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Lt. Col. Gary Stephens, product manager for air and ground tactical trainers at Project Executive Office -- Simulation Training and Instrumentation said Thursday that the $50 million has been approved for a "games for training" program starting in 2010.

However, the game is based on 20th-century gaming technology and can accommodate a limited number of players in a relatively small virtual battle space. It can�t interact with the Army�s real world computerized battle command systems and trainers can�t edit terrain or change scenarios during play, he said.

The new game -- dubbed "Game After Ambush" -- will be an off-the-shelf commercial product that comes with tools that will allow the Army to make almost any modification necessaryto terrain, scenarios, missions, etc.

Leslie Duvow, project director for gaming at PEO-STRI, said the Army will have 70 gaming systems in 53 locations in the United States, Germany, Italy and South Korea between February and September 2009.

"Each system will consist of 52 computers with ancillary equipment including steering wheels, headsets and mice," she said.

Soldiers will be able to drive virtual vehicles, fire virtual weapons, pilot virtual unmanned aerial vehicles and do "most anything a soldier does" in a virtual battle space as large as 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers, she said.

The new game will also be able to interact with the Army�s battle command systems that soldiers use in the real world to track equipment, enemy and friendly forces using computerized maps, he said.

The systems will be built to train a single platoon of soldiers at a time, but they could be linked over the Internet to train even more soldiers, he said.

The Joint Multinational Simulation Center is screening
applicants for a computer gamer’s dream job.

Tom Lasch, JMSC’s director of models and simulations, said the organization,
which opened a simulation building packed with hundreds of computer screens at
Grafenwöhr on Friday, is looking for a civilian "first-person simulation
specialist."

Whomever is selected will be charged with testing gaming technology —
computer simulations that the Army uses to train soldiers for combat — and
test-driving gaming technology that the Army is looking to acquire, he said.

The simulations, which include "America’s Army," "Darwars Ambush" and
"Virtual Battle Space 2 (VBS2)," need regular testing because the manufacturers
constantly add patches and extra features that could make the software
malfunction, Lasch said.

In the wake of the intelligence bungles that propelled the United States into the Iraq war, it's no secret that the nation's spies have been working to improve the quality of their analysis. Now the top U.S. military intelligence agency has come up with a new tool for teaching recruits critical thinking skills: videogames.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has just taken delivery of three PC-based games, developed by simulation studio Visual Purple under a $2.6 million contract between the DIA and defense contractor Concurrent Technologies. The goal is to quickly train the next generation of spies to analyze complex issues like Islamic fundamentalism.

Given a choice between a droning classroom lecture or a videogame, the best method for teaching Generation Y was obvious. "It is clear that our new workforce is very comfortable with this approach," says Bruce Bennett, chief of the analysis-training branch at the DIA's Joint Military Intelligence Training Center.

A new vest from TN Games aims to bring more realism to the video-game experience by simulating impacts. In a first-person shooter, for example, the gaming vest, called 3rd Space, mimics the force of enemy fire.

The vest's air compressor controls eight embedded pneumatic cells that produce impacts of various strengths and in various locations on the player's torso, in response to events that occur in a video game.