The US Army has developed a new center in PA called the Army Experience Center which uses interactive entertainment to provide to visitors a “unique insight into the life of a soldier”, thus modernizing their recruiting techniques. Between the large interactive simulators where you can have four player teams go on a Humvee, Apache or Blackhawk mission and a large section of linked PCs and Xboxes, it’s an impressive setup for what they are trying to accomplish.
The last time we posted something related to a game with the US Army (America’s Army by GlobalVR), many people were not happy and I’m sure we’ll see the same thing with this. Apparently the Army will be bringing these centers (which I think are a stretch to call them “arcades”) to different locations across the country in the near future. The only thing I’ll say about it is that no one will be forced visit these centers and if you do, you know what you’ll be getting into. I do find the simulators to be fascinating in the way they are setup and the LAN centers are certainly cool. Otherwise I can’t say that I’m afraid of them siphoning my business away if there was one opened locally.
This is an example of the public-space Out-of-Home interactive entertainment that we report about in the Stinger alongside our amusement and attraction reporting. Why it is important is that the development is part of a trend for ‘retail-tainment’, using amusement style products to promote a selling experience (in this case selling recruitment). The US Army also supports NASCAR and has invested in simulators and as AH stated above arcade games. All this along with their investment in home gaming (remember the blow out at the 2002 E3 show?)
More in this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/us/05army.html?_r=2
People get very negative about the US army, but if you don’t have alot of money it’s a pretty good way of getting yourself a college education. It’s not like it’s THAT risky. They’ve hundreds of thousands of troops over in Afganistan and Iraq and not that many get killed. Certainly very few compared with the opposition!
its your tax money!
I’ve noticed that the NY Times and a few other sources reporting on this are all calling it an arcade. I still think that it’s quite a stretch to call it that, in fact I know of some LAN centers who vehemently deny the moniker of arcade because the state they are in would then tax them heavily. Of course the ones calling this an arcade probably haven’t been in a real one for some time.
It’s not my tax money. In fact I got a job at Shannon airport a few years ago off the back of US army stopovers on the way to Iraq. The place was close to shutting down before this nice lucrative war money came along.
America is pretty culturally backwards with our stupid wars and 450 billion dollar military budget, but it’s not all bad. Look at these recruitment video games the army keeps putting out. They’re totally generic and politically correct. If this was 60 years ago they’d have you killing googly-eyed Arab stereotypes and putting the American flag over their villages, and everyone would applaud. So we have come some ways.
Respawn times in the real army suck`s!!