War Play

by Corey Mead

  Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world . . . What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

  Claims that education is essential to national security are as common today as they were in the World War II era, when entire school programs were given over to propaganda films and texts that impressed the virtues of patriotism and the bravery of the armed forces on receptive children nationwide. The contemporary hue and cry that American schools have lost their competitive edge to those of China and other countries resembles the panic of the 1980s, when our nation’s pundits knitted their collective brows over the ascendance of Japanese industry and innovation. The use of video games gives this old argument a uniquely twenty-first-century twist. The Obama administration, for example, recently established the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which it describes as “a multi-year competition whose goal is to motivate interest in STEM learning among America’s youth by tapping into students’ natural passion for playing and making video games.” In an unprecedented move, the White House also hired a video game czar to craft its national video games policy. Dr. Constance Steinkuehler, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, took on the role of senior policy analyst in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she guided the administration’s strategy for promoting and harnessing the power of serious games in the fields of education, civic engagement, health, and the environment, among others. Steinkuehler was charged with building new links between government, academia, and the private sector.

  The more this occurs, the greater the military’s influence on our nation’s approach to twenty-first-century learning will be. After all, the military has long been at the forefront of the serious-games movement, as Steinkuehler herself told me years ago, when she sat on my dissertation committee. Not only was America’s Army the first—and arguably still the best-known—blockbuster serious game, but the military is employing games multilaterally and to a much larger extent than any other entity, as we’ve seen. Moreover, we are poised to experience an explosive rate of growth for the nonmilitary uses of video games as learning tools. The use of games could dramatically reshape the nature of learning and education in the decades to come. The New York Times Magazine reports that a growing number of influential education professionals believe that school should be remodeled to resemble a good video game more closely—meaning that it should emphasize active, immersive, situated learning. In states such as North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and Massachusetts, video game–based learning has already taken root in selected schools. New York City recently opened Quest2Learn, the nation’s first public school to feature a curriculum based entirely on the principles of good game design. (The school’s founder and executive director, Katie Salen, is also a video game designer.)

  By using video games to teach, the military continues its long tradition of defining new modes of instruction. And yet it is because of video games’ educational potential that we need to question the ends to which this potential is being directed. Speaking of the army’s game efforts, Michael Macedonia has observed that “the big challenge isn’t getting the technology right. We’re almost there. The challenge is: Do we have the right story? Does it map to reality? Are we teaching the right thing?” Similarly, when it comes to the military influencing our schools, how will we determine what “the right story” is? And how will video games be used to shape this decision?

  Like those in the serious-games movement, I believe that video games have a broad range of positive learning applications. So what might be the possible dangers of the scenario I have just outlined? What is troubling about the military’s use of video games influencing our schools, or about the military’s actual games being adapted for our schools? One issue, as Douglas Noble points out, is that historically, the joining together of education and advanced technology has not “been driven . . . by the real and pressing needs of education.” Put another way, what the military wants and needs from learning is not necessarily what educators and students want and need from learning, and yet the military has for decades shaped American education to suit its needs. We can see this in the use of computers in schools; as we saw in Chapter 2, military research has been the primary force driving the creation and use of educational technology since World War I. This military imprint has helped to define what Noble calls “the purposes and the ‘products’ of education” in our high-tech society—a society that, as we have seen, is based on technologies derived in large part from military R&D.

  Another concern relates to Noble’s contention that individual technologies reflect “the particular goals of those parties or institutions with the resources and the power to determine the shape of the technology.” The possible problem with this is evident in Princeton historian Paul Starr’s argument that choices related to technological architectures can represent “politics by other means, under the cover of technical necessity.” Nor, Starr writes, does the issue stop there. Once a technology has been developed, it continues throughout its lifetime to assume a shape and character broadly reflective of its original context. If, as with America’s Army, versions of the military’s games are used in our schools, the ideological ramifications are more straightforward. As J. C. Herz writes in Joystick Nation, “The one thing . . . political simulations all share is the insistence that you, the player, are in control . . .And it’s really easy to get that impression, because you’re taking such an active role, and because the system works in this pseudomechanical way that seems transparent. But of course, this transparency is sim’s first and greatest illusion. Sim is not neutral . . . Every sim has a set of embedded biases and assumptions.”

  In Herz’s estimation, the interaction between player and game amounts to a form of “social contract” in which, at least while the game lasts, the player accepts “the designer’s values and assumptions.” This itself is not an issue. The issue is that most players don’t realize the nature of this contract, especially if the game is dressed up in bells and whistles and “lavishly produced.” This, Herz writes, is “what makes sim so effective at convincing people that certain types of political behavior are appropriate. Once you’re in the game, you’ve agreed to let someone else define the parameters.” When this happens, of course, the question becomes “who defines the parameters. Who has created this environment, and what do they want you to believe?” As Herz bluntly (and wisely) reminds us, “If you’re going to . . . fight a computer-mediated war—if you’re going to play these games—it’s a good idea to know who’s making up the rules.”

  We have seen how the military, frequently in concert with corporate interests, has influenced educational institutions regarding the skills that are valued and taught, the way students are evaluated and sorted, and the methods and modes of instruction. That the military is now working so hard to recruit teenage gamers into its ranks illustrates one way in which the rise of the military-entertainment complex is determining which skills will be valued and nurtured in our children and how those skills will be applied—educationally, economically, and otherwise. The fact that technologically adept teenagers, by virtue of their popular entertainment practices, possess the very skills that the military now deems essential highlights not only the military’s new approach to learning but also the contemporary confluence between war, entertainment, and education.

  All but War Is Simulation, Redux

  Every military and civilian official I’ve spoken with believes that the military’s video game use will only expand—exponentially, most likely—in the coming years. The Pentagon’s growing reliance on special operations forces, along with an increasing emphasis on
drone attacks and online combat, will help to fuel this escalation. (For instance, U.S. Special Operations Command recently purchased NeuroTracker, a virtual-reality system that trains the brain for fast-paced, chaotic scenarios.) Military leaders believe that America’s future wars will revolve around so-called hybrid scenarios. Much like Afghanistan and Iraq, these scenarios will involve the whole spectrum of military action—“from support to civil authorities,” as Thom Shanker reports, “to training local security forces to counterinsurgency to counterterrorism raids to heavy combat.” Virtual and video game–based training are considered essential to each of these specialized activities.

  The military’s game use will also continue to move beyond the realm of training, as with Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan and the games developed by WILL Interactive. For example, the navy is funding a project to hack used video game consoles as a means of gathering data, including chat-room information, about the consoles’ previous owners in order to track potential terrorists and enemies around the globe. (For now, the project forbids going after American citizens.) DARPA and the navy have also started using games as crowdsourcing tools. The Office of Naval Research’s MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet) challenged groups of online gamers to come up with innovative solutions for combating Somali pirates. The popular DARPA-funded online video game Foldit enables players to contribute to weighty scientific research. In one recent example, Foldit players deciphered, in a mere ten days, the protein structure of simian AIDS—a problem that had baffled scientists for more than fifteen years. Foldit’s success has inspired DARPA to invest millions of dollars in developing a game that will use crowdsourcing to help debug software code. (Unreliable software is a major drain on Pentagon funds.)

  The applications for video games do not end there. In a radical move, the army is seeking to create avatars for every member of the force. National Defense reports that these virtual representations “would accompany service members throughout their training and allow them to see, through simulation, how their skills, or lack thereof, would play in life and death situations.” These individualized avatars would be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. According to Chester Kennedy, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for engineering, global training, and logistics, “With avatar technology, you can take somebody today who experienced a new threat and have him role-play for those going into theater in real time . . . If you look at the training continuum, how many things can be satisfied by an [artificially intelligent] avatar today as opposed to two years or a year ago? We’re continually dramatically improving.”

  Still, for all its efforts and interest in the video game realm, the military has taken an approach that has been haphazard at best. Certainly no identifiable strategic framework or set of priorities has guided the Pentagon. In several cases, the adoption of games has largely been the result of efforts by specific people within the Pentagon hierarchy or within the service branches—Casey Wardynski is an example—who have, through force of will or otherwise, maneuvered their way through a change-resistant bureaucracy in order to make their visions of effective digital learning a reality. (The ad hoc technological improvisations of soldiers in the field have been equally important in this regard.)

  There are also aspects of warfare that are, of course, simply unpredictable. As one general told me, “Things are going to go wrong in the real world that you just can’t predict. They’re based on how humans behave, not on how a machine behaves.” The “green on blue” attacks in Afghanistan, in which Afghan police and soldiers intentionally kill their NATO coalition counterparts, are an example of this. They provide a telling reminder of the limitations of technological solutions to real-world problems.

  Overreliance on technological models and simulations was a hallmark of the Cold War years, when, Paul Edwards writes, American foreign policy became inextricably bound to “high-technology military strategy.” This bond was reinforced within the military by an ethos of techno-rationality in which new technologies were seen as capable of overcoming the most difficult political and military circumstances—part of what led to such disaster in Vietnam. The use of video games represents both a symbolic and a practical update of this belief. As in the Cold War, the military discourse surrounding this technology often centers on human-machine integration, the centrality of the man-machine unit to systems-based military thinking. At its extreme, this discourse shades into what Edwards calls “fictions, fantasies, and ideologies” that include visions of battlefield oversight through centralized, instantaneous, computer-based command and control.

  In many ways, the evolution of the military’s game use has mirrored the Pentagon’s painful learning process during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the risk of sounding flippant, I see the scenario as often going like this: Soldiers need to learn how to interact with Afghan warlords and Iraqi sheikhs? Give ’em a game. Soldiers need to learn basic communication skills in Arabic and Pashto? Give ’em a game. Soldiers need to learn how to manage IED attacks while running convoy operations? Give ’em a game. Thousands of veterans are suffering from PTSD? Give ’em a game. Video games can make it appear as if the military is effectively covering an issue that in fact needs greater attention and resources.

  The Pentagon also remains challenged by issues of fidelity (the measure of realism) in simulation. Take the example of electronic warfare, in which the military wants radar on missiles to exhibit a high level of fidelity. This is possible in the air, where maybe only one hundred platforms are operating at a time. But as retired general Paul Kern told me, “When you take it down into the ground domain and you’ve got thousands of platforms operating, the simulations tend to get bogged down. How we scale all of that and how we manage that is one of the challenges we haven’t figured out.” Once logistics, with their millions of bits of information, are brought into the equation, the issue becomes even more complex. Everything from bullets to fuel to food has an impact on a real operation. How then, Kern asks, “can you get the same impact on you as a human being in decisions that you make without going to the level of fidelity of feeling a bullet enter your head?”

  There are economic issues at play here, too. While the intellectual support for using video games is “huge,” says Colonel Anthony Krogh, director of the army’s National Simulation Center, that support doesn’t always translate into resources. For example, of the $3 billion allotted annually to PEO STRI, only $20 million is dedicated to gaming per se (as opposed to more basic modeling and simulation, such as tank simulators). “That’s pennies,” Krogh told me. “It’s budgetary dust compared to some other programs. And yet hundreds of thousands of soldiers are training with VBS2.” (By way of comparison, a single Tomahawk missile costs $1 million. During the first twenty-four hours of U.S.-led bombing in Libya in 2011, at least 110 Tomahawks were fired.)

  PEO STRI, for one, is striving to adapt to this situation. Colonel Franklin Espaillat, who oversees six product lines, including gaming, at PEO STRI, outlined the organization’s mode of operation for me. “It’s all about reuse for us,” he said. “When we buy something, we reuse it across the product line wherever we can. With virtual training, the expense comes right at the beginning but diminishes after the initial capital investment.” Because PEO STRI has a limited amount of research and development money, it relies on the corporate world to perform the bulk of its R&D work.

  The constant tension between requirements and funding will probably define the military’s game-related efforts for years to come, forcing people such as Krogh and Espaillat to continue balancing between the two. “We believe that with simulation we save lives,” Espaillat says, “but our challenge is that we continually have to prove that it’s good to the budget folks. We have to constantly show simulation training effectiveness so that we can keep these programs alive.”

  Frank DiGiovanni, the Department of Defense’s director of training readiness and strategy—the senior Pentagon official in charge of training poli
cy and oversight—acknowledges that the problem will continue with the military’s current budget cuts. “The DoD is asking me to still have people who are ready for conflict, but to do it with much less funding,” he told me. “Because I’m the training guy, I’ll certainly make the case that investing in these technologies, you will get return on your investment.”

  Like many defense officials I’ve spoken with, DiGiovanni believes that the military should learn from commercial industry’s development model. “Industry is very agile when it comes to fielding technology,” he notes. “I would certainly like to see the department’s training community be just as agile. There are reasons, of course, why we’re maybe not as agile as we could be. But in the case of software- and technology-based things, not being agile sometimes allows technology to pass you by.”

  Cyberwar

  Nowhere in the military will video games and related technologies play a more significant role than in the realm of cyberwar. This kind of warfare didn’t exist a generation ago, and yet it may have a more pervasive and debilitating effect on countries at conflict than real-world combat. (At the very least, cyberwarfare will be an essential aspect of any coming major clash.) Brookings Institution defense expert Peter Singer refers to this new element of war as “battle-zone persuasion,” in which the purpose “is not to blow up the enemy tank, but jam it, co-opt it, persuade it to do something that its owner doesn’t want it to do. This is new in war.” Seen in this regard, the Stuxnet and Flame computer viruses unleashed against Iran’s nuclear program by the United States and Israel are notable not only for the actual damage they’ve inflicted but as harbingers of the future struggles between nation-states. As David Sanger reports, Stuxnet “appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.” With this threshold irrevocably crossed, America stands at the beginning of a new and uncertain era of conflict.