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The Army is remaking its basic training for the first time in 30 years to cope with a generation that, as the general in charge says, has a courage and physique shaped by, you guessed it, video games.
Back in 2006, the US Army approached Microsoft with a lucrative contract offer: supply a ton of Xbox 360 consoles to the Army for the purposes of training soldiers. Microsoft’s answer? No, thank you.
Army officers are practising counterinsurgency strategies for Iraq with using a video game plainly inspired by SimCity. In fact, a frustrated officer unprepared for the fall of Baghdad asked for such a thing by name years ago.
If, to feel safe and secure, you depend upon the image of the U.S. fighting man as 200 pounds of rompin’ stompin’ shitkickin’ dynamite, this might not be the video for you to watch.
Or, maybe they’re Mass Effect-ified. But the U.S. Army’s concept for a soldier in the year 2030 definitely looks video game-ified – especially with its strength-enhancing exoskeleton and… combat drugs? Maybe it’s Helghast-ified?
Last week, GamePolitics brought you the live coverage of a demonstration against the Army Experience centre, a video game recruiting expo in Philadelphia. Seven were arrested. One has now written about it, and why.
Yesterday in Philadelphia, a crowd of 100 marched on a mall demanding the shutdown of the “U.S. Army Experience” – a video-game based recruiting station. Seven were arrested for cosplaying Shyguys wearing masks.
Serious games are an increasingly prevalent, albeit not necessarily increasingly popular, type of videogame. One of the most prominent players in serious games has long been the military, with their significant investments in training games of their own, as well as advertising and cross-over games like America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior.
They’ve been at it a lot longer than you think. Way back in 1981, the US Army commissioned Atari to create a modified version of the hit arcade game Battlezone, to be used to train soldiers to manoeuvre and target the Bradley “armored fighting vehicle” (that’s a “tank” to the rest of us).
I knew about the game thanks to an article Peter Smith wrote for a collection I co-edited. I unearthed the image above during some research for the Atari VCS book Nick Montfort and I are finishing. It’s from the official Atari fan club magazine.
Atari Age, vol 1 num 1, May/June 1982 [Atari Museum]
