True Believers: Digital Game-Based Learning in the Military
By Marc Prensky

Joy sticks and buzzers. It may seem like all fun and games, but the U.S. military is using game-based learning to get young recruits ready for almost everything.

Business people are slowly "getting it." Schools get it here and there. But the U.S. military gets it big time. The military has embraced digital game-based learning with all the fervor of true believers. Why? Because it works for them. And trust me, the guys in charge of training at the Pentagon are a very sharp group. They have seen and evaluated everything.

"We're a few standard deviations ahead of most, including those in the industry, yet most people don't know who we are," says Michael Parmentier, head of the Readiness and Training unit at the Department of Defense.

The military's training mission is a daunting one. It has to train 2.4 million men and women in the four services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines), plus almost another million civilian employees, to work as individuals, teams, units, and in combination to meet all sorts of unforeseen and difficult objectives around the world under very high-pressure conditions. It has to train its officers to lead, manage, and command. It has to educate military dependents. Turnover is large enough to make any corporate executive shudder, and among those who stay, job change is rapid, particularly at the officer level. Strategy, tactics, and equipment are all continually evolving at rapid pace. Extremely sophisticated technology is playing a greater and greater role. And the training has to be fast. No time for lollygagging around--this is the Army! (Or the Navy! Or the Air Force! Or the Marines!) We've got missions to perform and they'd better be done correctly!

Not only are the military branches extremely complex organizations themselves, they need to be coordinated to work together in most mission situations. The services have a combined incoming cohort of a quarter of a million enlistees to train each year in military training basics in over 150 military occupational areas and in literally thousands of specialties and subspecialties. They need to train for war, yet increasingly they need to train for peacekeeping missions, as America's role in the world changes. Finally, their incoming recruits are not seasoned adults, with work experience and habits on their resumes. Typically, they are high school graduates and nongraduates, most of whom have never worked before. Molding those people into a well-trained force is a staggering job, and the military approaches it with the purpose and budget of a major mission. The combined training budget of the armed services is about US$18 billion, excluding trainees' salaries, including US$6 billion institutional training and US$12 billion operational unit training.

It's precisely because of that mission that the U.S. military is the world's largest spender on, and user of, digital game-based learning. The military uses games to train soldiers, sailors, pilots, and tank drivers to master their expensive and sensitive equipment. It uses games to teach midlevel officers how to employ joint force military doctrine in battle and other situations. It uses games to teach senior officers the art of strategy. It uses games for teamwork and team training of squads, fire teams, crews, and other units; games for simulating responses to weapons of mass destruction, terrorist incidents, and threats; games for mastering the complex process of military logistics; and it even uses games for teaching how not to fight when helping maintain peace. In fact, there seems precious little that the military doesn't use some form of games to train. Let's start with an example.

Joint force employment

The day I arrived at the Pentagon for a meeting with the Training and Readiness Unit of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, the guys in the shop were eager to show me the first copies of a brand new game prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for midlevel officers--captains, majors, lieutenant commanders, and so forth--that had just been completed two weeks before. The game has the rather prosaic, but highly descriptive, title Joint Force Employment (JFE), but it's anything but prosaic. Its purpose is to ensure that officers from each of the military services have the opportunity to prepare themselves for Joint Task Force operations, which is the integration of military personnel from different services--Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines--into a cohesive interoperable military organization. The Joint Staff has established Joint Doctrine (doctrine is the military's term for "the way it should be done"), a set of standard guidelines and rules of engagement associated with specific joint operational tasks and functions. JFE is, essentially, a how-to field-training exercise for those officers. According to its official description, it's designed exclusively for today's U.S. military to convey the concept that joint warfare is team warfare and to enhance knowledge of Joint Doctrine within the U.S. military.

Adopt the role of Joint Force Commander and tackle 10 realistic scenarios to hone your knowledge of doctrine. -- JFE training game box

How much of a real game is JFE? Well, for starters it comes in a game-sized shrink-wrapped box printed with fancy graphics and screen shots, looking for the entire world like it should sit on the store shelf right next to Quake III, Age of Empires II, or EverQuest. Even the (real) official Joint Chiefs of Staff logo on the front of the box looks--to those of us unfamiliar with it--like an artists' conception right from a commercial game. In fact, the only thing on the box that gives away that it isn't a commercial game are the words, "This product is the property of the United States Government," in the lower right-hand corner.

So, right from the beginning, rather than hide the fact that it's a game behind the corporate speak of "training challenge" or "competition," the military flaunts the product's "gameness." Just listen to the box copy:

• Select from computer-assisted walkthrough mode or player-controlled mode to create and control large combinations of forces and compete against state-of-the-art computer artificial intelligence.
• Adopt the role of Joint Force Commander and tackle 10 realistic scenarios to hone your knowledge of doctrine. Adjust friendly and enemy forces in four selectable scenarios to test varying military possibilities.
• Spectacular photorealistic terrain maps that range from the frigid arctic to the vast desert.
• 3-D military units pulled directly from the U.S. military arsenal.
• Dazzling high-resolution and high-detailed graphics.
• Dynamic 3-D battle effects including flying debris and smoking buildings.

So, JFE definitely looks like a game. But, much more important, JFE also feels and plays like a game. In fact, it's two games. The first is a traditional quiz game played after a fairly computer-based training tell-test introduction to Joint Doctrine, but the quiz is spiced up with high-powered graphics and sounds. It's the second game, however, that's the "real" game, the meat of the program. That game is a heart-pounding war simulation in which you set your forces rolling and shooting, take out bridges and enemy planes, have air cover flying overhead (if you request it), all in the same dynamic 2.5-D top-down view as up-to-the-minute games such as Warcraft II, Command and Conquer, and Tiberian Sun. In fact, the subcontractor of the JFE game, Semi-Logic Entertainments, is the maker of the games Real War, Stunt Track Driver, and Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen. We're talking state-of the-art gaming here; the U.S. military trains its commanders-in-chief staffs with a high-end video game version of digital game-based learning. This kind of gaming technology fills a particular niche--training the top of the warfighting command structure. Although the number of personnel in a Joint Task Force's staff is relatively limited, the ability to rapidly integrate military personnel into a JTF and prepare for unanticipated missions on the fly justifies the use of online digital games.

A bit of military history

The relationship between computer games and the U.S. military is a relatively long and complex one. The flight simulator, which some think of as coming from the military, was originally designed by Edwin Link in 1930 as an entertainment device. His "Blue Box" was sold to amusement parks until 1934, when Link, a pilot himself, met with the Army Air Corps to sell the Corps on the concept of pilot training with his device. But eventually, as the military devoted more and more money to research, things began to go the other way. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the military spent billions of dollars a year on research and on training, creating very complex, sophisticated types of simulations. Through the early 1990s, the military was the technology leader, inventor, and financier, and the games companies were the beneficiaries. To a surprising extent, the technology in today's commercial games is by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research and Production Agency), STRICOM, the Army's Simulation Training and Instrumentation Command, and others.

The entertainment industry now rests on a technological foundation laid by large amounts of government-funded research and infrastructure, including advanced computing systems, computer graphics, and the Internet. In the area of computer graphics, for example, Department of Defense funding resulted in development of the geometry engine in 1979. This technology has since been incorporated into a number of game devices, such as the Nintendo 64 console. Similarly, early advances in networking in the late 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for the ARPANET, which grew into today's Internet and has become the foundation of today's growing networked games industry.

In the 1970s, the DoD developed aircraft, tank, and submarine simulators, and in the mid-1980s, SIMNET pods, networked tank simulators that trained the troops up through and including the Gulf War. The DoD has invested more than US$1 billion in JSIM, its current high-end simulation technology. The military-sponsored and funded display, simulation, and networking technologies in these projects have made their way into most commercial computer games, and of course, into military simulation games such as Apache and Harpoon. By the time of the Gulf War, commercial computer games were so close to military reality that--as J.C. Herz wryly points out in her computer games history, Joystick Nation--General Schwartzkopf felt the need to explicitly state in a war briefing that "this isn't a computer game."

We know the technology works, we've proven it over and over again, and we just want to get on with using it.

But toward the end of the decade, as the military's budget got crunched, and as cheaper, smaller, more powerful computing power became available commercially, the tide began to turn again. Today, the computer-games industry has eclipsed the DoD in terms of what it can do and how fast it can do it, and industry is again leading the technology. Today's military often borrows or buys its game technology from the best commercial games. In fact, today's commercial military games have gotten so sophisticated--having used a battalion of ex-majors, colonels, and generals to create super-realistic versions of everything from submarine to tank to the latest fighter and attack helicopter simulations--that they're now being used for training inside the military. (This actually began around 1978, when Atari adapted its Battlezone game for ARPA, DARPA's predecessor.) Today, the Air National Guard is working with Spectrum HoloByte to modify the Falcon 4.0 flight-simulator game for military training to compensate for decreased flight training time. The Navy and Air Force are negotiating with the makers of consumer flight-simulation games to create military versions. The U.S. Marine Corps continuously evaluates commercial war games software for use in training, and the Marine Corps commandant has authorized commanders to permit certain games--including (in 1996) Harpoon2, Tigers on the Prowl, Operation Crusader, Patriot, and DOOM--to be loaded onto government computers and to allow Marines to play them during duty hours.

And it's not just equipment simulators. Other kinds of commercial games and interactive movies, created by companies that build consumer games, are being adapted for military team training, antiterrorism, and weapons of mass destruction training, as well as other projects too secret for them to tell me about. Today, when the military has an idea for a training game like Joint Force Employment, it farms it out to commercial games houses such as Semi-logic, Vidual Purple, and others, rather than building it in-house.

All this, and yes, the military uses Jeopardy! for training as well.

Why has the military embraced digital game-based learning so completely? The first reason, says ADL team member Don Johnson, is cost. "We did it because the other forms of training are so expensive. Even virtual simulation can cost millions to build and millions to maintain. This doesn't cost you anything to operate once you've built it."

The second reason is motivation. Johnson's group is part of the office of the Secretary of Defense for Personnel and for Readiness, whose job it is to worry about things such as recruiting and retention, quality of life, and quality of education and training. They're very mindful that the people that they're trying to bring into the military--the 18-year-olds--are probably the first generation that grew up with computers, and who "get bored real easy" with traditional classroom instruction. They keep this in mind when designing all their recruiting strategies and training programs, as do the individual military services, who turn the young people into soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. The military is now using the Web and developing games as a way of recruiting and retaining kids. "I do think the point about being motivational is really a very, very relevant one," says Johnson.

In addition to cost and motivation, add relevance. Because modern warfare increasingly takes place on airplane, tank, or submarine computer screens without the operator ever seeing the enemy except as a symbol or avatar, simulations can be surprisingly close to the real thing. In addition, because war is a highly competitive situation, with rules (or at least constraints), goals, winners, and losers, competitive games are a great way to train. In the words of one former officer: "You play these games as a kid, you grow up understanding the risks and rewards of making decisions in real life." Chess has grown up. War gaming has become a business term.

The real problem for the military, according to Thinking Machines founder Danny Hillis, is not to simulate a tank or airplane, but to train the people's minds so that when they get into a real tank on a battlefield, they do the right thing. That's why military training has relevance to all training. But the question is always, "How do we do this?" Michael Parmentier is clear that 18-year-old recruits expect to be hooked up electronically to the world "because that's the way they do things. If we don't do things that way, they're not going to want to be in our environment." As Don Johnson says, "We know the technology works. We just want to get on with using it."

Published: February 2001