CasdraBlog

I've been intrigued by Full Spectrum Warrior since I first heard about it from Penny Arcade. It is a military training simulation dressed up as a commercial video game. In it you are a squad leader commanding eight men in a arab urban area. This article, The Making of an X Box Warrior, in the New York Times is interesting:

But can you learn strategy from the game? Cummings said he believes so. Out in Illinois, Jim Kondrat, the captain in the Illinois National Guard, said that he had seen firsthand the results of training with Full Spectrum Warrior. He bought a copy of the game when it was publicly released and watched his young recruits gather around an Xbox to play it. ''When you have wounds and action going on around you,'' he said, ''it starts to stress the leader. We had one guy with both his teams pinned down by fire, and I was saying: 'What are you going to do? What are you going to do?' And he was freaking out.'' Then one soldier hit upon a plan to fire a smoke grenade. It worked: the enemy was confused, and the soldiers successfully flanked them.

In fact, the virtual world offers some unequalled ways of visualizing a battlefield. Consider how the game faciliates ''after-action review,'' a key part of training. After soldiers practice a technique, they talk about it to analyze what went wrong. Typically, soldiers will argue about precisely what happened on the field. With video games, however, they can literally replay the scene to find out.

I don't really have time for this (see last post), but I'm going to get it anyway.