Be all that you can be -- virtually

The fortress had the menace of an indoor climbing wall and the candor of a Hollywood set seen from the side. But the six Army special forces soldiers who stood in front of it, their camouflaged backs to the corner of the Los Angeles Convention Center, looked ready to take on the curious hordes beyond the moat of glowing monitors at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The giddy mix of fantasy and firepower announced something that gamers and military insiders have long known: The Army has entered the virtual combat zone in force. Full Spectrum Warrior, based on a program designed to train combat leaders, hit the Xbox market in June, and America’s Army, a PC-based recruitment tool, has enlisted 3 million players since 2001.

The Army spends $1.4 billion each year on training simulations, and in the past decade the electronic arts have taken the luster off live training, or what one of the Army’s top simulation experts refers to as “go out in the woods and mess around.” Today’s motto? “All but war is simulation.”

So-called “tactical decision aids” or “game-based simulations,” as graphics pioneer Michael Zyda describes them, are small change in a huge operation. The Army’s contribution to Full Spectrum Warrior was $4 million, roughly half the game’s development budget. The Institute for Creative Technologies, the Army-funded Hollywood-USC venture in Marina del Rey that created the Full Spectrum family, spins off sci-fi scenarios of future wars for about $9 million a year. Microsoft is spending $2 billion to develop the next Xbox. “If someone gave me $1 bil today and said build the next training system,” says Michael Macedonia, the chief scientist for the Army’s simulation procurement program, “I would have to leverage [commercial] technology rather than re-create it.”

The planning for future war leverages the special talents of the entertainment industry. “If you’re developing a game, you have to think a little bit in the future,” says Jim Korris, ICT’s creative director, whose tousled hair and owlish glasses give him the look of the grown-up teen geek who meets himself in a time-travel movie. Korris, who is a longtime television producer, and his team of actors, gamers, designers, filmmakers and writers think up the stories that give shape to what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the “known unknowns” of future war. “We need to be prepared for the things we don’t know,” says David Hendrie, a former Army officer and reservist who works with Korris.

Besides Hendrie, few at ICT have military experience. The closest Korris got was working on “cop shows” like “Miami Vice.” So he launched a series of “trainups” and war-game exercises for his team that culminated in a hotel conference room around a 30-by-30-foot model of Hue City, where they re-fought the epic 1968 battle. The American side was allowed to imagine and employ future weapons systems; the Vietnamese got only one upgrade. Hendrie, playing the Vietnamese commander, chose an electromagnetic-pulse device that fried the Americans’ sophisticated electronics, and won.

Military recruits have high expectations for the training they will receive, Korris says. “They had been out playing Quake or Doom,” he explains, referring to two popular tactical games of the 1990s. “They were, like, ‘I’m going to see Mega-Quake.’ ”

Full Spectrum Warrior, the fluid commercial version of its bulky Army predecessor, Full Spectrum Command, feeds those expectations. In the game, the player is a platoon-level leader, sending a melting pot of American soldiers with names such as Barnes, Mendez and Yang across a sun-scorched Middle Eastern cityscape. Graffiti crawls across alley walls and minarets rise over narrow Malnika Street, where passersby stop to harangue the American “occupiers.” The scene is purposely generic. “It’s all Greeked up,” Korris says unironically.

The emerging market for military simulations expanded rapidly during the force transformations of the last decade. Defense planners realized, as Hendrie puts it, that “the future of the Army was all about deployment,” the rapid reaction to evolving problems. Macedonia says that special forces are the Army’s largest user of training technology. “My customer is the war fighter,” he says.

A major issue for war gamers in today’s multi-tentacled military is compatibility (what defense people call “interoperability”). “You want to hook simulators up that play across networks,” says Zyda, who runs the Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulations program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. The goal: a virtual space where Marine riflemen can meet up with Air Force targeters and Army artillery spotters.

“Serious games,” as enthusiasts call them, face other high hurdles to their acceptance as training tools. Many of today’s games are fluid, graceful, yet unconvincing. “Fidelity” is a buzzword among military game designers, who want games not just to look but also to feel real. “Learning is really tied to emotion,” Macedonia explains. “Proust, when he smelled that damn cake -- well, that’s real, that’s how we make connections.”

Infidelity can turn off military people, who Hendrie says are especially attuned to the accuracy of reality games. “If you make things too realistic, but they’re not totally accurate, you have a problem,” he says. In his years in Hollywood, Korris learned the skill of using “specificity” to create the illusion of verisimilitude (“it’s a trick, a misdirect”). Fidelity, he explains smoothly, “is the difference between facts and truth.”

Some in the military complain about the violence in training games. “We think that’s a lie,” says Hendrie, who believes that virtual bloodshed is the moral cost of military training. “That’s the terrible price you have to pay....No technology is ever going to eliminate that.” In Full Spectrum Command the violence is muted by poor graphical rendering, but in the commercial version the bad guys die in a woozy mist of blood.

The challenge for military gamers, Zyda says, is intelligence, not graphics, making the “virtual humans” worthy adversaries. “How do you make it more immersive? How do you do computer story? That’s the real problem for the next 30 years.”