From the September 11 Commission: "In the fall of 1999, training for the attacks began. Hazmi, Mihdhar, Khallad and Abu Bara participated in an elite training course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Afterward, K.S.M. taught three of these operatives basic English words and phrases and showed them how to read a phone book, make travel reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They also used flight simulator computer games..."
Emphasis added. Full text available through the New York Times (registration required). A virtual world implementation could only have made the training more effective.
True, and that's why the military is using There for training, right?
VWs, and games more generally, are pretty good educational devices, which is (I guess) what the Education Arcade is mostly about.
Flight sims in particular are one of the oldest forms of game/instruction cross-over, they have a long history of military financing, and they're very effective.
Imho, the neat thing about flight simulators is that the interface of a plane cockpit can be as alien and counter-intuitive as the comptuer interface. Because you've got mechanical interface IRL + mechanical interface in-game, you can learn a lot about the properties of the interface through the process of play.
(I think I probably am paraphrasing something that Dave Myers said in his Nature of Computer Games book...)
Posted by: greglas | Jun 17, 2004 at 12:18
Just spotted this on VOIP, which seemed tangentially relevant enough to mention:
"Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura Parsky told the Senate Commerce Committee that unregulated VOIP would be a "haven" for terrorists unless the government forces connected providers to build special wiretapping capabilities into their systems."
Posted by: greglas | Jun 17, 2004 at 13:57
greglas>Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura Parsky told the Senate Commerce Committee that unregulated VOIP would be a "haven" for terrorists
I wonder if this will have any influence on British Telecom, who last week announced that the entire phone system for the UK is going to switch to VOIP by 2008...
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 18, 2004 at 09:04
Richard > I wonder if this will have any influence on British Telecom
Yes, it probably does. I think that the phone system forms part of what is called the critical national infrastructure (www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page76.html) which has all kinds of provisions associated with it. Big telco’s will of course open the VoIP systems to the US government, what I guess they will have issues with are people running their own peer to peer VoIP connections using strong encryption.
Dragging this back to games, if an MMO thinks of offering things like TeamSpeak as a service, then they could find the heavy hand of regulation gently holding by the throat.
Posted by: ren | Jun 18, 2004 at 09:15
How would a VW implementation make training more effective?
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Cole | Jun 18, 2004 at 10:06
Actually, no. They were training to operate commercial aircraft, not to dogfight--dogfighting might be better in an MMG, because live opponents are always more chalenging than AI.
However, an MMG has to deal with latency, and quick, seamless response is preferable for a good flight sim.
Since flying a commercial craft is essentially a solo-play game--yes, you have to talk to air traffic controller and avoid other aircraft, but that's easily simulated in a single-player game--a single-player game would offer a superior training experience.
Posted by: Greg | Jun 21, 2004 at 17:08
Ir's my understanding that commercial pilot training simulators are quite effective at simulating and training pilots. Obviously they don't replace practice.
Posted by: Antilochos | Jun 23, 2004 at 18:59
Jeff> How would a VW implementation make training more effective?
Greg> However, an MMG has to deal with latency, and quick, seamless response is preferable for a good flight sim.
I think Ted's idea was not that a VW would do better than flight sim -- just that more immersive/extensive/realistic games might serve as more effective educational instruments in theory. But I'm just guessing what Ted was thinking...
Posted by: greglas | Jun 23, 2004 at 20:21