And they’re not even going to play games on them!

Instead, the consoles will be headed to the USAF Research Laboratory’s information directorate in Rome, New York, where they’ll be combined with 336 consoles the lab already own to form a “cluster” of Cell chips. A PS3 Rat King, if you will.

This cluster will then be put to work grinding out better ways to process high-res radar images, video footage, as well as research on “neuromorphic computing”, a term that didn’t sound that scary until I looked it up.

Air Force To Expand PlayStation-Based Supercomputer [IW]

Well, alright, maybe it’s a heartwarming story anyway. The jamfest was put together by Pro vs. G.I. Joe, which arranges morale-booster multiplayer competitions between sports stars and service members overseas. Via Xbox Live and a satellite connection, Roethlisberger (git-tar, second from right), and his offensive line – Ramon Foster (guitar, left), Willie Colon (vocals) and Trai Essex (drums, looking like he’s playing on easy) took their Guitar Hero 5 skills up against the Army’s 336th Military Police Company.

Afterwards, Big Ben orated:

To be able to interact with these guys and enjoy it – and I could see the joy on their face – and get to beat them a little bit in some Rock Band. It’s a lot of fun.

Facepalm.

Madden NFL 10 cover boy Troy Polamalu didn’t play, but he did show up in grass-covered sniper camouflage (yes, really.) I bet Hines Ward’s eyes got real big when he saw that, thinking that getup would be perfect for his next out-of-nowhere blindside hit on Keith Rivers.

NFL Super Bowl Champion Steelers Connect with Soldiers in Iraq for Guitar Hero Competition [Ripten]

We are of course talking about America’s Army, the free-to-play shooter that’s been drumming up interest in the US armed forces for nigh on seven years now.

According to a statement issued by MIT as part of a 2008 report – which is now being presented to the US Congress by the Army – “30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined”.

Not a bad investment, then! That is, if you mean “bad” in terms of effectiveness vs money spent. If you mean “bad” in terms of “you shouldn’t recruit soldiers through a video game”, that’s another topic for another day.

America’s Army Extremely Effective Recruitment Tool [GamePolitics]

On one side we have scaremongering tabloids allowing fearful lobby groups to voice their ignorance of the medium; on the other we have gamers ill-equipped with the necessary vocabulary to defend a brave developer.

Jane Roberts, president of the Australian Council on Children and the Media, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the images seen in the leaked footage of an MA15+ game would not be out of place on the evening news where, I might add, they could be viewed by people of all ages.

Roberts claims that Modern Warfare 2 is guilty of “promoting” terrorism, saying, “If that material was on the internet about how to become a terrorist, how to join a group and how to wipe out people – that would be removed because it would not be acceptable.”

She falls for the fallacy that to depict something is to endorse it.

Gamers claim that Modern Warfare 2 is just a game. It’s fantasy; it’s not real; you shouldn’t take it so seriously, they cry. Gamers, it seems, agree with Roberts’ view that it is “a product that’s meant to be passed off as a leisure time activity.”

Both perspectives are mindless. Both perspectives only trivialise the medium.

The debate demonstrates how immature the medium is when the argument is focused solely on the very inclusion of this content. Surely what’s worth discussing in Modern Warfare 2 isn’t the fact you play the role of a terrorist in a particular mission, but rather how Infinity Ward handles that scenario. Shouldn’t we be more interested in who the player is controlling? How is this scenario structured in terms of mission objectives? How complicit are we? What happens if we refuse to carry out those objectives? What are the fail states?

Let’s not forget that neither Roberts and the general public, nor indeed anyone outside of Infinity Ward, Activision and an exclusive coterie of games media have actually played the game in its entirety. Without knowledge of vital context, we can’t answer these questions. We can, however, address the broader issue of what such confronting, provocative scenes mean for the medium.

Activision says the mission “is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.” Cinema has a rich history of taking viewers inside the minds of people who commit atrocities. As a more mature medium, film can portray serial killers, murderers, terrorists or just base thugs. As an audience we accept that such films aren’t automatically promoting these activities, but may in fact have something important to say about the human condition.

David Cage, president of Quantic Dream and currently working on the defiantly adult Heavy Rain, recently said: “As a game creator I have one very simple rule: Everything is allowed, no limits, as long as it makes sense in the story and is not gratuitous.”

Video games shouldn’t shy away from something just because it is unpleasant. Choose almost any game and one could describe a scenario that, at least on the surface, seems horrifying. In Cage’s own Fahrenheit, for example, one of the player-controlled characters is a serial killer who, in the opening scene, brutally murders another man in the bathroom of a restaurant.

The idea that the player is assuming another identity, stepping into the shoes of a virtual character is a challenging notion. The language we use to relate our in-game experience reinforces how blurry the distinction is between player and in-game avatar; we talk in phrases such as “I did this” and “I did that”. In Far Cry 2, for example, I shot a man in the legs then watched as he staggered away to collapse behind a tree. I pursued him, drew my knife and stabbed him through the chest.

Did I do this? Was I guilty of murder? No. But the brutality of the scene combined with the necessity of my actions – if I hadn’t killed him, he may well have killed me – heightened my emotional connection to the world, to the character and the themes the developers had intended. I understood the desperation of this place.

The emotional climax of BioShock arrives when you finally encounter Andrew Ryan. You realise you have no free will and have been blindly obeying whatever instructions you’ve received. Atlas asks you to kindly kill Ryan and, since you have no choice, you bludgeon him to death with his own golf club.

It’s a shocking, repulsive sequence. The player is forced to watch “himself” commit bloody, gruesome murder. But it serves a purpose. In context, the whole scene – especially the way direct control is taken away from the player – is crucial to understanding your character’s relationship to Ryan and the tragedy of his downfall.

Shawn Elliott asks, “Must we commit mass murder to appreciate the extent of its evil?” Perhaps not. But Infinity Ward, recent marketing cock-ups notwithstanding, has previously displayed a deft touch in presenting us with an intelligent and mature commentary on how war can affect us. Let’s play the game and hear what they have to say before we condemn them. Isn’t that what a mature medium would do?

Monday Musings is a regular column designed to get you thinking and talking about game design or an industry topic. I’ll be tackling a specific subject each Monday, so email me if you have any suggestions.

Writes the Los Angeles Times:

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

Note, this isn’t explosive ordnance disposal, they’re talking about riding in a humvee and picking up details that someone might have buried explosives in the road. This is important because, of bombs discovered before they went off, like 90 percent of them were found because someone’s spidey-sense went off.

The story quotes a sergeant major who finds the research fits with his own observations. “The gamers are very focused on the screen rather than the whole surrounding,” he said. Country boys and hood rats have a more finely-tuned radar – that head on a swivel mentality when you’re potentially in a dangerous situation.

Some Troops Have a Sixth Sense for Bombs [Los Angeles Times via Game Politics]

In Wales, the 200th U.K. soldier to die in the Afghanistan conflict was memorialized this weekend. Pvt. Richard Hunt would have been 22 today, Hundreds came to pay their respects.

His father Phillip, enjoyed playing Call of Duty: World at War with his son. He left a copy of the game at his grave (along with a wreath and many other memorials). It bore the note: “Happy Birthday ‘Hunty’. Play you again one day. Dad.”

Hundreds Join Tribute to Soldier [BBC via GamePolitics]

The movie, 6 Days in Call of Duty 4, was created by machinima artists J. Joshua Diltz and Joseph Delappe using both a static and roaming ground cameras for the capture. It’s essentially nine minutes of a multiplayer match with nothing but the visuals, the sound of the game and music that I don’t immediately recognise. They’ve created the project in “homage to the lives, both military and civilian, lost during the Second War of Fallujah.”

I actually got in touch with Diltz because I remember asking a question about Six Days in Fallujah at the conference during the Q&A. Damned if I can remember what I asked, but apparently, it left an impression.

Diltz emails:

The idea for 6 Day originated from the conference. Your question I think actually sparked the concept that Joseph DeLappe conceived. Joseph was curious what six days in a military themed shooter would look like through a static camera. He wanted to see what effects combat would have in a virtual space, particularly how many deaths would occur and how many bodies would be left on the screen after 6 days of game sessions.

I developed the point of view camera concept and also the console panel. I thought it was interesting to see what the conflict looked like from the ground perspective and how it correlated with real life events. The scrolling command console keeps the piece grounded in the virtual world. I found it quite intriguing that all the action on screen was visible in the scrolling data. It certainly separated the visuals which mirror real conflict from the data that was creating the illusion behind the scenes.

Joseph will be showing a more somber version of movie in a gallery installation at the Beijing Biennale. That piece will include only the static camera which is visible in the larger pane of movie.

You can download the video for yourself here.

Thanks for the link, Professor Lowood!

The complex is responsible for building, repairing and disassembling components for nuclear warheads, so yes, it’s a high securty, important place. And as such, it’s got serious restrictions on bringing in stuff that can in any way store or transmit information. After all, you never can tell where spies are lurking!

One of the employees has been busted for bringing in a PSP, which because of its wi-fi capabilities violates that rule. And even if it didn’t have wi-fi, they’d still have been busted, because under another of the facility’s rules, video games are prohibited at the workplace. Which is why the other two guards have been suspended; they were found to be in possession of other, unnamed consoles that while not capable of transmitting data, still violated workplace regulations.

So, security guards at high security military complexes: next time you’re bored, just bring a newspaper and do the crosswords, ok?

Y-12 Guards Docked For Bringing Video Games to Work [NTI, via Dtoid]

The Games and Extras page of the official U.S. Air Force website is chock full of interesting little activities to help demonstrate how much fun it is to be in the Air Force. While a majority of the selections amount to nothing more than slightly interactive demos, the ECHO ZULU section has several scenarios to play through, from using flares to scare insurgents, to using remote-controlled planes to scare insurgents. I’m sensing a theme.

Sure, it might not be as entertaining as America’s Army 3, but it probably cost us U.S. taxpayers a whole lot less.

Games and Extras [U.S. Air Force]

But the HD World does. A custom F-16 fighter simulator, it runs off 120 dual core PCs with 120 $US400 graphics cards inside them, all chained together.

All that processing power gets you 10,000 “entities” on screen at once, realistic explosion and destruction effects and “20-40 visual acuity”, which is apparently as close to photo-realism as current projector technology can manage in a situation like this.

Oh, and it all comes wrapped in a 180-degree screen, along with a fully authentic replica of an F-16 cockpit.

If it didn’t cost millions and millions of dollars, I’d already have one on order.

Ultra-HD Military F-16 Flight Simulator Runs on 120 PC Graphic Cards [Gizmodo]