Dr. Roger Smith, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientist at the PEO STRI, sees the advantages of games over simulators quite clearly: "Time-on-task is an important part of learning. The more time you spend rehearsing, exploring options, and studying outcomes, the better you will become at a skill. If a simulation is so difficult to use that you spend all of your time and mental energy wrestling with the hardware and software, then there is little left to apply to learning. If you cannot get your hands on a simulation every day, then your learning is limited due to lack of access. Games can improve both of these situations and potentially boost the existing motivation of soldiers by adding back story, artwork, interactivity, immediate feedback, intuitive GUIs and accessibility."
Many soldiers serving in the U.S. Armed Forces today have never known a world without videogames. This generation, weaned on first-person shooters from an early age, is what Retired Marine Col. Gary W. Anderson, former Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, called "the new Spartans."
Gaming literacy can't be taken for granted when using games in training, however, as there is a risk of excluding some people altogether. According to PEO STRI research, only about 50 percent of young enlisted soldiers considered themselves gamers or were familiar with the mechanics of game play, and among young officers that number dropped to around 33 percent. Smith explains that in training they are careful to pair up recruits so that teams have a mixture of experienced and novice game players. "When we do this, it does not take the novices long to acquire the skills necessary to use the games."
So what makes training games essentially different from your average off-the-shelf titles? "I listened to a great presentation on virtual worlds by Daniel Laughlin from NASA last week," says Smith. "When asked the difference between games and simulations he replied, 'With a simulation you have to bring your own motivation.' I thought that was an excellent way to differentiate the two. The soldiers that we train have a motivation for succeeding that resides outside of the game - it is proficiency and survival. If a game can make them more proficient at a skill and help them survive in a lethal environment, then they are going to be all over it."
Creativity is not something defense contractors are often accused of, so the work of developing engaging and effective training games is usually outsourced to developers who understand how to put the artistic aspect into these games. "I think the U.S. Military has always been visionary in inventing and adopting new technologies," says Doug Whatley, Founder and CEO of BreakAway Games, "but to their credit, they realized early on that the game development community was driving technology and design innovation with entertainment games and simulations and decided to take advantage of the industry's model of smaller teams and iterative development processes."
