The U.S. military using real-time satellite data to practice prior to engaging the enemy? A training system that depicts Ground Zero with 3-D, true-to-life landscapes, accurate topography, local vegetation, variable weather conditions, and advancing time? If it sounds like something out of a video game, if it seems as hi-tech as a scene from "Star Wars," that's not too far off. This kind of technology could soon find itself a part of DARWARS, a program being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that makes good use of gaming technology to assist the U.S. Armed Forces in combat.

Should the satellite technology be used in DARWARS -- a nickname for DARPA's Training Superiority Program -- it will be the same technology gamers can currently find in the massive multiplayer role-playing game "Dark And Light" by NP Cube. Cambridge, Mass.-based BNN Technologies – the military subcontractor that is DARWARS' primary architecture developer – plans to make that decision sometime this month.

"Someone from the Army was at the [video games industry's] E3 trade show in May, saw the VWorldTerrain technology used in 'Dark And Light,' and invited the VWorld people to a games showcase hosted on June 30 in Washington where there were many large military contractors," explains Bruce Roberts, a division scientist at BBN. "It is absolutely correct to say that there is a policy of investigating gaming technologies to be used in military systems. That's why we go to E3, to the annual Game Developers Conference, to the Serious Games Summit, and to the games showcase. And that's where we first saw the VWorldTerrain technology, which is now under consideration."

At DARPA – the central research and development organization of the Defense Department – there is an effort underway to move training closer to when it needs to be used so it won't be forgotten, according to Dr. Ralph Chatham, program manager for training superiority and the man behind DARWARS.

"Games aren't training," he explains, "but games are engaging, even compelling, and they make people want to train. Also, the games have built-in ways of giving feedback, a key element of training which tells trainees how they've done and where they need help."

At least two of the many segments of DARWARS involve modifications of popular first-person shooters. The first is a tactical language tutor built on Epic Games' "Unreal Tournament" game engine and designed to teach foreign language, gestures, and culture. In the trainer, a digitized character might speak to the trainee in Arabic who responds but is then corrected by the character because perhaps he didn't roll his R's correctly. In a second portion of the same program, the trainee needs to respond to a dangerous situation by talking his way out of it and not shooting. If he is confused and doesn't know the proper words, he is looped back to the tactical language tutor.

"The object is to put into the brain that's behind every trigger finger a little bit of knowledge of the country in which the trainee is engaged," says Dr. Chatham. "We are hoping that by December, anyone heading to Iraq will be able to take this CD, plug it into their desktop or laptop, and whenever they get a chance, they can access about 80 hours of language training."

Similarly, DARPA has created a multiplayer convoy ambush trainer using Codemasters' "Operation Flashpoint," in which a squad of soldiers driving vehicles are ambushed, the attackers being another squad of soldiers in the next room. The program provides not only training but also competition, which is what has made it so popular since it was sent to Iraq last month.

"It allows people to make mistakes without losing their own blood," says Dr. Chatham."

At Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor's applied advanced research laboratory isn't involved in DARWARS, but it is keeping a watchful eye on game developers and their technologies because it finds they can solve several of the military's training needs.

"What is attractive to the DOD about the game developers – especially those who build multiplayer games -- is that they've found a way to have many, many players interacting in a common world environment. They've built large systems with a lot of complexity that many people can interact with and that people enjoy interacting with, meaning that there's an entertainment value to it," says John Welsh, manager of complex systems at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories.

But taking a game and turning it into a training system is no trivial matter, which is one reason why none of the training systems fall into the commercial game industry category of "massive multiplayer game" where hundreds of thousands of gamers play at once.

"While one principal theme of DARWARS is to scale up training," says BBN's Roberts, "there are some serious issues involved when you start scaling up the numbers of trainees involved. It's important for these systems not to give everyone the same experience, since not everyone has the same objectives. That's why I jokingly call this Modestly Massive Multiplayer -- we're not going to be able to go over a few hundred people engaged in a collective activity."

And so it's not just a matter of building a scenario and figuring out how to shoehorn everyone into the game. Each trainee must get the training they need without becoming merely a prop for others who are getting the proper training.

In addition, the training system needs to be able to track the trainee's growing competency as well as deliver the tools for doing an after-action review.

"On the plus side," says Roberts, "the receptiveness to such systems by the soldiers is very hot. We're talking about a generation that's now in their late teens and '20s and early '30s that grew up around gaming and so they are very comfortable with it. They are playing games for diversion and they are just as happy to play games and learn something from them."

Incentivizing game developers to license their technologies or to involve themselves in military projects has been a challenge for the DOD.

"The reality here is that the government isn't spending a lot of money on these contracts," says Roberts, "And so there's not a lot of profit to be made – perhaps 8 to 12% profit -- which isn't the kind of return on investment that a typical game developer would be looking for."

Instead, commercial game developers are often allowed to retain the rights to commercial versions of the work they do for the military. In effect, the government is paying for the developers' research and development which can be applied to future games.

Meanwhile, BBN has put together an advisory board of top executives of game publishers and developers with good track records of being able to produce successful games.

"For us, it's important to become much more aligned with or appreciative of the strengths and weakness of the game development community," says Roberts, "and to learn more about how that community thinks about business if we are going to have a successful relationship with them. This is why we're reaching out to both developers and publishers to make sure we're getting good advice." He wouldn't name any of the six to eight executives because no formal relationship has yet been established.

DARPA, too, is reaching out to the gaming community, and developers who believe they have something to offer are encouraged to e-mail Dr. Chatham – at rchatham@darpa.mil.

"We need to be cautious, use games when we can, and extract the value out of the massive investment that the gaming community has made," says Dr. Chatham. "We also need to fight the whole idea of games sounding frivolous to the generations that didn't grow up with them."

Paul "The Game Master" Hyman was the editor-in-chief of CMP Media's GamePower. He's covered the games industry for over a dozen years. His columns for The Reporter run exclusively on the Web site.