American Army

Many years ago I first heard of American Army - the game. It intrigued me that the American Army would create a game for both recruitment and training purposes, giving it away for free. Ever since then it has always been at the back of my mind that I ought to try it out, as it apparently is sporting quite a lot of training material and educational practice from a militaristic point of view.
Now as an outspoken pacifist, I must admit that one of the reasons for me to test it out has been to see how "bad" the Army would provide learning / training in a gaming scenario based virtual environment. Granted this is probably not the best reason for testing it, especially not from a research point of view, so for the purposes of this research project I really tried hard to take of my private political filters, and give it a "proper" go!

So I got the game from http://www.americasarmy.com/ which basically is a pr page for the army, so I really had to try hard to remember why I set out to do this. The actual installation process was quite easy, and I created a user account. The game is well presented and the graphics are nothing but well presented - something that some other virtual environments could learn from. Normally when I start out playing a game, I will start by jumping into the game and just play hard. However with this game you have to do training sessions in order to open up scenarios and online gaming servers. For instance you need to qualify as a rifle man before you can access any of the online battle fields. So I went off to the shooting booths. The actual training material was quite simple order style instruction, which I in my naïve frame of mind would attribute the army quite well, so actually perfectly fitting the scenario. I easily qualified as a rifle man, even with distinctions, and I rushed off to get some more training. I now qualify as a medic, a parachute jumper, tank driver and have some Special Forces accreditations. I must admit that all the shooting exercises are quite well done and fun, where as the special forces training sessions are very boring, especially the first one, where each special member of the force is introduced. It is all following a very instructivist paradigm, and become quite boring after some time. I also got quite annoyed with the yelling in my face attitude that the sergeants have during training, so perhaps just very life-like, and highlighting yet another reason for me to not join the forces.

An important question to be asked is, whether the training helps in “real-life” combat situations. The closest I get to answer this question would be through the online gaming scenarios, and the answer is unfortunately – No, not at all! I have tried playing the game online at the very beginning after my first accreditation, where I was killed as fast as a pig in a slaughter house. The experience now is very much the same even with my special forces badges, and I’m pretty sure that there is quite a lot of you aspiring army kids who are doing nothing else than living in these online killing fields targeting the innocent new recruits to boost their own statistical kill/death ratios. The good thing about this is that I of cause get to survive this experience, and now know that the army definitely is not for me!