I Love the Script of Napalm in the Morning

1. I Love the Script of Napalm in the Morning Engl 197 Simulations Professor Raley 3-6-2012

2. “You too can become a military assault commando” • From Link Trainer & SIMNET to Doom & Call of Duty, the first-person shooter video game is a direct descendent from military spec. flight and combat training simulations. • Ex. Steven Woodcock, software engineer who writes military simulations and is responsible for all weapons code development, testing and integration takes a new job developing video games for Sega and Sony PlayStation in early 1990’s • “The commercial sector has more than held its share of the flow of technology within the military-entertainment complex”, meaning game elements developed within the commercial sector have been appropriated for use by the military, creating a bidirectional flow of information in game/simulation innovation • Ex. Doom, the original and archetypal first-person shooter, demonstrates (gamer’s) immersive potential made possible by faster and more powerful graphics engines, peer-to-peer networking and a modular design which enabled players to create custom levels and scenarios – a ‘military spec’ scenario is soon developed, setting up a cyclic or 2-way relationship between the two sectors • The result: America’s Army, Full Spectrum Warrior and other games/simulations developed specifically by Armed Forces lower costs associated with live training exercises and help soldiers with “Imaginative combinations of physical and mental activities [that] provide Marines the opportunity to make decisions under conditions of physical stress and fatigue, thereby more closely approximating combat.”

3. Appeal for extreme realism is universal Mäk • Launched in 1990 by MIT engineers who had also worked with SIMNET project • Provide distributed interactive simulation (DIS), high level architecture (HLA) and virtual reality development to the US Dept. of Defense • Also licensed by several entertainment firms • Result? Company develops game (Spearhead II) to be simultaneously released to both military and civilian markets which uses the same gameplay engines for both versions and only differs in terms of classified ballistics information and tactical details. Game incorporates AI and networking to enhance the semblance of reality. Institute for Creative Technology • “reflects the fact that although Hollywood and the Pentagon may differ markedly in culture, they now overlap in technology.” • Do we agree with this? • Writers, producers, artists and others collaborate with military leaders to imagine as many different permutations of a given scenario as is possible to include into a computerized simulation • AF recognize the application of (among others) AI and networking protocols in simulating a more realistic training exercise • Does more real equate with more fun/diversion?

4. Military-industrial becomes military-entertainment “Military technology, which once trickled down to civilian use, now usually lags behind what is available in games, rides and movie special effects” • Military flight simulators focused on cockpit, lacked networking capability and realistic environment • Consumer network games like Falcon 4.0 fill in the details (lacking in earlier simulations) that the average consumers want in their game experience; because these details add to the overall experience (more immersive), they are adopted and modified for use back into the military. • Major General Ray Smith’s 1997 concern that simulations are not complex and sophisticated enough seems very dated • As soon as a new weapon system is adopted, its simulation appears on game store shelves • The most popular first-person shooter games increasingly use human or near-human foes rather than fantasy-derived monsters

5. War Games • The push for realism heightens emotive content of gameplay and... • Creates a truer-to-life portrayal, further approximating real-life scenarios but... • At what point is a game no longer a game? • Play as learning/development • When does it all become too real and, if it never does (or if it is already), how would we be able to tell the difference between real and virtual if everything were fed to us on a screen?

6. The Synthetic Theater of War • Live Simulation: people & equipment in “real” environment • Virtual Simulation: simulated weapons and equipment in simulated scenarios • Constructive Sim: multiple computer-modeled combat scenarios • Major General Ray Smith, revisited: “In war you fight people, not machines. We’re training to beat computers, instead of training to beat the enemy. You cannot model the effects of confusion and surprise, the friction and fog of war.” • I would argue that, 15 years later, we can model some of these things well and training to beat computers is more valuable than ever. • Other “simulations of war” • Drone combat • DARPA’s robot cheetah:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17269535 How are these examples simulations?

7. Good, Clean Fun • The desire to go to war seems to require the conviction that the participant is willing to die for their cause. Most, people, though, really don’t want to die. To be able to eliminate one’s enemies without placing one’s self in harm’s way (as with unmanned vehicles and robots) satisfies our drive for security and self-preservation but is merely a temporary solution. In time the enemy will have the same technology. What will happen then when robots battle robots or virtual legions decimate each other across a virtual battlefield? Could future disagreements be settled in seconds following a query entered on a command-line prompt?