
Are they effective?
Yet behind the beautifully animated 3-D soldiers lurks a fundamental
question: Do these games create better-trained soldiers
or are they just hype? For all the buzz about games, there
is little proof that they work better than old-fashioned
classroom training by human instructors or training in the
field.
Before we buy a hybrid car, we ask whether it gets better
gas mileage than the old guzzler. Yet the effectiveness
of militarized games is more faith than fact, although there
is some evidence that some games are useful for education.
A group of researchers found that diabetic children who
used a video game with diabetes-control themes had a 77%
decrease in emergency room visits. Researchers at the University
of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies
also report that X-Box-style virtual reality simulations
have helped Iraq war veterans with post-traumatic stress
disorder. Whether this translates into better combat skills
for battling al-Qaeda is another matter.
Games could be the most cost-effective solution for a high-tech
military. But intensive research is needed to learn how
effective they are. The problem is not that games aren't
a useful supplement to live training. The danger is that
as defense budgets shrink and video games become ever-more
sophisticated, there will be a temptation to replace live
training with simulations. For all the virtues of virtual
reality, it cannot recreate the tension, terror and bloodshed
of war.
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