We have had uncountable number of games where warfare and succeeding in war objectives is the main theme. From Bronze Age medieval setups like the Age of Empires to 1942 to Star Wars to Battlefield 2: Modern Combat we have seen it all. The games connected to the military form a sizeable chunk of the industry’s games. Games have always prepared young people for war.



However, a recent initiative by Colonel Casey Wardynski takes the motivation for young men and women to enlist a step further. Not only this, Col Wardynski’s project has many backers because of the economics behind it. What is he doing? He is deploying perhaps the most cost-effective recruitment method presently available to the US army - a war game!!



TV ads costs between 5-10 dollars an hour to get the US army brand in front of each viewer. The game is Colonel Wardynski’s supporting costs around 10 cents an hour which is based on the $2.5m annual running costs for the website where the game America’s Army is available for free download. Players can use it to try the role of a soldier and see if it’s something they want to do in real life.




This has proved not just a stunt by the Colonel and the US Army but a real hit. A good 29 million people have grabbed a copy with 6.1 million active users. But that’s only the beginning. The objective of the game - America’s Army, a first-person-shooter simulation of army training and combat whose development began in 1999 and which was launched on July 4, 2002, Independence Day is to recruit more soldiers. It was a success story. A good 40% of the new recruits have claimed to have played the game before enlisting.



Pat Kane in The Guardian asks; ‘So is the marriage of war and games inevitable? After all, humans play games for wonderful, enriching reasons - and sometimes for no reason at all. But they have always played games to prepare for war. Some of our earliest and most enduring board games, such as chess and Go, began as teaching tools for the children of kings and emperors. Through such games they understood strategy, imagined the battlefield and saw the consequences of attack and defence.‘



Now, should this be a thing of concern?



The article quotes Greg Costikian of Manifesto Games being agnostic about the relationship between games and the military. He has a strong opinion on America’s Army. “Given that we have a volunteer military, the military needs to recruit. And if it’s legitimate for them to use TV and print advertising, what’s wrong with doing so through a game?”



Sheldon Pacotti who is scriptwriter for the forthcoming America’s Army console game, Rise of a Soldier says that his experience working closely with AA gave him - what is termed as - ‘nuanced ideas about the role of an outside military force’. He went on to say that foreign campaigns were much more subtle than the understanding of either American politicians or citizens. The truth about terrorism is that it is much more complex than any plot you could dream up for a game or any other type of entertainment. The virtue of Rise of a Soldier is that it doesn’t set out to demonize the enemies, their culture, or their worldview.



If that is the case, I am very happy about gaming being used to entice freshers to enlist in the military. In the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars, we have seen that soldiers were very poorly trained about treating people of the ‘intervened’ lands especially the prisoners. Without knowing about their cultures and ways of lives, they have actually went ahead to antagonize whole citizenries. Besides, prejudice against Arabs and Afghans made soldiers demonize these people that was reflected in the brutal treatment of prisoners resulting in gory and horrifying deaths in places like Bagram, Baghdad or Basra.



If the ideas behind such games are correct, why not encourage it? In the long run, it might actually make American soldiers humans from the demons they are now. We must not just stick to the ‘war’ in these games, but look at it from a wider perspective altogether.



Opinion based on the article by Pat Kane in The Guardian. Also check Foreign Ground in Defence Gaming. Thanks Duke Shimazu4609