"The discussion of video games inside the Beltway is shallow and two-dimensional," Rejeski says, noting the military as an exception. "It's either about violence and its effect on kids, which is something worth talking about, or it's about intellectual property, which is again valid. But what is the educational value of games?"
The value, of course, is a subjective matter.
The U.S. military has been developing games like Full Spectrum Warrior, which Army technology officer Michael Macedonia describes as "first-person thinker games," not first-person shooter games.
(University Of Southern California)
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Craig Anderson, chairman of the psychology department at Iowa State University, has written more than 20 articles on video games since 1986, and has concluded, after years of research, that "playing a lot of violent video games is related to having more aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors." Still, he adds, "video games can be a very good teaching tool, and if the content of a game is educational, then that's what the player can learn."
The military grasped this concept years ago.
The average age of the 510,000 people in the U.S. Army is 20. "They can't remember when there wasn't a PlayStation or a Nintendo. They're immersed in the technology," said Michael Macedonia, chief technology officer for the U.S. Army's Orlando-based Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation. There, the motto is "All but war is simulation."
Macedonia's brother, Christian, is in charge of a clinical staff of 180 at a field hospital at Abu Ghraib prison. Before volunteering in Iraq, he was an OB-GYN in Bethesda for the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, where he directed students through medical simulations, from physical exams to life support.
In one of their first phone conversations after Christian Macedonia landed in Iraq, he told older brother Michael that he missed his "simulation labs."
"The great thing about living in a gaming world is you can do things that happen only once in a lifetime or once a year and do them 20 times a day," says Christian, 41, in a phone call from Iraq. His family lives in Bethesda. (Christian calls his 12-year-old son, Aaron, "the Buddha of gaming.")
The medics and soldiers in Baghdad, "or at least on this end of the Sunni Triangle," he says, "love their video games," especially the John Madden NFL games and Halo.
In the past three years, the U.S. military, with increasing popularity, has capitalized on simulation, developing games like Full Spectrum Warrior and America's Army to train soldiers.
These aren't first-person shooter games, says Michael Macedonia, but "first-person thinker games," capturing the subtleties of situations.
"A 19-year-old private has to master a wide range of skills," he said. "He's a negotiator, a Third World economist, a diplomat."
Further, a commercial version of Full Spectrum Warrior -- the brainchild of the Institute for Creative Technologies, an army think tank in Marina del Rey, Calif. -- is now available for Xboxes and PCs, while America's Army, with 4 million registered users online, has been downloaded more than 16 million times since July 2002 and has gone through 15 upgrades -- so far.
Now people like Paul Wessell, developer of Glucoboy, are hoping to model that kind of success -- if not necessarily in such large numbers, then certainly in its efficacy.
Wessell's son, Luke, was diagnosed with diabetes at age 3. He clung to his GameBoy when he was 7 years old and hid (if not intentionally lost) his blood glucose meter.
So Wessell, with his background in automation technology, founded Guidance Interactive Healthcare four years ago and invented Glucoboy for his son. The device, a quintessential serious game, creates an incentive for kids to play with their hand-helds after scoring well on their blood tests. It's still in the last stages of development, said Wessell.
Luke is now 16. By spring, his father said, he hopes his son will be able to play Nintendo as a reward for scoring well on his blood test.
