War Play

by Corey Mead

  Ultimately, the idea of using a game to brand an enterprise, to tell people what that enterprise is like as a way to motivate them to either respect it or join it, is one of this game’s legacies. The success of America’s Army helped popularize the idea that a game could promote a brand. In this way, the game has been as influential in the world of marketing as it has been in the military.

  A Cocktail Party in Calabasas

  The concept for America’s Army arose in 1999, when the army’s recruitment numbers were at a thirty-year low. In that year alone, the army missed its target number by seven thousand—the worst showing in the history of the all-volunteer force. In response, the RAND Corporation, a federally funded public-policy think tank, began conducting research into why teens were not attracted to the army. At the time, Wardynski was working on his army-funded doctorate in policy analysis at RAND’s Pardee Graduate School, and he talked regularly with the lead researcher on the project. RAND’s data indicated that fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old males no longer particularly valued the skills and values historically associated with the army: leadership, discipline, patriotism, doing something for the community, traveling the world. Instead, they wanted to develop the skills valued by future employers, the skills needed to “succeed” in life, to do something mentally challenging; they wanted to enjoy their lives, and they wanted to get paid well right away or else learn the things that would help them find a well-paying job later on. None of these interests matched what young males thought the army could provide. Indeed, the only real motivation for joining the army was receiving tuition assistance for college. What’s more, there were nearly as many reasons not to join the army as there were to join: the loss of personal freedom, the irrelevance of military service to future careers, the possibility of hating the army once one enlisted, the loss of a “normal” lifestyle. (Tellingly, in the post–Cold War nineties, concerns about the physical dangers of military service ranked far below lifestyle concerns.)

  The issue of military service itself wasn’t the only problem. Equally important, teens rated the army as by far the least desirable of the four military services. The army is low-tech, they said; it’s sweaty, dirty, and dangerous, and it’s for people who have no other options in life. On a PowerPoint slide divided into quadrants, the RAND researchers mapped out the army versus the navy, air force, and Marines. The worst quadrant to be in was southeast, which indicated low-tech and ordinary. According to respondents, the air force was high-tech and elite; the Marines were elite and sweaty but not low-tech (though this is not true—the Marines are comparatively low-tech); and the navy occupied a middle ground. The army, located squarely in the southeast, owned the worst piece of turf.

  In an effort to reverse this negative trend, the secretary of the army, General Louis Caldera, ordered four working groups of senior officers and civilians to come up with innovative ways to boost enlistment. Adopting the language of corporate America, Caldera wrote, “Our [selling] strategy must be based on solid market research and our messages must be better targeted to those segments of the market where we envision increasing our market share.” Booz Allen Hamilton, a major defense consulting firm, was brought in to organize and evaluate the various alternatives for new recruitment initiatives. The firm’s Working Group B portfolio of proposals ranged from the mundane to the ridiculous: perhaps personal computers could be given to new enlistees, or recruiting stations could be relocated to areas with greater foot traffic. Perhaps teenagers could be offered laser eye surgery to join the army; perhaps the jails could be emptied; perhaps Ethiopians and Somalis and other foreigners could be recruited to beef up the army’s numbers. Patrick Henry, assistant secretary of the army for manpower and reserve affairs, stated that young Americans needed to be convinced that the army was not “an employer of last resort.” To this end, he said, the army had to “find a way to link together emerging technologies and a soldier’s drive toward self-edification.” As part of this effort, the Pentagon raised its recruitment budget to a record-breaking $2 billion a year.

  As it happened, in January 1999, a few months before Army Secretary Caldera issued his call for new recruitment strategies, Wardynski attended a cocktail party in the affluent city of Calabasas, California, next to Malibu in the Santa Monica Hills. Calabasas houses a number of technology companies that dot the road next to the 101 freeway, an area known as the “101 technology corridor.” From 1997 to 1999, Wardynski, his wife, and their three children lived nearby in a rented house while he finished his graduate course work at RAND.

  On the warm winter night of the cocktail party, Wardynski ended up next to the party’s fire pit, drinking margaritas and chatting with a man named Jesse, a friend of a friend. Jesse was describing his business, which involved distributing media on CDs for the movie industry and assorted advertisers. Whatever the content—movies, commercials, instructional videos—Jesse would dump it onto a CD and ship it off to a waiting customer. Intrigued, Wardynski asked Jesse about his distribution costs. The answer surprised him: it cost little more than a dollar to ship a CD to its destination. As an economist—and because recruiting was a key focus of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis—Wardynski immediately pricked up his ears. He knew what the army was spending to put its message into homes, and this number was breathtakingly low in comparison.

  As he continued talking with Jesse, Wardynski realized that a CD could hold a great deal of content. Even better, a CD could be shipped directly to people’s homes. But what exactly, Wardynski asked himself, would the army’s content be? Soon after his discussion with Jesse, he did some research on the Internet and discovered that the computer game company NovaLogic was a quarter mile from his house. The company, it turned out, had just provided training software for the U.S. Army’s Land Warrior, a program designed to integrate commercial, off-the-shelf technologies into a complete “soldier system,” meaning that each soldier would become “an individual, complete weapons system,” equipped with “weapon, integrated helmet assembly, protective clothing and individual equipment, computer/radio, and software.” On top of that, the company had recently produced Delta Force, a popular first-person shooter video game.

  Wardynski called NovaLogic, told them who he was, and requested a meeting to discuss an idea that was just then taking shape in his mind. He had noticed that when he took his children to Best Buy, they would hang out in the video game aisle, and it would take a great deal of effort to drag them away at the end of the visit. At home, his children and their friends seemed obsessed with military-themed video games, which they played in every spare moment. On a later trip to Best Buy, Wardynski decided to look more closely at the video game aisle, and what he found there surprised him: roughly two-thirds of the games were about armies. Some of them were Roman armies, some of them were futuristic armies, but they were armies nonetheless. This finding, coming on the heels of his talk with Jesse, compelled Wardynski to call NovaLogic.

  The company was happy to arrange a meeting. In March 1999, Wardynski sat down with both the president and the CFO to discuss whether it was possible to make a computer game about soldiering—not about fighting, but about what it took to be a soldier—and if so, what the disk space and cost requirements would be. They talked about Delta Force and about the cost of doing a video game. Again, the pricing is what drew Wardynski’s attention: creating a game cost between $1 million and $2 million—cheaper than making TV commercials. What’s more, a video game could be a far more compelling medium for delivering information than a thirty-second television ad.

  “Let me get this straight,” Wardynski asked the CFO. “We could have Delta Force II, your top-tier game, for one or two million dollars?”

  “No,” the CFO responded. “Delta Force II would be far more expensive. We’d have to give you one of our old games.”

  “How is the army going to appear high-tech and cutting edge if we start out with a product that’s no longer salable?” Wardynski asked himself. Nonetheless, he found the ta
lk with NovaLogic useful: he learned how games are built, the number of staff and length of time required, the technology involved. The discussion with NovaLogic helped crystallize key aspects of the game that Wardynski was starting to envision: online, multiplayer, soldier-focused, small team–based. Primarily, the discussion convinced Wardynski that building a game for the army could be done. The question that remained for him was, how do you do it?

  The Economic Rationale

  Wardynski’s radical notion of how a video game could revive the army’s hidebound recruiting process stemmed from his background as an economist. He felt that young adults were getting the bulk of their information from computers and the Internet and that the army, to attract recruits, needed to adapt to the popular culture of the information age. The video game, Wardynski thought, could be a highly effective way to do so, primarily because it could be delivered directly into the homes of its target audience. He says that America’s Army was explicitly designed to target twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys—in his words, “to capture youth mind-share”—who had yet to decide what to do with their lives. “When a kid starts thinking about what he’s going to do with his life, it’s not at age seventeen, it’s more like age thirteen. You can’t wait until they’re seventeen,” he told me, “because by then they will have decided that they’re going to college or to a trade school, or they’ll already have a job that they’re planning to stay in. You have to get to them before they’ve made those decisions.”

  By connecting directly with young males, a video game could offset what Wardynski calls the “market failures” that had led to such a steep drop in army recruitment numbers at the end of the 1990s. The idea was less about entertainment than about economic theory. The shift from a draft-based army to an all-volunteer force in 1972 had gradually pushed the army away from mainstream American culture, while the popularity of the Internet and the increasing ubiquity of computers in middle-class teenagers’ lives had rendered the army’s traditional advertising and recruiting strategies ineffective.

  When the draft was in place, the army didn’t need to get people excited about joining up, but the advent of an all-volunteer force meant that people had to be sold on soldiering as a career choice. Recruiting became a two-way interaction, one that had important repercussions for the army. “Now I’m trying to match your interests to some piece of this organization, where before it was like we’re going to match your abilities to some piece of this organization,” Wardynski says. “That’s a whole different approach. And that interest piece is a killer, because we may have jobs that aren’t interesting, or they’re not interesting at the price we’re willing to pay, and so there’s an ongoing discussion and conflict between what we’re willing to pay, what this job is worth in an economic sense.”

  Economists tend to approach market analysis as if people have perfect information and make economic choices rationally. But according to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two seminal figures in behavioral economics, this approach ignores the facts that information can be expensive to acquire and assimilate, that there are innate biases in human decision-making, and that instead of being rational, people tend to base their decisions on heuristics, or decision-making shortcuts. These heuristics can lead them to be overly influenced by the vividness and availability of information in their immediate environment. Thus they make decisions based on imperfect information. Behavioral economists believe that first impressions are crucial, because it takes a lot more information to change people’s minds than it does for them to make up their minds in the first place. In Wardynski’s reading, this is the result of human evolution. “Genetically, the people who would end up surviving were the ones who had embedded shortcuts,” he says. “The shortcuts are: the first information you get is the most important information you get, and vivid information is crucial. If you’re a caveman running around, hunting for dinner with your buddies, and some big furry cougar jumps up with claws and teeth and devours your friends, that’s real vivid. It’s important to you because you could be next. So the people who could figure out real quick from vivid information what to do with it were the ones that survived and contributed to the gene pool.”

  A great deal about the army is vivid; that in and of itself was not the issue with recruiting. Rather, the problem was (and is) the particular type of vivid. The army, Wardynski says, is primarily “vivid-dangerous, vivid-bad, vivid-abuse, vivid-degrading—it sucks, right? Platoon, all the movies made about Vietnam and about how shitty the army was and the cruddy leadership and the lousy conditions. Or vivid-heroic, but in a negative way. Saving Private Ryan: heroic as hell, but I don’t want to be there!” Wardynski believes that army veterans can also do more harm than good in this regard. Even if they love the army, he says, the stories that veterans tell are going to be vivid because “nobody wants to listen to some boring story about hanging around at the forward operating base, eating steak and lobster served up by Brown and Root in an air-conditioned mess hall in Fallujah. They want to hear about the ambush or the getting blown up or how you overcame the screwed-up army. So even if veterans love the army, the stories they’re going to tell you are about somebody getting blown up. So from a recruiting perspective, they’re not our friends—we have no friends! We’re not even friends with ourselves, because we don’t know how to talk about ourselves, or when to talk about ourselves, or whom to talk to.”

  Wardynski felt that the army had fallen behind on two fronts: first, in making up-to-date information about itself available, and second, in assimilating the millions of strands of information about the army that did exist on the Web. This, then, is where Wardynski thought a video game could be useful: it would be located in pop culture, where young people could find it, which would take care of the information search problem. Because the game would feature an immersive, engaging format, the assimilation costs would go down, too. Both of these things would chip away at the market failure problem.

  Another important issue for Wardynski was disintermediation, a term in economics that refers to cutting out the middleman. As opposed to going through traditional distribution channels, a company disintermediates by dealing directly with its customers, often through the Internet. “You can ask yourself, ‘What do I know about the army, and where did I learn it?’ TV, print, movies, the news—those channels entail intermediation, and they’re intermediating our story,” Wardynski says. At the time, he felt that what most Americans knew about the army was completely out of date. Soldiers in the post-Vietnam volunteer army had a much better quality of life than those in the Vietnam-era draft army, and yet people didn’t know this. (For example, in the draft army soldiers needed to get permission from their unit commanders in order to get married, whereas in the volunteer army they don’t.) The army remained, in effect, locked in a time warp. If young people watched TV, they thought soldiers were still “living in Gomer Pyle barracks,” Wardynski says. They thought soldiers couldn’t date, that they couldn’t own a car. A video game would help the army to disintermediate these outdated images by delivering large volumes of its own content directly to young people’s computers.

  Paradoxically enough, Wardynski also wanted the game to deter people who might not be well suited to military service from joining the army. His reasoning here was again economic: the army was losing $400 million a year on recruits who dropped out of basic training because the military was not what they had expected. The army has a dropout rate as high as 18 percent; given that the training costs can be more than $100,000 per soldier, that represents a serious financial loss. By letting young people “test-drive” both basic training and actual battle, Wardysnki saw America’s Army as a way to weed out those who might drop out later at vastly greater expense to the government.

  He rejected any criticism that a market-based focus in relation to young adults and military service was a cause for concern. “There’re plenty of people that would say, ‘Well, aren’t you targeting young people?’ Well, who would you have us talk to?
Old people? I mean, what army would that look like? Of course we’re talking to young people, and of course we’re talking about being in the army, but we want it to be a good fit.”

  Finding a Sponsor

  Following his visit to NovaLogic in early 1999, Wardynski began to pursue the question of how the army could get access to a top-tier game without having to pay for an entire professional game studio. Though he held a prominent position in the army, his Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis did not have the purview or the budget to build a video game on its own. He needed a sponsor.

  At the time, Wardynski’s mentor and boss was Lieutenant General David Ohle, the army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel. During the months that the video game idea was crystallizing, Wardynski was working on another Pentagon project for Ohle about the financial impact of being married to a soldier. (This was the topic of Wardynski’s dissertation.) Though this project took most of his time, the game idea continued to excite him. Finally he decided to take action. He wrote an e-mail to Ohle’s point person for recruiting, Major Keith Hattes, outlining his video game idea and asking for Hattes’s assistance.

  Hattes had recently graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. When he received Wardynski’s e-mail, he wrote to several faculty members at the school, saying that he wanted to “canvass [their] interest” in helping the army’s recruiting efforts by developing a new “technological initiative” proposed by the director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point. Lifting from Wardynski’s e-mail, Hattes wrote that the idea was “to build a game-oriented, virtual reality-based, distributed (web-based/linked), interactive, and adaptive simulation that would allow potential recruits to explore virtual Army adventures and progress through levels of expertise and areas of specialization over time based on their abilities and interests.” The goal, Hattes noted, was to mass-market the simulation by CD or online “to targeted population pools to assist in expanding market audiences and also pre-screen potential recruits.”