America’s Army has moved beyond a training game into the commercial world as well. © U.S. Army.

VBS1 (Virtual Battlefield Simulation; see www.virtualbattlefieldsystems.com) is a mod by Coalescent Technologies of the COTS game Operation Flashpoint, originally created by Bohemia Interactive. VBS1 is used by the Marine Corps in its Infantry Cognitive Skills Labs.

Created by Will Interactive (www.willinteractive.com), Saving Sergeant Pabletti is a game that trains leadership, ethics and inter-cultural communication. The player wins by making the proper values-based decisions for soldiers, changing who they are and how they perform. Over 80,000 soldiers a year train on this game, made by the company who also created the Gator Six, Battery Command game. This game is not 3D CGI, but instead uses fast branching through video clips to show the player the consequences of his/her actions.

A real star of military games is America’s Army (see www.americasarmy.com), which started out as an advergame, to publicize the US Army, but has become so wildly popular (more than 4 million registered players!) that it is now being used for actual military training, ranging from basic training of new recruits to warrior training using advanced weapons such as combat robots and the new XM25 rifle, which is still in development (game feedback will likely influence the rifle’s final design). Surprisingly, America’s Army has found many international military and civilian fans, and cadres of gamers exist in many countries, holding regular meetings and competitions. The America’s Army team continues to add play levels and missions to keep its membership engaged; it is preparing a major upgrade to the online version of the game, which is also coming out this Summer on Xbox and PlayStation 2.

Forterra Systems has created simulations for U.S. Homeland Security. © Forterra Systems Inc.

Opportunities in Military Gaming
There are many opportunities in military games and the field is growing. Whereas a significant portion of military gaming and simulation is controlled by giant aerospace companies such as Boeing (which has more than 3,000 people working on this type of modeling and simulation), many games are produced by small companies or teams. A brand new area, but one that is sure to expand rapidly, is games for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and similar organizations. Games for homeland security are usually very different from classical military simulators, and large companies are not well established in this area. Many classic military games are very complex, and can take weeks to learn. On the other hand, homeland defenders such as police and fire fighters, which operate in concert with National Guard and other military units, have little patience for such complicated game interfaces — they need something more akin to Casual Game play action, which can be learned in minutes instead of weeks, and which can be employed by users with almost no gaming background — a police or FBI station is probably not a good place to go looking for hard-core gamers.

This is a very large potential business area, given the total audience of some 4 million First Defenders in the U.S., with millions more in similar positions and with similar threats in other countries. Unfortunately, the market is fragmented — many homeland defense groups would like to have their own customized versions of a game (with 3D maps of their own city, for instance), and funding can be spotty. A major change that occurred recently is that the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) now allows First Defenders to use federal security-related funding to purchase training games, which should open up this market very quickly.

One remarkable new opportunity waiting to be exploited is a new translator between the standard military 3D simulation format, Open Flight (from MultiGen-Paradigm) and the popular entertainment animation toolset, 3ds max, called Flight Studio, by Bluerock Technologies. “OpenFlight artists now have an efficient pipeline into Discreet’s 3ds max software with Flight Studio,” said Brian Blau, the ceo of Bluerock. Flight Studio can be bought from Turbo Squid (www.turbosquid.com), as can thousands of royalty-free 3D models and animations created in OpenFlight. Animators have tried to move 3D model and environment files between military and entertainment applications for years, without success. The creation of this Rosetta Stone between the two communities can enable the tapping into the vast files created for the military at a cost of billions of dollars, which include models of military vehicles and actual earth terrain in fidelity undreamt of by entertainment gamers, and into entertainment gaming vaults that contain storylines, precise human movements and detailed characters that the military so sorely lacks.