U.S. Army Drafts Web-Game Pros to Design Training Tool

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

April 13, 2004

The U.S. Army has recruited a surprising ally—the online gaming industry. A multiplayer virtual training tool currently in development may soon train hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers simultaneously for their ever evolving roles around the globe.

The Army has joined forces with There, an online community and computer gaming company, to create an online military training tool that uses existing gaming technologies.

While the project is still in the research and development stage, the online environment is potentially enormous. Given enough time and resources, experts say the "massively multiplayer" system could play out in a real-time, scale model of an entire virtual Earth.

Currently, the project re-creates only a limited local environment, but it does so in real-world scale.

"If you are playing something like EverQuest, for example, the scale of that virtual world is such that it feels like walking one mile [1.6 kilometers] takes about two minutes," said Robert Gehorsam, vice president of strategic initiatives for There. EverQuest is an online fantasy role-playing game not unlike the low-tech Dungeons & Dragons so popular in the 1980s.

"In this world, if you walk a mile it happens in real time," Gehorsam said. "That doesn't mean that every tree and rock is there, but we'll build out the concept as we need different areas."

Virtual training, in which soldiers are immersed in a simulated computer environment, has proven useful. Soldiers inside a mock tank, for example, can look out simulated portholes at a computer-generated landscape populated with friendly and enemy troops.

An Evolving, Portable World

The current interface of the virtual training tool developed by There looks familiar to gamers. It uses a keyboard, mouse, and microphone for audio. That's a positive for many of the soldiers who may end up training in the simulated world.

"The kids in the Army today have been playing computer and video games all their lives," said James Grosse, principal investigator with the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command's Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando, Florida.

"They are moving up to leadership positions in the Army, and this stuff is second nature to them," Grosse said. "So how can we leverage that draw, leverage all of the time they've put in, and get some training for our soldiers at the same time?"

The virtual trainer runs on a standard home computer and Internet connection. Developers say this wide platform and portable capacity is a key to the continuing evolution of the program's training effectiveness.

"Looking at our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq—how can we leverage all the missions they've done? The checkpoints they've manned? The room sweeps, the convoys they've driven?" Grosse said. "When they leave, how do we transfer that knowledge to new units that are heading over? Because the units, old and new, don't get to interact."

"This tool allows the new people who are ready to deploy to be at their home stations, go onto the Net, and get into scenarios where the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan can be the role players and play these things out," Grosse said. "[Experienced soldiers] can say, 'Hey, this is what happens in these scenarios, these are the lessons we've learned.' That can be a powerful thing."

As missions are played out, the data and information generated will remain available as the environment grows and evolves. "We don't need to keep reinventing the wheel," Grosse said.

Both the Army and game developer There are anxious to get the system into the hands of some real soldiers. They hope to have their chance this summer and fall, when a prototype environment could be tested by soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division—recently returned from very real duty in Iraq.

Human Element

The U.S. armed forces have used computer simulations for decades. Computer modeling came of age during the Cold War, an era when the United States faced more conventional enemies and combat scenarios.

The latest virtual trainer, however, represents a new type of training tool. Participants can access the system from computers anywhere in the world. And the program is designed to train soldiers for what's known as asymmetric warfare.

"Today, with what we face in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, we don't know where the front lines are," Grosse said. "Every building could potentially hide a sniper, or a car bomb could suddenly appear. We have hostage situations and special forces missions. It's not the traditional stuff that our troops have trained for in the past."

Experts say a key to computer-based training for such situations is the human component. Real people will control the virtual characters that populate the simulated environment.

Gehorsam, the There vice president, gives the example of a prototype scene set in downtown Baghdad: "If we have a hundred or a thousand people involved in that scene, they could be accessing this system from anywhere on Earth," Gehorsam said. "The real value is in having those real people act like real people. If you have large numbers of people in there acting the way they do in real life, you'll learn more things."

He notes that the system could potentially accommodate a hundred thousand players or more. While artificial intelligence will be able to control some characters, such as large crowds, Gehorsam says the unique value of the system is in the human input of living players. Many of those players will be soldiers well qualified for the task.