Computer games liven up military recruiting, training.

Computer games--which entertain millions of U.S. teenagers--are beginning to breathe fresh life into military recruiting and training.

Earlier this year, for example, the U.S. Army launched a new computer game--called "America's Army"--over the Internet.

Aimed at encouraging teens to join up, it enables players to experience both basic and advanced training, join a combat unit and fight in a variety of environments, including arctic Alaska, upstate New York and a third-world city.

Players can fire on a rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper school, train in urban combat and parachute from a C-17 transport.

The game accurately depicts military equipment, training and the real-life movements of soldiers, said Lt. Col. George Juntiff, Army liaison officer to the Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., which developed the game.

"America's Army" features sound effects by moviemaker George Lucas' company, Sky Walker, and Dolby Digital Sound. In addition, sound effects from the movie "Terminator II" were provided at no charge.

The game is getting considerable attention. During its first two weeks, more than a million Americans downloaded the game for free, Juntiff said.

"That's an enormous number," he said. "It's the largest release in computer game history."

Even more people are likely to acquire the game starting in October, Juntiff said, when the Army was scheduled to begin distributing it as a free CD set to a target audience over the age of 13. The developers plan to upgrade the game every month to attract new players, he said.

Actually, "America's Army" consists of two separate games--"Soldiers," a role-player based on Army values, and "Operations," a shooter game that takes players on combat missions. It was developed and distributed at a cost of $7.5 million by MOVES and the U.S. Military Academy's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, N.Y.

The computer game is a "very cost-effective" way to reach potential recruits, especially compared to television advertising, said Maj. Chris Chambers, OEMA deputy director. "It is also a more detailed means of showing the American people what we do."

The game also puts the Army in a positive light, said Juntiff. "It lets people know the Army is high-tech. It's not what they see in the movies."

The game, in addition, raises ethical issues, Juntiff said. "The game sets rules of engagement, and if you violate those rules, you pay the price."

Once they enlist, recruits, these days, can expect to encounter computer games throughout their military training, said Michael R. Macedonia, senior scientist for the U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), headquartered in Orlando, Fla. Even well-known commercial games have been adapted for military use, he told National Defense.

That process began, he said, in the 1980s, when the Army modified the Atari tank battle game, "Battlezone," to let it have gunner controls similar to those of a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The idea, he explained, was to enhance the eye-hand coordination of armor crews.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the Marines edited the commercial version of the three-dimensional game "Doom" to create "Marine Doom," to help train four-man fire teams in urban combat.

More recently, the Army's Soldier Systems Center, in Natick, Mass., has commissioned the games developer, Novalogic, of Calabasas, Calif., to modify the popular Delta Force 2 game to help familiarize soldiers with the service's experimental Land Warrior system.

The Land Warrior system includes a self-contained computer and radio unit, a global-positioning receiver, a helmet-mounted liquid- character display and a modular weapons array that adds thermal and video sights and laser ranging to the standard M-4 carbine and M-16A2 rifle.

A customized version of another computer game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, is issued to all Navy student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at 65 colleges around the nation. The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has installed the software at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.

LB&B Associates, of Columbia, Md., has modified the game engine from author Tom Clancy's best-selling computer game, "Rainbow Six Rogue Spear," to train U.S. combat troops in urban warfare. The game--marketed by Ubi Soft Entertainment, of San Francisco--is based one of Clancy's military novels.

The new version--which is still being developed--will nor be used to improve marksmanship, but to sharpen decision-making skills at the small-unit level, said Michael S. Bradshaw, LB&B's Systems Division manager. LB&B has completed a proof-of-concept version, which "worked brilliantly," Bradshaw said. The project, he explained, has been turned over to the Institute for Creative Technology for final development.

Tapping Into Hollywood

The Army established the ICT in 1999 to explore the use of commercial entertainment technology and content for military training and education, Macedonia said. It is situated at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, in order to tap into Hollywood's entertainment industry, with its expertise in story, character, visual effects gaming and production.

The ICT is working with STRICOM and commercial game-development companies to create two additional training simulations.

Scheduled for completion in December is "Combat System XII," a PC-based company-command simulator. As the commander of an Army light infantry company, the student must interpret the assigned mission, organize his force, plan strategically and coordinate the actions of about 120 men under his command.

The other game, "C-Force," will run on a game console, such as the Microsoft Xbox or Sony Playstation 2. The student is a squad leader, who must lead and coordinate about a dozen men in completing a series of combat missions.

The use of entertainment technology is not new for military services, said Macedonia. Before World War II, the developer of the first pilot training simulator, Edward Link, sold the trainer to amusement parks while awaiting military contracts, Macedonia explained. During the war and afterwards, the Link Trainer helped prepare more than half a million aircrew members.

The Link Trainer, however, used levers, valves and vacuum bellows to imitate an aircraft in flight. To provide a more realistic experience, the Navy asked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a computer to provide flight simulation, leading eventually to the development of computer-simulation technology.

Simulation was adopted quickly in the commercial world, first in amusement parks, then in video arcades and most recently in the computer-gaming industry.

When the Internet became accessible to non-academics in the early 1990s, the computer-game community embraced it, said J.C. Herz, the New York City-based author of "Joystick Nation," a history of video and computer gaming.

One reason for the growing popularity, according to Herz, is that computer gaining appeals to innate aspects of human behavior, including a drive to compete and collaborate, a hunger for status, a tendency to cluster and the appetite for peer acknowledgement.

When the commercial version of "Doom" was released in 1993, it spread like wildfire, she said. Annual sales of computer games now exceed $7 billion a year industry, rivaling the U.S. movie industry, Herz said.

Players don't just buy the games, she said, they spend hundreds of thousands of hours learning how to master them, creating new scenarios and teach others the same skills.

Meanwhile, personal computers have become much more powerful, Macedonia said. "For four years, I've been trying to convince people that they're nor toys any longer," he said. "They have as much capability as supercomputers had a decade ago," he said.

At the same time, Macedonia noted, prices for a personal computer plummeted from several thousand dollars to just a few hundred, putting them within reach of almost every household. An estimated 70 million Americans have game consoles in their homes, he said. Each week, he noted, 73 percent of U.S. teenagers surf the Internet.

Computer use has become so pervasive that the armed forces cannot afford to ignore it, said Macedonia. "If you're an 18-year-old going into West Point today, you don't remember when there weren't video games," he said. "You've always had a computer, and you've never even seen a manual typewriter--except maybe in a museum."

All the Way Up

The services' use of computer games has spread through every level of training, Macedonia noted. Wargaming and simulation are included in the curriculum of every U.S. war college and the operations of every command headquarters, he said.

The Naval War College, in Newport, R.I., has worked with Sonalysts Inc., of Waterford, Conn., to create mote than 500 games. Among them were three combat simulations that Sonalysts developed for distribution by Electronic Arts, of Redwood City, Calif., including "Jane's Fleet Command," "688(I) Hunter/Killer" and "Sub Command."

The Army's Armor Center, at Fort Knox, Ky., has licensed "TacOps," a commercial clone of "Janus," a noncommercial military simulation, for company and battalion wargaming.

The Army Command and General Staff College, at Leavenworth, Kan., uses a strategy game called "Decisive Action," originally developed for corps-level operations.

The Institute for National Strategic Studies, at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., employs a game set in ancient Greece, based upon the Peloponesian wars, of the 5th century B.C., between Athens, Sparta and Persia.

"We use it to teach grand military strategy," said Army Lt. Col. Chip Cutler, a senior military fellow at the institute. "My 13-year-old son played it the other night. I don't know if he had a grand strategy, but he definitely put a hurt on Persia."

So widespread has the use of such games become that the Air Force's Air University, headquartered at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., every year sponsors a conference to bring together the military and commercial wargaming community.

The services have come to rely heavily upon industry, which has far deeper pockets, to invest in research for new developments in the gaming field, Macedonia said. For example, he noted, Microsoft spent more than $2 billion to create its Xbox, well above the Army's entire annual budget for science and technology.

Too often, however, when the services modify a commercial game, they remove too much of the detail, said one industry executive, who asked not to be identified. "The military doesn't have the money to do it right," he said. "They try to make the games cheap and affordable, but the engines suffer."

For their part, the military services still run many war games that don't use computer simulations, which have their limitations, said Cutler. "It's much easier to devise tabletop games, which don't rely upon modeling and simulations," he said.

Macedonia acknowledges the existence of a strong anti-simulation sentiment in the services, particularly among older personnel. "There is a sort of an attitude in some quarters that 'we don't need no stinking computers,' but that is changing," he said.

"Twenty percent of all Army officers now have their own Web pages," he said. "And those 18-year-olds just coming into the Army have been playing video games all of their lives."

The reality is that "computer games are not nonsense," Macedonia said. "We win wars with these games, because they help train soldiers."

Being a soldier is "more than how to hold and shoot a rifle," he said. "We want thinking soldiers who can understand and articulate problems. We saw that in Desert Storm and Somalia. Just watch the movie 'Black Hawk Down.'"

"People were amazed at how well we did in Afghanistan. I was not amazed. The most precise weapon in the world is a well-trained soldier."