America's Army game gets new firepower

WASHINGTON D.C.--The final day of this year's Serious Games Summit started with a presentation by Colonel Casey Wardynski, the driving force behind America's Army. The game is hands down the best-known and most-played entrant in the serious game space, and Wardynski's presentation packed the house.

Wardynski's stated purpose was to provide a road map for other government agencies contemplating serious game development. Beginning with an overview of issues to be considered, he spoke about the choices his team made with America's Army and explained the results of those choices. His presentation concluded with an interesting look at future plans for the game. With merchandising deals in the works and a planned switch to the Unreal Engine 3 (development with the new engine begins in February 2006), the Army's experiment in serious gaming is starting to look like a franchise.

Like other conference speakers, Wardynski didn't assume much game industry knowledge on the part of his audience. As a result, he spent some time covering topics that are already familiar to most gamers, let alone developers and publishers.

Still, the early part of his presentation included some interesting comments, like the offhand remark that the Army "would have had to pay Microsoft $10 per disc to be on the Xbox." He also said that the decision to adopt team-versus-team gameplay was largely due to dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence, which he described as "very expensive and not very good."

It's when he got in to costs and payoff that Wardynski's presentation got really interesting. Setting aside the onetime licensing fee for Unreal Engine 2, America's Army has only cost the Army about $2.5 million per year. That includes everything: initial development, the Web site, running some game servers (far more are run by the user community), updating the software and adding new missions, and support.

That $2.5 million per year has bought the Army 60,000 daily visitors to the game's Web site, 29 million game downloads since launch, and 6.1 million active users. Wardynski uses "cost per person hour" as a metric for the effectiveness of America's Army as a marketing tool: How much does it cost to put the Army's brand in front of someone for one hour? The game delivers a cost per person hour of 10 cents, versus $5 to $8 for TV.

Even more telling, 20 percent of entering cadets at West Point have already played America's Army, and from 20-40 percent of new Army recruits have played it as well.

Referring to other Army marketing efforts, Wardynski said, "We've had success above anticipated. Compared to the [Army-sponsored] race car, the bull riding, and so on, this is more effective than all of them, but costs less."

It's clear that America's Army has been a good investment for the Army, and Wardynski described plans to make it do even more. An update now in the works will make every gameplay session start off at an in-game version of an Army recruiting center. Functions that are currently handled by text entry within the game's UI or a browser will now be presented through performing tasks in the recruiting center: Gamers use a computer in the reception area to log in to America's Army; clicking on a clipboard that's sitting on an end table will launch a survey.

The in-game recruiting center features a number of Army marketing posters, which Wardynski noted could be changed as desired, including customization based on IP address. He even discussed using this feature for in-game advertising, suggesting that posters might feature corporate sponsors or that the recruiting center might have a Coke or Pepsi vending machine, in addition to 3D object replacement and texture replacement, though it wasn't clear if this capability exists now or if it's in the works.

Though Wardynski describes America's Army as "strategic communications" rather than a recruiting tool, given how the Army has struggled with low recruiting rates since the invasion of Iraq, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the the in-game recruiting center is intended to drive recruiting. And given the current media frenzy around game violence, this is a touchy place for the Army to be. As a result, it will be interesting to see if the change affects recruiting, as well as how the Jack Thompsons of the world will respond.

One of the more interesting uses of America's Army technology is something that only a minority of the game's users will ever experience: heavy-weapons training for Army personnel. Given the expense of firing an antitank rocket--hundreds of thousands of dollars--and the risk of using live ammunition in training, the Army is working hard on moving toward virtual solutions based on technology from the game. In the Serious Game Summit's exposition room, the Army was displaying an ITAS turret-mounted missile launcher, as well as a Javelin shoulder-fired missile launcher.

The viewfinders for both weapons were connected to simulator software based on America's Army, and the viewfinder view was mapped to weapon alignment, yielding a convincing virtual experience.

Firing an ITAS missile and guiding it in to a distant tank was a visceral experience that felt far more realistic than doing the same thing with a mouse and keyboard. Consequently, it's easy to believe that this tool can effectively supplement real-world training. A similar tool for the CROWS turret, which is mounted on Humvees, is currently in the field. Meanwhile, the ITAS and Javelin products are rolling out soon.