Using Games in Military Training Simulations

Howard, from Engineering Computer Simulation, discusses military training and games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-engineering-simulations-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Engage Expo and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Howard: I’m Howard Mall and I’m VP of Engineering for Engineering Computer Simulations, Incorporated, Orlando, Florida.

Interviewer: What are you guys about? How do you use gaming?

Howard: Well, we started doing serious games where we basically built games as game platforms for doing simulations for military applications, for government and for a variety of different DOD customers. In that case, we are a solution provider. Yeah, that’s what we do.

Interviewer: Did you move away then from serious games, or are you using serious games and just applying it to the commercial sector?

Howard: Well, actually we really kept that going, and for the most part our most popular has been the tactical combat casualty care simulation which is what we developed for the U. S. Army. They are now using that at Fort Sam Houston where they have a combat medic school, and it is being used to do sustainment training and to do new combat medic training.

Basically, we have created a virtual environment in which you play the role of a combat medic. It’s a first person treater.

Interviewer: Awesome.

Howard: You are put into a scenario where your team has incurred multiple casualties, and now you have to make decisions about not only who to treat and when to treat and what treatment they need, but you also have to make decisions about my personal safety. If I get shot, there’s no nobody to treat the wounded and also the mission and other forms of situation awareness.

We found that the 3D environment has really helped to create immersion, especially for the young soldiers who are coming in, who are 18-years-old to help them, to engage them in the material and to help them get through and learn it and retain it.

What’s interesting is we were also involved with the training effectiveness evaluation. The results of this are going to be published in the Journal of Modeling and Simulation this next year where we actually proved the effectiveness of this training and that it was valuable over other forms of supplemental training.

Interviewer: Can you talk about how effective it was relative to other supplementals?

Howard: Having delivered a pretest, and it was in the middle of their education where they had already gone through a course lecture, given a pretest, compared it then to their post test and then their ongoing performance with their live exercise, it was a 12 percent improvement.

Interviewer: When serious games first started, when it got that buzz word, it was hard to convince people to do serious games. Did you even have any issues convincing the government to implement serious games for the training because they already had success, I guess, with U. S. Army.

Howard: Right. I think you’re thinking of America’s Army.

Interviewer: Yeah, America’s Army.

Howard: I’m not sure but that was actually for a completely different purpose. America’s Army was geared towards recruitment, which you’re probably aware of. In this case, we came with a set of requirements where they’re looking for us to do training. So, a) the budgets usually don’t support the usual game publishing model that you’re used to with commercial games. So, there’s a hurdle to overcome.

The other aspect is that design is very significantly hampered by… You’re much more constrained. You now have these learning objectives you have to achieve in addition to making it compelling, making it fun or challenging and still able to achieve those goals.

So, that’s where I think you might see stuff that’s not so great. I think we were successful because we did a lot of focus groups with our customers. We worked really hard on usability. We worked really hard on making sure we hit all the marks in terms of education as well as playability.

Interviewer: Yes, speaking of design, can you talk about the game mechanics that you had to use to effectively communicate the education goals that you had?

Art: Right. Well, I would say that in general we look at the requirements, and we design various different ways of approaching the problem using a virtual environment, and they would change based on what it was the particular thing we were choosing to educate.

But, in general, what I would say is that the learning occurs as almost like a head fake. Like you’re playing the game but by being successful in the game, you have to learn the game, learn what it takes to be successful and the lesson is actually embedded in being able to figure out what is the successful path to achieving your goal in the game.

Interviewer: It’s mastering the system.

Howard: Right. Let’s look back to the traditional games. You play Pacman. You started to memorize the levels and know exactly what you needed to do to accomplish your goal. It’s the same type of thing. Even though it’s a more free form environment, you’re still learning the principles of success for the game, and those are where your lessons occur.

Interviewer: Can you talk about… Have you used specific game mechanics to keep people engaged? Do you have rankings, levels, points, leader boards, stuff like that? Have you ever done that to see if it’s effective?

Howard: I can talk about some of the work right now we’re doing. We’re doing some work on the mobile realm where we’re taking, basically… You have combat medics who are being trained – actually, I’m sorry. In this case, they’re combat lifesavers. They’re one below combat medic. They don’t quite have the training, but they are regular soldiers who are being taught how to do certain procedures in order to fill gaps, basically, and make sure that soldiers survive.

In this case, they go through a very stringent and very quick training program, but sometimes they have these periods of time where they are either waiting for the next lane or there’s these down times.

So, what we’ve done is developed a mobile version of our tactical combat care simulation to be on a mobile device that they can now use in between those classes, and in many cases we have vignettes that match the next class they are going to take. So, it helps them get prepared and ready for the next class.

In that case, what we’ve done is sort of like – what would you call it – a trivia game that you would play at a bar where everybody is being ranked all the time everywhere, and there’s an instructor station and they can put it up and everybody can see the rankings as everybody is playing.

So, you can see how they are doing answering all the questions and going through and doing all the things that they need to do. So, that one hasn’t been tested yet, but I think we’re actually going to see some success with that and provide some further engagement because in these down times people are having fun as well as approaching the material.

In terms of our tactical combat casualty care simulation which is also, I should mention, we’re doing a version for the Marine Corps now. In that the big thing was to do an after action review. So, after they have completed their exercise, they now can go back and review all of the actions they took, all the interactions they made with different aspects of the environment in addition to an evaluation where we actually generate a go-or-no-go. That’s Army speak for whether it was satisfactory or unsatisfactory on certain critical measures.

And then, we also explain, we give them an explication of why they did well or why they did not do well. So, while that’s not a score, I think that that’s probably what you look at in terms of how did I do and how do I approach it to do better.

Interviewer: You mentioned Social Network’s 2.0 Mobile Technologies in one of your posters. Is that where you see some of these simulation training events happening now? Is that where some of your players and users…

Howard: Sure. He’s looking at a poster right now and that’s probably some of our markitecture, but in terms of social networks, I think that, especially for adult education, adults learn better in a more unstructured environment and they learn better from their peers.

This is true also of children, I should say, but you learn from your peers. And so, the idea here is to create environments in which that type of knowledge transfer occurs similar to the water cooler but in a virtual environment. It can be done at a distance. That’s where I think the social network aspect comes into play.

Also, in many cases that what you have in a social network informs other systems that we provide, such as scheduling an event, inviting people to an event, finding a teacher, finding an expert in a field. So, those are some of those things that support those education goals as well.

Interviewer: Where do you see the future then of this space going?

Howard: I think that you’re going to see the barrier of entry to virtual worlds decreasing through many issues. I’m seeing a lot of multimedia issues with a lot of browsers and things like that. I think you are going to see more security applied to it because there’s issues of privacy and things that people are dealing with, both in the social network and now with the virtual environment as it’s growing on.

I also think what you’re going to see is probably more of a diversification in terms of certain people taking on certain sectors of virtual worlds.

Interviewer: Sure.

Howard: Because right now I’m already seeing them. You’ve got collaborative spaces. You have social networking spaces. You have business oriented document management spaces. You have those types of things.

I think match ups are going to be important in terms of bringing together the things that we do on the web, the things we do in the 3D environment. So, that’s right. I see the sector going, at least, probably in the next two to three years. I think you’re also going to see a shake out of capabilities. I think you’re going to get also to a point where, at least, I hope some of the standards that are growing up are going to become what you want to develop in.

So, the way that the web has HTML and you have an Apache server or whatever, I’d like to see people… Well, we’ve got Colota now, so we’re getting some cases to where 3D modeling, animation and even some physics can start to be standardized and have standard formats that everybody will start to play in.

I think now we need to get a messaging protocol for virtual worlds to have people to start to agree on that and bring that together. So, now you can start to have one browser to go to any type of virtual environment you want to.

Interviewer: Oh cool. Where can listeners find out more about your company or the simulation?

Howard: Oh sure. They can read it. They can find us online at ECSORL.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.