War Play

by Corey Mead

  With other military video games in mind, I ask whether any of the training focuses on instilling army values.

  “Yes, if the intent is to reinforce things like escalation of force and rules of engagement, rules of land warfare, which we always do,” Williams says. “You know, ‘Okay, you just frickin’ mowed down that person’s cow, we need to talk about that. It’s ha-ha funny in the game, but you just took away that person’s livelihood. How much cash did that cost your battalion commander, who had to pay off that village elder?’ We talk about second- and third-order effects. ‘This car was just trying to drive around the convoy—why did you feel the need to drop eighteen rounds of fifty-cal through their windshield? Is that the rules of engagement?’ You talk them through it, and they leave thinking, Okay, what did I learn? I learned that maybe shooting Ahmed’s cow is not the best move of my career.”

  “A lot of soldiers enter the training sessions thinking they’re gonna be fun, just a chance to play around on video games,” Jackson explains. “And I’ve seen how shocked they are when they’re killed in VBS2, when they can’t just reboot. I’ve seen them start to make connections between what they’re doing in the simulation and what they’ll be doing in Afghanistan. For a lot of these kids, playing VBS2 is the first time that they realize they might die.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WILL Interactive and the Military’s Serious Games

  THE GAME GOES LIKE THIS: You are Specialist Kyle Norton, a nineteen-year-old midwesterner whose life has begun to spiral downward following a tour as a bomb-disposal technician in Iraq. Already beset by financial difficulties, you receive a surprise e-mail from your fiancée, who announces that she has become pregnant by another man. Still reeling from this news, you learn that your best friend has just been killed in an ambush. As these scenarios unfold, questions appear on your video screen, prompting you to decide whether, as Norton, you should seek help for these issues. Depending on your responses, Norton either becomes suicidal or begins to heal.

  This game, Beyond the Front, is the brainchild of WILL Interactive, a Maryland-based serious-games company that has the military as its major client, accounting for about 75 percent of its business. Founded in 1994 by former secondary-school teacher Sharon Sloane, WILL differs from its competitors in that it utilizes what it calls Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulations, or VEILS—live-action, interactive movies in which users become the lead characters. The games are based on real events, use real actors, are shot on location, and last between two and three hours. Similar to the old Choose Your Own Adventure book series, each game offers players more than eighty “moments of decision,” every one of which affects the story line and the outcome (each story contains at least a thousand possible permutations). For her work, Sloane received the 2009 Women in Film and Video’s Women of Vision Award, along with the U.S. Army’s 2008 and 2009 Distance Learning Maverick Awards.

  Like VBS2 and America’s Army, WILL’s products are examples of what game aficionados and scholars call “serious games”; the phrase refers to any game designed for something other than entertainment. Though it may be entertaining, a serious game’s primary function is to educate the player or help him or her solve a problem. Serious games are used extensively in education, health care, city planning, science, engineering, and emergency management, but their primary maker and user has always been the military.

  The first serious games were in fact war games. Many scholars point to Kriegsspiel, a nineteenth-century Prussian military officer training game, as a direct antecedent of today’s serious games. The term itself seems to have first appeared in Clark Abt’s 1970 book Serious Games, in which he declared, “These games have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement.” Though Abt was referring to card games and board games, his definition remains relevant in the digital age, when almost all serious games are simulation-based computer and video games. (The army’s never-used 1980 game Battlezone is generally considered the first contemporary serious game.) In 2005, following his experience with America’s Army, Mike Zyda updated Abt’s definition by defining a serious game as “a mental contest, played with a computer in accordance with specific rules, that uses entertainment to further government or corporate training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objectives.”

  In the field of education, paper-based serious games were common in the 1960s and 1970s, before the Back to Basics movement relegated most of them to the dustbin. With the widespread introduction of computers into the public school system in the 1980s, computer-based serious games such as Oregon Trail and Math Blasters became popular in classrooms nationwide, followed in the 1990s by more advanced games such as Dr. Brain, which teachers often passed over in favor of the newly arrived Internet.

  Outside the public school realm, the most prominent serious-games movement originated at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2002. Headed by Ben Sawyer and David Rejecsk, the Washington, D.C.–based Serious Games Initiative promotes the development of digital games in the realms of policy and management and has led to such offshoots as Games for Change, which focuses on social issues and has clients such as USAID, the World Bank Institute, the American Museum of Natural History, and CURE International; another offshoot, Games for Health, is sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and focuses on improving health care. But Sawyer acknowledges that the military was and is by far the most prominent player in the movement, in regard to both early adoption and continuing funding, development, and use.

  And WILL is the most prominent creator of serious games for the military, particularly games that address the psychological and emotional issues service members might face. The games that WILL develops for the military are primarily non-combat-related, focusing instead on what Sloane calls “high-stress situations, high-risk situations, and emotional issues,” including suicide prevention, mental health, sexual assault, off-duty behavior, ethical decision-making, and reintegration into civilian life. The ability to address such a broad range of noncombat issues is part of why WILL has become the go-to serious-games designer for the military.

  The Emotional Component

  A graduate of Boston University, WILL’s Sharon Sloane began her career as a high school English teacher before moving on to stints as a counselor at both the high school and the community college level. She soon found, however, that her real interest lay in instructional design—specifically, in developing training materials. After leaving the classroom, she worked as an independent consultant doing product development; her primary materials were videotapes and an early form of computer-based training.

  In the late 1980s, Sloane consulted on a project that involved developing interactive video disks—the disks, a new technology at the time, resembled large phonograph records—to train emergency-room personnel. In the series Sloane worked on, trainees played the roles of doctors or nurses treating patients suffering from heart attacks, seizures, or gunshot wounds. With each case unfolding in real time, trainees had to make diagnoses, order medications, and perform other urgent tasks. Despite the cumbersome, expensive technology, Sloane found the experience of working on the simulations—of immersing doctors and nurses in life-and-death situations—“profound.” The technology itself may have been primitive, but to Sloane, the learning method behind it was potentially groundbreaking. “It really hadn’t been done before,” she says, “in terms of making learning a real-time, first-person experience.”

  For Sloane, the experience was a wake-up call. At the time, the field of modeling and simulation operated on the assumption that if you gave people information, that information would automatically translate into behavior and skills. Sloane realized that this assumption was only partly true. Information wasn’t enough to change people’s behavior; true learning required an emotional component.

  After founding WILL in 1994 with Lyn McCall, a former army colonel with experience in
modeling and simulation, and Jeffrey Hall, a screenwriter, Sloane developed a new kind of digital game—the aforementioned VEILS, which were based on slice-of-life true stories. Sloane had asked herself, how can we use video and interactivity to engage people emotionally and cognitively in order to change their behavior? Her solution was to create games that were in essence interactive movies; their first-person perspectives allowed players to “become” the lead characters and make decisions that would affect the stories’ final outcomes. This interactivity was key to making the players feel an emotional investment that would lead to actual behavior modification.

  In 1998, WILL’s first contract from the military resulted in Saving Sergeant Pabletti, a game that focuses primarily on sexual harassment. The army had approached WILL in the wake of the Tailhook scandal, in which dozens of navy and Marine Corps aviation officers were charged with sexual assault and improper conduct following an annual symposium in Las Vegas. In Saving Sergeant Pabletti, a team of twelve trainees in the woods of South Carolina is suddenly rendered leaderless when Drill Sergeant Pabletti is struck by a hunter’s stray bullet. The trainees need to make a stretcher to carry Pabletti to safety, but sexual and racial prejudices prevent them from working as a team, and Pabletti eventually dies. In playing the game, users are offered the choice of six possible characters. With each character, they are taken back in time to the week before the incident. They are then required to make “values-based decisions” for their fellow soldiers in order to change the way the team as a whole thinks and acts. In so doing, WILL claims, players are addressing not only sexual harassment but also issues relating to leadership, ethics, and racism.

  The initial response from soldiers to Saving Sergeant Pabletti was positive enough that years later, following the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the army ordered incoming soldiers to play the game on their flights to Iraq. In both cases, the military was using the game partly for public relations purposes. As Sloane says, “The army wanted to show the public they were taking care of the sexual harassment issue.”

  Pabletti led to several more army contracts for WILL as well as to inquiries from the other services. In 2006, as the military reported its highest suicide rate in decades, WILL received its biggest contract yet: to build a game that would combat this alarming uptick in soldier deaths and help to remove the stigma that many soldiers associated with seeking mental health care. The result was Beyond the Front, the game featuring Specialist Kyle Norton. Beyond the Front’s unique vantage point—players actually take on the identity of someone who is suicidal—made the game a standout in its military context. The army was so pleased with the results that in 2009 it made Beyond the Front mandatory for all active-duty, National Guard, and reserve units. Every soldier in the army played the game, and the feedback WILL received was again uniformly positive. Soldiers appreciated the game’s rawness, the bluntly realistic manner in which it depicted the stresses, even the horrors, of postcombat life.

  With its profile within the military now higher than ever before, WILL received a contract to develop The War Inside, in which players take on the roles of four different characters: a young soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder; a sergeant who can no longer connect with his wife and child; a spouse trying to understand her partner’s emotional difficulties; and a platoon sergeant working to create an environment that encourages his soldiers to seek treatment for mental health issues. In a related game, The Mission to Heal, players can also be a social worker experiencing compassion fatigue, a case management nurse teetering on the edge of burnout, and a squad leader trying to overcome his own prejudices against mental health care.

  Once again the military was happy with the results. In the meantime, however, a new issue had arisen. “What about National Guard and reservists?” the Pentagon asked Sloane. “They lack support, they’re not on a base, they come back home and they’ve lost their jobs, their suicide rates are shooting upward.” In response, WILL developed The Home Front, which emphasizes suicide risk awareness and suicide prevention among guardsmen and reservists.

  Currently WILL is focusing primarily on what the army calls “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.” (“Strong Minds, Strong Bodies,” goes the cheesy official tagline.) The idea is that building resilience in soldiers before they deploy can lessen the impact of combat stress, including, potentially, post-traumatic stress disorder. In outlining the program, the army identified five separate areas of importance: family, and physical, spiritual, emotional, and social well-being. WILL has now developed a series of sixteen games covering the first two areas, family and physical well-being.

  In the first game, Single Parenting, players take on the role of Specialist Bridget Franklin, a young soldier who has just had a baby. When Franklin receives orders to deploy, she must figure out how to balance her professional obligations and career requirements with her parenting obligations. With no partner to help out at home with the baby, what is her family care plan? Are her parents a potential resource? (Maybe, but they have serious health issues.) Will the baby’s father play a role while she’s deployed? Should she leave the army instead of leaving her baby? These are among the questions soldiers must resolve as they play the game.

  In a second game, Blended Families, players take on the role of Keith Earhardt, a staff sergeant with a daughter from a previous marriage, another daughter from his wife’s previous marriage, and a son from his current marriage. At stake in the game are two primary issues: how the families will blend together and how they will fare during Earhardt’s deployment.

  WILL is also focusing on military ethics. In one new game, players, as unit commanders, must figure out how to reconcile their orders with their personal value systems. In each scenario, they have to balance loyalty to the other people in their unit, loyalty to the army’s mission, and loyalty to their own morals. The scenarios are nuanced. In one, the player’s unit comes upon a wounded civilian; the local culture is such that the unit shouldn’t intervene, and yet if the soldiers don’t provide medical assistance, the person will probably die. If they do intervene, players must also determine whether to use military resources, which are supposed to be for soldiers only, to help the civilian.

  Sloane says that the continuing evolution of WILL’s games for the military matches the issues that are “keeping the leadership up at night.” Ten years ago, she says, “we wouldn’t have done PTSD and suicide prevention. We wouldn’t have done training for warrior transition units or soldiers who are severely injured physically.” At the moment, the leadership’s primary concern, Sloane says, is “what happens when soldiers return from their deployments—the strains and the stresses on the family members.” As we’ll see, more and more soldiers are fighting these “invisible wars” at home.

  A Soldier’s Story

  When Matthew Pennington enlisted in the army at age seventeen, he was escaping an alcoholic father and a future of dead-end jobs. A child of divorce, he had grown up dividing his time between rural Maine and Fort Worth, Texas. The stability and discipline of the army appealed to him, but more than that, the idea of regularly preparing for different missions seemed to promise that his life would never grow stagnant. Pennington was easily bored, and the army seemed like a place where his desire for continual change would be rewarded.

  In 2002 he deployed to Afghanistan, where, as a Signal Corps operator, he helped build a communications network from the allied air base at Bagram. The tour was engaging and without incident. Upon his return to Fort Bragg, Pennington quickly volunteered to go back overseas, this time to Iraq with the 2nd Armored Calvary Regiment. Though a friend of his was killed during this tour, Pennington still enjoyed his time in a war zone. When he returned to Fort Bragg, he volunteered to head back to the fight again. He received training as a machine gunner and then redeployed to Iraq, where his unit provided logistical support for resupply convoys.

  By now it was late 2005. Almost as soon as Pennington touched down in Iraq, he could tell that the war’s tempo had c
hanged. Previously the violence had seemed sectioned off, reserved for certain locations and towns. This time it was clear that the violence could—and would—strike anywhere at any time. His superiors informed him that members of his unit had only a 65 percent chance of surviving. “It wasn’t a matter of if [the violence] would get you,” he says, “it was when.” Yet as a self-described “adrenaline junkie,” Pennington thrived on how “pumped up” the danger made him feel.

  One night, however, Pennington had a bad feeling. “It was one of those missions where everything seemed to go wrong that could go wrong,” he explains. His convoy that night included a number of fuel and ammunition trucks, vehicles that had become frequent insurgent targets. Pennington was in the driver’s seat of the lead Humvee, a position he disliked; he preferred being on top of the vehicle, behind the machine gun. As they traveled by night from Balad to Tikrit, the convoy was plagued by fog. While motoring through the insurgent stronghold of Samarra, Pennington’s vehicle abruptly lost its lights. With only one low beam remaining, Pennington arrived at a 90-degree turn in the road; off to the left, several insurgents opened fire. As he steered into the turn, he saw an IED in the road directly ahead. With no time to avoid the blast, he attempted to maneuver his vehicle so the engine, not the cab, would take the bulk of its force. A moment later the IED exploded, sending fire and thick smoke billowing through and around the vehicle.

  Pennington tried to slam on the brakes, but there was no response: looking down, he saw that his left foot was gone, blown off by shrapnel that had pierced the vehicle’s floor. His right leg, too, was shredded, and his lungs were badly scorched from the fire and smoke. With no other options, he steered the front of the vehicle into a large dirt mound on the side of the road. As he waited for the convoy’s rear vehicle, he placed tourniquets on his legs. He then picked up his gun, trained it on the nearby fields, and began firing at the insurgents closing in.