Through such games they understood strategy, imagined the battlefield and saw the consequences of attack and defence. Some of our earliest and most enduring board games, such as chess and Go, began as teaching tools for the children of kings and emperors. But they have always played games to prepare for war. So is the marriage of war and games inevitable? After all, humans play games for wonderful, enriching reasons - and sometimes for no reason at all. The strapline on the console version, just launched in the US and due to be in the UK by Christmas, gets to the point: "Our game developers don't rely on imagination," it says. In fact, between 20 and 40% of new US army recruits have already played the game.
"Players can download it free from the internet, and use it to try the role of soldier, virtually, and see if it's something they want to do in real life," said Wardynski, who has a doctorate from Rand and is a professor at West Point Academy, the US's pre-eminent military tuition college, at the first Serious Games Summit in October last year. The whole purpose of America's Army, a first-person-shooter simulation of army training and combat whose development began in 1999 and which was launched in 2002 (on July 4, Independence Day, of course), is to recruit more soldiers. And people are playing: 29 million have grabbed a copy, and there are 6.1 million active users.īut that's only the start.
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