"A player’s score, or 'after action report,' depends on things like leadership, stealth, and honor."
By Trevor Garner
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There’s a new video game coming out that could lead the young techies you know to a military career. At least that’s what the U.S. Army thinks might happen when they rollout, America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier. It’s not the action that makes it unique - the game allows players to personalize the experience by creating a soldier and following the character through an army career. Youth Radio's Trevor Garner tells us what he thinks of this new game. (August 27 on Public Radio International's Weekend America & November 18 on Georgia Public Radio)
I’m at Ft. Benning, Georgia to try out the U.S. Army’s new video game: America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier. This hostile drill sergeant snapped me right into military mode...
DRILL SERGEANT (on tape)
Move! Hey what are you walking for? Get over here, formation, stop moving! What are you smiling for? What are you laughing at? Don’t you ever look at me? You got barrettes to go with that long hair? What do you think this is? This is the army!
TREVOR
Well, not exactly. But, it's as close as someone like me is going to get to being a soldier. Come on, I’m a 19-year-old art major with a passion for music and French romantic poetry. My goal is not entering the Army but testing out their new game.
I play action video games on a regular basis...Halo, Mortal Combat – anything with explosions or violence.
In most action games, like Halo, all you do is cause as much damage and kill as many enemies as possible, using a ridiculous arsenal of weaponry. Oversized machine guns and fragmentation grenades are a must.
America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier is about the experience, not the kill count. The way Rise of a Soldier works, you pick a character and follow him through his career. I start as a simple scout rifleman obeying orders and try to progress to special ops commando guiding an entire force.
A player’s score, or “after action report,” depends on things like leadership, stealth, and honor. Points are earned after a mission based on how well you follow protocol – and these “experience points” can be cashed in for attributes like improving your shooting ability or increasing your awareness.
All characters are customizable, from appearance to background. If I choose to be from Georgia, my soldier will actually speak with a southern accent. But I can’t choose gender, and the game is focused on infantry battle, so no cooks or mechanics either.
Associate Producer Marc Fish gave me a tour of the game.
MARC (on tape)
Okay you can sprint if you want, by holding down the left button. Be careful, enemy spotted. Okay, see him? Now, one of your teammates just went down, now if any of you get to him quick enough, you can revive him and put him back in combat. Otherwise he’ll bleed out.
TREVOR
Rise of a Soldier is different from other popular games where a character can’t magically gain advantage or instantly heal himself—there are no health packs or power ups in this game. When you’re dead, you’re dead. And take it from me, you die really, really fast. Every time I picked up the controller, my digital self was face first in the mud.
MARC (on tape)
As you’re moving your breathing will fluctuate, when your breathing fluctuates, makes it harder to shoot. And you’ll see that in this game.
TREVOR
Actually, I felt it—the hand controls shook whenever I tried to pull the trigger. But the weird thing is, in Rise of a Soldier, even in “hardcore” battle sequences, I saw no blood, no bruises, no guts. Why???
Graphic violence is replaced by other forms of realism. But I don’t want to play a game where guns waver with a character’s tiredness and have a kick back when they’re fired, a game in which it takes one or two bullet hits to incapacitate my character, and a game that requires a good amount of training prior to battle. All that realism frustrated me. But at least I got a chance to take out my aggressions when I put down my controller and picked up a rifle.
To get a taste of combat training, the officers at Ft. Benning took me to a rifle range to fire the actual weapons featured in the game. There was absolutely no comparison. I've never played a video game that shoots sulfur smoke in your face, smears grease on your hands, and blows out your eardrums with deafening explosions. My cheek was pressed against a gun barrel and every time it fired my brain cringed. It was more than the video game led me to expect. I felt dangerous and powerful—less like a couch potato and more like James Bond.
No joy stick can simulate what I got to try next. Paratrooper training. Ziplining from a 34 foot window...
GUY (on tape)
Trevor: I’m all hooked up ready to go.
Guy: Stand in front of the door, chin down.
Trevor: Good to go?
Guy: Whenever you’re ready.
Trevor: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Here I go. Whoa! Yeah!
TREVOR
I felt like Superman flying out of that building—well, if Superman were tied up with harnesses and attached to a cable. That was oodles more fun than getting killed 5 seconds into videogame play. I was enjoying the paratrooper exercises more than the game itself and I was beginning to see what a real soldier would go through. Sort of.
Staff Sergeant Joseph Barry has been in the thick of actual combat.
BARRY (on tape)
There’s no way you can capture that effect unless you’re there first hand, and you experience it. Can the video tell you what feels like to be [this hot] to be thirsty and all that? No.
TREVOR
Major Randy Zeegers, who helped design the game is careful not to describe it as a “recruitment device.” He wants to use the game as a very strategic kind of communications tool…
ZEEGERS (on tape)
To get the word out about how the army works, putting army values in front of potential soldiers. Letting them see what it’s like to be in the military. There’s actually a progression, where you enter the army as an individual, you become part of a team immediately, and that’s how the game is.
TREVOR
But most active duty soldiers at Ft. Benning didn’t need a new fangled digital finger fest to be sold on army life. Like Staff Sergeant Barry.
BARRY (on tape)
I enlisted as soon as I could, right after I graduated high school…family tradition, job training, male ego, being able to shoot guns, blow stuff up, the usual male pleasures you can’t do in the civilian world.
TREVOR
To be honest, I’ve never considered leaving the civilian world. And there’s nothing about America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier that makes me change my mind. As far as video games, I think I’ll trade in their so-called realism to explode some zombie heads.
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