Gamers helping to train military for the 21st Century
Read this passage today in a book called "The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century" by Colonel Thomas Hammes, USMC.
" Another promising possibility (for providing more realistic training) is the use of persistant, multi-player online games to provide genuine free-play environments. Such a system would provide the uniques prospect of fighting against self-organizing, loosely allied networks. Although we will have to provide a core of trained OPFOR, we should also open the game to volunteer civilian game players who simply want to claim bragging rights for defeating US forces in a game. It will provide all the uncertainty, multiple sides, shifting alliances, and unpredictablility we actually face in the streets of Iraq and countryside of Afghanistan.
Such games thought difficult to develop, will provide training at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Given their inherently distributive nature, they can involve all members of the interagency teams in the game play and, like all simulations, stimulate the team-building process...By keeping the games truly free, our leaders and staffs will also have to deal with the inevitable surprises presented by aggressive, thinking enemies."
hmmm for all you married or "involved" gamers out their imagine the possiblity of a whole different level of justification for why you need to play "the game" for another 5 hours tonight...."But honey I'm helping to train the guys over at the 82nd Airborne Division and they really really need us to be the OPFOR tonight."
