Weapons of mass distraction

The first-person shooter was invented roughly a year after the Gulf War. In 1992's Wolfenstein 3D, you mowed your way through a Nazi stronghold, gunning down poorly animated waves of blobby fascists. (They yelped, "Mein leiben!" when you shot them.) After that game and Doom, its follow-up, the archetypal antagonist for the FPS was pretty much set: Nazis, aliens or some variation of either. And why not? The Cold War was over -- who was left to fight in the real world?

That there was a larger geopolitical context to 1993's firefight in Mogadishu would remain obscure, even after Bowden's 1999 book -- even after a grandiose fanatic began taking credit for arming the militants who drove the Americans from Somalia. For the rest of the decade, it seemed as if there would be no other real-world enemies worth depicting -- certainly not for killing over and over. Subsequent shooters like Unreal and the Quake series made their aliens bigger, and their weapons more absurdly elephantine. In a decade of peace and excess, this looked like grotesque overcompensation to many, including myself; all that firepower directed at enemies who didn't exist, by bloodthirsty adolescents who'd never see genuine violence in their entire lives.

Half-Life (1998) also featured aliens, but emphasized realistic, contemporary weapons; many gamers counted as their favorite opponents not the spoogey invaders from another dimension, but the artificial-intelligence-driven commandos who fought you with coordinated precision at the beginning of the game. Counterstrike, a fan-made, custom modification (or mod) of Half-Life, ran with the human element, to create the most popular multiplayer game of all time. Millions still gather on thousands of servers worldwide, taking on the role of terrorist, or a special forces operative out to stop them.

Rainbow Six and other Tom Clancy-derived franchises sold well, as did NovaLogic's Delta Force series, but it was probably the growing popularity of Counterstrike that fostered the current audience for tactical shooters. And while African bodies were removed from the rubble of the double strike on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1999, and lifeless sailors were lifted from the thrashed hull of the USS Cole in 2000, Counterstrike went from free mod to retail game, and kept right on drawing fans. But it was the gameplay, not hatred of terrorism, that made it a phenomenon. "Tactical games take the best elements of first-person shooters and add in accuracy and teamwork," says Jason Bergman, news editor at Shacknews.com. "You simply can not do well in a tactical shooter without teamwork."

Teamwork is also key in America's Army, as a strategy and as a value Col. Wardynski wants to impart. Notwithstanding how some misinterpret the Army's new "Army of One" slogan, says Wardynski. "What [that] really means is that the Army is a lot of individuals put together so that it adds up to more than the sum of the parts -- and the game is sort of designed to capture it as well."

Some have dismissed the game as a recruiting gimmick. But the weight that the Army puts on this project might be better gauged by looking at the other duties that fall to the colonel -- while he tracks the download stats for America's Army, for example, Wardynski also handles personnel and funding issues for Afghanistan's very fragile, very real army. This is not the brainchild of a geeky corporal in Pentagon P.R.

As it turns out, the priority placed on America's Army is due to its integral place in "transformation," a new American military doctrine that aims to fully upgrade the Army into an information-driven force. "Mr. Rumsfeld talks about it a lot," says Wardynski. Starting next year, they'll begin to implement helmet-mounted, heads-up displays [HUDS] that will provide the next iteration of infantrymen with real-time data on terrain, enemy concentrations and so on -- "and it looks a lot like a game," according to Wardynski.

While writing a dissertation at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Wardynski would return home to watch his kids play games like Mechwarrior, and he was impressed by their ability to process multiple data streams from several HUDs at once. "The kinds of kids that are very comfortable with lots of information coming at them in visual presentations will feel very comfortable with our transformed Army," he says. This was the seed to America's Army; the funding to create it was approved in the final year of the tech-friendly Clinton administration.

So Wardynski and MOVES were already developing the game when American Airlines Flight 77 went plowing through the northwest side of the Pentagon. Among the 189 killed was Wardynski's boss.

Up to then, the designers were leaning more toward narco-terrorists or drug traffickers as the opposing combatants. "After 9/11 it was pretty clear the United States was at war, and we do have real enemies out there," says Wardynski.

Next Page: "A game is just a game. It's something you play"

• View blog reactions