April 3, 2003

More Than Just a Game, but How Close to Reality?

By AMY HARMON

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/technology/circuits/03camp.html?th

THE NEW YORK TIMES

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. -- THE noise level was rising, the body count was
mounting and the 13 marines sitting in front of computer screens in a dark
room here seemed briefly to have forgotten that the urban combat mission was
just a video game.

"Sniper on the roof! Sniper on the roof!" shouted Justin J. Taylor, a
corporal leading Fire Team 2, half jumping out of his chair as his eyes
stayed glued to the monitor.

"Where? Where? Where?" demanded a comrade in Fire Team 3. 

"I'm shot," came the despairing reply. "I can't see anything."

As the military embraces electronic games as a training tool, a growing
number of soldiers are fighting in a virtual Iraq war even as they remain
stateside. For many soldiers, the increasingly realistic simulations often
seem like the closest thing to being in combat.

"It gives you a sense of reality," Corporal Taylor said. "You get that
nervous feeling: do I really want to go around the corner or not? You want
to complete the job you've been assigned to do."

Recent recruits who grew up on popular commercial games like Half-Life,
Counterstrike and Quake 3 have a natural affinity for the training games,
many of which are adapted by the military from the retail versions. Some
military officials are enthusiastic about the benefits of running troops
through the exercises at minimal expense.

But as video war games gain popularity throughout the armed forces, some
military trainers worry that the more the games seem like war, the more war
may start to seem like a game. As the technology gets better, they say, it
becomes a more powerful tool and a more dangerous one.

The debate over the use of computer simulations large and small was
sharpened when Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the commander of the Army V
Corps based in Kuwait, remarked that the guerrilla-style resistance of Iraqi
militia groups made for an enemy that was "different from the one we
war-gamed against." The current situation in Iraq, some critics say, may
highlight the problem of depending too much on virtual realities for
training. They argue that military leaders can become too enmeshed in a
gaming scenario to allow for what is actually happening. 

General Wallace's forces directed a computerized dress rehearsal for the
Iraqi invasion with several hundred Army, Marine and Air Force officers last
January in Grafenwöhr, Germany. The command center led by Gen. Tommy R.
Franks of the Army conducted its own computer simulation, Operation Internal
Look, last December in Qatar. 

"You can get so habituated to the gamed reality that the real reality,
what's on the ground now, is thought to be artificial," said James Der
Derian, principal investigator of the Information Technology War and Peace
Project, a nonprofit group that studies the impact of technology on global
politics. "If the war doesn't go according to the game, you just keep trying
to make it fit."

Computer-simulated war games, like the one hijacked by Matthew Broderick's
hacker character in the 1983 film "WarGames," have long been used by
high-ranking military officers to test large-scale maneuvers that cannot
easily be replicated in the real world. 

What is new is both the way the games are filtering down through the ranks
to the lowest level of infantry soldiers, and the broader vision that is
being contemplated for them at the highest levels of the Pentagon. 

"These kids have grown up with this technology from birth," said Dan
Gardner, director of readiness and training policy and programs in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense. "If there are tools that are less
painful than reading through a book and can give them a better sense of what
it might be like, we need to use them."

Mr. Gardner stresses that nothing will ever replace "muddy boots" training.
But he said the adoption of the technology was accelerating partly for
practical reasons: real-life training is expensive, and it is hard to find a
place for it. The Millennium Challenge, a three-week real-life war game that
took place in 17 locations simultaneously last summer, cost $250 million. 

"Back in the cold war, with the threat of a potential adversary coming over
the border, the Germans were more amenable to having tanks running through
their towns," Mr. Gardner added. 

The possibilities of networked computers, combined with an increasingly
remote-controlled military like the one Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
has vowed to build, has spurred interest in adapting the architecture of
multiplayer games like Everquest and Ultima to create a "persistent world"
for training and perhaps more.

One notion involves a scenario quite literally torn from the pages of a
science fiction novel, in which a virtual training system becomes the actual
means of waging war. "Ender's Game," a cult classic by Orson Scott Card,
tells the story of a group of young soldiers battling aliens in a video
game. In the end, they emerge to find that their victory has saved
humankind, and that it was not a game. 

" 'Ender's Game' has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael
Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando,
Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of
thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that
allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in
different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions." 

At the root of the high-tech training enthusiasm are some sobering facts
about how quickly even the best-trained troops get rusty. A large proportion
of casualties always occurs in the first weeks of fighting, military experts
say, because soldiers are essentially brushing up on their skills while in
combat. 

Computer systems like the ones the marines here were training on could be
taken on ships or even set up in remote locations so troops could train
while waiting to go into battle. 

"Anything but war is simulation," says Ralph Chatham, the co-author of a
recent Defense Science Board report on training that recommended the
adoption of virtual technology. (Mr. Chatham attributes the quote to a
retired general, Paul Gorman). "Virtual games won't teach you how to walk
through thick grass, but they will teach you what to think about when you
walk through thick grass, and you'll be a lot better off when you get to
that grass."

Acutely aware of the concerns over blending entertainment with war, some
military trainers experimenting with computer technology try to distance
their software from the favorite leisure time pursuit of male teenagers.

"We don't use the word 'game,' " said Ken Whitmore, chief executive of
Coalescent Technologies, the company that turned the popular commercial game
Operation Flashpoint into the more prosaic, if more sophisticated, Virtual
Battlefield System 1 used by the Marines. "It's a simulation."

Capt. Donald J. Mathes, who has set up four "virtual distributed training
environments," including the one, here over the last year, said the Marine
Corps had come a long way from its early forays into games, which included
adopting the hyperviolent first-person-shooter game Doom. 

"Here it doesn't hurt you to get shot," Captain Mathes told the marines in
his standard lecture here after their fourth run-through of an urban combat
mission not unlike what they might see in Baghdad. "Here you have to learn
by dying. But you have to remember, you can't get desensitized."

The Army, in an alliance with Hollywood, has embraced the idea that virtual
training can be fun and effective. Since February, students at the United
States Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., have been using a game
called Full Spectrum Command, which is aimed at teaching infantry captains
how to make smart decisions fast. 

For Maj. Brent Cummings, who made several trips to Marina del Rey, Calif.,
to work with game designers at the Institute for Creative Technologies at
the University of Southern California (they wore sandals, he did not), the
game has replaced pieces of paper that he used to hand out describing
missions for which his students would need to map out plans.

Psychologists at the Army Research Institute are monitoring the game's use
and tracking a control group that is not using the game to try to measure
its effectiveness, but Major Cummings said the buzz in his classroom made
him believe that people were learning.

"They're immersed into the game,'' he said. "You don't command a company
with a keyboard and a mouse, but somehow the guy thinks he's in there. When
that happens, he's experiencing this different level of learning.''

But Capt. Jason Gentile, who took the course over the last two months, said
it was not necessarily so much fun. "I got beat a lot,'' Captain Gentile
said. "I had a fratricide incident. But it's good to make those mistakes now
so I don't make them six or seven months from now in Baghdad.''

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