Fun Inc. (22 page)

Among other things,
Generation Kill
explores just how this tech-raised generation fared in a real battlefield. The answer is a mixed one. The men were deeply disturbed by aspects of their first encounters with real combat. It seemed that all the virtual violence in the world had, if anything, increased aspects of their essential innocence in the face of the mess and gore of real war. War is full of boredom, uncertainty and the visceral fear of death or terrible injury, none of which can really be modelled in even the most advanced virtual arenas. And yet the men Evan Wright described were also fine soldiers: brave, highly competent, and possessed of an almost total mastery of the often bewilderingly complex technologies at their disposal.

In this respect, it’s clear that being well prepared for modern warfare shares many elements with good preparation for modern life: you need to be able to live and breathe certain kinds of software and hardware. Most of your actions are mediated by complex machines, while your sphere of power and information extends well beyond the personal space you occupy. You are a networked individual, using multiple tools, often deluged with information and options. In the case of war, senior commanders today have a bewildering arsenal of options at their disposal, and often only extremely limited amounts of time to make decisions. These men and women may not be in a game; but nor are their actions in any sense unmediated. In other words, anyone hoping, or fearing, that someone can be psychologically prepared for the consequences of combat by playing a game is likely to be disappointed. But anyone who thinks that games fail to offer soldiers any experiences truly relevant to their most serious purposes has failed to think sufficiently about what ‘relevant’ really means today.

Military games, in this respect, are not so dissimilar from many ‘games for change.’ What a game can do, as Suzanne Seggerman noted, is turn just about any complex and potentially overwhelming system of variables into a manageable simulation that can be played, refined and analysed as many times as you want. It’s a process that, compared to the cost and hazards of ‘real’ training exercises, offers fantastic value for money. And, most intriguingly of all, it overlaps directly with one of the most potent and rapidly developing fields not just of modern warfare, but of all kinds of human exploration, excavation and interaction with the most hazardous and challenging of environments – robotics.

Unmanned aircraft have been in use for reconnaissance purposes by both the British and American military since the 1960s. Today, however, technology has advanced to the point where highly complex remote-controlled ‘drone’ aircraft, known rather chillingly as Reapers, are being used for everything from interception and exploration missions to true ‘hunter killer’ roles. The operation of these machines bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain electronic leisure pursuit. In simple terms, drone aircraft – of which the US military alone now operates more than 7,000 – are designed for complete integration with both video game simulations and video game control mechanisms. It can be literally impossible to tell apart a training scenario, taking place via a ‘virtual’ drone within an environment generated by a modified version of the
America’s Army
game, from an actual mission as relayed by the multiple cameras and sensors attached to a real drone. Moreover, with every aspect of the control system in the training and real scenarios being identical, simulated interactions can be switched to ‘live’ ones at the flick of a switch. As a profile in
Wired
magazine revealed, America’s top drone pilot is not a swaggering
Top Gun
type, but a high-school dropout whose great aptitude was not for action but for video games.

Similarly, the increasing use of ‘remote-controlled-soldiers’ – caterpillar-track mounted robots able to wield machine guns, travel through snow, sand and water and relay home detailed images from their onboard cameras – blurs the line between simulation and reality in a disturbing, if highly effective, manner. Again, by using a specially adapted module and control system from the
America’s Army
game, soldiers can employ exactly the same controls and video interface to engage in both virtual and actual combat situations. Thus far, the main use of the robots has been for tasks like mine-clearing (units performed over 20,000 bomb disposal missions in Afghanistan and Iraq) but other engagements are only a matter of time, as is the inevitable escalation of the hardware and software involved.

The possibility of robot armies marching across the world under the control of youths wielding video game controllers within sealed military bunkers is a frightening one (not least because this kind of thing can sound dangerously attractive to certain kinds of gaming ears); and yet, rather more hopefully, it’s in areas other than shooting that the wider possibilities of the kind of games the military have invested so much money in really start to become obvious, and to get closer to what are perhaps the most essential ‘serious’ capacities of video games. Take, for example, a ‘virtual training program’ video game that has been developed for US military officers. Known as
Gator Six
, and based on hundreds of actual combat situations, the game uses actors and location filming to put players into the kind of decision-making situations that young officers actually face in the field. Short segments of video are played, a voiceover explains the key facts of each situation, and then you’re left to select actions from a number of multiple choices that gradually draw you deeper into each unfolding scenario.

A demonstration version of the software throws players in at the deep end with a video outlining a scenario similar to that faced by many units in Iraq. Combat operations within a fictional nation have just come to an end, and it’s your task as a young captain to pacify a town by maintaining order there and preparing it for a peaceful transition to democracy. With just ninety-five soldiers at my disposal and an irascible colonel breathing down my neck, I began the campaign with two options: did I want to ‘get the lay of the land’ by taking things slowly and staying outside the town for a day, or ‘roll through heavy to signal that you’re in charge’. I went for ‘heavy’, and was soon in a meeting with a local leader trying to assert my influence. How to behave towards this prickly power-broker: make bold promises, ‘maintain cultural distance’ or ‘lessen expectations’? I decided to stick ruthlessly to the mission imparted by my colonel: stop any insurgency in its tracks, stop the looting, don’t show weakness.

Soon, I was enjoying my second drive-by shooting in twenty-four hours. I decided to lay an ambush, and shoot to kill. And so on. Ten or so decisions later, my inexperience was laid bare as my men suffered heavy casualties under the combined weight of an ambush, mortar fire and a still-hostile local population’s contributions. A final video played, spelling out exactly how the decisions I made compounded to bring disaster. I listened to my men dying over the radio. It certainly made an impression.

Gator Six
, which is produced for the military by the specialist serious games design company WILL Interactive Inc., is memorable and impressive – and the non-military applications of its set-up are easy enough to imagine. Indeed, WILL Interactive themselves boast a range of training titles that deal with everything from suicide prevention to, in the case of the aptly titled
Anatomy of Care
, helping a hospital handle poor customer satisfaction. The company describes its products as ‘slice-of-life experiential learning programs’, and has a patent for the ‘interactive behaviour modification process’ that allows them to generate behaviours sophisticated enough to be useful.

Yet even the most complex video-and-multiple-choice game looks crude in some ways in comparison to the kinds of training simulations based on games technology that are already being piloted in other professions. Medicine is one area in which the use of game and virtual techniques is especially advanced – perhaps partly because the business of caring for the human body involves understanding the real-time interactions of countless complex systems and games are especially powerful at reproducing such systems.

One vital area of training is emergency triage: equipping healthcare professionals to assess the order in which casualties should be seen in a crisis situation. The principles apply equally to events like train crashes, treating sick people in remote areas, or even military operations; the underlying idea is that it’s vital, when time and resources are limited and needs are devastatingly urgent, to differentiate between those patients who might be saved by intervention and those who won’t be.

Take the example of the ‘wilderness’ training many British doctors undergo at conferences and on training courses in Scotland. Typically a climbing accident is simulated: a number of volunteers lie down at the bottom of a small cliff; next to each victim stands an instructor, who will answer questions put by the trainee about the condition of each victim – their pulse, blood pressure, wounds, responsiveness. There are also a number of printed cards explaining the bare bones of the scenario. Such exercises usually involve around ten instructors and serve perhaps a couple of dozen students. They are, in other words, extremely resource-intensive; and, while they are expertly run and scrupulous in the medical details, they also offer only a minimal degree of realism and interaction.

Compare this set-up to a prototype triage game currently under development by the TruSim division of Blitz Games Studios, whose areas of research include serious gaming. In the triage game, everything takes place in an interactive three-dimensional world: you explore the site of, for example, an explosion in a city, and find the bodies of those who need treatment as you investigate the wreckage. With highly realistic graphics and an interface that allows users to monitor vital signs, the data presented mirrors almost everything a medic would be able to discover about these patients in a real-life situation and, crucially, forces them to take triage decisions in real time without any break in the immersion.

The game is much less mediated than the ‘real’ scenario; and, of course, the cost of running dozens or even hundreds of such game situations is negligible. ‘It’s interesting,’ one doctor who had watched the TruSim demonstration told me, ‘because how can you simulate a complex, open fracture of the leg in real life? You can’t, at least not without a lot of tomato ketchup. But in a game, you can represent difficult wounds exactly. For large-scale emergency training, at the moment, they have people dressed up in latex and fake blood, pretending to be in a car crash. It’s involving, but it’s also very obviously unreal. A virtual world can simulate the noise, the chaos, everything. You could assess, for example, the exact percentage and degree of someone’s burns from the way they looked in a game.’ And, of course, you could roll out such a scheme across the country and compare data and different approaches between centres at a minimal cost: game technologies excel at nothing so much as scoring, comparing and rewarding progress (medics, moreover, are a notoriously competitive bunch in the first place).

Perhaps the most important single demonstration of the potential of games for serious applications comes not from combat or emergency medicine but the purest of all training environments: the education system. There will inevitably come a time when no one alive remembers a time before video games existed. Like books and movies, they will be a part of the media landscape older than living memory. Within a modern school, that time has already arrived: every single pupil was born into a world where video games were simply a fact of life, and it’s in this environment and among these pupils that the serious potential of video games suddenly starts to seem less a novel possibility than a creeping inevitability – as much a fixture in our future lives as the mobile telephone or the computer screen.

Until 1999, Derek Robertson was a primary school teacher in Scotland. ‘I still am at heart,’ he says, when we first speak in March 2009, although his official job title has moved on considerably since those days. From 2001 to 2006, he lectured on the postgraduate course in primary teaching at Dundee University; from August 2006 until June 2008 he was a development officer seconded to an organisation known as Learning and Teaching Scotland; and since then, he has boasted the title of National Adviser for Emerging Technologies and Learning in Scotland. It’s largely thanks to him that Scotland now leads the world in the emerging field of what Robertson calls ‘games-based learning’.

Even a decade ago, Robertson was profoundly sceptical of everything to do with video games. Then, in 1997, on the last day of term before Christmas, the children got to bring in toys and games, one of which happened to be a Super Nintendo games console. ‘I watched these two boys play a game,’ he explained, ‘where they were manipulating and arranging 2D shapes forming sequences and patterns. They were doing this really quickly, but what interested me was that these boys were in my supposedly bottom maths set and, when it came to problem solving in the traditional contexts with which I was presenting them, they appeared to be pretty hopeless. But this game challenged my thinking. How come they were so good at problem solving in the context I was watching, via a computer game?’

So Robertson began trying out games in the classroom, according to what he felt were the principles of best practice in teaching: involvement, engagement, stimulation and rigour. He used, for instance, Nintendo’s series of
Zelda
adventure games to get children to write stories known as ‘ergodic’ texts – that is, stories with no single linear path, where a reader’s decisions about which page to turn to next give rise to a whole range of narratives. It was an instant success, as was the learning of various mathematical principles through other games. Yet the key point was not that video games achieved miraculous results but that, as he put it to me, they were a context that really meant something to the children. ‘I think it’s very important that learning doesn’t look at a child as though they come out of a vacuum: that school embraces where children come from and what there is out there that impacts on their cultural life.’ Within the digital culture that all children are now born into, of course, video games have tremendously positive connotations, and, given that their most basic mechanisms are in many ways simply variations on the common theme of learning, it was probably only a matter of time before they began to find their way into educational structures.