Gaming Technologies Impacting Military Training
GAMING COMPANIES AND THE MILITARY SEEKING “RIGHT BLENDING” FOR EFFECTIVE MILITARY TRAINING TOOLS.
Games such as “24 Blue” and “Decisive Action” will probably never have the sizzle or the cult following of commercial blockbuster games like “Halo 3” or “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.” That’s because neither 24 Blue nor Decisive Action were designed for that purpose. Instead, each is an example of the impact that gaming technologies is having on military training as a teaching tool. 24 Blue, designed by game and technology product developer BreakAway, Ltd., simulates realistic flight deck operations—complete with aircraft, deck equipment, and AI controlled personnel—all set amid the hazards of war and flight deck itself. The training simulation tool was developed by the company for the U.S. Navy to conduct launch and recovery training and analysis. Decisive Action, designed by Jim Lunsford and HPS Simulations, is a modern division and corps level simulation that depicts combat with maneuver brigades and battalions along with supporting artillery, airstrikes, electronic warfare, engineers, helicopters and even pysops units. The U.S. Army Command and General Staff College has recently selected Decisive Action as a training tool for its officers.
Because of limited resources and the increasing cost of military training, the military is looking at different alternatives to conduct training more efficiently and effectively. Gaming technologies are expected to play more of a role in military training going forward as gaming companies and military officials seek the right blending of technology to produce effective training tools.
GAMING IMPACT ON THE MILITARY
Gaming applications and technology in particular have had a major impact on military training, according to Charles E. Hughes, professor and associate director, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida and director, Media Convergence Laboratory, at UCF. “Technology has an enormous impact on the military as it has on our everyday lives,” Hughes told MT2. “We are all better connected and have faster access to information.
These are clearly desirable in military operations, keeping troops in contact, allowing information to be transmitted even in the fog of war, and monitoring the health and position of all troops. I think that the technology enabled by the market demands of games is very important in military training and military hardware; it drives innovation and pushes down cost.” Hughes said he’s not a great advocate of desktop games in the actual training process, except for places where they are clearly appropriate, such as when training people in tasks like controlling drones and robots or in battlefield management. “I believe that mixed reality (the merging of the real and virtual) is a more appropriate technology for mission training, for example, in tasks like situational awareness,” Hughes said. “However, much of the underlying technology for this is made possible by games, for example, better articulation of virtual models and more realistic AI behaviors.”
Gaming technology’s influence on military training is growing, said Julia Loughran president and owner of research and consultant company ThoughtLink Inc. “Over the last ten years, there has been a slow but steady shift in the use of games for military training,” Loughran told MT2. “It used to be that you couldn’t even say the word ‘game’ associated with the military, but today, the term ‘game’, especially the term ‘serious games’, is becoming more common place, where serious games are not like a traditional game because the emphasis is on the reinforcement of learning and not on entertainment.”
Gaming is providing a disruptive approach to how military training has been previously contracted, designed and implemented, said Ben Sawyer, cofounder of Digitalmill, a technology project and software development firm, and the Serious Games Initiative. SGI is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health and public policy. “That doesn’t mean [the impact of gaming technology on military training] is entirely pervasive or without problems, but in a broader sense, I think that it’s part of a broader goal of thinking beyond the obvious when it comes to how we will train people in the future,” Sawyer said.
GAMING AND MILITARY DIVIDE
Though some military services today are using gaming technology more than others, there have been barriers in the past that have prevented the two sides from coming together, Doug Whatley, founder and CEO of BreakAway Ltd., told MT2. “The term ‘game’ has been a huge barrier in getting the sides together,” Whatley said. “Game implies all that entertainment, fantasy and frivolity to an audience focused on how to save lives. What the military wants thought is what games offer: the immersion, the engagement, and most of all—the technology. As more game companies began to separate the game from the technology, the military has been much more receptive.”
Sawyer said that most game companies are focused first and foremost on a different risk-reward ratio than the military- simulation space. “The goal of game companies is high return, which means a lot of focus on the user since they are the absolute customer,” Sawyer said. “Games are more customer-centric, and innovative, and closer to the market as a result since a bad game basically doesn’t sell and people lose their jobs. That doesn’t mean all games are great but the pressure to make them great is what drives the innovation and creative aspects that I think other industries including defense seek.”
Loughran said the fact that both sides have different missions and needs has also been a factor. “With gaming companies, they are almost entirely profit driven. They want those games that sell a lot of product,” Loughran said. “And that can be sometimes [because of] bigger monsters or more fun and enticing virtual reality and other types of things whereas the military is saddled with needing to come up with games that actually have a training benefit. Therefore, sometimes those [focuses] go at different odds from one another.”
Another difficulty has been the sometimes lack of understanding by the gaming companies in how the military operates and does business, said David “Bart” Bartlett, director of marketing and business development for the national security division at Forterra Systems Inc. “Some commercial gaming companies have some great products,” Bartlett said. “If you don’t have the understanding of the market space for the military, it is difficult for them, you know what I mean? I think that is the biggest issue. They don’t have the people who have dealt with government contracts. If they had people that did, I think that would make it easier for them.”
CULTURE’S ROLE IN THE DIVIDE
Organizational culture and underlying leadership have also played a role in the divide between gaming companies and the military, Loughran said. “I do believe that the leadership in the Army has been quicker to address the benefits and see some of the prospects of gaming technology more so than maybe some of the other industries,” Loughran said. “And I believe that it is very hard to change ways of doing business. I like to make the analogy of, it’s like making meat loaf. If your family has used the same family recipe for making meat loaf over many generations, it’s going to be hard to introduce a new meat loaf recipe into your family. And with the military services, the way they make meat loaf is generally by using face-to-face classroom types of situations and large scale simulations. So it is at two ends of the spectrum and it is really hard to get them to try a new way of doing training.”
On the flip side, there could be gaming companies that don’t know how to work with the government, Loughran said. “[Gaming companies] also have their own personal culture, organizational culture and that does not involve knowing how to work with government agencies. They are not familiar with how government contracting works … So what I think you are seeing is an uprising of the new companies who are doing game development that either used to be in the government contracting business or are just starting with a focus that government will be their clientele.”
Whatley said culture doesn’t play as much of a role today in whether the military will use gaming technology to help with training as it once did. “We see the ‘culture’ factor at work in private industry and in medicine as well, so it’s not just at work within the military,” Whatley said. “The issue really comes back to what has been available from the game industry historically, which has been solutions that didn’t fit their needs. The military wants to have as much control to develop and customize their simulations as possible, and they need a certain level of realism and integration out of their simulation tools. In truth, there could be a combined cultural compromise for both sides: They could probably sacrifice some of that demand for precision in some instances in order to gain more agility in planning and strategy; and we as game technology companies could probably reach for some more precision in other cases to provide them with higher fidelity and more immersive and emotional realism.”
SERIOUS GAMES
One avenue that has helped bring about more dialogue between gaming companies and the military has been the Serious Games Summit, which is held in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The Serious Games Summit GDC spotlights the rapidly growing serious games industry that features the use of interactive games technology within nonentertainment sectors. GDC is the world’s largest professionals-only game industry event. Sawyer said the goal of SGS is “basically to get everyone interested in the same room (virtual or real) as much as possible so they can figure out ways to work together better and better.”
Serious games and gaming technologies have even taken on a higher profile role at military conferences and shows. At this year’s 2007 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Fla., there will be a special event called “DoD Training— Impact of Gaming Technologies.” The goals of this event are: (1) to provide DoD with an opportunity to articulate their training roadmap and identify areas ripe for insertion of gaming technology and (2) have leaders in serious gaming initiatives respond on the state of gaming technologies and discuss what needs to be done to meet these needs, identify areas how standards, specifications, tolls and pedagogy can contribute to this vision. Speakers from each service represented will provide their service’s vision of the future for how gaming, and associated technologies, may fit into training, simulation, education or even other areas such as operations, planning or acquisitions.
RIGHT BLENDING
There has been much discussion in the gaming industry and in military circles on what it will take for both sides to reach the “right blending” of technology to fit the training needs of the military. Loughran said finding that medium will largely depend on defining the best situation to use gaming technology. “I believe that gaming technology can be best used in situations where the training needs to be adaptive, where you need to quickly change the requirements because of enemy tactics changing quickly,” Loughran said. “It can also be very beneficial to use games for part-task or small team training.” She also said there is a “desperate need for metrics” that show definitively that games can be beneficial. “This is difficult because metrics are sometimes hard to define particularly in team-based games,” Loughran said. “And data needs to be collected, which can be difficult inside gaming engines. Then there has to be a thorough analysis of the results to compare games to other forms of training, and that can sometimes be expensive.”
Whatley said finding that right blending will begin with gaming companies realizing that “games business should be all about providing tools.” “The military is looking for the technology, not the end experience we create,” Whatley said. “The other thing is that between stretched staff resources, shrinking budgets, and the challenges of dealing with an ever more agile and adaptable enemy, the military needs to be equipped to respond as quickly as possible. That doesn’t happen with large-scale simulation tools or with custom-made serious games. But that can happen with the right tools, and game technology offers the right blend of fidelity and agility to empower rapid response planning within the military.”
Sawyer said the right blending of technology will be hopefully whatever best solves the military’s problem or need. “From what I see, we’re ultimately looking at a concoction of game development, Web 2.0 styles and approaches, augmenting and anchored by traditional instructional design and simulation approaches,” Sawyer said. “We must learn to create the best hybrids that fit the problem. This really means the right blending must include a healthy dose of problem analysis and inter-disciplinary design teams that have the capacity to check egos and preconceptions at the door so the blending can take place.”
The military would like industry and gaming companies to provide simulation tools to help make its training process more effective and efficient and also help fill in the gaps in the process when they arise, according to Terry Bennington, a retired U.S. Marine Corps sergeant major and project officer for the Technology Division, Training and Education Command, Quantico, Va. “We have modified a lot of our training events in order to fulfill requirements that the warfighting Marine needs out there right now,” Bennington told MT2 recently. “Simulations need to parallel it in order to [fill in] the gaps. As you know, simulations cannot do everything. But simulations can do a lot of things. But everything that we do within simulations has got to be built that identifies a task within our training requirements manuals. And if you don’t do that, then what you are really building is a game.”
THE FUTURE OF GAMING TECHNOLOGIES IN MILITARY TRAINING
Gaming technologies could play a prominent role in the future of military training, Sawyer said. “I think games represent a democratization of simulation and as such, the goal is to get more people exposed to more advanced training via simulation using games,” Sawyer said. “If we want tomorrow’s sailors, marines, airman and soldiers to be cross-trained and more capable, then I think we need to find ways to build training tools that work in ways different than we have before.”
Loughran said the future of gaming technologies in military training could depend on the gaming community showing the military how it can help the military do its job better. “I think, going back to my earlier analogy, if we can show that the meat loaf tastes better and is less filling with measurable results, we can have a chance to get games to be more of a legitimate military training tool,” she said. “I think we need to answer for the military how will it help them do their job, demonstrate how it makes their job easier and demonstrate how it improves job performance.” ♦