Thanks to the student who sent me these links.
They build off a conversation in class about the military's role in assisting the development of war based video games.
All from Wikipedia:
- America's Army.
America's Army was a series of first-person shooter video games developed and published by the U.S. Army, intended to inform, educate, and recruit prospective soldiers. Launched in 2002, the game was branded as a strategic communication device designed to allow Americans to virtually explore the Army at their own pace, and allowed them to determine whether becoming a soldier fits their interests and abilities. America's Army represents the first large-scale use of game technology by the U.S. government as a platform for strategic communication and recruitment, and the first use of game technology in support of U.S. Army recruiting.
- Marine Doom.
Marine Doom is a 1996 modification of the first-person shooter Doom II for the United States Marine Corps, which was later made available for download to the public.
. . . In 1996, General Charles C. Krulak, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, issued a directive to use wargames for improving "Military Thinking and Decision-Making Exercises". He entrusted the Marine Combat Development Command with the task of developing, exploiting and approving computer-based wargames to train U.S. Marines for "decision making skills, particularly when live training time and opportunities were limited".
- Full Spectrum Warrior.
. . . In 2000, the U.S. Army's Science & Technology community was curious to learn if commercial gaming platforms could be leveraged for training. Recognizing that a high percentage of incoming recruits had grown up using entertainment software products, there was interest in determining whether software game techniques and technology could complement and enhance established training methods.
Having established a U.S. Army University Affiliated Research Center (the Institute for Creative Technologies – ICT) in 1999 for the purpose of advancing virtual simulation technology, work began in May 2000 on a project entitled C4 under ICT Creative Director James Korris with industry partners Sony Imageworks and their teammate, Pandemic Studios, represented by co-founders Josh Resnick and Andrew Goldman.
At the time, there was a great deal of interest in leveraging the stability, low cost and computational/rendering power of the new generation of game consoles, chiefly Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox, for training applications. Legal restrictions on the PlayStation (using the platform for a military purpose) combined with the default Xbox configuration “persistence” (i.e. missions recorded on the embedded hard drive for after-action review) led to the final selection of the Xbox platform for development.
A commercial release of the game was required for Xbox platform access. The team, however, quickly concluded that a viable entertainment title might differ from a valid training tool. The exaggerated physics of entertainment software titles, it was believed, could produce a negative training effect in the Soldier audience. Accordingly, the team developed two versions of the game. The Army version was accessible through a static unlock code; the entertainment version played normally.
