War Play

by Corey Mead

  In proposing the development of a computer-based video game/simulation, Hattes and Wardynski were adding to the long legacy of military research and expertise. In the years immediately preceding Wardynski’s proposal, no one had worked harder to bring the worlds of the military and the entertainment industry together than professor Mike Zyda, who was one of the ten recipients of Hattes’s e-mail.

  A Clash of Cultures

  After months of meetings—and months of navigating the internal politics of the Pentagon—Wardynski convinced his superiors that the game should be built by Zyda’s brand-new MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School. In May 2000, the secretary of the army, Louis Caldera, approved the Army Game Project as a recruiting initiative, one of many that the army was taking on at the time. Caldera assigned the game project to the assistant secretary of the army for manpower and reserve affairs, Patrick Henry, who in turn made John McLaurin, the deputy assistant secretary of the army for military manpower, the project’s executive director. Though his actual involvement was only occasional, McLaurin, in name, oversaw the Army Game Project for the first several years of its existence.

  Technically, a project like America’s Army should have gone to STRICOM, the army’s simulation and video game office, and been funded through the army’s research, development, testing, and evaluation budget. Instead, with McLaurin’s blessing, Wardynski ran the project out of OEMA, with funding provided by the secretary of the army’s VIRS account, which goes toward recruiting initiatives that fall outside the normal channels. VIRS money is what’s left over at the end of every year after the funding for traditional recruiting initiatives (television, advertisements, funding for recruiting stations) is taken out. Wardynski valued the relative autonomy this arrangement allowed, but he was also aware of its tenuous nature: not only does VIRS money fluctuate on a yearly basis, its release to specific projects depends wholly on those projects’ so-called godfathers. In the case of America’s Army, that godfather was McLaurin. Wardynski knew well that if McLaurin disappeared, so did the money, and thus the project.

  Still, on a practical, day-by-day level, America’s Army was Wardynski’s baby, and he continued to insist that America’s Army—at that point called TAG, as in “the army game”—center on basic training and army values. In this he was following a well-established tradition of addressing—and enhancing—the morals of its soldiers. As we’ve seen, George Washington himself sought to improve the morals as well as the literacy of his charges by instituting a program of Bible study at Valley Forge. This deeply ingrained thread of moral instruction achieved a new prominence with the onset of World War I in 1914, when calls for universal military training in public high schools and colleges became more vocal. Military education, like public school education in general, was viewed by its promoters as a means for resolving a welter of social issues. As scholars Lesley Bartlett and Elizabeth Lutz write, this included eliminating a “‘moral rot’ that had become symbolically associated with the country’s growing wealth; the lack of a sense of duty or loyalty in the massive numbers of new immigrants; and the social disorder of strikes and other labor unrest.” Military training was to inculcate discipline and respect for authority, thereby developing “the ‘moral qualities’ of ‘good citizenship’” and a “quickened patriotism.”

  Attributing a quasi-religious role of moral betterment to the military continued through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, only to be seriously damaged by the experience of the Vietnam War. The military spent decades struggling to recapture its pre-Vietnam image, a goal that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 seemed finally to place within reach. In keeping with this goal, Wardynski saw America’s Army as an ideal tool for rebuilding the military’s public image.

  As part of Wardynski’s efforts to focus the game on army values, he created a Red Team in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point, where OEMA was located. (In the military, a Red Team is an opposing force.) Headed by the chair of West Point’s political science program and featuring a combination of political science, international relations, and communications professors, the Red Team’s job was to review the existing antigames literature in order to figure out the areas in which America’s Army would be most vulnerable to criticism. By anticipating potential criticisms in advance, Wardynski hoped to guide the game’s development in such a way that these concerns could be avoided, or at least minimized.

  As the Red Team searched LexisNexis, the names of two antigames activists kept popping up: Lieutenant Dave Grossman, author of the best-selling book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, and Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer whose endless crusades and media-driven lawsuits had made him the bane of the video game industry. Grossman’s primary argument was that video games and simulations desensitized soldiers to the act of killing. Thompson’s approach was to sue game companies on behalf of parents who had lost their children in school shootings.

  With Grossman and Thompson in the back of their minds, Wardynski, OEMA, and the Red Team developed the design criteria—the Ten Commandments, as they thought of them—for America’s Army. They knew their target audience of male teenagers would be interested primarily in the game’s combat elements, but they recognized that these elements could not be the game’s public selling point. Therefore, they decided to emphasize that the army focused on the sanctioned, not random, use of violence. “The army, job one is to fight the nation’s wars on land,” Wardynski says. “And that entails the managed use of violence. And we use as much violence as it takes to do the job. And we put that story in the game—that is, the army’s story.” This is what Wardynski saw as America’s Army’s key attribute: the violence in the game would be backed by America’s “credibility and reputation.”

  Along with the sanctioned use of violence, OEMA’s primary criterion for the game was that it take into account “international sensitivities.” Because of this, OEMA initially struggled to design the game’s bad guys. “That was pretty much solved for us on September eleventh,” Wardynski recalls, but there was still the challenge of how to depict al-Qaeda. “It could’ve been stereotypically Arab-looking guys,” he says, “but we chose not to do that, because al-Qaeda isn’t stereotypically Arab-looking—they have Swedes, they have Somalis. So we made the bad guys look like everybody.”

  A related issue was who would play the enemy in the game. “If you could be the enemy,” Wardynski realized, “then we couldn’t bind you to the rules and standards of conduct that we wanted.” OEMA and the Red Team therefore decided that users would play only as friendly forces. In a move unprecedented in commercial gaming, America’s Army used mirror imaging, so that players would always see themselves and their team as American, while the game’s other users would appear to be from the opposing force.

  “We need the focus on basic training and army values to keep the politicians and generals off our back,” Wardynski told Zyda. “The army isn’t in the business of having first-person shooter games.” Here a fundamental conflict arose between Wardynski’s and MOVES’ visions for the game: from a gamer’s perspective, basic training is boring. Values, in the context of a video game, are boring. The people at MOVES were all hardcore gamers, and they felt strongly that Wardynski was wrong: action needed to come before values, or no one would want to play the game. Zyda had hired Mike Capps, a former MIT graduate student with years of experience in computer graphics and virtual reality, to head his development team. As Capps saw it, the MOVES team needed to build a game as good as Counterstrike or Half-Life or Unreal Tournament—a game, in other words, that was not only high quality but also fun—and then insert the army’s message underneath that. As Capps pointed out to Wardynski, “If we follow the path of, ‘Let’s plan out the army’s message first and then try to make that fun,’ the game will fail.”

  In addition to Mike Capps, Zyda’s team included creative director Alex Mayberry, who had spent nearly a decade in the commercial game industry. The army supplied
Lieutenant Colonel George Juntiff as a design consultant; Zyda credits Juntiff with essential service in making the game look and feel as army-authentic as possible. Zyda’s MOVES Institute, meanwhile, provided a steady stream of graduate students conducting research in everything from streamlined graphics algorithms to analysis of the psychological dynamics of immersion. This cutting-edge research was applied repeatedly in the first two years of the game’s development.

  Capps selected Epic Games’ highly regarded Unreal Engine as the technology on which the team would build its army modifications—that is, the game’s content. For $500,000, the team purchased a license for the game engine via the Naval Postgraduate School’s contracting office. Because Unreal Engine was recognized within the world of gaming as a topflight technology, both MOVES and Wardynski thought it would lend credibility to the army game.

  As the developers and Wardynski hashed out the game’s details, the developers worked to strike a balance between army authenticity and gamer enjoyment. For example, one mission involved taking a radio tower out of commission. In real life, Rangers might simply blow up the tower—a scenario that wouldn’t suit the game because it would happen so fast. Instead, the developers designed the mission so that players need to identify friendly forces, battle enemy insurgents, and protect NGO workers until communications specialists manage to overwhelm the tower.

  Wardynski rejected several of the developers’ proposed missions owing to their lack of military realism, while the developers discarded several of Wardynski’s desired effects for technological reasons. For example, the game contains a parachute jump, but the jump’s intended beach landing had to be scrapped because accurately rendering water requires a great deal of hardware. The use of rope in the game was abandoned for similar reasons.

  By May 2000, Wardynski and the developers had agreed on ten initial levels for the game. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Juntiff, the MOVES team immediately began visiting army posts across the country—they eventually traveled to nineteen in all—to gather data. They visited a rifle range at Fort Polk; they photographed weapons at Fort Lewis; they observed house-clearing operations at Fort Benning. Everything that would appear in the game was either photographed or shot on video. Thousands of relevant sound effects were recorded. The braver developers even engaged in a tower jump and were willingly attacked by dogs. In one memorable episode, the MOVES team participated in a late-night Black Hawk helicopter ride over a barrage of live shells pinging the ground below. Not only did these experiences provide fodder for the game, they gave developers the vicarious thrill of engaging in real military action. This marked a vivid departure from the developers’ normal routine of spending seventy-hour weeks ensconced in front of their screens.

  To ensure the fidelity of the game’s animations, the developers outfitted soldiers with motion-capture sensors. The soldiers were then filmed enacting various operations—say, throwing a grenade—in accordance with military procedure. (The results were so accurate that they’ve been used to train West Pointers.) Not all of this translated directly into the game. The developers felt that if characters’ running, for example, accurately reflected humans’ true speed, the relative slowness would drive gamers away. In several instances, then, the animators cropped or otherwise streamlined the action so that gamers would remain engaged. To do this, they worked frame by frame through their videos to pinpoint key moments that the eye needed to observe; all intermediate movements were removed. When speeded up, the resulting effect resembled that of a flipbook, with the eye witnessing the motion as a continuous scene.

  Russell Shilling, an associate professor in the Naval Postgraduate School’s Operations Research and Systems Engineering Departments, led the MOVES team’s sound design efforts. He had spent years consulting with Hollywood’s leading audio designers and engineers, and his research at MOVES focused on auditory psychophysics. Inspired by his experience, Shilling wanted the game to feature the most evocative, intricate sound yet heard in a first-person shooter.

  To determine how best to achieve this, Shilling and his graduate students embarked on an ambitious research agenda. They wanted to learn more about how sound evokes presence and emotion in a video game and whether this improves the way players execute memory-related functions. To find out, they employed a variety of methods, including measuring how a player’s heart rate and breathing changed in response to certain auditory cues.

  Shilling and his students also scoured professional libraries for relevant sound effects. When a weapon is fired in the game, for example, the impact of the bullet—or, in some cases, the grenade—is accompanied by a complex, multilayered sound: shell casings clatter off walls; bullets roar past the ear; glass explodes and shatters on the floor. Tinnitus accompanies the aftermath of a grenade.

  The MOVES team also took pains to make the game’s physics significantly more accurate than those in most popular commercial shooters of the time. In America’s Army, a rifle may gently swing, depending on the avatar’s breathing; moreover, there is a notable kickback when the rifle fires. (Sometimes weapons even jam.) Depending on the caliber and type of weapon, after a bullet is released, that bullet may penetrate deeply into wood, adobe, or dirt, or it may ricochet off a steel surface—whatever it would do in real life. The avatar’s distance from the target is also taken into account.

  Zyda and his team intended these physics to affect the way players make decisions in the game. For example, players quickly learn that if they set off flashbang grenades at close range, they temporarily go blind and deaf. If they stay too close to walls while moving, they face an increased risk of being nailed by ricocheting bullets. If they run around firing their weapons quickly, their scores are much lower than if they stay stable and take time to point and shoot accurately. To drive this last point home, players are penalized for causing friendly-fire incidents.

  Despite the MOVES team’s scrupulous efforts, conflict continued to mark the relationship between the developers and Wardynski during the two years of the game’s construction. Again, much of it came down to Wardynski’s insistence that the game’s design criteria focus on army values. “You can’t just have a billboard in back of the game listing those values and call it done,” he told Zyda and Capps. “Somehow you’ve got to show those values and why they’re important.” Wardynski gave them examples of the kinds of missions he wanted in the game: “Have a basic training scenario where players can choose to do the wrong thing and then show them why it’s the wrong thing.” As an example, Wardynski told the team, say that players want to be a medic in the game, and when they’re taking the medic exam in basic training, they decide to cheat and look at another player’s paper. When they’re on the battlefield and they’re responsible for helping wounded soldiers, the fact that they cheated in basic training means they don’t have the skills to do their job, and other players will know they’re incompetent and not to be trusted.

  Wardynski also wanted the game to show inherent conflicts in the warrior ethos, where one element says, “Don’t leave a fallen comrade” and another says, “Mission first.” He instructed the MOVES team to develop a scenario in which players might have to leave a wounded or fallen comrade in order to accomplish their mission. “These are the kinds of things that make us an American army,” he told Zyda and Capps. “That’s what will make this game special. You’re not going to see that kind of thing in Ghost Recon or Halo.”

  The back-and-forth between Wardynski and the MOVES team persisted after the game’s initial release. Wardynski wanted to add additional nonkinetic (that is, non-battle-related) scenarios to the game, because he felt that the developers still hadn’t focused enough on army values. He continued to worry that America’s Army would be labeled solely as a first-person shooter. To avoid this, he wanted the next scenario to be Airborne School, where players would learn to be army paratroopers, which would be fun as well as nonkinetic. The MOVES team, however, wanted the next scenario to be Sniper School, because that would appeal more to teena
ge boys. Wardynski felt the word sniper had a negative connotation in the civilian world, conjuring up images of a man in a bell tower shooting at innocent people. In the army, a sniper is simply an advanced marksman, but Wardynski felt that this distinction would be lost on the media and the public. The developers insisted that calling the scenario Sniper School would make for better game play. Wardynski finally compromised, saying, “Fine, we’ll have the scenario, but it will be called Advanced Marksman, and we’ll only do it after we do Airborne School.”

  The developers eventually had their revenge: as soon as Advanced Marksman was released, they labeled it Sniper School in their discussions on the game’s website, a name the community of players quickly adopted as their own.

  Playing the Game

  By now there are several versions of America’s Army. Let’s take a closer look at perhaps the most popular one, America’s Army: True Soldiers, which was developed for the Xbox. Like the game’s other versions, True Soldiers is a first-person shooter with a nine-part individual training section and a subsequent nine-part team section. These exercises, which take hours to play, lead up to the multiplayer function on Xbox Live.