America’s Army
Carrie Kolb
Engl 459



I liked the games we played in class against each other because of the strategies required, but I lack the patience required for any staying power in this game. The controls are a little complicated and I died a couple of times in boot camp; the drill instructors were not amused. I went to a week of boot camp when I was in ROTC in high school and America’s Army boot camp brought back a lot of lovely memories: we went to Disney World when it was over. Since I do remember being yelled at a lot, I think the realism of the game is fairly accurate except the drill instructors are nicer (in the game). When I play a video game, I expect it to be surreal, so I didn’t anticipate the effect of my breathing when I aimed my firearm at first, or that my arm would be less steady after running. The game had an awful lag on my laptop, but the graphics are interesting enough, and it is definitely better than Second Life. That the army made this game free online shows their confidence in its realism, and I find that fascinating. Where the realism of Second Life was a real turn off, in America’s Army the realism is what interests me the most. I’m not even good at chess because it requires patience and planning but instead of trying to move little plastic pieces across a checker board, I’m moving real people across a real battlefield to take the other players out. I do like chess, for the first few minutes of a game, so once I realized how like chess America’s Army was, I thought it was fun. Then I got killed again; the gunshot sound made me jump every time I got killed (I should remember to turn the volume down). But after death, I can watch the battle unfold from my teammate’s camera. That’s not very real, but I’d generally prefer to watch anyway.
I noticed during the bridge game that the player who stayed out in the bushes lasted the longest while those of us who attempted to cross the bridge were picked off one by one. On that mission, I thought that patience was the most important thing. When we did the border map, the key was in sticking together more than patience. The different requirements of each simulation were interesting, so I asked a friend who was in the army for his input on the game and wound up discussing mission tactics.
For the border map, the assault team needed to stay together in order to clear each area before moving on to another area. We had a familiarity with the map so each player knew approximately where to go.
In a real situation, the assault team moves like a train: each man with a hand on the shoulder in front and each man assigned to look in a certain direction such as first in looks forward, second looks left, third looks behind the door, fourth looks right, etc. Each car on the train cannot move except as part of the whole: so, too, with soldiers or cops when they move in on their target. Train cars do not separate and then hook up later so no member of the team disconnects from the train to move alone. In the game, we couldn’t literally hold on to one another, but we could move in groups. In real situations, the assault team would also have a map of the house to clear so they could coordinate a cluster team at different entry points so the enemy has no time to escape: one team in the front door, one in the back, and both enter at the same time. During the in class simulations, when I was on the assault team, we didn’t move as one, and failed to capture our objective. The key would have been to stick together to succeed for the assault team. Teamwork and communication are the most important skills to master in the simulations provided by the game, as in the real world. If one team member does not follow orders, he jeopardizes the entire team.
Defense, however, is different. When my team defended the objective, we tended to hole up in the building where it was located. In the game, there is no real danger except that posed by the assault team, but in a real situation, the defense should not be in the same house because the enemy may decide that the information is less important than just killing everyone by dropping a bomb and hope to salvage something of value later. I hadn’t even considered that option, so that part of the game failed somewhat to appear realistic, but it would still behoove the defensive team to spread out somewhat and cover the entry points from another building as well as from inside the objective building. Communication is very important as I learned when I was covering an entry point from across the street and got killed by a teammate: gotta let your team know where you are at all times! Our defensive plans didn’t work as well as the other team’s because they frequently captured the objective, so holing up in the one building did not turn out to be the best approach, which is true to the real world situations, if for different reasons.
The bridge crossing, however, did not work well when the assault team stayed close. I noticed that the player who stayed in the woods lived the longest. We didn’t capture the objective (to cross the bridge) but he lived, which is more than the rest of us. I asked why sticking together didn’t work with the bridge and learned that in Vietnam, the plan was not for each man to move as part of one train but to spread out. The idea was that if one man was killed, the others were far enough apart to survive long enough to counter strike. The bridge crossing called for those tactics because a cluster of soldiers moving through a narrow space are easy to pick off in rapid succession: the close quarters do not require the enemy to shift much between targets. A spread out assault team gives each player the opportunity to cover his teammates and the opportunity to run when under fire.
I didn’t play defense on the bridge during any of the simulations but I understand that the defense should stay closer together, have more than one line of defense. Not as close together as the assault team in the border map, but spread out more than the border map defense: small clusters, so players can cover one another but also pick out targets without fear of injuring teammates.
Chess requires strategies by one player for all the men on the board. America’s Army requires strategies by one team leader for all players. Situations in the real army require strategies by one leader for all players and players who do not follow the plan die. In the game, it is the same. During one simulation, I was field promoted to the leader. I am not a strategist, so if that had happened during a real situation, a lot of people would have died. So I inquired about field promotions in the real army as well. A field promotion typically goes to the most experienced team member, the one who has been there the longest. One can assume that the soldier who has been in the battle for the longest time should know a lot about the situation, the terrain, and the other soldiers who will be under him. He should be the soldier with the most experience and the ability to delegate his soldiers to tasks appropriate to their particular skills. What happens, then, if the longest surviving member of the team is the medic? Or even the cook? Can they be promoted to field leader even though their combat experience doesn’t equal that of other team members? Well, the phrase “military intelligence” was not coined for nothing. It happens in the real army too, just as sure as the America’s Army player who typically got killed first (me) could be promoted to leader during some simulations.
The game was fun during the in-class simulation, and I understand a little of the planning process…just enough to believe that the simulations on America’s Army are fairly decent representations of real world situations. I prefer the assault teams when I played America’s Army because there was a little more action. The defense teams just had to sit around and wait for assault to make a move. There was no real fear of dying: if I got killed, I’d just watch. I think I’d prefer to be defense if it were real. I’m not sure I could keep it together while moving around if my life were in real danger; it’d be bad enough just sitting in one place, every sense on alert. During the game simulations, I didn’t enjoy defense at all because there was no action until something moved, and then it was over as soon as it began with one of us dead. (Rather anticlimactic for me since it was usually me dead.)
I attempted to play Halo, just to compare, but I died a lot there too so I just watched for a while. Halo wasn’t as realistic but I think if I had to choose, I’d choose Halo simply because it wasn’t real, although I suspect that Halo live requires just as much strategy.