War Play

by Corey Mead

  Anita Jones’s interest in the subject stemmed from her previous tenure as chair of the University of Virginia Computer Science Department. There she had hired Randy Pausch, the computer science professor whose book The Last Lecture, published shortly before his death in 1998, became a national sensation. While teaching at UVA, Pausch had taken a sabbatical to go to Disney Imagineering in Orlando, where he worked on DisneyQuest, an indoor interactive theme park filled with virtual-reality attractions. Pleased with the results, Pausch invited Jones—who by then had moved to the Pentagon—to pay a visit to Orlando. As she toured DisneyQuest, Jones had a sudden realization: she was paying various Pentagon outfits heaps of money to build large-scale visual simulations, and yet what Disney had was far better and cheaper. This realization led her to fund Zyda’s National Research Council conference and study.

  The conference took place in Irvine, California, over two days in October 1996. Two very different groups were involved. One consisted of military representatives from all four services, DARPA, the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The other group consisted of entertainment industry personnel from such companies as Paramount, Disney, Pixar, and Industrial Light and Magic. Zyda, like Jones, wanted to capitalize on technological advances occurring not just in the military but in the worlds of entertainment and digital technology as well. While the specifics of these advances might have varied between fields, Zyda felt there was a key point at which they overlapped: simulation.

  The conference featured testimony from the military side about its oft-failed attempts to do physically based modeling for virtual environments. The problem, the military people said, was that they would get wrapped up in the physics and the virtual environments would be difficult to upgrade. The entertainment group offered some simple advice. Look, they said, all you have to do is give people the illusion of an explosion happening; you don’t have to do the actual physics. This was a wake-up call for the military folks, who, from the entertainment group’s perspective, were trying to solve a bunch of problems that they didn’t need to solve. Why not use games built by people who actually know how to build games, the entertainment people suggested, as opposed to using games built by defense contractors?

  The Zyda committee’s final report, “Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense,” claimed that by “sharing research results, coordinating research agendas, and working collaboratively when necessary, the entertainment industry and the DoD may be able to more efficiently and effectively build a technological base for modeling and simulation that will improve the nation’s security and economic performance.” In addition, the report declared it essential that academia be involved in this collaboration, arguing that the entertainment industry and the Department of Defense needed to band together to sponsor the development or further enhancement of academic programs dedicated to the fields of modeling, simulation, and virtual reality—all in the name of national security.

  Not everyone was enamored of “Linking Entertainment and Defense.” Anita Jones had delivered the funding for the study through the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO). At the time, the DMSO was pushing something called the High Level Architecture, a new infrastructure for networking virtual environments and simulations across the entire Department of Defense. Testimony at the NRC conference pointed out several limitations of the High Level Architecture, but the DMSO insisted that Zyda’s report praise it as the future for networking games. When Zyda refused, the DMSO was furious. After the study came out, Zyda asked Captain Jim Hollenback, the DMSO’s director, what he thought of it. Hollenback did not mince words: “We hated your fucking report,” he told Zyda. “We threw all the copies in the trash.”

  The End (and Beginning) of a Dream

  Zyda had to wait two more years before the military was ready to accept his report’s recommendations. In January 1999, he received a phone call from Mike Andrews, the chief scientist of the army, and Michael Macedonia, one of his former PhD students at the Naval Postgraduate School. Macedonia was now the chief technology officer at STRICOM, the Pentagon’s simulation and training office. When General Kern had laid down his order to make the military more like Disney, Andrews and Macedonia were on the receiving end. They told Zyda they wanted him to write the operating and research plan for a new institute they planned to build at the University of Southern California, UCLA, or UC Berkeley. This facility, to be named the Institute for Creative Technologies, would give the army direct access to the game and virtual environment technology being developed by the entertainment industry and academia and would be funded by a Pentagon seed grant of $100 million. Andrews and Macedonia felt that “Linking Entertainment and Defense” provided the perfect road map.

  The call couldn’t have come at a better time for Zyda. After spending most of his career at the Naval Postgraduate School, he was looking for a way out. Working from “Linking Entertainment and Defense,” Zyda wrote the research agenda and operating plan for the Institute for Creative Technologies in thirty days. He flew to USC to meet with the dean of cinema, the dean of engineering, and the director of the Information Sciences Institute. Then, in March 1999, Zyda went to the Pentagon to meet with Andrews and Macedonia in person. Both of them were enthusiastic about his document. “This is great!” they told him. “Why don’t you go back and spend some more time socializing at USC? We want to build the institute there.”

  Zyda spent the next three months working on setting up the ICT. That June, however, Andrews and Macedonia abruptly stopped returning his e-mails and phone calls. He soon learned that the position of ICT director, which he had been promised, had instead gone to former Paramount television executive Richard Lindheim, a veteran of Star Trek and a close friend of USC dean Elizabeth Daly. Zyda had spent most of 1997 doing technology consulting for Lindheim, advising him on building the StoryDrive Engine for Star Trek: Voyager.

  Denied the job he wanted, Zyda decided to create a research institute like ICT at the Naval Postgraduate School. Again using “Linking Entertainment and Defense” as a template, he set up the MOVES (Modeling, Virtual Environments, and Simulation) Institute, staffed by a combination of researchers and graduate students dedicated to modeling and simulation, with a core emphasis on computer gaming. This put Zyda in the unique position of building his own research institute to compete against the other research institute he had founded.

  Both the ICT and MOVES ended up playing crucial roles in advancing the military’s use of video games for training and education as well as for recruiting and mental health treatment. In later chapters we will see how the ICT and MOVES—along with the army’s simulation and gaming office—are two key sites from which the twenty-first-century military-entertainment complex has expanded. Today the ICT in particular remains influential, and is helping to keep alive the military’s tradition of technological innovation.

  Yet the soil from which the military-entertainment complex has grown consists of more than just technology and video games. Equally relevant to this growth is the military’s extensive, yet little noted, legacy of educational innovation. As we are about to see, this legacy—like that of technology—possesses surprisingly deep roots.

  CHAPTER 2

  Building the Classroom Arsenal: The Military’s Influence on American Education

  IN LATE DECEMBER 1777, General George Washington marched the tired, hungry, badly equipped troops of his Continental Army to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia, to settle in for the winter. The choice of location was strategic: Valley Forge combined the elevation of Mount Joy and Mount Misery with the natural barrier of the Schuylkill River to form a secure location from which the army could keep watch on the British and ensure that the British could not launch any surprise attacks on their position. Yet the absence of attacking troops hardly meant that the army was safe from harm: starvation thinned its ranks, while proliferating diseases killed thousands more. Washington’s repeat
ed petitions to the Continental Congress for relief went nowhere; the Congress had no additional resources to give.

  The harsh, wearing conditions of their winter camp threatened the Continental troops’ morale and discipline—a potentially fatal situation for a ragtag army that was barely holding its own against the better-equipped and better-trained British units. The army was further hampered by its lack of a standard training manual. The American troops had received training, yes, but the variety of manuals used for this training meant that organized battle movements were nearly impossible to execute, a fact as potentially fatal to the troops as the lack of food and supplies.

  On February 23, 1778, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, an elite former member of the king of Prussia’s general staff, arrived at Valley Forge bearing a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Steuben wanted to offer his military skills to the rebel troops. Though the Prussian spoke little English, General Washington sensed his talents nonetheless and quickly named him acting inspector general in charge of creating and running an organized, unified training program. Steuben threw his considerable energies not only into drilling the men but also into composing a comprehensive drill manual, which his aides translated from French into English for each day’s exercises. In addition to imposing uniform standards and methods on the Continental Army, Steuben broke new ground by working directly with his troops, breaking down the traditional barriers between commanders and their charges. By May of the same year, he had managed to turn a scruffy and disorganized army into a confident, even imposing fighting force.

  Standardized battle drills weren’t the only new educational event at Valley Forge that winter. Recognizing a need to provide basic literacy instruction to his soldiers, General Washington ordered that the Bible be used to teach them reading and writing. He wasn’t looking to make his troops literate so they could perform their military tasks, but rather to enable them to read their Bibles so they might achieve greater spiritual awareness. His rationale was moral, not military, and he enlisted chaplains as instructors. Hardly noted in the years since, this seeming footnote to the storied history of Valley Forge was in fact the first instance of soldier education in the American military.

  These two tracks first seen at Valley Forge—one involving training, one involving education—have had a major impact not only on the military but on the American school system in general. For the most part, the scope of this impact remains barely recognized. Yet some of the most dominant strands in American education, including standardized tests, adult education, and workplace learning, have been innovated, refined, or greatly expanded as a result of military needs and military funding. The military has also been a leading force in increasing access to education, especially for those from less privileged backgrounds. Because of this educational legacy, a full understanding of the military’s current use of video games as learning tools is impossible unless one sees it, rightly, as the continuation of a long instructional tradition. During times of war, when large numbers of lower-skilled inductees have nearly overwhelmed the military’s capacities, the armed forces have been a seedbed for new teaching methods and tools. In particular, military research and funding have been the primary drivers of educational technology since World War II, including the computers-in-the-schools movement that began in the early 1980s and that laid the groundwork for the welter of high technology in classrooms today. This is not to mention the myriad academic fields that owe their existence or their growth to military needs and funds: physics, both nuclear and otherwise—indeed, a great deal of science as a whole, including neuroscience, cognitive science, and information science; robotics; computer science and computer engineering; psychology, including behaviorism and human engineering; electronics, digital and otherwise; and earth sciences, including seismology, meteorology, and oceanography. As educational historian Douglas Noble points out, “The emphasis on science and mathematics education in the schools since Sputnik in the late 1950s is perhaps the most visible consequence of military technological enterprise.”

  Also influential have been the military’s concepts of learning—often because civilian policymakers have failed to grasp the difference between training and education. Historically, for the military, learning is task-related, useful only as a means to achieving something else, something of strategic import. The armed forces are concerned not with knowledge for knowledge’s sake but with knowledge for the performance of specific duties. This functional approach has spread from the military to our public schools, as a crucial part of what education historians W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson term the “vocationalism” movement, which they identify as “the single most important educational development of the twentieth century.”

  The military’s influence on education can also be seen in regard to standardization, as the armed forces have remained at the forefront of standardized testing since the beginning. Even today the military continues to boast the largest testing program in the world. Here we see the origins of the idea that learning can be brought under scientific management, an idea that in the twenty-first century has been central to the high-stakes testing policies of the Bush and Obama administrations.

  Since World War II, the military’s technological advances have continually influenced national standards for literacy. Scholar Deborah Brandt writes that as military-funded technologies entered American society both during and after World War II, literacy came to be treated as an essential war-fighting resource and the crucial element in our postindustrial economy. Literacy became what Brandt calls “a collateral investment needed to get the most out of investments in technology.”

  The military’s impact on American education isn’t just the result of the fact that national defense plays such a prominent role in the life of any nation-state; it’s equally due to the sheer size of the military’s instructional needs. Every year, tens of thousands of new recruits enter basic training, after which they move on to over three hundred occupational specialties, along with numerous subspecialties, where they have to learn both battlefield and peacekeeping tactics. The vast majority of these new recruits are young and inexperienced, often fresh out of high school (or high school dropouts), and many of them have never before held a job. (The armed forces are the nation’s largest employer of initially unskilled labor.) The U.S. military as a whole spends far more money on training—around 16 percent of the yearly defense budget—than any of the world’s other militaries.

  It’s important to note, though, the manner in which the military’s influence has often spread. In the aftermath of World War II, ex-military personnel often moved into the corporate or educational sectors, taking the lessons of their military experiences, insights, and preferences into their new jobs. Similarly, many of the main proponents of the computers-in-the-schools movement in the 1980s had military backgrounds or had worked on military-sponsored research projects and so were influenced by the military’s interest in technology and computing.

  The military’s technological innovations spring from concrete problems that need immediate solutions. Take standardized testing: the armed forces, especially in times of war, have to classify and organize vast numbers of soldiers every year. (For example, over a two-year period in World War I, the army increased its number of personnel twentyfold.) These soldiers must be slotted into occupational areas for which they show aptitude. Whatever the inherent problems with standardized tests—and there are many—the military relies on them to accomplish such otherwise unmanageable tasks.

  Other pressures include the military’s relatively short training periods and its need for immediate results, coupled with the range and scope of its training mission. It can’t just place a gun in someone’s hand and say go; nor is firing a weapon the only skill a soldier needs, even in the infantry. Soldiers have to be trained and educated in basic skills (say, math), military skills (say, marksmanship), and specific job skills (say, operating complex weapons systems). They must be taught to perform these skills in less
than ideal conditions (namely, war) and to operate as individuals, in teams, and in units. What’s more, every soldier, and every unit as a whole, has to update and maintain these skills over years or decades. Efficiency, specificity, uniformity—these are the particular needs of military training, and they have long been reflected in the military’s learning innovations.

  The Twentieth Century: From Standardized Testing to Distance Learning

  Born in 1876, Robert Yerkes grew up on a farm in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and from an early age he knew that the hardscrabble life of a country farmer was not for him. After an uncle financed his way through Ursinus College, a small liberal arts college founded by members of the German Reformed Church, Yerkes accepted an offer from Harvard to undertake graduate study in biology. His stated goal was to become a physician, but he became sidetracked by an interest in animal behavior, which eventually compelled him to switch to the field of comparative psychology. After receiving a PhD in psychology in 1902, he took on a number of part-time jobs, including teaching at Harvard and working as the director of psychological research at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Fifteen years later, at the relatively young age of forty-one, when the United States had newly entered World War I, Yerkes became president of the American Psychological Association (APA).

  At the time, the field of mental testing enjoyed little credibility, let alone standing, a circumstance that Yerkes was determined to rectify. Yerkes badly wanted to establish the field of psychology, barely a quarter-century old at the time, as one of the “hard” (that is, legitimate) sciences, and he believed that mental testing, with its reliance on quantification, would provide the rigor necessary to make psychology respectable in the eyes of the larger scientific community. He quickly perceived that the war would provide the perfect vehicle for popularizing these tests, and he urged the APA to become involved with the war effort. Nominated to chair the APA’s Committee on Psychological Examination of Recruits, Yerkes approached army officials with the idea of administering intelligence tests to their incoming soldiers. It was not a tough sell: the army had already determined that new methods of mass screening were desperately needed to sort and classify the vast numbers of inductees.