Perhaps all those concerned parent organizations had a germ of truth to feed their panic after all: the US military has been finding their FPS games really have been useful as recruiting tools:
The army began using simulation training game tech for recruiting a decade ago when it rolled out the online game “America’s Army” (www.americasarmy.com/). Britain, Australia and New Zealand eventually went in the same direction as the marines. To the despair of parents everywhere, it appears that video games do serve a useful purpose. “America’s Army” was originally developed as a recruiting and public relations tool. It cost over eight million dollars to create. By late 2002, it had 929,000 registered players, 563,000 of whom stayed around long enough to finish the basic training exercise. The game costs $3.5 million a year to maintain. So far, nearly ten million people have downloaded the front end (player) software. At peak times, over 5,000 players are online with the game simultaneously. Recruiters are satisfied with the number of prospects coming in because of the game. But an unexpected bonus has been the number of other uses the game has been put to.
The game, like many games today, was based on one of the “game engines” that are for sale to those developing commercial games. A “game engine” is the software for an earlier, successful, game, with all the specific graphics and play elements removed. When you buy a game engine, you add your own graphics and specific game and play elements, and have a new game. America’s Army used the Unreal game engine, and that led to clones of the America’s Army software for additional training systems. Using the highly realistic combat operations depicted in the game, special versions are used to create specific games for all sorts of combat situations. The public will never see most of these, especially the classified ones.
The USMC, of course, prefers not to do things the army way:
The marines went with a different engine because, well, even with lots of updates, the America’s Army software is showing its age. More realism is a matter of life and death in these training simulations, as getting the details wrong can teach troops the wrong lesson and get them killed. The marines have long been innovators in the use of tactical training and wargames. Back in the 90s, they adapted one of the first FPS (First Person perspective Shooters), “Doom” to marine use. Now they have a much more realistic game engine to use, and one that can be easily networked. Many marines take their laptop computers to combat zones, and that takes care of a lot of hardware problems.
