Air Force's latest video game targets potential recruits.

• Author: Peck, Michael
• Position: Up Front

The U.S. Air Force has launched a new video game that seeks to both entice new recruits and also highlight the service's non-traditional missions, such as humanitarian relief and unmanned aircraft operations.

"USAF: Air Dominance," which will be shown at NASCAR races and other events, puts prospective blue-suiters behind a joystick as they fly three missions: piloting an F-22 fighter that's coming to the aid of a friendly F-4 under attack by hostile MiG-29s, controlling a Predator unmanned air vehicle on a photo-reconnaissance run and flying a C-17 transport plane dropping humanitarian cargo in a war-torn nation.

"First things people think about the Air Force are pilots and fighters," said Sgt. Mary Daugherty, with the Air Force Recruiting Service. "That's a very small minority of the Air Force. We want to show that there are other things out there, like UAVs and cargo planes."

The game will inevitably be compared to the highly successful "America's Army," but the Air Force has chosen a different approach. While "America's Army" can be downloaded on home computers, "USAF: Air Dominance" can only be played on specific computers in Air Force mobile recruiting

centers.

The game will be installed on six kiosks inside a tractor-trailer that also serves as a mobile movie theater, said John Lee, a senior strategist at GSD&M, the advertising agency retained by the Air Force for its recruiting efforts. In addition, 28 recruiting squadrons will each have two kiosks on trailers.

"USAF: Air Dominance" is simpler to play than "America's Army." While the Army game intends to provide a realistic rendition of Army doctrine and tactics, the Air Force aimed more for an arcade game than an ultra-realistic flight simulator. The game is easy to grasp, and each mission only lasts a minute or so. It's designed to briefly let spectators at NASCAR and other events play for a couple of minutes, and then direct them to the recruiters. "We were trying to have a three to five minute experience, so multiple people could experience it," said Lee. "We can't have hundreds of people playing the game for an unlimited amount of time."

The game's developers say that they could have made it far more realistic--but that wasn't what the Air Force required. "We made it more arcade-ish at the request of the Air Force, to make it more fun and playable," said Billy Cain, vice president of Critical Mass Interactive, the developer of the game. While the result is aircraft that don't...