Alright, before I get started, this topic has to do with videogame companies contracting out to the military as well as to emergency personnel. This means using simulators to train people to kill and to save lives. The former can be addressed in Acid Shampoo's thread, found here. While I am focused on both the applications of killing and saving lives through virtual environments, this thread is not the place to discuss the psychology of it.

Now...

The BBC published an article this week stating that Epic Games; the company that contributed to Batman: Archam City, Mass Effect, and Infinity Blade; will be contracting their Unreal Engine simulation technologies to the federal government. Epic Games also released a statement on their website highlighting the same key details.

According to the articles, more than $10 Million will be invested in the projects they have in mind. Some scenarios will include field training, life on a base and handling enemy attacks. Some scenarios will include medical training, such as anesthesiology and other forms of pain suppression. Some scenarios will be purely for weapons research, seeing just how powerful and accurate a weapon will be during combat. And some scenarios will deal with FBI simulations, such as crime scene forensics.

This brings about some questions:
- For the base training, will tactile stimulation be involved? Will the computer generated AI, for example, control a turret firing weak ammunition, such as blanks or paintballs? To what degree will the AI be accurate and precise? Will the AI be able to differentiate different parts of the human body when it is hit? How will hit detection against the AI be handled to avoid damaging it?
- For medical training, how will the AI gauge the level of anesthesia or pain suppressant? What signs will show that too much or too little is applied? Will the vital signs fluctuate in a pre-programmed arrangement, or a random one? After all, you have to consider that every human is different, and thus will respond to pain suppression in a different way. Medics will need to be trained to handle such scenarios.
- How will weapons training work? Will all of the data entered into the simulation be theoretical, using ideal values? Or will initial range testing be used for that data collection and then fine tuned in simulation?

Perhaps the most pressing question I have is this: How will Epic Games use what is learned through this experiences to change the way civilian videogames are made? Will the US government allow Epic Games to access the AI and simulation data gathered from within the training exercises? Or will only a fraction of the data be usable by the company to prevent abuse by the general public?

And how will Epic Games benefit financially? Ten million is a rather impressive lump sum, and that's merely the beginning. As the project advances several months to years, you can expect more and more revenue to be collected through this agreement. Epic Games may be able to use this to really break ahead of the market, perhaps expanding to even more locations than they already have (currently six across the world). What surprises me is they are privately held, so the general market can't invest in them. Maybe that will change with this. After all, Facebook was privately held for years but it eventually gained enough money to warrant selling stock. So we'll see.

Lastly, how far will simulation training go? Will we someday see it in our classrooms as a supplement within our history courses? Our science courses? Perhaps even our literature courses? I'm interested in seeing just what the possibilities of this technology are, as I sure you too are wondering.

Please feel free to share your comments and concerns here, as well as questions for discussion.