The “Tactical Language Series” have been developed by Alelo for the US military, which seeks to train soldiers “visual literacy and cultural knowledge for the geographical and linguistic areas in which they will serve”. In other words, how to understand and get along with people whose country you’re in, holding a gun.
It stems from most soldier’s inability to understand the customs and nuances of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, which at best can lead to stunted cooperation, and at worst can be deadly.
The game teaches both language and customs at once by presenting a virtual battlefield, though in this one, there’s no shooting. You can only interact with civilians, and have to not only communicate with them verbally, but try and understand things like facial gestures and hand movements whose meaning may differ greatly from those used in the West.
Makes you wish this program had been around in 2001, and again in 2003. Might have saved us all a lot of trouble.
How the military improved its language education [Boing Boing]
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Monday, June 7, 2010 at 10:25 PMI find it kind of stupid that these kinds of things are necessary, surely they could just be trained in this before deployment. But it certainly is important, from what little I have seen of soldiers overseas they don’t seem to understand or care to try to understand the cultures of the countries they are in.
Aaron Meacham
Monday, June 7, 2010 at 10:59 PMErr… isn’t that what this is doing? Training them before deployment?
warcroft
Monday, June 7, 2010 at 10:52 PMWoah, woah, hold on. . .
You mean theres alternatives to shooting?
vibesublime
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 12:03 AMyeah, you just click in the right thumbstick
Brendan
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 2:00 AMI’m loving the frame rate.
Space Monkey
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 2:46 PMYeah, it prepares the soldiers for the reality of the third world: people stutter, have a low frame rate and poor anti-aliasing there :p