Army video games shaped by growing need for junior-officer training tools.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Up Front

To help sharpen junior officers' decision-making skills in peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the Army is banking on its multimillion-dollar investment in video game technology.

Although not everyone is convinced that video games provide solid training tools--as opposed to just entertainment--there is growing evidence that digital simulations can be valuable supplements to traditional training, said William R. Swartout, director of technology at the Institute of Creative Technology.

The ICT, at the University of Southern California, was started with a $45 million Army grant for the sole purpose of transitioning technologies from the movie industry to military training.

The Army does "a great job teaching people specific tasks," such as how to shoot a rifle, or how to work with a specific piece of equipment, Swartout said at an industry conference hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army.

To make the training more relevant to current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, ICT engineers are introducing artificial intelligence technology into video games, to make the training more realistic.

"What we want to do is move it up to a more cognitive level--create an environment where a soldier is under a lot of stress and things are going wrong. He has to figure out what to do," said Swartout.

One project called critical leadership analysts system uses a case-study Approach to teach captains how to make sound decisions. The trainee, in one instance, watches a video of food distribution operations in Afghanistan. The operation goes badly, mostly as a result of poor management. After watching the video, there is an after-action review. The computer tells him what went wrong, and the captain can interview the characters from the movie, both friendly and enemies, to get their views.

"There is no magic here," said Swartout. "We envision in advance what the likely questions are, and we film the answers."

As the trainee types in a question on the console, the computer's text classification system automatically figures out the most likely answer associated with the question typed in. It only works about 70 percent of the cases, Swartout said. The Army concluded that this success rate is "good enough for this type of application."

ICT also developed a so-called "mission rehearsal exercise system." Rather than watch filmed actors, the trainee interacts with computer generated actors, whose "artificial intelligence" understands the human language as...