Tag Archives: Military

IPT

Posted on by

Matthias Spruill (SAIC) sent me an email out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in serving as a member on the IPT team. Well, yeah! ;-)

It’s been two/three years now, since I got to know Curtis Conkey, Brent Smith and Kent. Not only are they a very interesting group of individuals, they are the only group who knew immediately how to pronounce CILR properly! :mrgreen: (None of my educator/academic colleagues has ever done it… they always tried “siller”, or something unrecognizable…)

Great to be able to run with people who understand what I am doing, again. With the pending changes in my workplace, it may work out well this time.

Training Project Office (TPO) for gaming

Posted on by

There is simply an incessant stream of news about the military and serious games! Wow!

Moreover, the Army are coming up with new projects to serious looking at this new training technology. Interactive Entertainment Today reported that the US Army has founded a new project office for games that focuses on training simulators.

The new project office, Training and Doctrine Command’s (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming (TPO Gaming), is part of TRADOC’s National Simulation Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The office is headed by Col. Jack Millar as her director.

TPO Gaming’s purpose is to develop a toolkit that soldiers will be able to use themselves to create combat training scenarios. The are interested in the visualization of the technologies, rather than the entertainment part, and will focus on FPR and RTS games initially.

While there are plenty of war videogames available to everyday consumers, TPO Gaming doesn’t believe that any fill the requirements of a true simulation.

Millar said that aside from being immersive, the simulations should be “scalable, feature an intuitive interface, model behavior at the entity level, contain an after-action review capability and allow easy distribution.”

Although not all in the army agrees. Some prefers Commercial-off-the-shelf (OTS) games, and what they lack in depth or real-world applicability is made up for in convenience.

Cool! /Cool? Half empty of half full? Kupo?

Neverwinter Nights for military

Posted on by

It was at I/ITSEC 2007 that I first heard about Shawn A. Weil from the folks from Aptima, Inc. (Woburn, MA). It appeared that Aptima (or should I say Weil?) also worked on Neverwinter Nights for a little bit, and had presented their papers at past I/ITSEC (2004/2005).

It looks like they have been busy:

  • Alexander, A. L.; Brun, T.; Sidman, J.; and Weil, S. A. (2006). From Gaming to Training: A Review of Studies on Fidelity, Immersion, Presence, and Buy-in and Their Effects on Transfer in PC-Based Simulations and Games. DARWARS research paper. (PDF)
  • Freeman, J., MacMillan, J., Haimson, C., Weil, S., Stacy, W., and Diedrich, F. (2006). From
    gaming to training. Society for Advanced Learning Technology (SALT Conference). Orlando, FL. 8-10 February 2006. (PDF)
  • Weil, S. A., Hussain, T. S., Brunye, T., Sidman, J., & Spahr, L. (2005). The use of massive multi-player gaming technology for military training: A preliminary evaluation. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 49th Annual Meeting. Santa Monica, CA: HFES. Also found here: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings, pp. 1186-1190(5)
  • Weil, S. A., Hussain, T. S., Brunye, T. T., Diedrich, F. J., Entin, E. E., Ferguson, W., Sidman, J. G., Spahr, L. L., MacMillan, J., & Roberts, B. (2005). Assessing the potential of massive multi-player games to be tools for military training. Proceedings of the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC). Abstract (PDF)
  • Freeman, J., MacMillan, J., Haimson, C., Weil, S., and Diedrich, F. (2005). Systems, studies, and
    strategies in game-based learning. Proceedings of Training & Simulation International (TESI Conference 2005). March, 22-24, 2005. Maastricht, Netherlands. (PDF)

I/ITSEC 2007 (Orlando, FL)

Posted on by

My participation in the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2007 was more chance than planned. I had seen an advertisement for Serious Games Challenge on the Serious Games listserv, and decided to go for it. After two months of hardwork, we finally had a completed mod for submission… and it came in as a Finalist entry!

By all accounts, I/ITSEC was a wonderful conference. There are a lot of interesting folks (mostly military, or ex-military personnels) who peers at the world using the same sand-colored binoculars as I do. :-)

This is so liberating, I actually have one guy said it to my face, we only want empirical studies! YES!!! Looks like I will be back next years, too.

Oh, it was a surprise to meet Mike Matzko there, too. (Long time no see!)