Military men love war games. Now simulated swords are being hammered into profitable ploughshares, reports Mike Holderness

War is virtually hell

You are sat at a personal computer, guiding a missile towards a tank with a joystick. You hit it, and it explodes satifyingly. Question: who are you and what are you doing?

You could be playing a computer game. You could be a soldier in training. You could be both at once, using a great deal of the same software that recreational gamers use... or exactly the same.

Last week, the US Marines announced that they're using the computer game Doom in training. Doom is a multi-player shoot-'em- up game which can be played over a wire connecting your computer with the next nerd's, over an office network with someone in Accounts, or over the internet. Doom players have built and distributed at least 1000 "scenarios" for the game.

As the "Official Frequently Asked Questions" list puts it: "In Doom, you're a space marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action... id Software fully expects to be the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world." And it couldn't have asked for better promotion than endorsement by the US Marines.

The virtual worlds of computer games on the one hand, and of military and industrial training simulators on the other, are merging rapidly.

Alnost all the human traffic at present is in the other direction: people who've worked on military/industrial simulation browsing the richer pastures of game design. The games market is commonly reckoned to be $billion 14 a year worldwide, though it's hard to be precise when the two biggest players, Nintendo and Sega, are locked in bitter and secretive competition. It's even harder to estimate the size of the market for industrial-strength simulation, but it's likely to be about a third of that. And, barring the Second Cold War, it's unlikely to increase.

Mark Hurry first got into computer graphics through working on military map-making. "That's where I got into computer graphics. I'm not enthralled by computers, but the good thing about working on graphics is that you get more of a sense of achievement seeing a nice picture that you've made than from, say a payroll program." He isn't allowed to say what he did next, but he later left the military to work for a company which was trying to produce low-cost simulation equipment - at the time when "low- cost" meant £100,000. The other reason for the convergence, of course, is that a £2000 desktop computer could now achieve the same performance.

This week, Mark's Digital Workshop company in Enfield is finishing its part of the beta test version of "Back To Baghdad". In the words of the Web page of producers Military Simulations Inc.: "You are going Back To Baghdad(tm) to finish the war that George Bush prematurely stopped. You're the flight leader of an F-16C Block 50 with all the armament needed to get the job done."

Digital Workshop is writing the game-playing and visual simulation part of the program, including ground imagery bought from the French SPOT satellite. The company which is writing the parts of the program which simulate the behaviour of the F-16 plane, FACC, has worked on simulators for the US Navy and Air Force. More good promotion for a game clearly marketed at US military-hardware enthusiasts.

Meanwhile, Mark says, Sega is co-operating with US defence contractor Lockheed-Martin, and Nintendo with Silicon Graphics.

As he says, "the lucrative military 'cost-plus' projects are very hard to come by these days. Anyway, military contracts "tend to take between two and three years from the time you start talking to the time you get some work out of it, where the entertainment industry will move now if you come up with a good idea."

Joseph Steel "had a keen interest in computer graphics since I was at school." One of his lecturers at university was consulting on virtual rain for a company producing ships' bridge simulators. The suggestion of a job there "seemed like a way to work on computer graphics and get paid for it". "One of the nice things about it," to Joseph, "is that it's very demanding. In computer animation like Toy Story you can take hours to draw one "frame" - but in simulation you need to put out 25 every second."

Now, Joseph is working for Datapath on a graphics "engine" which games designers like Mark can use for many different purposes. One of the differences he sees between his old job and this is that in traditional simulation, each project tended to re-invent these basic picture-drawing parts of the program from scratch. Now, he has to reconcile the demands of users whose games may be simulating racing cars, planes - or, yes, a wire-guided missile, for training soldiers.

Mark, on the other hand, sees the difference between the two environments as that between "flair" in games programmers and (long pause) "structured" work for clients bearing long specification documents.

"Flair" can be a problem, if for example it means that the working of a computer program is completely incomprehensible to anyone but the programmer. A manager at a British producer of industrial training simulators, who prefers not to be named, has hired dozens of programmers "with rounded backgrounds and university qualifications," but none who have been in the games market - they "tend not to have formal qualifications, and they tend to have been hackers at home..."

Is it the predilections of those schoolboy programmers which explains the prevalence of military scenarios in games? And does the migration of programmers from military projects to games help to reinforce it?

Not entirely. Some of the reason is purely technical. Asked whether he can see a future merger of simulation with movies, Mark starts to tick off horrifying design problems. "Say you have an interactive movie and you give people a choice of three doors to go through. The first thing I'm going to want to do is go back the way I came, to see what happens. Will the system cope with that?" The relatively restricted repertoire of choices facing a player or a pilot makes the game or simulation program feasible. "In a sense, we have it easy - compared to the absolute freedom which people would demand from an interactive movie."

And not everyone who leaves the military-industrial complex goes into shoot-em-up games. It's a small world. Gordon Selley, who once worked with Mark, is now working on the TechnoSphere computer-art project (OnLine June 1995), simulating the evolution of creatures designed by internet surfers.

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