War Play

by Corey Mead

  Early in the twentieth century, the rising prominence of artillery made the calculation of ballistics a tactical necessity. Up to and throughout World War I, ballistics data had primarily been tabulated by hand, even as the growing number and variety of modern weapons called for ever more complex calculations, which became the province of skilled mathematicians known as “computers.” By World War II, however, advances in air and weapons systems required quicker means of calculation. To meet this requirement, the military sponsored the creation of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), popularly regarded as the world’s first digital computer. Though ENIAC wasn’t completed until the fall of 1945, after the war had drawn to a close, the military connection remained strong: ENIAC’s first task was to provide calculations used to plan the detonation of the hydrogen bomb.

  Military-sponsored technological innovation continued apace for the next two decades, as the Department of Defense and its subagencies underwrote the great majority of computer and electronics research and development. In the years after the war’s end, the DoD founded a number of grant-giving agencies that continue to underwrite new technology today. Among these agencies were the highly influential Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); the Army Office of Scientific Research, now the Army Research Laboratory; and the Office of Naval Research. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the military remained what historian Paul Edwards notes was “the proving ground for initial concepts and prototype machines.”

  Paralleling the rise of these DoD-operated institutions was an increasingly large defense contracting sector, ranging from companies whose sole focus was military contracting to larger, more diverse corporations, such as IBM, Raytheon, and General Electric, whose success was built on a combination of military subsidies and commercial sales. Beginning in the 1960s, the private electronics sector also experienced unprecedented growth, compelling it to begin pouring money into its own research and development. Despite this sector’s self-financed efforts, however, military funding continued to be the primary force spurring the creation of new technologies.

  There were several reasons for the military’s intense interest in and financing of computers, but none was as important as the huge information-processing needs of what had become an immense bureaucracy. With the advent of the Cold War, American supremacy was thought to hinge on the maintenance of a robust military, whose efficient functioning required number-crunching on a vast scale. Computers greatly accelerated this process, further sparking the growth and increasing complexity of military bureaucracy.

  Beyond the military’s bureaucratic needs, the drive for computerization reflected a broader ideological shift. In the late 1940s and ’50s, computers were enlisted as tools for the newly popular practice of tackling society’s biggest problems with seemingly objective statistical and mathematical tools. In fact, computers were for many years developed specifically to meet this function. Even as the private computer industry continued to expand during the early 1960s, the military, and the defense industry as a whole, remained the prime buyer and sponsor of computer-related technology.

  The other major beneficiary of computer-oriented military funding during this period was academia; the Pentagon and ARPA underwrote research in the field at such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and UCLA. Perhaps most notably, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with its groundbreaking artificial intelligence program, received the majority of its computer-related research money from the military. In their superb analysis of the video game industry, Digital Play, Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter draw on this exchange to note that the “military-industrial-academic complex provided the triangular base from which the information age would be launched.”

  Spacewar! and Beyond

  The roots of the military’s historical involvement with video games extend beyond its sponsorship of computers. For several decades—from the 1960s to the early 1990s—the armed forces took the lead in financing, sponsoring, and inventing the specific technology used in video games. Without the largesse of such military agencies as DARPA, the technological foundation on which the commercial game industry rests would not exist. Advanced computing systems, computer graphics, the Internet, multiplayer networked systems, the 3-D navigation of virtual environments—all these were funded by the Department of Defense.

  Virtual military training dates back to the late 1920s, when Edwin Link, the son of an organ and automatic piano maker, developed the first flight simulator, which was made of wood and powered by organ bellows. Video games, however, derive from preparations for nuclear war and space exploration; arguably the first digital game, a faux-military simulation, was in fact called Spacewar! The game was invented in 1962 by twenty-three-year-old Steve Russell and his cohorts in the fictitious Hingham Institute Study Group on Space Warfare, a collection of like-minded, Pentagon-funded engineering graduate students at MIT. Russell and his friends were as fascinated by science fiction as they were by their basement lab’s latest acquisition: a Programmed Data Processor-1, or PDP-1, one of the first microcomputers, which Russell describes as “the size of about three refrigerators,” with “an old-fashioned computer console” and “a whole bunch of switches and lights.”

  The PDP-1’s manufacturer had shipped the computer to MIT in the hope that the electrical engineering department could put it toward some new and intriguing use, though building the world’s first video game could hardly have been what the manufacturer had in mind. For a time the PDP-1 just sat idle in the corner of the engineering lab. Russell was “itching to get his fingers” on the new machine, however, so he and his friends began discussing what they could do with this new mini computer. According to Russell, “Space was very hot at the time—it was just when satellites were getting up and we were talking about putting a man on the moon. So we said, gee, space is fun, and most people don’t appreciate how to maneuver things in space. So I wrote a demo program that had two spaceships that were controlled by the switches on the computer.”

  Russell’s main influence in programming Spacewar! was Edward “Doc” Smith’s science-fiction “space opera” Lensman, which appeared serially in magazines before being reworked into highly successful books. Russell and his MIT coworkers were big fans of Lensman. “The details were very good and it had an excellent pace,” Russell says. “[Smith’s] heroes had a strong tendency to get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar! He had some very glowing descriptions of spaceship encounters and space fleet maneuvers.” “Glowing” is certainly an accurate description, as is evident in this sample from one of the Lensman books:

  Beams, rods, and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed, and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only to be exploded in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens.

  Russell felt that by “picking a world which people weren’t familiar with”—that is, space—“we could alter a number of parameters of the world in the interests of making a good game and of making it possible to get it onto a computer.” In the game, two players used switches and knobs to maneuver spaceships through the gravity field of a star while firing missiles at each other. The fuel and the missiles were limited, as they would be in real life; adding to the pressure, players also had to avoid colliding with the star as they fired their weapons. Players could launch their ships into hyperspace at the last minute to avoid incoming missiles, but the ships would reenter the game at random locations, with each reentry increasing the chances that the craft would explode. Graphics-w
ise, Spacewar! was quite primitive: the spaceships were little more than green blips on the murky blue-black background of the oscilloscope screen. Irritated by the inaccuracy of the game’s initial star field, one of Russell’s coworkers eventually rewrote the script based on real star charts.

  Spacewar!’s originality derived from the interface of the PDP-1, which came equipped with a keyboard and a circular monitor. As Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter write, the game’s “radical innovation” was that it featured “interface controls for navigation and made the screen a graphic input to the player.” These twin features of navigation and display are, the authors note, “the foundation of digital interactive entertainment—the crucial ‘core design’ subsequent hardware and software designers would work up and sophisticate through generations of games.” Russell himself had wondered whether there might be a way to commercialize the game in order to make a profit from it. After a week’s contemplation, however, he decided that no one would be willing to pay money for it. Instead, he and his friends just gave the source code to anyone who asked for it.

  Spacewar! was an immediate hit among the growing network of computer programmers occupying university research institutes nationwide. Within a year, the game had grown so popular that Stanford University’s Computer Studies Department had to initiate a “no Spacewar! during business hours” policy. By the mid-1960s, a copy of the game was on virtually every research computer in the country, whether in academia, industry, or the military.

  Russell and his MIT associates were enthusiastic members of the emerging subset of computer virtuosos known as “hackers”—those who experimented with the programming capabilities of computers for the sheer fun of it. Young, male, and white, both nerdy and counterculture-cool, these hackers were subsidized by the burgeoning military-industrial complex, with their research going to fight the Cold War. The shock of the Soviets’ 1957 Sputnik launch had led to vastly increased funding for science and technology, most of it channeled through the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Nuclear mobilization, ballistics, missilery, space defense—these were the concerns of the Pentagon and of policymakers alike. Hackers such as Russell and his friends occupied a precarious position in this new environment. They took their money and much of their guidance from the military, and yet their ethos was one of freedom and playful exploration, and they were harshly disillusioned by Vietnam and, later on, by Watergate.

  It would be unfair to say that the hackers’ playful spirit was at odds with their military mandate, however. In fact, experimentation and whimsy were encouraged in places like the MIT computer engineering lab as a way of expanding the heretofore limited applications of computers. Until the early 1960s, computers were envisioned solely as sophisticated calculators and machines for modeling. Russell and other young hackers introduced the radical notion that computers could be tools not only for calculations but also for entertainment. Spacewar! wasn’t exciting because of its technology; it was exciting because it introduced a whole new way of thinking about computers—namely, that they could be sources of pleasure. Within a few years, this emphasis on enjoyment became the heart of the growing video game industry. So even though, as Ed Halter writes, video games “were not created directly for military purposes,” they nonetheless “arose out of an intellectual environment whose existence was entirely predicated on defense research.”

  The military’s specific interest in computer-based war gaming can be traced to the late 1970s, when the Army War College introduced the board game Mech War into its staff officer training curriculum. Much more common during this period, however, was the development of high-end computer simulations, not games, for military training. In the 1980s, collaborators from the military, the entertainment industry, and academia began building “distributed interactive simulations” (DIS)—simulations that use distributed software or hardware to create virtual theaters of war, in which participants could interact in real time. These simulations employed the latest advances in computer graphics and virtual-reality technology, which added to the immersive qualities of their synthetic environments. As DIS technology continued to evolve into the next decade, an increasing focus on content and on compelling narratives brought these simulations closer in basic form to commercial video games.

  The military’s interest in the kinds of video games popular today dates to 1980, when Atari released its groundbreaking Battlezone. Not only did Battlezone evoke a three-dimensional world, as opposed to the two-dimensional worlds of such previous arcade hits as Asteroids and Tempest, but players viewed the action from a first-person perspective, as if they themselves were tank gunners peering through their periscopes at the battlefield outside—in this case, a spare moonscape with mountains and an erupting volcano in the distance. This first-person element made Battlezone a direct ancestor of today’s enormously popular first-person shooters.

  Soon after Battlezone took off, the army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) requested Atari’s help in building a modified version of the game that could be used as a training device for the then-new Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. General Donn Starry, the head of TRADOC at the time, had recognized early on that soldiers would be more responsive to electronic training methods than to print- and lecture-based ones. “[Today’s soldiers have] learned to learn in a different world,” Starry told a TRADOC commanders’ conference in 1981, “a world of television, electronic toys and games, computers, and a host of other electronic devices. They belong to a TV and technology generation . . . [so] how is it that our soldiers are still sitting in classrooms, still listening to lectures, still depending on books and other paper reading materials, when possibly new and better methods have been available for many years?” Yet while Army Battlezone (also known as Bradley Trainer) was eventually produced, the game was never used to train any actual soldiers.

  The military’s digital efforts took a major step forward with DARPA’s construction of SIMNET, a real-time distributed networking project for combat simulation. Until the 1980s, simulators had been built as stand-alone systems that focused on such specific tasks as piloting a tank and landing a jet on an aircraft carrier. Each of these systems cost tens of millions of dollars—often twice the amount of the real systems for which the soldiers were training. To rectify this expensive and unwieldy practice, in 1982 DARPA drafted the help of air force captain Jack A. Thorpe, who years earlier had floated the idea that simulators did not need to physically replicate the full vehicles they were representing but could simply be used to enhance the training for these vehicles. Take aircraft: there was no need to use simulators to teach an air force pilot everything he needed to know about flying; simulators could train him only in things that he couldn’t learn from flying during peacetime. Why not, Thorpe asked, determine first which training functions were needed and then base the simulator hardware on that?

  Thorpe’s experience with simulators began in 1976, when he worked as a research scientist in flight training at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona. Tasked with improving the state of flight simulators, which at the time were three-story mechanical contraptions in which pilots were shaken around like leaves, he looked for a way to change these single-pilot machines into ones that could teach group skills. “Group interactions are the most complicated combat operations,” he says. “They also tend to be the ones in which the costs of screwing up are the highest. Yet because it is so difficult and expensive to organize groups, pilots get very little training in collective skills. They have to learn these skills on the job, during combat, which makes casualties disproportionately high during the first few missions.”

  To rectify the situation, Thorpe conceived of a network—anything from dozens to hundreds of individual simulators all interacting with each other. He thought it was wasteful for simulator training devices to focus on individual service members; the network he envisioned would allow for a collective training experience centered on entire crews and units.

  By the time of Thorpe’
s DARPA appointment in the early 1980s, the environment seemed ripe for him finally to put his networking concept into practice. ARPANET—the forerunner of the Internet—had exploded onto the military scene and was generating a great deal of positive interest in the science of networking. Aware that building the kind of system he envisioned would be economically infeasible, Thorpe looked to affordable, non-DoD technology such as computer and video games to make his vision a reality. He hired military contractor Bolt, Beranek and Newman to develop the networking and system software necessary to bring SIMNET—that is, simulator networking—to life. The originality of Thorpe’s vision later prompted Wired magazine to declare, “William Gibson didn’t invent cyberspace, Air Force Captain Jack Thorpe did.”

  By January 1990, the first SIMNET units were finally ready to go. The army stepped in first, buying several hundred units for its Close Combat Tactical Trainer system. SIMNET’s training value became apparent one year later, during the first Gulf War. In the war’s most significant engagement, known as the Battle of 73 Easting, the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment destroyed dozens of Iraqi fighting vehicles in just under two hours, while killing or wounding more than six hundred Iraqi soldiers. Because the 2nd Armored Cavalry had prepared for the war by training extensively on SIMNET, the military decided to use the Battle of 73 Easting as a model for future networked training. The goal was to provide a much more rounded experience of battle than simulation had previously allowed for, one that emphasized the stresses and fears, the emotional experience of war, as much as it did the tactical ones. To this end, the SIMNET team assembled reams of data on 73 Easting: extensive interviews with 150 participants, radio and tape recordings from the battle, overhead photographs of the skirmishing, action logs, even a step-by-step re-creation on the actual battlefield by soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry. The results of this effort pointed the way toward the future of military training: interactive, immersive, complex, and variable scenarios in which the total experience of war could be brought forth in its digital replication. Because simulation was given much of the credit for the military’s Gulf War success, the postwar period saw DARPA’s SIMNET-related research and development efforts expand significantly.