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America's Army

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This article is about the computer game America's Army. For the Army of the United States, see United States Army.

America's Army
Screenshot from Americas Army
Developer: The MOVES Institute (U.S. Army)
Publisher: U.S. Army
Engine: Unreal engine
Release date: July 4, 2002
Genre: First-person shooter
Game modes: Multiplayer,

Training (Single player)

ESRB rating: Teen (T)
Platform: PC (Windows, Linux), Mac OS

America's Army is a multiplayer first-person shooter computer game released free of charge by the U.S. Army, to aid recruiting and public relations. America's Army was developed by the MOVES Institute(Modeling, Virtual Environment and Simulation Institute) at the 'Naval Postgraduate School' and is based on the Unreal engine.

Fundamentally a playable slice of propaganda, the U.S. Army considers the game as a "cost-effective recruitment tool". The goal of America's Army, as spelled out in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, is to penetrate youth culture and get the Army into a young person's "consideration set," as Timothy Maude, the Army's deputy chief of personnel, put it. This "battle for young thumbs and minds" by itself has caused worldwide attention, indignation and ethical debates.

America's Army has over 4.2 million registered player accounts and has had up to 4859 players playing online simultaneously since 2002.

The game can be found as a free download on the Internet or at recruiting centers around the United States. America's Army is the first well-known overt use of computer gaming for political aims. Some debate has sparked surrounding the fact that the game is paid for entirely by U.S. tax dollars. According to a poll by "I for I Research", 30% of young people who had a positive view of the military said that they had developed that view by playing the game. One payoff is showing up at the military academy at West Point where 19 percent of 2003's freshman class said they had played the game. The "aggressive, innovative experiments" called for by Congress seem to be doing their job; enlistment quotas have now been met for two years straight and are on track for 2002.

America's Army typically falls into the subgrenre of tactical shooter and is often compared to other tactical shooters such as Rainbow Six where the focus is on realism, as opposed to unrealistic "arcade"-style gameplay. It is also in many ways comparable to the popular online game, Counterstrike.

The game currently features 26 multiplayer maps in various locations, from snow-covered mountains to middle-eastern desert ruins, as well as 14 single player training maps whose completion allows the player added benefits in game (such as the ability to play online or to become medic, special forces unit or sniper). Maps vary in size, objectives, and weaponry available to players.

History

After the number of recruitment numbers hit their lowest point in thirty years in 1999, U.S. Congress decided to carry out "aggressive, innovative experiments" with regard to the number of recruitments. The U.S. Department of Defense raised its spending for recruitment to more than $2.2 billion, which paid for not only the game, but a title sponsorship of a team taking part in NASCAR races. Target groups for recruitment are between 17 and 24-year-old males. The average age of a US soldier is just 20.

In 1999, Colonel E. Casey Wardynski, who later became project manager of America's Army, exhibited to the Staff for Personnel as well as the Secretary of the Army for Military Manpower of the U.S. Army the idea of an online computer game controlled by and based on the United States Army.

On July 4, 2002, the first version of America's Army, named Recon, was released and offered for free and for download and became, also because of a multitude of (U.S. Army sponsored) servers, in a little while one of the most often played online-first-person-shooters.

On November 6, 2003, version 2.0.0. America's Army: Special Forces was published. Integrated was a new U.S. Army unit, the Special Forces. This version, progressive in comparision to the first one, underscored by the permanent financial support of servers, shows how much personnel and money the U.S. Army invests in the game. The Army is spending $3 million a year to develop future versions of the game and $1.5 million annually to support it. Meanwhile the developing studios work on version 2.3 Q-Course and 2.4 Overmatch which should include modern combat tanks.

Versions

File:America's Army2.jpg
Promotional graphic

The most recent update of the game, 2.2.1 America's Army: Special Forces (Vanguard) is available for Microsoft Windows and is being ported to Linux and Mac OS X.

  • Version 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 - America's Army: Recon — (released July 4, 2002)
  • Version 1.2.0 - America's Army
  • Version 1.2.1 to 1.9.0 - America's Army: Operations
  • Version 2.0.0 - America's Army: Special Forces
  • Version 2.1.0 - America's Army: Special Forces (Downrange) — (released June 1, 2004)
  • Version 2.2.0 - America's Army: Special Forces (Vanguard) — (released October 19, 2004)
    • Version 2.2.1 - America's Army: Special Forces (Vanguard) — (released November 18, 2004)
  • Version 2.3.0 - America's Army: Special Forces (Q-Course) — (release date: 2004 to 2005)
  • Version 2.4.0 - America's Army: Special Forces (Overmatch) — (release date: Spring 2005)


Propaganda

America's Army is a figurative and written type of message presentation, aimed at serving US recruitment as well as giving a positive impression of the US Army in general. Although America's Army's message also conveys true information and claims to represent the real army, it is biased, fails to paint a complete and balanced picture and hides negative aspects in order to mislead and advance their cause.

While most call it "propaganda", some people prefer the word 'advertisement' because in English the word 'propaganda' often carries a strong negative connotation. However, being not about the promotion of a commercial product but about political and nationalist, America's Army falls fundamentally into the definition of propaganda. A standing army is of high political importance as well as the national and international support of it.

Realism

Unlike many other games, the developers have focused intensely on realism.

Two meters affect your ability to aim, jump, and recover after exertion. These two meters are your CEM (Combat effective meter) and the Stamina bar. The CEM is dependent on your Stamina bar and affects your accuracy, while the Stamina bar affects how long you can run, how high you can jump and so forth. Your chance of hitting a target is diminished when standing, and is improved by crouching or lying prone; this information is relayed to the players via the CEM (the higher the CEM the more accurate it is). When walking, accuracy is greatly diminished. This sort of realism discourages common complaints like "bunnyhopping" which are found in other games, such as Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament'.

Player damage is mapped based on the part of the body hit and type of weapon used. Damage also causes bleeding, which causes a player's health to deteriorate over time. It is possible, if the wound is not treated by a medic, for a soldier to bleed to death. Typically one shot to the head, or a few to the body, causes death, whereas, a player could possibly sustain several shots to a limb. Wounds affect running speed, accuracy, and general in-game effectiveness.

Hit detection is particularly precise, with the developers claiming it's possible to miss with a shot passing through the gaps in a target's fingers. It's certainly true that more careful targeting is more necessary than in the previous generation of games.

However, unlike most games out today like Doom 3 and Counter-Strike, and to keep its "Teen" rating, this game has a different view on being shot. Instead of toting the "realism" of blood all over the place, the game demonstrates wounds as only being light puffs of red. With the arrival of v 2.1, Rag-doll physics were added to death animations, creating more realistic dying scenes, and allowing dead bodies to more readily interact with the environment, for example allowing a body to roll down a staircase, lean over a desk, or fall off a hill.

Players may select from several "classes" including squad leader, rifleman, automatic rifleman, grenadier, and sniper. A few players from each team may also be "medics," able to stop the bleeding caused by wounds received by their teammates.

In the SF version of the game, where only Special Forces qualified players may play, after completing the difficult training, players are allowed to use the M4A1 SOPMOD, a version of the rifle that can be modified for the mission. Examples of modifications are varying scopes and undermounted objects like a bipod, a grenade launcher, and a flare launcher. Those players who have not qualified as SF or who cannot select a spot are allowed to hold positions for the AK-74 version, called an AKS-74U, the RPK, a squad automatic weapon, or the RPG-7, as Indigenous Forces, representing locals helping out the Army in a mission.

Hand grenades in the game can kill easily, and can be "cooked", so the enemy has less time to run. Both the initial explosion and resulting shrapnel may kill or injure the player. Smoke grenades are also available for concealment. Some classes have the flashbang available to them as well. Flashbangs can cause virtual blindness (caused by showing a black screen for a length of time varying by proximity to the explosion simulating the real life temporary blackout caused), and by temporary deafness (simulated by playing a ringing sound instead of the audio normally heard, such as footsteps or gunshots). A grenade issued only in SF missions is the thermite grenade. It is used to destroy vehicles and other objects, and consists of a medium explosion accompanied with a bout of flame where the grenade has exploded, causing damage to anyone who may walk through it.

Accounts

To complete training and thus play online, players are obligated to create and maintain accounts. These accounts store username, password, e-mail, experience points, training results, group (special groups for members of the army), time of creation and last update: visible; user id, last username, time of username change, last domain and ip used, pb ban, ... : hidden;

The player is able to gain and lose experience points while playing on "official" and "leased" servers.As the name already implies, these points equal those used in role-playing games (RPGs) without affecting the player's strength but restricting access to certain servers (by setting a min and max "honor") and giving a competitive edge at the class selection. The experience points are converted into a smaller unit called "Honor" which is very similar to "Level" in RPGs. This "Honor" is valuable in the game for the reasons mentioned above and therefore makes the accounts valuable.

For a long period of time, players have been reported that their account were "stolen", which can be done by renaming or changing the account's password. Paranoia among players is spread through warning messages of ways for "account theft" and reports of loss. Ironically, the trigger for "account theft" was a warning message on the official website that warned filesharing users of sharing the file containing the password. The only chance for the account's retrieval is to make use of the support page within the 24h since the renaming of it.

The developers are partly responsible for the account stealing situation, because they save the username and password unencrypted in a specified file in the gamedirctory as a common CVAR of the Unreal engine and thus permit easy parsing by malware. Furthermore, the developers deny publishing the id of the account which would prevent the account's disappearance. Additional criticism comes from international players claiming the developers give preference to American citizens when accounts are lost. The first person to reach 100 Honor was a foreigner and has never got his account back.


Weaponry

The game features actual real-world weapons, modeled carefully. As in life, each has differing qualities of accuracy, deadliness, recoil, etc.

American Weaponry

OPFOR/IF Weaponry

US/OPFOR Transformation

One of the more interesting technological features of America's Army is the implementation of the OPFOR, which was required to preserve realism for players on both sides, allowing all to play on the side the game promotes while avoiding the politically thorny issue of asking players to kill American soldiers.

Each player sees himself as an American soldier, carrying American munitions, such as an M16, within a team of American Soldiers. He sees his opponents as non-uniformed rabble carrying Eastern-Bloc weapons, such as AK-47s. His team members radio or shout audible messages in English, yet he hears the opposition speaking in an unknown tongue (a made-up language christened OpForeign). However, should he swap sides, he finds that they too see themselves as Americans, and his old colleagues are now the ragged foreigners.

Where this becomes confusing to many players is the realisation that when they pick up an enemy weapon, it behaves differently to its US counterpart. An AK-47 removed from a fallen opponent is fully automatic, more powerful, but less accurate than his M16. Yet when his opponent possessed it, to him it was an M16. The key is that each weapon behaves as the owner sees it, with an invisible transformation taking place as it's picked up. Players paying great attention occasionally notice that weapons in enemy hands behave "wrongly", but the effect is subtle.

In recent releases this has carried through to other objects, with the US Stryker Armoured Personnel Carrier appearing to be a Russian BTR-80 if on the other side.

Cheating

While cheating has become much more prevalent, PunkBuster, the anticheat software incorporated by America's Army and developed by Even Balance Inc., tries to find and banish cheating players from the game. As a result, some people have been unable to play due to "Punkbuster"-updates. These bannings are done through GUID banning or hardware banning, meaning the hardware would perhaps have to be replaced to play the game again.

Clans and competition

Many America's Army players are members of clans. These groups of online gamers, found in many other games, join together to compete against other clans, or for simple fellowship. Hundreds of these clans exist in this game and most of them aren't organized. In most cases those players add the initials of their clan (sometimes called "clan tag" by players) in their nickname since it is the only way to be identified. Most clans have their own website ("clan page") but they usually don't offer anything interesting for surfers to visit them. Some clans even pay a lot of money (usually by sharing the costs) for a "leased server" in order to play games there and become popular.

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