Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
I begin, in the time-honored military lecture way, by telling you what I intend to tell you:
Early results with language, convoy operations, and information technology troubleshooting suggest that, at their best, lightweight digital simulations can train superbly. However, the notion of training delivered on personal computers also gives rise, apparently by spontaneous generation, to a horde of ‘games for training’ fanatics whose products ensure that, at the median, such simulations are dreadful. Even the best of breed suffer because training individuals to perform as part of a larger military unit often forces the rest of the team and other echelons, above and below, to become expensive and difficult-to-schedule training devices. Moreover, current military operations require soldiers to spend most of their time doing exactly what they did not join the military to do: deal with very sticky situations involving human and cultural interactions. A successful second training revolution must deal with these new missions. To do so simulations will need ‘people engines’ to control characters in virtual cultural landscapes in the same way ‘physics engines’ control physical simulation objects. A handful of plausibility arguments suggest that this might be doable, but there are few existence proofs. Finally, and always, whatever we create will fail if training is not embedded from the beginning.
THE FIRST TRAINING REVOLUTION DOES NOT SCALE
In Chapter 2, I discussed a revolution in military training.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.