What is a "compelling experience"? Reconceptualizing what counts as realism in the U.S. armed forces' simulations, exercises, games and instructional technologies

Ghamari-Tabrizi Sharon M, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines the meaning of ?compelling experiences? in connection with several military training simulations as variously understood by the simulation makers, the entertainment industry, and military professionals. Under a previous NSF grant, the PI completed thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork at several production facilities in the US where the Army has collaborated with entertainment industry professionals in producing video games, narrative and interactive films, and immersive virtual reality environments for training soldiers deploying to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The current grant will underwrite return trips to original field sites for follow-up interviews and document collection, as well as funds for two short trips to consult with members of the Army test and evaluation community, some of whom are skeptical of the entertainment industry's involvement in defense training technology. The primary reason for the follow-up research is that the research question has shifted from inquiring into the meaning of a simulation's fidelity for its makers to its compellingness, and that the focal point of the research has shifted away from multiple settings of simulation production to alternations in the cultural foreground and background. The new questions will explore the emotional and cognitive cues that constitute the compellingness of a simulation. The new set of questions will include the following: What are the emotional cues you are trying to create in your project? How do you know if you have succeeded in triggering a response? What are the sensory prompts that you have added to intensify the emotional response of the user? How did you originally translate the training objectives laid out in the project requirements document into a narrative? How does the fully-fleshed out story map back onto the training objectives? How did you fix the emotional cues to narrative events? How do you translate the cognitive demands of the training objectives into prompts and triggers for the right behavior and emotion in the user? How are you testing the compellingness of your simulation? How do you know whether you have achieved it? The Department of Defense's entertainment-based training technologies have fused the once separate domains of work and play. Whereas the original research examined how defense simulation makers strive to make the simulated environment look like the real world, the current research will look at how the modernization of training and warfighting make the real world look like the simulated world of entertainment. The research will examine how the simulation developers believe that learning, thinking and deciding, training to operate machines in small groups, training to communicate to crewmates near and far, can take place within the evocative space of a story world. It will also explore whether the story worlds that confront them in public culture turn out to be the actual means with which they grasp their own lives.