TIL the US Government once released its own video game to inform, educate, and recruit prospective soldiers.
America's Army - Wikipedia
So, I worked on this. I built their in game support system (irc backed!), wrote a bunch of the web auth code, and accidentally once deleted the production user database from the secondary site (whew, disabled and re-replicated from primary).
It was a lot of fun and got me a trip to E3 back when it was the big thing.
It was an interesting concept because no matter what, you would play the american side and fight the terrorists. (you would look like a terrorist to the other team)
They parked a few vehicles outside the E3 convention center:
I recall they lowered guys out of a helicopter on ropes one year, too. It was hilarious to walk around the floor at E3 and see CoD or whatever guys in their fakey-looking booth bro costumes pass real army guys wearing real uniforms passing out enlistment info and ads for America's Army. Why pay booth bros when you can just assign some soldiers you're already paying?
Any idea what those pads they are parked on are made out of?
Holy shit, I was there that year! I remember that!
I just want to say, your work on that game absolutely would've contributed to making my high-school years better. Me and my social group played this game constantly, spent tons of hours playing SF Refinery 😂 From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much!!
It was a legitimately good completely free multiplayer FPS game. I was into it for a while ages ago, and it was quite fun.
I genuinely doubt it actually inspired a remotely meaningful number of people to actually join the army, though.
Probably the opposite. Who wants to do a job where you die the first hour on the job?
lol yeah the learning curve was pretty steep, because for a very long time there were no heal mechanics, so if someone winged you decently without outright killing you, you were gonna have serious trouble contributing to the round.
It was actually pretty good. I remember having to pass an ingame training course to use the medic class. I still vaguely remember how to apply a tourniquet lol
I still vaguely remember how to apply a tourniquet lol
Do blood sweep on individual. On the affect limb place tourniquet high and tight into the groin/armpit as possible. Velcro firmly. Twist stick until you think the stick will break (ignore screams of person you're applying it to). Write the time on the tourniquet so the medics know what to do about it later.
That was such a pain in the ass, 10mins in I finally think to myself "wait, this is supposed to be fun, why am I watching class in a game?" dropped the game and nvr came back
I also remember playing the ingame training but not the actual game. I don't remember intentionally quitting like you did, but I don't think I finished it either.
Yeah the game was shockingly good for what it was
It was extremely popular. I played it a lot. Many players were international because, you know, it was free.
It was great anti-miliarty propaganda. I mean I died several times per hour.
It was extremely popular.
It was free to play. But it didn't hold a candle to Team Fortress, Call of Duty, or even Tribes in terms of overall player count. The project was eventually abandoned when Pentagon officials realized they could just send kick-backs to EA executives in order to inject their propaganda into a more popular franchise.
Now US Army and Navy sponsorship of tournaments is routine, streamers regularly get promoted based on their military affiliations, and native advertising has ramped up substantially.
But it didn’t hold a candle to Team Fortress, Call of Duty, or even Tribes in terms of overall player count.
In terms of player count, no. But mechanics and graphics? They were pretty freaking good.
Although one pretty ridiculous thing was that one would never play as "the enemy." You're always on the side of the US Army, obviously, and the enemies are vaguely mid-eastern people dressed very stereotypically, yelling. But if your friend was on that enemy team, they'd see themselves as a US soldier and you as a somewhat racist terrorist stereotype. And the guns work like that too; you start of with an M16 or whatever your role might be, but when the enemy kills you, they'll pick up an AK with a drum magazine. Weirdly the guns had different mechanics, so which ones was the game using at what times?
Anyways, thought to mention. I played Tactical Ops mostly at that time (having had stopped CS when the annoying 1.6 steam update came), but with one friend we did AA. Always on American servers, playing with like 190 ping. (And yes, if it's a steady ping, you can actually get used to it and hit things. Well even.)
I never played any of those because they're not free
I played this at the same time I played Tribes (renegades always) and this game was a novelty, Tribes was the fun.
Tribes is my all-time favourite shooter. I esp loved Tribes 2.... unpopular opinion maybe but wow was that an amazing game to me.
I was one of those international players, it was pretty good and a nice change when you needed a break from Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, which was very popular around the same time.
I was one of those international players, it was pretty good and a nice change when you needed a break from Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, which was very popular around the same time.
Ahh shit I remember ET. That was my jam.
I recall playing the tutorial. Never went online. Dial up sucked. Interesting tidbit, if you shoot your drill instructor at the range you're dropped into a prison cell at Fort Leavenworth. All you can do from that point is listen to somebody whistling and drag a tin cup across your cell bars.
Didn't expect so much hate for this game... In terms of simulations, in 2002, the original game was light years ahead of its time. They did a lot of things right that it took the more popular mil sims years to get correct. I'd go as far as to argue it is one of the most realistic squad-based tactical shooters of all time.
It being that realistic made it a terrible choice for me.
So I did all of the medical training that had on there, which I did learn stuff from but also found out that I should never actually work in the medical field.
But because it didn't easily identify friend from foe, I kept killing my own team. Not on purpose I was just really bad at identifying friend from foe and if I saw it moved I killed it.
Otherwise it was a solid game. All the issues I had with it were with me.
I’ll suggest that there hasn’t been anything like it. I’ve tried a couple that were supposed to be more realistic mil-sim and not just FPS run-‘n-gun, but they don’t hold a candle to AA.
Painfully realistic. To the point of not really being fun. Which I think was kind of the goal -- they Army was trying to show the kiddies a little bit of what reality was like, while also trying to rope them in.
Closest comparison is probably ARMA 3, IMO
The special forces test was hard.
For the written test. there's parts where you would be shown a helicopter for 100 milliseconds then have to remember the configuration, number of rotors, ordinance... Or you see a tank for a split second and have to correctly identify the barrel measurements and other little details.
The stealth mission was difficult too. I managed to be a medic and a ranger but not special forces.
The special forces test was nuts, was playing on a friend's account at the time but it boiled down to just crawling through the lowest point along the entire path. Literally the entire mission you're in a drainage or small creek just crawling and going stealth. I can't remember if you eventually fight or do anything, I just remember the two hours of crawling on the ground to go undetected.
After I got the SF certification you could play this map called Hospital where you're extracting a VIP while an insurgent team is trying to kill him. So much fucking fun. I loved this game. Yvan eht nioj
That's when I stopped playing. I think I was an hour in before I got spotted and then wasn't going to spend another 2 hours literally crawling.
I absolutely remember playing America’s Army. It took me like six attempts but I finally got it installed lol
There was a guy who saved someone in a car crash and he said he learned what to do medically in the moment from this game.
Nawww it was way harder than that!! If you wanted to play as the medic class in a game online you had to do the offline training. The training made you sit through like a 45 minute long combat life saver class. No shit had to like walk into the classroom and sit near the projector and look down to answer questions lol
If you wanted to do the Special Forces maps (basically night mode maps) you had to pass this skull dragging class where you had to avoid being spotted and slowly move into an area. I remember trying for like 3 days just to pass that friggin class!
Hold the 'm' button on his laptop?!?
I heard on a podcast a long time ago that the Army considered it one of their most successful recruiting tools. Not because it brought in more recruits, but because fewer recruits dropped out, apparently because playing the game led to fewer surprises after joining.
Til
This was legit very popular for a while. It was even common in e-sports.
Oh man, was it version 2.1 or 2.4 that was the best? I think it was the one where urban assault was released. So many hrs playing until 3.0. There was a test to be able to play medic in the game. It taught basic first aid.
I think this one is the one where a player used the first aid knowledge learnt in game to save someone's life irl?
I remember a story making the rounds about that as well, waaay back.
Its not implausible. The medic training was pretty thorough compared basically any other video game ever, and if all you're really trying to do is stop massive bloodloss ASAP, knowing how to dress a wound and apply a tourniquet absolutely can be the difference between dying before the ambulance arrives and not.
Wasn't it a guy responding to a vehicle accident and he credited America's Army for teaching him about triaging patients? I think it stuck in my mind for the egregious click-baity headline.
I played it for a while. It was ok for the time, when there weren't many pseudorealistic tactical FPS games.
People were in an uproar over "indoctrination" by the game. If your child can be convinced to join the army by playing that game... maybe it's for the best.
Ya, idk how this would recruit someone into infantry. I played it for a little bit and it was a getting shot simulator. Idk if I ever even saw someone on the other team.
Every game I play teaches me that I will immediately die in real life if anything bad ever happens.
Every FPS - shot dead immediately. No respawning.
Scary game - heart attack immediately.
Every sword game - maimed horrifically.
Zombie apocalypse - eaten immediately, and I’ll turn into a fat one that explodes later.
Do you remember when people figured out, on certain maps... stand exactly here (in spawn), fire a grenade launcher at this exact pixel in the skybox, and 80% of the enemy team is now dead?
We had those but nade throws in the original call of duty.
Was a good way to end up getting kicked if you did it in the first 10 seconds on some servers.
Played the Hill capture point map a lot (48east) it was a really simple shot from either side once you saw someone do it. But a server full of regulars could kinda police that shit.
Shit, that game was fun to pass the time, but never once did it inspire me to enlist.
To be fair, it was a video game aimed at children to teach them how to be good soldiers during a time when the US was entering a deeply unpopular war under false pretenses.
Around the same time there were all sorts of lawsuits surrounding video games and their effects on children, so maybe it was a double whammy.
Regardless of any claims for or against violent video games, the Army shouldn't be recruiting like that.
Its still around IIRC, been through like 5 versions now. If you're in the military you can use your .mil address and be marked in game as actual military for better or worse lol.
The most surprising part of the whole thing? It was actually a really fuckin solid game. (The original, can't speak for whatever version is out now.)
then they realized pouring money into actual game studios with more cost-effective
And that gamers didn't want actual realism.
Super fuckin dystopian
You never played as the “bad guys”. You and your team on your screen were always American, 100% of the time. The terrorists you were fighting saw a presentation on their own screen that you were the godless terrorists, and they were the heroic Americans. No one was ever the bad guys. Except, some “other” in some distant place. But not you.
We had heated arguments at one place I worked when AA wanted to hire us for some short contract. The one side of the argument was, guys, they literally just want us to set up and configure one web service for them. I don’t think we’re gonna wind up killing anyone from the global south in the course of setting up that server. The other side, which I remember verbatim, came in the form of a heated retort:
“Would you set up a blah blah blah server for the NAZIS?”
To be fair it was called "America's army". Not CoD, not Battlefield.
Lemmy guess, seeming as this is Lemmy, you were calling the US Army Nazis?
I honestly cannot remember whether it was me or the other lefty guy that was comparing the US army to the Nazis. But yes, one of us was.
🎶Yvan eht nioj🎶
I prefer the superliminal messaging, personally.
HEY YOU, JOIN THE NAVY!
Superliminal is why I joined the Navy.
Had big vans parked on the UT Campus lawn paid for with Pentagon money, where you could play the game right next to a real live military recruiter.
I like to think about this while I'm looking at videos of Palestinian student protesters getting maced, tackled, and dragged away by campus security.
AA2 and AA3 were legitimately great games.
Now they just pay Activision to do that on their behalf with CoD.
Played this a lot. My favorite map is bridge.
This game and the OG Planetside both taught me the simple joys of fighting for/on a bridge.
You can have a huge overworld, you can have an intricate map with all the lanes and passageways you want, but, in the end, the (much, much older) children yearn for the bridge.
Yes the map is beautiful but the kill lines here at the bridge are when_the_light_hits_the_hills.pacha
Same.
Something soo satisfying about shooting snipers who thought you should stick the barrel out if the upstairs windows
The training/intro sergeant sounded just like one of my actual sergeants.
The first iteration had a rules of war/ethics type system where as well as K/D ratios etc. it gave you a rank for how well you obeyed the rules of war. I remember I number of articles talking about how abysmally low all the scores were.
The game was such a realistic representation of the US army that players could just war crime to their hearts content with no repercussions.
First match I played after the training I panicked and ended up killing a team mate and ended up at Leavenworth lmao never played again after that.
It had a reporting system. If you reported someone for camping, the vote would be turned against you and if people agreed you were kicked. 😂
And it was a damn good game at the time. I remember getting a free cd from a recruitment center in a strip mall in town
I think I might actually still have it around somewhere. I think mine came in a magazine or something though. I remember never really getting to try it because my computer couldn't run it that well.
It was really good but they found other recruiting methods more effective
I unintentionally TKed people on the bridge map constantly. It was a fun game though.
To be fair that's because so many people never bothered to learn the suppression angles. So they ran right through streams of tracers. Repeatedly. Then blamed the machine gunners for not being riflemen and charging into knife range.
I played the crap out of AA Proving grounds. Was a ton of fun! Had a bunch of shit "join the army" bs in it, which I doubt worked on anyone with a few brain cells, but the game was great.
If someone would just fund one to educate, inform & recruit STEM explorers. Programmers included.
Factorio?
Thanks! Didn't know about that.
I've been thinking (for a while, Pokemon's not new), if designers got people interested in actual biological life forms instead of imaginary piccachu, squirtle etc
...well, Pokémon got millions to learn massive amounts of information about hundreds of imaginary characters. What if they had learned actual instead of imaginary?
LOL. Played that game for years. Did the whole clan thing. It was pretty good fun
Yep, pretty damn messed up. They put out like 3 or 4 of them before I guess enough people complained about the overt propaganda targeting minors
The Air Force once injected an unsolved, 1000-year-old mathematical puzzle written in another language into the game Prometheus, and an unemployed college dropout genius who lived with his mom solved it, got recruited to participate in a highly classified mission to the planet P4X-351 where he, a crew of Air Force officers and personnel, and a few civilian scientists ended up being forced to evacuate due to an impending planet-wide explosion (as well as an aerial assault by a band of space pirates) by jumping through a stable wormhole whose terminus was aboard the starship Destiny - an abandoned scientific vessel launched one million years prior by a species known as The Ancients who had planned to use it to travel to the center of the known universe.
Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada....
Bush's War on Peace was a wild time back in the early days.
Pretty sure I got a copy from the army recruiter at my school. It ran slow as shit on my parents ' janky ass Gateway, so I never got to really play it.
I definitely played this in high school. Never joined the military
A few things about America's Army:
It may (I am 90%, but not 100% sure of this) have been the first PC, online, FPS to feature ragdoll physics for dead players.
It employed a... rather baffling way of doing team conflicts:
You are always on Team America, and the opposing team is always Team Generic Terrorists. (With 80s/90s movie era costumes for the bad guys, dependent on map location)
What this results in is... you have your M4. You are shooting at bad guys with AK74su's. But... from the opposing team's POV, its the same.
So, if you kill someone... you can now pick up an AK74su. Even though from their POV they dropped an M4.
And so on, with rough equivalents as an SVD and an M110, an RPK and an M249.
These 'picked up' weapons would basically morph into having the ballistics of the Eastern Bloc weapon at the point they were picked up.
Very weird, I've never seen another game do that.
The game also had a good number of training courses, many of which were initially bugged as all hell.
I remember the SERE course failing me consistently, showing that I had been detected by guards who are apparently able to see through boulders or 30 feet of a hill (the camera would show you how you were spotted like a 'deathcam' and it was quite obvious it was often total bs).
Also, in certain training missions it was possible to shoot your instructor.
This would result in you being sent to the brig: Log in to your account, and for a week, all you get is a view from inside a prison cell, no game menus or options at all, rofl.
Oh, final thing: I am pretty sure this was the first online PC FPS that modelled that M203 projectiles must travel a certain distance before the explosive charge will detonate, so taking out someone with an M203 round to the face, non explosively, became a way to humiliate people, as you either had to be pretty skilled to do it , or your opponent had to have very poor situational awareness.
Hilarious! I guess adding permadeath to the game would’nt’ve helped with the recruiting mission, but this feels like it’s in the same spirit.
The game had a whole system of ranks and qualifications based off actual Army ranks and skills.
You had to do pretty comprehensive medical training before you could be a field medic, you had to qualify as a marksman to be able to use a DMR, you had to pass the SERE school before I think night time missions and NVGs could be used, had to complete parachute training before levels you'd paradrop into, etc, and these would become available as you reached a certain number of kills or successful missions or what not.
Basically, it had a persistent progression system, and it was quite in depth...
... And if you did things like tons of team killing, or killing the instructor, not only would you end up in the brig... you'd have basically all of your progress reset.
Its about as close as you can get to permadeath in a round based, pvp shooter.
The enemy is dumb, they think we're the enemy but they are the enemy!
Theres a metaphor there somewhere...
Oh wow, it is maybe a first. I remember doing that in Modern Warfare 2 quite a bit, but didn't realize how much this game pre-dates it.
Another fun fact about the game is it has a surprisingly robust audio system built in. I had a clan member who could pinpoint exactly where an enemy was on certain maps (pipeline I think?) just by the sound their footsteps were making and the direction/proximity to his location.
Also, shout-out to all the boys out there that did the precision m203 artillery bombing on bridge! I remember getting good enough to hit each of the individual cover posts. I spent so much time playing this game.
In SOI this was referred to as the fuck zone, because it was 14-34 meters (this is 15 years ago, memory's hazy). Crude joke, but effective mnemonoic device. Was related to the number of rotations for the round.
In my civilian life, handled a case before the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals related to mortar rounds, and his contracted had been terminated because the paint thickness had an effect on the arming distance.