A research paper written for ‘Engineering Bodies of War’, a lecture series on ethics conducted by Prof. Jessica Behm at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU, Spring 2015
Much has been written and argued about how the gaming industry has long held the coattails of the military for story-telling inspiration, its depiction of war, the glorification of violence and narrative of battlefield strategy. Games borrowing from war culture has been dealt with a great deal more than the inverse: how the gaming industry is beginning to impact war technology; and the nature and direction of this impact.
This research paper attempts to look at both sides of this symbiotic relationship to try and create a holistic picture of the military-industrial-entertainment landscape. An area of focus is the areas in which technology invented by and for the gaming industry is utilized by defense engineering. This is an area I feel worthwhile delving into as an engineer of peace attempting to throw light on just one of many aspects of the war machine. This paper does not cover the rhetorical effects of gaming, neither its psycho-sociological impact on the player.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SYMBIOSIS
As a starting point it would be pertinent to investigate some of the details of the genesis of this continuously evolving relationship. This throws up some interesting insight into the influencer and the influenced and how those identities have (not simplistically) variably interchanged over time.
During the 1950s at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a physicist named William Higinbotham used computer technology pioneered by the Department of Defense (DoD) to create a small physics-based game called Tennis for Two (Beekman). Though this game is not a military-themed one, the context of its creator and the tools he used are noteworthy. The intervening years till the mid-1990s, were marked by an on-and-off flirtation between military contractors and the game market. In 1972 US defense contractor Sanders Associates developed the very first home video game console prototype, the Magnavox Odyssey. “Like much of early computing, nascent digital gaming benefited from military spending” (Rayner). In the early 1980s, the Army Training Doctrine and Command (TRADOC) turned to Atari’s popular arcade game Battlezone to turn the sci-fi shooter into a training simulator for the Army’s latest infantry fighting vehicle, the M2 Bradley (Beekman). Though no Bradley crewman ever trained on the two prototypes that were built, again, the intent is writ. It was the end of a historic military era that ushered in the age of game tech in ‘militech’.
The Modern Era of Military Games. With the end of the cold war, came the need for a streamlined and more efficient military procurement practice. This meant a seamless interfacing with industrial manufacturing processes, mandated by Secretary of Defense William Perry, wherein “commercially available off-the-shelf alternatives should be considered first”. This shift in policy radically transformed the fields of computer simulation and training (Lenoir 1). By the mid-90s, a number of high-end military contractors specializing in simulation and training had begun to spin off their products into the gaming market. Some of these are: Evans & Sutherland’s flight and tank simulators repurposed as arcade games, Silicon Graphics’ boards for Nintendo’s Playstation and SuperMario series, and the creation of Real3D, a company founded on Martin Marietta’s graphic chip design patents (the largest military contractor of its day, now Lockheed Martin).
Another significant stride in the collaboration between the entertainment and defense industries was the birth of the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) made possible with the Army’s $45 million five-year grant to the University of Southern California (USC). According to Timothy Lenoir in Fashioning the Military-Entertainment Complex:
The ICT’s mission is to enlist film studios and video-game designers [in applying entertainment-software technology to military simulation, training and operations and academic research], with the promise that any technological advances can also be applied to make more compelling video games and theme park rides (2).
At its inauguration, the Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera said, “We could never hope to get the expertise of a Steven Spielberg . . . working just on Army projects. [This will be] a win-win for everyone.” With the creation of the ICT, the military-entertainment collaboration had become an official engagement. Driven by a mutual need for enhanced technological research, the stage was set for bigger, better entertainment and creative opportunities and for what a CIA spokesman in the Washington Times called “out-of-the-box thinking”. Clearly the time was nigh upon the gaming industry to repay its debts to the war machine. And it was more than ready and willing.
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOUR PROCESSOR
Traditionally, and for obvious tactical reasons, the military has not been one to let go of its control over procurement and development of its own technology. This changed, however, in the early 90s. With the ever-looming threat of Armageddon now gone, defense budgets shrank. Simultaneously, the development of sophisticated industrial and consumer products accelerated. The military’s attitude towards the gaming industry began to change from beyond playing games to serious investment in a source of ultra cheap, readily available hi-tech. The consumer-electronics industry had been taking advantage of military innovations for years. It seemed only fitting that it should now return the favor. In 2009 the United States Air Force issued a procurement request for 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) video-game consoles, with the intention of linking them up as a supercomputer running on the open-source Linux operating system. It was to be used for research, including the development of high-definition imaging systems for radar. The air force had earlier built a smaller computer from a cluster of 336 PS3s and the cost of this procurement would have come to around one-tenth of that of a conventional, militarily developed supercomputer. Examples like these abound that demonstrate the cost-benefit of video-game hardware as and when appropriated for military use: from Xbox video-game controllers modified to control reconnaissance robots and drone aircraft, to NVidia graphics chips that power PC video-cards used to run simulations.
What brought this on? Consumer electronics companies have the advantage of constantly self-updated R&D and can leverage a vast network of global exports to spread their margins, in effect keeping costs low. Says David Standingford, group leader of electromagnetic modeling at BAE, “products such as the PS3 and NVidia graphics cards have become immensely powerful computers in their own right.” The game industry has advanced rapidly in the past five years, taking advantage of hardware developments to produce spectacular, realistic graphic displays and games with increasingly sophisticated AI components. Game software now outstrips the best the military has to offer (Lenoir 1). Compare that with the glacial pace of expensive military development and procurement that could run into years before new gear lands into the soldier’s hands, by which time, and oftentimes, the technology is already nearing obsolescence.
The emphasis on creative solutions, constant technological innovation and smaller bottom lines, without which gaming and allied companies cannot survive in the world of consumer business, feeds directly into the military’s growing need for the cheap, quick and efficient. And game tech companies know this full well, evidenced by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s description of one of their graphics technologies as the “soul of a supercomputer” with applications beyond gaming.
“War is now a first-person shooter”. In the Hollywood movie Good Kill (Voltage Pictures), the leader of a drone unit addresses a team of fresh US Air Force recruits saying, “… half of you were recruited in malls precisely because you are a bunch of gamers.” Another important reason for war technology to look at game tech, is the familiarity that young future soldiers already have with handheld controls. This can prove to be an invaluable asset at the recruitment and training stages both for the new inductee who is not intimidated by technology, rather well-versed with; as well as for the military that can deploy ready-to-use technology for better training and simulations which in the long run help lower induction costs and time-to-deploy. This brings us to the actual physical act of interaction that gamers are called upon to perform, wherein movement and tactile motion become crucial to game studies. “This corporeal approach to games . . . is key . . . while . . . an issue of more concern is not only what the player is learning, but how a game like America’s Army indoctrinates a kind of fine and gross motor (s)killset highly prized by the US government, other governments and various global factions and groups” (Burrill 7).
Another parallel that one is compelled to draw is the environment of modern warfare and that of popular gameplay today. Gamers, like the drone warriors of today have already spent hours in dimly lit rooms huddled over a machine, looking for targets. What the military gets are quasi-made soldiers, pre-oriented with strategic thinking and semi-skilled at military hardware.