Defense

multiplayer games invests players in games and compels them to

play. As the military attempts to incorporate information technologies into simulation, Herz suggests that it will require not

only hardware and software infrastructure but also the cultural

infrastructure to leverage these resources.

Macedonia recognizes the role that the commercial game

industry has played in military simulations over the past 25

years. The military has readily adopted commercial simulations

for use in strategy and tactics games in school curricula and for

developing individual and collective skills in unit training. These

efforts have resulted in stimulating collaborative activities,

either with military modifications of commercial games or commercial simulations developed for the military. The military further recognized the importance of commercial entertainment

technology with the creation of the Institute of Creative Technology, which brings together the defense and commercial industries

to produce a revolution in how the military trains and rehearses

for upcoming missions and to prepare for the challenges of the

21st century.

An Industry View

by J.C. Herz

Computer games and military simulation are like siblings separated in infancy. Although they share the same technological parentage, the commercial game and defense simulation industries have

Overview

Simulations are a critical aspect of U.S. military training.

Commercial computer games are a growing part of our entertainment industry. The two fields have much in common, and the military can learn from the successful experience of the commercial

sector. J.C. Herz provides an industry look at gaming technology

and culture and suggests ways in which commercial experience

can be applied to the military. Michael Macedonia responds to

Herz’s analysis and provides a military gamer’s perspective on

computer games and the military.

Despite their common antecedents, the commercial gaming

and defense simulation industries have developed differently

since the 1970s. Once much smaller and weaker, commercial computer gaming has grown into a $7 billion industry and has outpaced military simulations in terms of technology and innovation.

Herz attributes this growth to user-driven innovation in software

design and the social ecology driving online multiplayer games.

The commercial gaming industry encourages player innovation by

soliciting feedback in the design and development phases of new

products and by incorporating player modifications into the next

iterations of established products. User-driven innovation is successful because it is inherent in the industry’s cultural infrastructure, which can leverage interpersonal dynamics of competition, collaboration, hunger for status and peer acknowledgement,

and tendency to cluster. This social ecology that drives online

Computer Games and the

Military: Two Views

by J.C. Herz and Michael R. Macedonia

Center for Technology and National Security Policy

The National Defense University (NDU) established the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in June 2001 to study the implications of technological

innovation for U.S. national security policy and military planning. The center combines scientific and technical assessments with analyses of current strategic and

defense policy issues. Its major initial areas of focus include: (1) technologies and concepts that encourage and/or enable the transformation of the Armed Forces, 

(2) developments by defense laboratories, (3) investments in research, development, and acquisition and improvements to their processes, (4) relationships among

the Department of Defense, the industrial sector, and academe, and (5) social science techniques that enhance the detection and prevention of conflict. The staff is

led by two senior analysts who hold the Roosevelt Chair of National Security Policy and the Edison Chair of Science and Technology and who can call on the expertise

of the NDU community and colleagues at institutions nationwide. The papers published in the Defense Horizons series present key research and analysis conducted

by the center and its associate members.

A publication of the

Center for Technology and National Security Policy

National Defense University

APRIL 2002

Number 11

Horizons

April 2002 Defense Horizons 1
J.C. Herz is the chief executive officer of Joystick Nation, Inc. She can be

reached at jc@joysticknation.com. Dr. Michael R. Macedonia is the chief

scientist and technical director for the U.S. Army Simulation,Training, and

Instrumentation Command. He can be reached at Michael_Macedonia@

stricom.army.mil.

been nourished differently over the last 25 years and developed differently. Military simulation, the older sibling, evolved in a focused,

formal, hierarchical environment, as contractors built specific,

costly applications on powerful workstations. Military simulation

projects were fewer in number but were long-term projects implemented within large organizations in a coordinated fashion.

Commercial game development, the younger sibling, initially

was much smaller and weaker. Without access to large financial

resources or institutional support, commercial games were fly-bynight affairs—floppy disks in Ziploc bags peddled by enthusiasts.

Gamers programmed their products hastily, played them enthusiastically, and then deleted them to save space on hard drives. Because

games were processor-intensive and consumer computers were slow,

resourceful game designers used every known loophole to squeeze

extra processing cycles out of slow computers, such as the TRS–80

and Commodore Amiga. These small machines were inferior to military supercomputers in every respect.

Between programmers and gamers (two groups that overlapped considerably), a community took root and flourished, informally and organically. When the Internet became accessible to

nonacademics in the early 1990s, the computer game community embraced it, and

the already robust bulletin-board, magazine, and modem culture burst onto file

transfer protocol (ftp) sites and, later, the

World Wide Web. After Id Software opensourced the Doom level editor in 1994,

there was an explosion of player modifications, as gamers took three-dimensional

(3–D) engines and editing tools into their own hands.1 As in any

Darwinian environment, the fittest survived, garnering fame (and

gainful employment) for their creators along the way.

By the end of the decade, nearly every strategy and combat

game on the market came with a built-in level editor and tools to

create custom characters or scenarios. Nourished by the flexibility of

these tools and the innate human desire to compete and collaborate,

a dynamic, distributed ecosystem of official sites, fan pages, player

matching services, and infomediaries flourished—and continues to

grow in an unrestrained fashion, on a global basis. As the player population expands, so does the game industry, which now rivals the

Hollywood box office, exceeding $7 billion in annual sales.

Meanwhile, computers keep getting faster. As Moore’s law kicks

in and hard drives grow in capacity and shrink in price, commercial

games get better looking and more sophisticated. Graphic accelerators smooth out the edges and goose the frame rate. Faster chips

process real-world physics. High-bandwidth connections throw distant opponents into virtual arenas. The technological discrepancy

between a military simulation and a commercial PC game has all but

vanished. Nevertheless, in many respects, commercial games are

superior, both in single-player mode and as networked multiplayer

platforms. Everquest, Sony’s massively multiplayer online world,

hosts 350,000 players (each of whom pays $10 per month for the privilege), with over 100,000 simultaneous players at prime time.

Technologically, the commercial game industry has superseded

its military sibling (in the past few years, the military has attempted

to leverage commercial game technology for military applications,

providing the impetus for programs such as the Institute for Creative

Technologies at the University of California, as well as more limited

applications such as Marine Doom). But in terms of innovation, the

commercial game industry remains leagues ahead because of its

development process and cultural infrastructure: extensible applications, constantly modified and improved by the player base, a

highly motivated, globally networked, self-organizing population of

millions, all striving to outdo one another.

Just as the American military emphasis on wargaming scenarios and simulation gives it an organizational edge (for example,

decisionmaking and analysis versus sheer firepower), the ability of

the computer game industry to innovate quickly is a product of its

organizational structure and culture. A player-driven culture of continuous, relentless, distributed innovation

is the industry’s greatest asset, far more

valuable than the technology-driven popular games.

As the U.S. military seeks to transform itself via information technology

(specifically networked simulation), it

must examine not only the hardware and

software infrastructure necessary to

achieve that transformation but also the cultural infrastructure necessary to leverage those resources: continuous, user-driven innovation as a conscious principle of software design and a social ecology

that drives online multiplayer games. To this end, it is useful to consider the knowledge economy that drives commercial games. In certain respects, the computer game culture may serve as a template for

rapid adaptation of virtual environments in response to shifting conditions and constant technological flux.

User-Driven Innovation in Software Design

In 2001, the typical development cycle for a computer game was

18 months from the genesis of the design specification to the release

of the product (production typically involves 12–20 people, with

costs ranging from $5 million–$7 million dollars). But for many

games—particularly the stronger-selling PC titles—that process

begins before the official development period and extends beyond it,

with a continuous two-way stream of feedback between developers

and players.

Perhaps the most extreme example of front-loaded game design

is the forthcoming multiplayer online world based on the Star Wars

movies, which is being built by Verant, the leading developer in this

genre, and LucasArts. When it is launched in 2003, Star Wars Galaxies is expected to attract more than a million subscribers—more

than 300,000 simultaneous players at peak usage. The environment

is massive—it will take weeks or months to traverse without “hyperspace” shortcuts—and will support a full-fledged economic and

technologically, the

commercial game

industry has superseded

its military sibling

2 Defense Horizons April 2002
political system. Players will develop their characters by scaling a

number of intersecting skill trees (such as engine mechanics, armor

production, combat, and specific environmental knowledge). As a

design and engineering challenge, Star Wars Galaxies rivals the construction of a space station in its sheer scale and complexity.

But even while the basic technology is built and the game

mechanics are still conceptual, players are a vital part of the design

process. Immediately after the development deal was signed, Verant

set up a message board to communicate news about the game in

progress and to solicit feedback from a player population with over

10 million hours of collective experience with games in this genre.2

In a virtual environment as complex as a massively multiplayer

online world where success depends entirely on player interaction,

developers recognize a player base as a strategic asset. The dynamics of these games are rapidly evolving, and many of the parameters

have yet to be defined. When in doubt,

designers turn to online message

boards to tap player perspectives on

the pros and cons of specific features

and on aspects of massively multiplayer game play that could be

improved. The game belongs to the

players, who are going to inhabit this

virtual environment when the product

is launched and will determine its success, as much as it does to the developer. Therefore, developers find

it in their interest to keep players in the loop as the game takes

shape and to exploit their experience. This effort is part of the core

design process on the bleeding edge of networked simulation.

Within existing technologies in well-established genres, the

player base is even more actively involved in the design and evolution of computer games. First-person shooters such as Quake 3

Arena and Unreal Tournament3 are built on engines that have

evolved for years, passed between programming teams and a population of gamers who customize and often improve the game even as its

sequel is being planned. Player innovations are thus incorporated

into the next iteration of the product. Perhaps the most salient

example of this phenomenon is in-game artificial intelligence (AI),

one of the great engineering hurdles in any game, civilian or military.

In first-person shooters, as in any combat simulation, a marked difference is evident between real and computer-generated opponents—human opponents are invariably smarter, less predictable,

and more challenging to play. There is no comparison between a multiplayer deathmatch (elimination combat with up to eight people on

the same 3–D map) and a single-player game with AI opponents.

Because of this discrepancy, first-person shooters are, de facto,

online multiplayer games; several have dispensed with single-player

mode altogether.

However, like all engineering challenges, AI is subject to the

million monkeys syndrome: put a million gamers into a room with an

open, extensible game engine, and sooner or later, one of them will

come up with the first-person shooter equivalent of Hamlet. In the

case of Id Software’s Quake II, it was a plug-in called ReaperBot, a

fiendishly clever and intelligent AI opponent written by a die-hard

gamer. ReaperBot was the best Quake opponent anyone in the software community had ever seen, and the plug-in rapidly disseminated

within the million-strong player population, who quickly began hacking away at its bugs, even though such modifications were technically illegal. These improvements in game AI were incorporated into

the core technology of first-person shooters, to everyone’s benefit,

not least the game companies.4

The salient point is that the architecture of Quake, the very

nature of the product, enables distributed innovation to happen outside the developer’s walls. In essence, the user base—trainees and

officers in a military context—are transformed from simple consumers into active, vested participants in the development and evolution of the game. Of course, not all players roll up their sleeves and

write plug-ins. But if even 1 percent contribute to the innovation of

the product, even just by making minor, incremental improvements

or subtle tweaks, ten thousand people

then are involved in research and

development.

Most players who tinker with

combat games are not programmers—

nor do they have to be—because the

editing and customization tools in

today’s games require no programming

skill. Anyone familiar with basic game

play can construct levels of combat

games in a few hours. Real-time strategy games offer similar capabilities. New maps, with custom constellations of opposing forces,

can be generated with a graphical user interface.

Notably, historical and quasi-historical simulations such as Sid

Meier’s Gettysburg allow gamers to replay military conflicts under

different conditions (“What if Stonewall Jackson had been there?

What if Pickett hadn’t charged?”), which does not mean the software

delivers any definitive answer that a military tactician could not. The

flexibility of the framework allows and encourages non-expert, individual players to ask the questions, explore the solution space

around a particular scenario, and create new scenarios that might

not have occurred to the game’s designers.

In a commercial context, this tool-based, user-driven activity

extends the life of the game, which both enhances the value of the

product (at no incremental cost) and increases sales: the longer

people play the game, the longer they talk about it, effectively marketing it to their friends and acquaintances. Will Wright, author of

the best-selling SimCity series, compares the spread of a product in

this fashion to a virus: “Double the contagious period,” he says, “and

the size of the epidemic goes up by an order of magnitude. If I can

get people to play for twice as long, I sell ten times as many copies.”

Wright’s formula bears out on the bottom line—his latest game, The

Sims, has spawned two expansion packs and racked up $340 million

in sales since its 1998 release.

The Sims, which scales SimCity down to the neighborhood

level, is noteworthy because it illustrates the level of engagement a

game can achieve when its designers incorporate player feedback

and collaboration before, during, and after the product is released.

Four months before the game shipped, its developers released tools

that allowed players to create customized architecture, props, and

characters for the game’s virtual environment. These tools spread

the user base—trainees and

officers in a military

context—are transformed

from simple consumers into

active, vested participants

April 2002 Defense Horizons 3
rapidly among SimCity players, who began creating custom content

immediately. In the months leading up to the game’s release, a network of player-run Web sites sprung up to showcase and exchange

“handcrafted” Sims objects and custom characters. By the time the

game was released, there were 50 Sims fan sites, 40 artists pumping

content into the pipeline, and 50,000 people collecting that content.

A quarter-million copies sold in the first week. A year later, there are

dozens of people programming tools for Sims content creators, 150

independent content producers, half a million collectors, and millions of players reading 200 fan sites in 14 languages.5 At this point,

more than 90 percent of the Sims content is produced by the player

population,6 which has achieved an overwhelming amount of collective expertise. The player population systematically trains itself,

generating more sophisticated content as it learns. This is a completely bottom-up, distributed, self-organizing process—none of

these people are on the Maxis payroll.

The Social Ecology of Games

Why do players invest hundreds or thousands of hours mastering the minutiae of these games, honing skills, creating new scenarios, and teaching others how to do likewise?

The dynamics that drive mastery and knowledge exchange in

and around computer games derive from the social ecology of computer games—the conventions of interpersonal interaction that

define status, identity, and affiliation both within the games and in

the virtual communities that surround them. Commercial game culture is structured to harness innate

human behavior: competition, collaboration, hunger for status, the

tendency to cluster, and the appetite

for peer acknowledgement. In other

words, the forces that hone games,

and gamers, have more to do with

anthropology than code.

Beyond the technological infrastructure is a cultural infrastructure

in place to leverage these interpersonal dynamics. Tools and editing modes allow players to create

assets to extend the game experience. But more important than the

standalone benefit of these assets is their value as social currency.

The creator of a popular level, object, or plug-in may not receive

monetary remuneration, but he garners notice, and even acclaim,

from his fellow gamers.

Game modifications are reviewed on thousands of game sites,

from fan pages to high-traffic news destinations like GameSpy. These

rotating showcases serve dual functions in computer gaming’s attention economy. Gamers looking to download new content sift for quality, and content creators get widespread exposure. Because game

culture is global, well-designed modifications are lauded by an international array of Web sites in half a dozen languages. Even game levels and character models (known as skins),7 which require less time

and skill, are circulated around the world. But even on a more local,

limited basis, player-generated content circulates among peer

groups, particularly among high-school and college-aged males, for

whom games are a nexus of friendly rivalry and bragging rights. Competition (formal and informal) is the keystone of computer game

culture and motivates casual and hardcore gamers alike to hone

their skills and evolve new strategies. Online game tournaments

have grown into quasi-professional events, with top gamers earning

substantial cash prizes.

In computer game culture, status is easily established, readily

compared, and (perhaps most importantly for this demographic

group) quantifiable. Every game ends with a winner and losers.

Tournament players are ranked. Player-created content is not only

reviewed but also downloaded and therefore measurably popular.

The author of a game level may have an internally driven sense of

accomplishment, but he also knows that thousands of people are

playing his song—a big deal for a teenager, particularly when fan

sites start pointing to his home page.

This web of relationships between players—competitive, cooperative, and collegial—sustains the computer game industry, no less

than the latest 3–D engine, facial animation algorithm, or highspeed graphics card. Game code disseminates and thrives because it

is an excellent substrate for human interaction, not because it is

technologically impressive. Behind every successful computer game,

there is a surge of interpersonal dynamics, both on an individual

level and on a group level; games elicit and enable the most basic

kinds of human pack behavior.

These group dynamics are best represented by the vast network

of self-organized combat clans that vie for dominance on the Internet. No game company told players

to form clans—they emerged by the

thousands in the beta test for Quake

and have persisted for years. The

smallest have five members; the

largest have hundreds and have

developed their own politics, hierarchies, and systems of governance.

They are essentially tribal—each

has a name,8 its own history,

monikers, and signs of identification

(logos and team graphics). Clans

occasionally cluster into transnational organizations, adopting a shared moniker across national

boundaries and adopting a loose federalist structure. Generally,

however, clans are comprised of players in the same country because

proximity reduces network lag—a real factor in games that require

quick responses.

Although most clans revolve around first-person combat games,

there are hundreds of clans plotting against one another in real-time

strategy games like Age of Empires, HomeWorld, and Space

Empires—Starcraft alone has 165 competing clans.9 Because strategy games are more nuanced than squad-based combat, clans in this

genre tend to maintain more elaborate Web sites that go into some

detail about clan history, rules, chain of command, custom maps, and

treaties with other clans (some clans even create password-protected areas for their allies to access strategic and diplomatic communication—the smoky back rooms of strategy gaming).

commercial game culture is

structured to harness innate

human behavior: competition,

collaboration, hunger for

status, the tendency to

cluster, and the appetite for

peer acknowledgement

4 Defense Horizons April 2002
The clan network may seem anarchic—it is fiercely competitive and has no centralized authority. But beneath the gruesome aesthetics and intermural bravado, it is a highly cooperative system that

runs far more efficiently than any “official” organization of similar

scale because clans, and the players who comprise them, have a

clear set of shared goals. Regardless of who wins or loses, they are

mutually dependent on the shared spaces where gaming occurs,

whether those spaces are maintained by gamers for gamers, such as

ClanBase, or owned and operated by game publishers, such as Sony,

Electronic Arts, or Blizzard Entertainment, the developers of hit

games like StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo II, respectively.

Blizzard is a salient example for networked simulation mavens

because the company dedicates as much attention to nurturing competition between groups and individuals as

it does to developing hit titles. A customer

who buys a copy of Diablo II also gets

access to Battle.net, a huge multiplayer

gaming platform that Blizzard maintains

for its customers at no additional charge.

Players simply select the Battle.net option

from within the game and are instantly

connected to a worldwide network where

they can chat,10 challenge opponents, initiate multiplayer games, download new

maps, exchange ideas, strategies, and tactics with other gamers, and participate in online tournaments.

Compared to the code that drives the game itself, Battle.net is

not hugely sophisticated. But it is the cultural infrastructure that

invests players in the game and keeps them playing. This infrastructure is built into the experience and is recognized as a huge factor in

Blizzard’s success. The Battle.net ecosystem is actively nurtured as

an integral aspect of corporate strategy. The “soft stuff” is not dismissed as nonprocurable. It is budgeted, staffed, maintained,

patched, and extended, no less than the underlying game engine.

Blizzard’s products are computer games, but the social dynamics of

a networked player population are the backbone of its business.

Persistent Worlds

This awareness of cultural importance is even more true of

companies like Electronic Arts, Sony, and Microsoft, which maintain

persistent multiplayer worlds for nearly half a million gamers on a

subscription basis. Unlike most games, for which playing fields exist

only while participants are actively engaged, multiplayer online

worlds like Everquest, Ultima Online, or Asheron’s Call persist

regardless of whether an individual player is logged on. The virtual

environment does not vanish when a player logs off—there are

forces (some internal, some resulting from other player’s actions)

continuously at work. This sense of persistence gives the game depth

and is psychologically magnetic: the player is compelled to return

habitually (even compulsively) to the environment, lest some new

opportunity or crisis arise. The experience is qualitatively different

from that of transient multiplayer environments (for example, combat and strategy games). The world is dynamic and therefore less

predictable. More importantly, a single game can continue for days,

weeks, or months. Players arrive in an environment knowing that

action may flare and subside but that the game is not going to be over

in a few hours, and they gain a sense of being embroiled in a set of

circumstances on a daily basis—a human experience that is almost

impossible to simulate in accelerated time.

The persistence of the virtual environment allows players to

develop character identities within these worlds, which all hew to

the conventions of role-playing games. In these games, player

progress is represented not by geographical movement (as in console

adventure games, where the object is to get from point A to point B,

defeating enemies along the way) but by the development of his

character, who earns experience points by overcoming in-game challenges. At certain milestones, the character is not only promoted to

a new experience level, gaining strength, skill, and access to new

weapons and tactics, but also attracts more

powerful enemies. The better the player

becomes, the more challenging his opponents become. Thus, the player scales a

well-constructed learning curve over several months while building the initial character into a highly skilled, fully equipped

powerhouse.11

While acquiring experience and skill,

the player is also networking on a number

of levels. The hazards of the environment

in these games necessitate player formation into small foray groups, or parties of four to six players. In addition, larger groups of players agglomerate into guilds ranging from a

few dozen to upwards of 100 affiliated characters. Like clans in the

combat and strategy genres, these groups are tribal. They evolve

their own customs and leadership structures. They form alliances

and declare wars with other guilds. Some are peaceful and welcome

new members. Others are roving bands of thugs who relish the opportunity to annihilate beginners should they mistakenly wander into

parts of the game world where player killing is allowed.

On a basic level, this interaction is what drives the massively

multiplayer online world—the standard societal tensions that

inform any city-sized population (Everquest has a bigger population

than Miami, Pittsburgh, or Cincinnati). There is crime—and a collective response to crime. There are politics, and the complex web of

rivalries, obligations, and conflicts that implies. In a persistent

online world, players build not only skills but also reputations. Veteran characters have status by virtue of sheer strength and experience. But beyond that, long-time players have built reputations and

connections—bonds of cooperation and friendship keep them

rooted in the environment long after they have mastered the intricacies of game play.

From Industry to Military

On the most basic level, the computer game industry should

prompt a military evaluation of the communications structure

around defense simulation. How is information shared? After a group

of soldiers has fought a virtual tank battle, what sort of media (for

example, screen-captured video or logs) exists to document that

experience? Are they given on-demand access to that media, and are

the computer game

industry should prompt

a military evaluation 

of the communications

structure around

defense simulation

April 2002 Defense Horizons 5
A View from the Military

by Michael R. Macedonia

J.C. Herz provides insight into how computer games are changing our culture and influencing technological development. Consequently, commercial simulations are having a major impact on military training. For over two decades, the military has demonstrated

interest in commercial games, beginning with the introduction of

Mech War by Jim Dunnigan in the late 1970s to the Army War College.

However, several factors have raised the importance and visibility of game technology and content to the Department of Defense

(DOD) community. First, simulation technology is now a major

strategic capability for the United

States, and no other country has

invested in this capability as much

as we have. For example, wargaming and simulation are part of the

curriculum of every U.S. war college

and the operations of every command headquarters.

Moreover, modeling and simulation are considered essential to

transformation, the remaking of the Armed Forces for the new realities of the 21st century. These tools present a powerful way for military leadership to visualize the future and assess the needs for the

new forces. The U.S. military is also exploiting commercial simulation to revolutionize training and education—with dramatic effect.

Technology

The Web and commercial entertainment technology offer innovative and relevant methods for enabling students and staffs to learn

their jobs and fight together as teams in complex virtual environments. Relevant denotes taking advantage of the powerful graphics

and multimedia that young soldiers and officers have grown up with

and understand. As a public institution, the military cannot ignore

the fact that 73 percent of American teenagers are surfing the Web

each week. This activity is made possible by the presence of personal

computers and the Internet in virtually every school in the United

States and in many households.

Personal computers have the same capabilities as supercomputers had less than a decade ago. Furthermore, 70 million game

consoles in the United States have transformed the expectations of

the generation coming of age in the military in this century. Game

consoles are no longer mere toys and far surpass the capability of

1980s minicomputers, such as Digital Equipment Corporation VAXes

still used in many military simulation facilities. The performance

numbers of the latest game machines, for instance, the Microsoft XBox, provide proof that we are in an era of ubiquitous supercomputers. According to Microsoft, X-Box performance is an order of magnitude greater than the Sony Playstation 2 to 146 gigaflops. This

performance is achieved by huge investments by such firms as IBM,

Sony, and Microsoft. Microsoft has spent over $2 billion in the development of the X-Box, far surpassing the Army’s annual $1.6 billion

they able to maintain it as a group forum? Does the status of that

unit rise or fall in relation to other units, based on performance in

virtual combat? If so, how is that status represented, and does the

competitive pool consist only of soldiers at a particular facility at a

particular time, or every unit that has ever logged on to the simulator? Run a group of soldiers through a simulator, measure their

progress, and the process is called training. But pit them against

units across the corps, and the process becomes personal.

How easy is it to modify scenarios in strategic or tactical simulations? Is it possible for those modifications to be exchanged

between officers on a network, replayed in parallel, and discussed?

What sorts of shared online forums exist to disseminate best practices and new ideas in real time. If

they exist, do people use them?

And if not, why?

Concentrating on the technical aspects of simulation is easy:

how faithfully the terrain is reproduced, the modeling of weapons,

the resolution, the frame rate, and

the physics. These are merely engineering challenges, and they are

explicit: processing power, bandwidth, memory. Even more sophisticated processes such as supply chain simulation, statistical casualty

projections, and the parameters that define enemy decisionmaking

are self-contained design decisions—they are easy to control, and

the effects of changing them are measurable. It is easy to demonstrate progress, and therefore to justify one’s budget, by addressing

these challenges.

But the more acute challenges are not so explicit. How does a

large, hierarchical organization adapt rapidly to face changing conditions? How does it leverage technology to make itself smarter and

more effective? These are not straightforward engineering challenges. They require hardware and software infrastructure. But they

also require cultural infrastructure to leverage those resources. The

difference between a population that can effectively coordinate on a

network and one that cannot is cultural. The lesson of computer

games, for the military simulation and wargaming community, is that

this cultural infrastructure is integral to the rapid technological evolution of multiplayer virtual environments and that it can be implemented by design. People in the computer game industry get paid to

build these dynamics into commercial products and to integrate

player-driven processes into the core technology. It is a functional

requirement in a brutally competitive market whose customers are

online, everywhere, all the time.

Game industry customers may be the future officers and

enlisted recruits of the military. The current generation grew up playing online. The social ecology of computer gaming is what they have

grown to expect from networked simulations and multiplayer virtual

environments. This ecology drives them as gamers and as learners.

The question is whether the military will harness those dynamics to

transform itself, or whether this generation of soldiers will transform

the military, over a longer of period of time, despite itself.

modeling and simulation are

considered essential to

transformation, the remaking

of the Armed Forces for the

new realities of the 21st century

6 Defense Horizons April 2002
science and technology budget. Hence, DOD has sought to leverage

these capabilities and investments in its simulations.

In this environment, the military has readily adopted a number

of commercial simulations for its school curriculums and unit training. These simulations are used for a variety of purposes, such as

understanding political strategy, exploring unit tactics, and learning

command and control (C2) concepts. Moreover, several of the services are investing in research to add new capabilities to these simulations—albeit on commercial platforms such as the Sony Playstation

II—to provide more realism and explore new methods of pedagogy.

Strategy and Tactics Games

Strategy and tactics games have been particularly popular with

the service colleges. For example, instructors at the Naval War College use the commercial fleet tactics game, Jane’s Fleet Command.

Sonalysts, a defense contractor that exploited its expertise in naval

tactics and technology by developing commercial games distributed

by Electronic Arts, developed Fleet Command. According to Sonalysts, the Royal Navy has asked for a license to modify the game for

operational planning. Sonalysts has recently released the multiplayer game Sub Command, which lets users command 688(I), Seawolf, or Akula submarines in extended campaigns. This includes the

planning for Tomahawk cruise missile operations.

The Army has also adopted commercial strategy games for its

officer and noncommissioned officer training. The Armor Center at

Fort Knox has licensed TACOPS, a commercial clone of Janus (a noncommercial military simulation), for company and battalion

wargaming. The Army Command and General

Staff college uses a turn-based strategy game

called Decisive Action, originally developed

by one of its instructors, James Lunsford, for

a corps-level operations course. In a twist,

Lunsford commercialized the game and is

distributing it through HPS Simulations.

The use of these types of games has become so widespread that

for the past several years, the Air University has sponsored an annual

conference that brings together the military and commercial

wargaming community for both technical interchange and concept

exploration.12

Skill and Team Building

In the last two decades, DOD has also begun to use some commercial games for developing individual and collective skills.

Though the Army had used some arcade games as skill-enhancers in

the early 1980s, they generally were not part of a specific training

regime. For example, the Army briefly experimented with the Atari

tank battle game Battlezone, which introduced the idea of the firstperson shooter, on the theory that it would enhance eye-hand coordination of armor crews. The Army modified Battlezone, a futuristic

tank battle game, to have gunner controls similar to a Bradley

Infantry Fighting Vehicle. Probably the first 3–D video game to be

used for collective training was Marine Doom. This was accomplished by editing the commercial version of Doom to create an environment akin to an urban combat scenario. Nonplayer characters

(the AI bad guys) were transformed from monsters to opposing

forces. Marine Doom was a project of the Marine Corps Modeling and

Simulation Management Office, which adapted the game Doom II in

1996 for training four-man fire teams. These games ostensibly taught

concepts such as mutual fire team support, protection of the automatic rifleman, proper sequencing of an attack, ammunition discipline, and succession of command.

Though much hype surrounded these efforts, their primary

impact was in stimulating the development of noncommercial military training simulations such as SIMNET, the first networked armor

combat simulation (as was the case of Battlezone), or in heightening interest in commercial games by the military. For example, the

program manager for Soldier Systems commissioned game company

Novalogic to modify its popular Delta Force 2 to include features

found in the Army’s Land Warrior system to familiarize soldiers with

the system. Land Warrior is a complex, integrated system that

includes a self-contained computer and radio system; a global positioning system receiver; a helmet-mounted LCD display; and a modular weapons system that adds thermal and video sights and laser

ranging to the standard M4 carbine or M16A2 rifle. The Army is evaluating how this realistic game can improve soldier performance with

the system.

Recently, Ubi Soft Entertainment has agreed to allow LB&B

Associates, Inc., to adopt the game engine used in the best-selling

Red Storm game, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Rogue Spear, to help

train U.S. soldiers. The company says the

game engine will enable DOD to train military personnel in how to conduct military

operations in urban terrain. USA Today

reported that Ubi Soft claims that the U.S.

military is using the game to train against

terrorists.13

Perhaps the most successful use of commercial games for training has been with

Microsoft Flight Simulator. The Navy issues a

customized version of the software to all student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training Courses at 65

colleges. The office of the Chief of Naval Education and Training has

also installed Flight Simulator at the Naval Air Station in Corpus

Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.

An extensive Navy study on the training value of Flight Simulator found that students who use microsimulation products during

early flight training tend to have higher scores than students who do

not use the software. In fact, 54 percent more of these students

received above-average flight scores. This revelation also came after

the realization that most Navy flight training students were using

Flight Simulator at home.

New Research

These experiences have encouraged research efforts by the

services to explore the use of commercial entertainment technology

and content for training and education. In 1999, under the direction

of Michael Andrews, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research

and Technology, the Army established the Institute for Creative

Technology (ICT) at the University of Southern California.

DOD has also begun 

to use some

commercial games for

developing individual

and collective skills

April 2002 Defense Horizons 7
5 While most of these sites are labors of love, a few are profitable. The guy who

runs “Mall of the Sims” (www.mallofthesims.com) is self-sufficient on ad revenue. 6 For further discussion of The Sims, see “Learning from the Sims,” Industry

Standard, May 26, 2001, <http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,22848,00.html>. 7 In some cases, game skins become cult phenomena unto themselves. Witness

the Half-Life Hockey League <http://www.planethalflife.com/hockey/>, a labor of love

by one very dedicated aficionado, who has modeled the entire National Hockey

League (current stars and past legends) as a roster of Half-Life characters. Not only

can you replace Half-Life’s generic soldier character with Mario Lemieux, but it is also

possible to recast a multiplayer death match as an Eastern Conference face-off

between the Boston Bruins and the New York Rangers. (Picture Mark Messier and Ken

Belanger, running down the halls with automatic weapons, out for blood—it was only

a matter of time.) 8 Clan monikers tend toward the flamboyant: The Enterprise Wrecking Crew,

The Dangerous Armed Warfare Guild, Pimps With Grenades, Desert Storm Troopers

(from Romania), Belgian Armed and Dangerous, TNT Gamer Clan from the People’s

Republic of China, and the Army of 12 Monkeys (ranked #1 on the Bosnia-Herzegovina CounterStrike tournament ladder). 9 <http://directory.google.com/Top/Games/Video_Games/Genres/Strategy/

Clans_and_Guilds/>. 10 Gamers actually spend more time with pre- and post-game banter in the chat

lobby than playing the game itself, and Battle.net’s messaging system is designed to

foster many levels and varieties of group communication. In addition to loitering in

the public chat lobby, players can cluster in private communication channels. Each

player can also designate up to 25 Battle.net members as “friends” and keep track of

whether they are logged onto the system. If players designate each other as friends,

the system gives them a higher level of information about each other’s whereabouts

and activities. 11 Not surprisingly, players are highly invested in the characters they have built

up. On a purely pragmatic level, those virtual personas represent hundreds of hours of

invested time (which is why high-level Everquest characters sell for thousands of dollars on eBay). 12 <http://www.cadre.maxwell.af.mil/wgweb/wgn/connections/default.htm>.

13 Mark Saltzman, “Army Enlists Simulation to Help Tackle Terrorists,” USA

Today, October 2, 2001.

The focus of ICT is to develop the art and technology for synthetic experiences that are so compelling that participants will react

as if they are real. Participants will be fully immersed physically,

intellectually, and emotionally in situations. They will be capable of

full three-dimensional mobility. Their behavior will be propelled

through engrossing stories stocked with engaging characters who

may be either automated or manned. The high quality of the automated characters will make it impossible to distinguish them from

manned characters. The goal is to produce a revolution in how the

military trains and rehearses for upcoming missions. It could provide

a quantum leap in helping the Army prepare for the world, soldier,

organization, weaponry, and mission of the future. For example, ICT

is exploring the development of synthespians (synthetic actors) and

intelligent tutors: simulations that represent smart opponents,

allies, friends, and even robots in the future. 

ICT is working closely with the game community to develop two

games for the Microsoft X-Box that will incorporate some of these

concepts. C–FORCE will be an X-Box title by Sony Imageworks/Pandemic Studios. The story line puts an infantry squad leader in a hostile urban environment. His squad’s survival depends on his quick

decisions and careful tactics. Combat Systems XII will be a PC title

by Quicksilver Software. Focused on company command, the game

will emphasize strategy, communication, and careful resource management, which can mean the difference between success and disaster for the company.

Future

The military is undergoing a major cultural shift in its approach

to simulation. The use of entertainment technology is not a new phenomenon in the military. Ironically, computer games owe much to

the military and the developer of the first pilot training simulator,

Edwin Link. Link initially sold the trainer to amusement parks while

he awaited contracts with the Navy. During World War II, the Link

Trainer proved the training value of flight simulation and convinced

the U.S. Navy to ask the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to

develop a computer that eventually would drive the development of

the first computer graphics technology.

What is different today is the emergence of a culture that

accepts computer games as powerful tools for learning, socialization,

and training.

Notes1 Doom was a milestone in the history of software distribution—the first level

was released as shareware, uploaded to the University of Wisconsin server on December 10, 1993. Crumbling under the network traffic bearing down on its ftp site, the system crashed twice. But Doom spread like wildfire—and generated millions of dollars

for Id when gamers purchased the full version. 2 This is a conservative estimate: Ultima Online was launched in 1997, and its

average monthly usage is 85 hours (yes, that is average). If you define “hardcore” as

the most dedicated 1 percent of the massively multiplayer online game population,

which exceeds 400,000, that’s over 16 million man-hours logged by hardcore players

since UO launched. 3 A history of first-person shooters can be found at <www.netgamingnow.com/

features/bhofps1.asp>. 4 For further discussion on the development of 3–D game engines as licensable

assets, see J.C. Herz, “For Game Makers, There’s Gold in the Code,” New York Times,

December 2, 1999. Archived at <http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/12/circuits/articles/02game.html>.

Defense Horizons is published by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy through the

Publication Directorate of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University.

Defense Horizons and other National Defense University publications are available online at

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/press/nduphp.html.

The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are those of the

contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other

department or agency of the Federal Government.

Center for Technology and National Security Policy

Hans Binnendijk

Director

8 Defense Horizons April 2002