who hasn't seen one of these games—known as first-person shooters—here's the gist of them. You're placed in a combat zone, armed with a weapon of your choice, and sent out to find and kill other players. Knife them, club them, blow them apart with a shotgun, set them afire, vaporize them with a shoulder-launched missile, drill them through the head with a sniper rifle—the choice is yours. Depending on the game, blood will spray, mist or spout. Sometimes your kills collapse in crumpled heaps, clutching their throats and twitching convincingly. Sometimes they cry in pain with human voices. Their bodies lay there for a while so you can feed off them if necessary, restoring your own health. Then you can grab their weapons and set off to find another victim, assuming you don't get killed first.

It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but among young males it's far and away the most popular genre of computer game. Some psychologists and parents worry that such games are desensitizing a large, impressionable segment of the population to violence and teaching them the wrong things. But that depends on your point of view. If, like the U.S. Army, you need people who can become unflappable killers, there's no better way of finding them. It's why the Army has spent more than $10 million in taxpayer funds developing its very own first-person shooter, and why the Navy, the Air Force and the National Guard are following suit. For anyone who thinks kids aren't learning playing shooter games, read on.

[...]

"I have to laugh when someone says, 'Oh, the people playing these games know it's not real,'" said Dr. Peter Vorberer, a clinical psychologist and head of the University of Southern California's computer game research group. "Of course they think it's real! That's why people play them for hours and hours. They're designed to make you believe it's real. Games are probably the purest example yet of the Internet melding with reality."

[...]

In late 1999, after missing their recruiting goals that year, Army officials got together with the civilian directors of a Navy think tank at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey to discuss ways of luring computer gamers into the military.

Combat gamers not only happened to target the right age for the Army's purposes but, more importantly, possessed exactly the kind of information-processing skills the Army needed: the ability to think quickly under fire.

"Our military information tends to arrive in a flood ... and it'll arrive in a flood under stressful conditions, and there'll be a hell of a lot of noise," said Col. Casey Wardynski, a military economist who came up with the idea for an official Army computer game. "How do you filter that? What are your tools? What is your facility in doing that? What is your level of comfort? How much load can you bear? Kids who are comfortable with that are going to be real comfortable ... with the Army of the future."

From an Army report: "Aptitudes related to information handling and information culture values are seen as vital to the effectiveness of the high-tech, network-centric Army of the future, and young American gamers are seen as especially proficient in these capabilities. More importantly, when young Americans enter the Army, they increasingly will find that key information will be conveyed via computer video displays akin to the graphical interfaces found in games."

With the vast funding of the U.S. government behind them, the Army/Navy team began developing a game that hopefully would turn some of its players into real soldiers. "The overall mission statement ... was to develop a game with appeal similar to the game Counter-Strike," wrote Michael Zyda, the director of the Navy think tank. "We took Counter-Strike as our model, but with heavy emphasis on realism and Army values and training."

An experimental psychologist from the Navy helped tweak the game's sound effects to produce heightened blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate. It was released in digital double surround sound, which few games are. In terms of game play, it was designed as a "tactical" shooter, slower-paced, more deliberate, but with Counter-Strike's demanding squad tactics and communications—a "serious" game for kids who took their war gaming seriously.

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After two years of development, America's Army was released to the public on the first Fourth of July after 9/11. The gaming world gasped and then cheered. Contrary to expectations, the government-made shooter was every bit as good a $50 retail shooter and, in some ways, better. Plus, it was free—downloadable from the Internet at www.americasarmy.com. That, too, was a calculation—one the Army hoped would weed out people who didn't know much about computers. The game and its distribution system were difficult by design, Zyda said.

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There are now more than 4 million registered users, more than half of whom have completed weapons training and gone online to play, making it the fourth most-played online shooter. The Army says there are 500 fan sites on the Web, and recruiters have been busy setting up local tournaments and cultivating an America's Army "community" on the Internet, hoping to replicate the Counter-Strike phenomenon.

[...]

But not everyone saw the game as a good thing. A Miami attorney named Jack Thompson went on ABC News and threatened to seek an injunction, saying it wasn't the government's job to provide kill 'em games to youngsters. He was deluged with angry e-mail and allegedly received death threats.

"The Army and the Defense Department have a very long history of conducting unethical, illegal experiments upon soldiers and civilians," Thompson angrily reminded players in a posting to the official Army Web site. "This 'game' is yet another experiment upon the unsuspecting pawns who play it. You are the latest guinea pigs."

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