Getting Serious About Games

Last Updated (Monday, 30 November 2009 09:01) Written by Peter Buxbaum

MT2 2009 Volume: 14 Issue: 6 (November/December)

 

Although There is Much Buzz About Serious
Gaming for Military Training Applications, the
Fact is That the Phenomenon is Still in Its Infancy. 

 

“We have commissioned studies on the effectiveness of gaming for training purposes,” said Roger Smith, chief scientist and chief technology officer for the U.S. Army’s PEO STRI. “The evidence shows that it works very well. It is usually much better than didactic classroom lectures because soldiers pay more attention and pick up lessons quicker. People who used to fail out of lecture or demonstration courses are now taking the same test and passing.”

INCREASING GAMING’S USE FOR MILITARY TRAINING

There have been a number of related developments that have allowed for the increased adoption of gaming for military training. The increased promulgation of widely accepted standards has enabled interoperability among gaming systems and components. Open standards and open systems have also been developed, which also ease system integration and reduce costs.

These developments have facilitated a trend in which some gaming companies have broken apart gaming systems to provide individual components or tool kits. This allows gaming technology companies to specialize in specific gaming components, such as image engines, physics engines, or terrain imagery, while integrators, much as they do in other areas of military acquisition, mesh components together into systems that meet military customer requirements.

Gaming technologies have their specific uses in military training. “We’re not going to teach a solider how to fire a rifle with a game,” said Smith. “But gaming can be useful to develop other related skills, such as how to pick targets or how to clear a building.”

The same goes for vehicle training. The Army won’t use a game to teach a solider how to drive an MRAP, but gaming could provide a driver training on interacting with his convoy group leader. The VBS2 acquisition was disti

nguished by the Army’s insistence that the system be ready to go on day one. “The RFP said we would not be spending any of our money to develop software,” said Smith. “The game needed to meet our needs out of the box.” Those requirements included content such as after action review, features such as scenario development, and the ability for diverse players to interact with the game across a network.

That out-of-the-box attribute did require some software integration, explained Chris Chambers, president of Laser Shot, the prime contractor on the acquisition.

“We have a piece of software exclusive to VBS that allows trainees to shoot into the VBS world with weapons simulators,” said Chambers.

Laser Shot actually provided two versions of VBS2 to the Army. One is a desktop version that is being fielded to battle command training centers at Army posts. The second, VBS2 Lite, contains no classified materials and allows trainees to use the game on their home computers.

VBS2 represents a successful adaptation of a commercial ground combat computer game into a military training application. The game, originally developed by the Czech Republic’s Bohemia Interactive in 2005 under the name Operation Flashpoint, is a first-person simulation, meaning that it presents the action from the soldier’s, rather than a bird’s-eye, point of view. The military product also brings in real-world, geospecific terrain data, another feature missing from the commercial product. VBS2 includes a number of non-kinetic war fighting tasks such as interrogating prisoners and running “presence patrols” that take assessments of the mood of the local population.

VBS2 is based on proprietary technology, although, since the Army has a complete license for the product and access to the source code, it can modify the game as it sees fit. VBS2 has been implemented at 54 Army training sites thus far and over 400 instructors have been trained on the system, Chambers said.

OPEN TECHNOLOGY CONUNDRUM

Serious gaming technologies are being advanced in the military by the use of open technology development. The Department of Defense released an Open Technology Development (OTD) Roadmap in 2006 with the aim of reducing the cost of technology acquisitions and increasing interoperability and reuse of technology components across department programs. OTD methodologies include reliance on common standards and interfaces, and open source software and design. Open source refers to software whose source code is available under a license that permits users to change and redistribute it.

The gaming engine Delta 3D is an example of open source software that has been used by dozens of companies and organizations around the world to generate 3-D visualizations and gamebased training systems. The engine was originally developed in 2002 at the Naval Postgraduate School, which still maintains the project.

“Over the last six years open source gaming engines like Delta 3D have been used to create both 3-D visualizations and serious gaming,” said Curtiss Murphy, a project engineer at Alion Science and Technology. “These allow serious games to be developed without massive licensing costs and restrictions. Access to the source code means that technology evolves from one project the next.”

The downside to open source is that the software may not be as feature complete as in some proprietary technologies. “It becomes a tradeoff,” said Murphy. “If you want to invest your funding to develop content for a training package instead of source code licensing, then the open source solution becomes very attractive.”

Camber Corp. has also used Delta 3D to develop simulations, including an award-winning game called Hunter, which has since evolved into a training device for the Apache helicopter. “We used Delta 3D for the out-the-window viewing system,” said Jerry Hendrix, senior director of engineering at Camber Corp.

Delta 3D boasts an online user community that provides information to game developers looking to get involved. “A lot of users run into the same problems,” said Hendrix. “The Website includes user forms and is a great starting point for ironing out technical problems.”

Hendrix said that open source gaming engines are particularly useful to support simulation style games and to update legacy task simulators with more current technology. But sometimes proprietary game engines work best for a specific set of requirements.

“We do a comparative analysis and look at customer requirements,” said Hendrix, “and we pick the best game engine for the customer.”

In any event, the open technology mentality has yet to make significant inroads within DoD. “It is not making much of a penetration,” said Murphy. “Open source is rarely mentioned in RFPs. Not enough people within DoD are aware of open source, and many are more eager to focus on the ‘whizbanginess’ of the latest technology.”

“We feel that the momentum toward open source and open standards for the implementation of training simulations is slower than anticipated,” agreed Hendrix. “But as more information is gathered and analysis is done in the use of these kinds of tools, they will become more accepted.”

The DoD has done significant work on gaming interface standards, said Warren Katz, chief executive officer of VT MÄK.

“DoD standards like Open Flight and SCORM have done a great deal of good in the display area,” said Katz, “but there is still a long way to go to develop better interoperability standards for the internals of simulation.” Open Flight is a visualization protocol while SCORM, Sharable Content Object Reference Model, an XML-based, DoD-developed standard, defines communications between client-side content and a host system.

Standards already developed in the command control and battle management space could, if required to be incorporated by gaming developers, provide new opportunities to develop robust gaming technologies. Katz pointed to JC3IEDM, the Joint Consultation, Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model, a standard that enables interoperability among systems required to share C2 information, and CBML, the Command Battle Management Language, as examples of operational standards that could be incorporated into serious gaming technologies.

“These could enable the exchange of standardized scenarios and would create a whole new opportunity to create command and control models and simulations,” said Katz.

Greater progress in defining a complete set of interoperability standards would help the serious gaming industry to develop a tool kit, or component, approach to the development of gaming technologies, said Katz. By establishing standard interfaces among components, companies would be freed from the task of creating end-to-end games and instead could generate expertise in developing specific gaming components or in integrating those components into larger systems.

“Gaming companies will learn to break systems apart and license components,” said Smith. “The integrators will be thinking about how best to incorporate and reuse separate components into much larger systems. These components will be classified as COTS products and will be bought like COTS.”

Would such a development benefit DoD? “Unambiguously yes,” said Katz, because it would allow program managers and integrators to choose the best of among each of the gaming components required for a particular project.

“It’s too hard to predict when this will happen,” said Smith. “At some point in the future, there will be a need for a major refresh of training software. That might be stimulus enough.”

A variation on the open source concept comes from Caspian Learning, a U.K.-based company, which developed a proprietary technology platform called Thinking Worlds that it used to deliver serious games to clients such as the U.K. military police and navy. The key feature of the platform is that it enables games to be developed by designers without having to write software code. Earlier this year, the company decided to modify its business model by de-emphasizing the development of gaming content and instead licensing access to the technology platform to gaming designers.

“Probably the biggest unique feature of the platform is that it puts instructional designers back at the center of gaming design,” said Graeme Duncan, the company’s chief executive officer. “Using an authoring interface, designers can create their own simulations using Thinking Worlds without ever writing a line of code.”

The platform enables designers to create and modify games quickly. In a military context, a new development on the battlefield can be incorporated into a game in a day, according to Duncan.

Thinking Worlds is also distinguished by the fact that it is a Web browser-based system, although it is also available to be deployed locally on an individual computer. “We wanted to give our customers the option to consume the product like any other Web page without any local executable fields needed,” said Duncan. “We worked for 12 months with Adobe engineers in India to reprogram our engine to use the Adobe Shockwave plug-in, which is found on 70 percent of the world’s PCs.”

The browser-based system does not provide the same level of graphics fidelity as would a locally installed system. “One size does not fit all,” said Duncan. “You have to pick the right type of technology for the right game.”

Nor is Thinking Worlds traditional open source software. “We don’t provide the source code; we provide the development platform,” said Duncan. “It’s the same platform our own designers use to develop games for our own clients.”

The main advantages of Thinking Worlds, according to Duncan: drastically cutting development time and dramatically slashing development costs. Caspian Learning is in the process of opening U.S. offices in Denver, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in order to drum up business in this country.

“We’re still in the process of implementing VBS2,” said PEO STRI’s Smith. “Once users get into that system they will start to ask for more. That demand will probably start popping up in 2010 or 2011.” ♦

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