First-person no-shooter By Brian Robinson Special to Defense Systems Sandia Labs develops a video game to teach ‘nonkinetic’ interaction skills Soldiers are trained to fight and use weapons. But on the modern battlefield, in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, knowing how to speak and negotiate with people — such as tribal leaders — could be just as important.
That’s the focus of a new training video game developed for the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by Sandia National Laboratories and BBN Technologies. Named DARWARS Ambush
NK! (for nonkinetic), 20,000 warfighters a year could eventually use it to hone their interpersonal skills and improve cross-cultural
awareness.
DARWARS is a DARPA-funded program
that provides a Web-based infrastructure that
can be used to deliver training packages to
military forces worldwide.
Ambush NK! is a variant of a training game
developed by BBN that focuses on the physical
things that can go wrong, such as an improvised
explosive device detonating or a convoy
being ambushed.
Sandia’s major addition to the program was
a peer/expert evaluation element that enables
warfighters to be the principal in-game
observers and assessors and allows for the
game’s participants to get real-time feedback
on how they performed and what errors they made.
“The goal is to make soldiers better thinkers and communicators
under stress,” said Elaine Raybourn, a Sandia scientist and the project’s lead. “When things go wrong, troops have to learn to shift how they think in environments that are potentially dangerous.”
The new video game is conceptually similar to one that
Raybourn developed several years ago for Army Special Forces
and is used to train soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C. DARPA asked her
to develop the new game once it became aware of the special
forces training tool.
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