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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Well, militaries across the world may soon have a new war game to their arsenal, and it could have a trickle down effect to retail games — British researchers have come up with a game system that incorporates a ‘smell box,’ in an attempt to see if they can make training stick better. In what sounds like an unpleasant experience, various smells are triggered as users ‘take an authentic walk’ around hostile areas. If it’s determined this is making training more useful, it could be rolled out next year and be used in training actual soldiers:
You know who likes the smell of victory in the morning? The British Army, that’s who – and now the Ministry Of Defence is pumping research pounds into creating a Virtual Battlefield complete with Virtual Smells so soldiers can sample that smell – alongside the bouquet of bullets, the whiff of weaponry and the perfume of the paramilitary – without having to step into harm’s way.
There are plenty of fields where the academic-’real world’ divide is pretty sharp — and it’s probably no surprise that game-related research falls into that category. Richard Bartle, MUD co-creator, criticises universities who are resistant to change — while ‘modern’ universities (ones who developed from polytechnics or institutes, at least in the UK) are more willing to lead the way with creative courses, older institutions are less likely to follow suit:
Fascinating article on Wired.com — the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s CIA counterpart, just paid $2.6 million for three custom video games to train its entire analyst corps, young and old. So, you want to bitch about $US60 titles on the Xbox, think of that next time. Plus, these games are bereft of squad-based FPS tactics or any real arcade action. They’re designed to get to the heart of epistemology, which is, in essence, how you know what you know, and in these three cases, it’s how to assess a threat or judge the quality of information.
