America's Army

America's Army (also known as AA or Army Game Project) is a tactical multiplayer first-person shooter owned by the U.S. government and released as a global public relations initiative to present an image of the current U.S. Army and help with U.S. Army recruitment.

The PC version was released on July 4, 2002 subtitled Recon, Operations and currently Special Forces. It is financed through U.S. tax dollars and distributed for free. It has been developed by the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School and uses the Unreal engine.

Rise of a Soldier is the subtitle for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 version that was developed by the U.S. Army, Ubisoft and Secret Level.

Overview

The game falls into the subgenres of an advergame, serious game and militainment. America's Army has been developed since 2000 and still changes through add-ons and patches. The PC version can be found as a download on the Internet or as free CDs at U.S. Army recruiting centers.

The gameplay is similar to that of Counter-Strike, a Half-Life modification and the most widely played online first-person shooter at the time and for the past few years. Professor Michael Zyda, the director and founder of the MOVES Institute, acknowledged Counter-Strike as the model for America's Army. The game is relatively authentic in terms of visual and acoustic representation of combat —especially pertaining to weaponry—but its critics have alleged that it fails to convey wartime conditions as accurately as it claims.

America's Army is the first computer and video game to make recruitment an explicit goal and the first well-known overt use of computer gaming for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device.

A counter on the homepage of the PC version claims over six million registered accounts as of 2005 which is often confused with the number of players. Statistics show that the game has had an average of roughly 3,000 to 6,000 players playing online at any one time between 2002 and 2005 and thus ranking in the ten most played online games tracked by GameSpy. By comparison, under the same counting conditions the most often played online game, Counter-Strike, has between 70,000 and 100,000 players.[1]

History

Although the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) has had plans for using video games since the early 1980s, it was not until 1996, shortly after computer-based wargames were permitted on government computers for U.S. Marines, U.S. Marine simulation experts created Marine Doom, a modification of the commercial game Doom II as a tactical training tool.

The success of Marine Doom led the U.S. Marine Corps to contract with MÄK Technologies for the development of Marine Expeditionary Unit 2000 the following year. This was the first game funded and developed by both the Department of Defense and the commercial game industry. The game was both used for U.S. Marine training and released to the public.

A 1997 report of the National Research Council, which Professor Michael Zyda was a member of[2], observed that Department of Defense's simulations were lagging behind commercial games and advised joint research with the entertainment industry.

In 1999, U.S. Army recruiting numbers had hit their lowest point in thirty years[3], and after two straight years of missed recruiting targets, the Congress of the United States decided to carry out "aggressive, innovative experiments" in military recruiting. The Department of Defense raised its spending for recruitment to more than US$2.2Bn, which not only paid for the Army Game Project, but also an entire promotional campaign to polish up the U.S. Army's image. The new slogan, "An Army Of One" was invented and used in numerous publicity efforts, such as the sponsorship of a NASCAR racing team.

A report by Professor Zyda induced the U.S. Army to provide US$45 million to the U.S. Navy's Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, to create a research centre to develop advanced military simulations.

Lieutenant Colonel E. Casey Wardynski, at that time an economics professor at the United States Military Academy, West Point, took the idea of an online U.S. Army computer game to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Military Manpower. After convincing them of the project's cost-effectiveness Wardynski, who later became director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point and the head of the Army Game Project, began working with Professor Zyda.

In May 2000, the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School was contracted by the U.S. Army to create the game.

In 2001 the Department of Defense licensed Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear from the French software company Ubisoft for training military personnel.

According to Professor Zyda, the September 11, 2001 attacks had a positive effect on the future acceptance of the game. [4]

On July 4, 2002, the United States' Independence Day, the first version of America's Army, named Recon, was released after three years of development and production costs of US $7.5 million. Distributed as a free download or CD it quickly became one of the ten most often-played online first-person shooters. The game was easily available, the gameplay was similar to Counter-Strike, and it had the then brand-new Unreal Engine as well as free servers sponsored by the U.S. Army. The Army currently spends US $3 million a year to develop future versions of the game and US $1.5 million annually for server support.

America's Army: Soldiers, which was a role-playing game in development stage that was to elucidate career paths in the U.S. Army, was never released and has yet to show any signs of re-development.

In 2003, Ubisoft 's commercial Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield was licensed by the U.S. Army to be used for testing soldiers' skills.

Version history

• 1.0 (AA: Recon) - July 4, 2002
• 1.0.1 (AA: Operations) - July 12, 2002
• 1.0.1b (AA:O) - July 25, 2002
• 1.1.1 (AA:O) - August 1, 2002
• 1.2.0 (AA:O) - August 22, 2002
• 1.2.1 (AA:O) - October 3, 2002
• 1.3 (AA:O) - October 10, 2002
• 1.4 (AA:O) - November 15, 2002
• 1.5 (AA:O) - December 23, 2002
• 1.6 (AA:O) - March 16, 2003
• 1.7 (AA:O) - April 21, 2003
• 1.9 (AA:O) - August 8, 2003
• 2.0 (AA:Special Forces) - Nov 6, 2003
• 2.0a (AA:SF) - December 21, 2003
• 2.1 (AA:SF Downrange) - June 1, 2004
• 2.2.0 (AA:SF Vanguard) - October 19, 2004
• 2.2.1 (AA:SF Vanguard) - Nov 18, 2004
• 2.3 (AA:SF Firefight) - February 18, 2005
• 2.4 (AA:SF Q-Course) - May 16, 2005
• 2.5 (AA:SF Direct Action) - October 13, 2005
• Xbox (AA:Rise of a Soldier) - Nov 16, 2005
• 2.6 (AA:SF Link-Up) - February 9, 2006

On November 6, 2003, version 2.0 of America's Army was published, with the full title of America's Army: Special Forces. In a booklet produced by the MOVES Institute, an article by Wagner James Au explains that "the Department of Defense want[ed] to double the number of Special Forces soldiers, so essential [had they proven] in Afghanistan and northern Iraq; consequently, orders [had] trickled down the chain of command and found application in the current release of America's Army."[5]

For not mentioning the contribution of the US Navy, there were tensions between the Naval Postgraduate School and the U.S. Army. After the game proved successful, the project was withdrawn from the Naval Postgraduate School due to allegations of mismanagement[6] in March 2004.

A different version of the game for Xbox and PlayStation 2, America's Army: Rise of a Soldier, is being developed by Ubisoft in collaboration with the U.S. Army. The Xbox version was released in November, 2005.

According to Colonel Wardynski the game generated interest from other U.S. government agencies, including the Secret Service, resulting in the development of a training version, similar to the public version, which is for internal government use only.

Gameplay

America's Army is a round- and team-based tactical shooter with a gameplay similar to Counter-Strike in which the player controls a soldier of the U.S. Army from the first person perspective instead of Counter-Terrorists or Terrorists.

Before being allowed to play online a player must first go through four training maps and have his progress saved online in a player account. Accomplishing the other ten training levels enables the player to become medic, special forces unit and sniper.

The main section of the game is the multiplayer part, in which players fight either as the "U.S. Army" or, on "Special Forces" maps, as Indigenous forces against an opposing enemy team.

One of America's Army's unusual features is the design of the player's opponents. The players characters' are divided into two teams: usually an Assault group and a Defense one. The Assault loses the round if the time limit, usually set to ten minutes, runs out. The player's side, whether Assault or Defense, is always identified as U.S. Army. The other side is always identified as the enemy (or OPFOR in the case of training maps.)

The players on either team appear as U.S. soldiers carrying U.S. weapons such as the M16A2. Their opponents usually appear as non-uniformed people carrying Warsaw Pact weapons such as the AK-47.

The game is a medium-paced tactical shooter, similar to the Tom Clancy series of shooters. Pacing is fast in the sense that players can be killed very quickly, but the players' movements are a lot slower and the gameplay contains fewer firefights than Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike, especially on larger maps. Unlike common first-person shooters, players are required to use iron sights for aiming to shoot more accurately.

Each round starts with the two teams spawning simultaneously and each always starting with the equipment of their soldier class. This equipment normally consists of one or two firearms and several grenades.

The round ends with only one team winning. This happens when the objectives are achieved, all members of the enemy team are killed, or when the round's time limit is reached. For example, the objective on the SF Hospital map, one of the most played maps, is to kill the rebels' VIP, while the other team's mission is to keep him alive and escort him to the escape zone.

The game features a kind of honor system making use of operant conditioning, which means that gamers who obey to the rules, dubbed "Rules of engagement", are rewarded with experience points or else punished with a decrease of them. Rewarded are the achievement of specific mission objectives, killing enemies and healing injured teammates. Punished are friendly fire and eliminating objectives which are assigned for protection. Players are automatically banned from all servers when their overall score is too low. For this purpose, a separate company has undertaken the task of tracking players and administrating servers. [7] Players with a high "HONOR" level are sometimes insulted as addicts.

Any player character killed before the round is over become "spectators"; their chat/voice messages cannot be seen/heard by the players still alive, but they can watch the rest of the round. In contrast to the blacking out of the screen when dead in Counter-Strike, for example, the developers of America's Army have done little so far to prevent spying spectators from communicating with those still playing, which has become a common type of cheating, widely referred to as ghosting. Players whose protagonist is dead receive information through the chat and the view as spectator and are capable of using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) communication programs to gain information, especially on players' positions. As is not uncommon in multiplayer online games, cheating (such as through the use of wallhacks or aimbots) is still prevalent in America's Army, despite the game being supported by the cheat-prevention utility PunkBuster.

Depending on server configuration, spectators can watch the rest of the round in up to three ways. One, which is always available, allows the "dead" player to choose a member of his own team and see through their eyes; another allows the ghost to rotate his view around the chosen player; there are also certain fixed viewpoints that allow the "dead" player to observe the entire map.

Controversy

Apart from the common controversy that surrounds games rewarding the virtual killing of other human beings, America's Army caused additional debate and disagreement that made it become the subject of journalistic and academic research.

America's Army is intended to give a positive impression of the U.S. Army. In the official Frequently Asked Questions page the developers, too, confirm that in a statement giving the reason why people outside the United States can play the game: "We want the whole world to know how great the U.S. Army is."

Unsurprisingly, a game of this nature has come under criticism. For example, it has been accused of playing down or excluding negative facets of Army life from its portrayal, such as collateral damage and harassment in the U.S. Army, as well the emotional trauma that real soldiers experience when they are confronted with bloodshed and corpses. Hence the critics claim that the game creates a false impression of reality. Specifically, a graduate of Utrecht University concluded the game "with its governmental background, is instead of an advergame, better to be described as a propagame."[8] Chris Chambers, the deputy director of development for America's Army, admits it is a recruitment tool,[9] and "the Army readily admits [America's Army is] a propaganda device," wrote Chris Morris, a CNN/Money columnist and director of content development.[10]

As well, Alexander R. Galloway, an assistant professor at New York University notes that, "What is interesting about America's Army, is not the debate over whether it is thinly-veiled propaganda or a legitimate recruitment tool, for it is unabashedly and decisively both, but rather that the central conceit of the game is one of mimetic realism." In his analysis, Galloway concludes that America's Army, despite being a fairly realistic game, with graphics approaching photorealism as well as real-life settings, does not make even the least attempt to achieve narrative realism -- that is, accurately representing what serving a tour in the Army would actually be like. Instead, it simply expresses a nationalistic sentiment under the guise of realism, being little more than a "naïve and unmediated or reflective conception of aesthetic construction."[11]

The Army Game and its official webpage, which must be visited to be able to play the game, contain links to the army recruitment website goarmy.com, another recruiting tool that, according to the Army Subcommittee Testimony from February 2000, has a higher chance of recruiting than "any other method of contact."[12] Leading American players to the website is a major goal of the game, and it was confirmed that twenty-eight percent of all visitors of America's Army's webpage click through to this recruitment site.[13]

In the Frequently Asked Questions section of the game's official website, its developers argue its suitability for teenagers. It reads, "In elementary school kids learn about the actions of the Continental Army that won our freedoms under George Washington and the Army's role in ending Hitler's oppression. Today they need to know that the Army is engaged around the world to defeat terrorist forces bent on the destruction of America and our freedoms."

America's Army, considered by the U.S. Army to be a "cost-effective recruitment tool," aims to become part of youth culture's "consideration set," as Army deputy chief of personnel, Timothy Maude, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee.[14]

The game has also been described as an extension of the military entertainment complex or so-called "militainment", further blurring the line between entertainment and war [15], with a few critics arguing that it contributes to a militarization of society.[16]

A poll by I for I Research said that 30 percent of young people who had a positive view of the military said that they had developed that view by playing the game. At the United States Military Academy 19 percent of 2003's freshman class stated they had played the game. Enlistment quotas were met in the two years directly following the game's release.[17] But another recruitment breakdown in April 2005 proves the game's recruitment power is still quite limited, in light of the recent casualties that American soldiers experienced in Iraq.[18]

M. Paul Boyce, an Army public affairs officer at The Pentagon, was quoted as saying it would never be possible to find out what difference the game has made to recruitment numbers, but that he hoped no one has been recruited because of the game alone on the grounds that America's Army makes no attempt to help answer "hard questions" about the Army, such as "Is it right for me, is it right for my family, and is it right for my country?".[19]

Because America's Army focuses on the technological aspect of war rather than the moral, it has been referred to as How We Fight, alluding to the U.S. government's series of films named Why We Fight, which supported the war effort for World War II.[20]

Cultural Impact

The Canadian punk-rock band Propagandhi has written a song against the game in its album Potemkin City Limits in October 2005.