Creating a World Classroom - Military Training

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Creating a World Classroom

Massive multiplayer online commercial games and massively multyplayer simulation provides the services with an opportunity to transform their training and education programs.
By Marty Kauchak

The U.S. Department of Defense is cautiously studying whether computer-based games help service members meet individual and collective (unit) training requirements. A small, but increasing, number of commercial off-the-shelf PC-based games are being used to supplement traditional instruction provided in classrooms, at fixed-site simulators and other venues. At the same time, DoD has also started an evaluation of relatively new categories of commercial games that operate over the Internet, or in a wireless environment.

The monikers of these game-for-training categories include massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and massively multiplayer (MMP) simulation.

Dr. Mike Macedonia, the visionary chief technology officer at the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation in Orlando, FL, shared with MT2 the untapped potential of MMOGs and MMP simulation and explained why his command is evaluating these technologies.

“The neat thing is that when you have soldiers with access to the Internet and the Army’s Knowledge Online system, you can conceive of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq training with an Army National Guardsman in Mississippi. So, what we are doing with these games is going beyond traditional advanced distributed learning and we are creating a world classroom.”

In-Service Games

Computer-based games have been in service training tool kits since the latter part of the 1990s. These products have been bought outright as COTS products to sharpen basic warfare skills or were tailored to meet specific training needs.

Since 1997, Sonalysts Inc. has teamed with computer game publisher Electronic Arts to develop three naval simulation games that are in use in the United States and other nations. Soon after the 1997 release of 688(I) Hunter/Killer: Submarine Simulation Game, the U.S. Navy recognized the product’s potential as a tool to refresh perishable skills and reinforce hard-to-learn training objectives.

The chief of Naval Education and Training issued a contract for the company to add several components to 688(I) Hunter/Killer to further increase its value as a training aid, said Bob Kurzawa, vice president of Sonalysts. The training command soon supplied a copy of the upgraded Navy game version to each service submarine. The game has been added to the training inventories of the British Royal Navy and the German Navy.

Other collaborative projects included Jane’s Fleet Command, which was released in 1999 and provides accurate modeling of the capabilities of over 300 weapons and weapons platforms. Modified or unedited versions of the product help train U.S. Navy warfighters and students. In 2001, Sub Command: Submarine Simulation Game was unveiled in English, German and Japanese versions.

Coalescent Technologies modified for the U.S. Marine Corps the Bohemian Interactive Studios’ commercial game Real Virtuality into a new product named VBS1—a fully interactive, 3-D training system. The new program provides a synthetic training environment in which team members can practice small units tactics. VBS1 was put through its paces at the 2002 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference as part of Corps’ Deployable Virtual Training Environment demonstration. The game has been evaluated for training onboard amphibious ships by embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit staffs.

Evolution

A natural evolution is the migration from games whose average training audiences are the size of a ship’s wardroom or other military unit (about 25 personnel) to larger scale games—including MMOGs.

This second generation of games originated as commercial entertainment products that, heretofore, have been online. Those games allow large numbers of players (often thousands) to concurrently play on a round the clock basis—or as long as the controlling data center or game publisher keeps open the competition.

Game environments for MMOGs and related products allow an individual to role play a number of characters in highly-interactive settings based on alternate histories or alternate realities.

And in a new twist, mobile MMP games based on wireless technology are also being honed. Japan-based developer and publisher Dwango’s game, Samurai Romanesque, has more than 100,000 subscribers.

DoD’s technology leaders are accelerating efforts to prove the mettle of MMOGs and other recent products as a viable training technology for DoD’s usually staid training requirements and acquisition communities. In July, the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office sponsored a seminar at the Alexandria, VA-based Institute of Defense Analyses. The seminar was to launch the idea of using a consortium to explore how to use this embryonic technology for the department’s training programs. In September, the Office of the Secretary of Defense included a panel discussion on this technology during the DoD Training Transformation Technologies Conference.

Promises and Shortfalls of Games

“We want games for training not because they are games, but because they are the most engaging intellectual thing that we have. They are the best learning tool that we have ever invented. And games are a language that ‘digital natives’ [his term for people who were born after 1974 and grew up in the digital world] understand and think fluently,” said Marc Prensky, founder and chief executive officer of Games2Train. He delivered his remarks at the September DoD training conference.

Prensky, an enthusiastic proponent of gaming technology for training, also provided another attribute of these games if they are used for military applications—their utility to furnish large-scale collective (unit) training. The current generation of commercial games supports participation from one person to a South Korean product in which “close to a million people play at once. That [approximates] the size of our whole military,” he emphasized.

Robert Gehorsam, vice president of strategic initiatives at There Inc., shared his industry colleagues’ enthusiasm of how MMOGs can benefit military training. “I think that there are joint training opportunities,” including mission rehearsal for special operations and intelligence units that could be integrated into these games, said Gehorsam.

Warren Katz, co-founder and chief operating officer, MÄK Technologies Inc., provided another positive assessment of the ability of MMOGs to supply military training, but added the DoD’s acquisition program prevents the rapid delivery of this technology.

“Technologically speaking, very good MMOGs are available, and have been available for some time,” Katz told MT2. “This would lead to the conclusion that perhaps it [absence of MMOGs in service training programs] isn’t a technological problem. At the same time, you have to observe that DoD doesn’t use any of them in large-scale applications. There are, however, small pockets of these games here and there as DoD evaluates this technology.”

“So why is it that the technology is available and is in use by the public who pays $9.95 or $11.95 for a game, and DoD hasn’t adopted the technology in a big way?” Katz rhetorically asked. He answered his own question: “There is only one conclusion—it’s a business problem.”

Possible acquisition impediments to DoD’s expanded use of MMOGs include “marketplace obstacles, entrenched bureaucracy, or some sort of other failure that prevents DoD from adopting MMOGs in a massive way,” he said.

Katz acknowledged DoD is using an increasing number of micro-simulations and other categories of games in its training programs. “There are about 20 or 30 COTS games that have been adapted from commercial games, or custom developed-which still have a ‘game flavor’ to them, that have been adopted by the military.”

But Katz added these games originated from research and development projects that “had almost no funding, and were rarely sponsored by TRADOC [U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command] and other service training commands. These are rarely recognized or endorsed by the larger training commands because they buy large products like JSIMS [Joint Simulation System], OneSAF [One Semi-Automated Forces], WARSIM [Warfighter’s Simulation) and others—because this is what the largest training industry players want. They want the large multi-hundred dollar contracts. And the service procurement organizations want these large decade-long contracts because it gives them and their industry partners security.”

Industry advocacy aside, some DoD officials are encouraging the department to further evaluate the training potential of this technology before embracing it. One individual in this camp is Dr. Ralph Chatham, a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) program manager, who told DoD training conference attendees, “Games are not training.”

Chatham, who is guiding the embryonic DARPA continuously available training wars program—nicknamed DARWARS—through its development phase, added that the military-industry team must address a number of uncertainties and limitations in MMOGs before the games become part of service training programs. These issues include: validation of games’ physics and scenarios; their interoperability and open architecture capabilities; their ability to support a formal after action review; and their degrees of privacy and multi-level security.

A U.S. Air Force Air Education Training Command representative speaking on a condition of anonymity said that that his service’s leadership also insists that “significant” additional research should be conducted before MMOGs and similar games are used to train his personnel.

Even Games2Train’s Prensky opined that more work is required to transform a commercial product into a good training game. “We have to take the thing called content and translate it from English into ‘game.’ That might involve making things more active. This is an art—not a science. There is no machine that you can put your training program in and have your game come out,” he said.

Search for a Proponent

There is a divergence within the services on how the technology and instructional communities view these games. The Army has established a four-year, $3.5 million science and technology objective contract with There Inc. to develop a game in which multiple players could fight terrorists in an asymmetrical, virtual environment.

Macedonia said the science and technology project’s rationale was not to focus on software development, “which is already proven, but rather, to extend [the programs], and determine the utility of MMPs simulation as a training environment.” The service’s Research, Development & Engineering Command, in collaboration with the Army Research Institute, is working with the industry team to bring the program to fruition.

But TRADOC has not written a requirement for these technologies in service training plans. The failure to secure a proponent in the traditional training community is the biggest near-term obstacle in fielding these systems, Macedonia said. Nonetheless, PEO STRI views these technologies as a future product line and will continue to study the utility of these games.

Marty Kauchak is MT2’s editor-at- large. He is based in Washington, D.C.