Spot On: Sweden's military trains for peace

WASHINGTON, DC--America's Army had a strong presence at this year's Serious Games Summit--a number of speakers addressed it, and the US Army even sponsored a reception on the first day of the conference to showcase the game and its technology. For some perspective on how another country's military was using serious gaming, there was a presentation on Foreign Ground, a training sim for peacekeeping troops that was developed for the Swedish Department of Defense.

Developers Nigel Papworth and Hakan Wallin spent a full hour describing their game and their approach to serious game development with limited resources.

Technology from America's Army is now being used to train soldiers in "hard" skills like gunnery. In contrast, Foreign Ground is intended to improve users' "soft" skills. The development team's brief was to create a game for peacekeeping troops slated for travel to countries in which they had no prior experience. Historically, these soldiers have faced difficulties in interacting smoothly with local populations: Armed soldiers in an unsettled region confronted with people with whom they share no common language makes for a volatile mix.

Foreign Ground is intended to remove that destabilizing element of unfamiliarity. The simulator supplements traditional classroom-based cross-cultural coaching by letting soldiers virtually walk the streets in their destination before they ever leave their home country. However, the development team faced tight restrictions on budget and timelines: They had just eight people and six months to create the prototype they showed at the Serious Games Summit.

These constraints drove some key design decisions. First, the team decided to mod existing software rather than build from scratch and selected UT2004 as their platform for development. Second, they felt that non-player character AI was the core of their game: If the in-game "local civilians" didn't react believably to the presence and actions of peacekeeping troops, their sim wouldn't be effective. Of course, AI is also one of the most complex programming challenges, and the development team quickly realized that their limited resources would prevent them from writing "traditional" AI like that found in commercial games.

As a result, they decided to radically simplify their model. They pared down all the parameters that might affect NPC behavior to just three: aggression, threat, and strength. Aggression drives NPCs to act, while perceived threats from the player's peacekeeping troops inhibit action. Raising rifles to firing position, for instance, will scatter a crowd of NPCs intent on looting a food shipment. Strength multiplies both aggression and threat: NPCs are more aggressive in large groups and perceive higher threat from larger groups of peacekeepers.

Though simple, this AI drove very believable NPC behavior in the demonstration shown at the Serious Games Summit. NPCs spoke to the peacekeeping troops when they approached peacefully, ran when they raised their rifles, and returned to attractive targets like a broken-down food transport when soldiers moved away.

Players can also interact with NPCs through customizable dialogue menus. Though this design decision limits flexibility to some extent, it's appropriate for the types of interactions that peacekeepers are likely to have with local civilian populations: The topics of conversation will probably be limited. The sim does have a simple menu-driven system for linking sound files to choices on the dialogue menu. By letting users hear recorded translations of the dialogue options, this could help them acclimate to an unfamiliar language.

There are a few key features the development team is still working on. According to Papworth, the most important item on this list is implementing "personal space" for NPCs so that they will recognize when the player has approached too closely and will react appropriately. The amount of personal space required would be customizable for different cultures.

Still, the development team is happy with the progress they've made in such a short time, and they've received positive feedback from their clients in the Swedish military, as well as "people from the UN" who they declined to identify more precisely.

The demonstration presented certainly looked effective: It seems likely the game will achieve the development team's goal of helping peacekeepers interact more smoothly with overseas civilian populations. A game like this has wide applications, and one can only hope that the consumer version comes out soon--targeted at US tourists.