Game Theory

In Northeast Philly, the U.S. Army is waging a war for our hearts and minds.

by Daniel Denvir

Michael T. Regan FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER: Gamers and aspiring soldiers go on mock missions in the Black Hawk helicopter simulator at Franklin Mills Mall.

This past fall, the U.S. Army launched a new campaign in Northeast Philadelphia: It opened a first-of-its-kind gaming and recruitment center in Franklin Mills Mall. Located across from a Dave & Buster's, the $12 million Army Experience Center is itself a kind of military Dave & Buster's for the "war on terror" generation.

The lobby is full of stainless-steel tables and columns, modern white leather furniture, big-screen plasma TVs and a snack bar. Beyond that lies a teenage boy's techno-violent dream.

After checking in at the front desk, hordes of young men race toward the three rows of Xboxes, playing tournament games of Halo, America's Army and Madden, as well as to the Apache and Black Hawk attack helicopter and Humvee combat simulators. Smiling recruiters chat with the gamers and provide a running commentary on the tournaments — "oh, good shot!" or "you got creamed!" One tall, muscular man with a booming voice speaks into a wireless microphone, eerily projecting his encouragement over an invisible speaker system.

All of the soldier staffers are dressed in khakis and black Army Experience Center polo T-shirts. There are no uniformed personnel at the center.

The center has been strategically placed to address a modern problem: Many urbanites don't want to join the military. Most dramatically, the number of black enlistees dropped by 58 percent from 2000 to 2007. Maj. Larry Dillard, who oversees the Army Experience Center, chalks this up to poor information borne of lack of intimate experience with Army life — most bases are in rural areas, and Dillard says 30 percent of Army recruits grew up within 50 miles of a military installation.

To this end, the center also features "career configurators" — large, freestanding pods with embedded touch-screen computers that allow visitors to search through myriad Army occupations — over 150 of them, many of which, ostensibly, are safely bureaucratic.

This is the paradox of the center. Though it draws teenagers in with blood sport, it sells the Army as a safe career. The harsher realities of war are not mentioned, nor is politics. Iraq and Afghanistan are not highlighted. (They are mentioned, in the sense that you can look them up on the base locator.)

Nina Huntemann, a media studies expert at Suffolk University in Boston, sees this as a problem. "They're using violence to pull people in, but not then discussing the potential real-world violence," she says.

The Army seems to like the approach: Recruiting Command has shut down five local old-school recruiting stations, letting the center carry the load. But Dillard insists recruitment is not its main function. On this point, Huntemann, who has studied other Army video games and combat simulators, agrees: The goal, she says, is to influence popular and cultural conceptions about the Army. In the long run, areas supportive of the military not only produce more recruits; they elect representatives who vote for weapons systems (and wars).

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The center is on the frontlines of this Army-meets-Madison Avenue mission. 

For several years now, the Army has been increasing its focus — and its spending — on advertising and cutting edge "experiential marketing." While television advertisements once drew potential soldiers into bland, strip mall recruiting stations, today's recruits traverse an ever sleeker and more calculated landscape. In 2007, the Army named Edward Walters its first ever chief marketing officer.

When I first called the center, I was referred to Amy Lindstrom of LA Ignited, a top-flight Los Angeles marketing and public relations firm that has worked for Sony, Nike and Jamba Juice. She referred me to Maj. Dillard. Before serving in Iraq, Dillard received Army funding to study for an M.B.A. at Stanford; upon his return, he joined the burgeoning Army marketing operation.

"The Army spends a lot on telling our story and we were trying to develop better metrics to understand which ways are more effective at communicating the value of being a soldier," he says. "What we found is that there are a whole bunch of preconceived notions about who soldiers are and what they do" — namely, that the lifestyle is a difficult one and that there is a lot of getting-shot-at involved.

How video games address this problem might seem to be a bit of a mystery. But Huntemann says the connection is clear: Military video games, she says, saturate pop culture with blood, gore and gun-toting men in uniform, making thoughtful engagement look banal. And that's just what seems to be happening at the center. In addition to drawing people in, the virtual violence in the video games trivializes real violence.

Nineteen-year-old Gary Hatos, on his second visit to the center, was considering enlisting "after checking out some of the jobs they do, not just combat. There's like 100 and something jobs and only seven are for combat, they were tellin' us."

It's true that the majority of Army jobs are not in the infantry, and at the center, visitors can use Google Maps technology on a large, touch-screen computer to explore bases in Georgia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Photographs of troops shooting pool, riding bikes or conversing with appreciative-looking children complement information on the base's military purpose and the amenities of base life. This doesn't mean, though, that military jobs aren't dangerous — historically noncombat casualties have outnumbered combat casualties thanks to car and helicopter crashes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and gun-related accidents and suicides. "Noncombat" troops are driving the convoys that get hit by the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

The Army Experience Center's most high-tech draw, the three combat simulators, lies behind the lounge. Pvt. Jose Colon, a 20-year-old recent recruit, led me to the outside of the Black Hawk simulator and explained what participants would be doing. Maj. Dillard leaned over and said that I should give it a try. So, I joined a teenage boy and girl outside of the simulator where an on-screen Army officer briefed us on our mission.

The mission was to accompany a ground convoy from one base to another in a fictionalized hostile land. The terrain was mountainous and sand-colored. All three of us took our places behind life-size replicas of machine guns that were poking through the Black Hawk's side doors. A voice began barking orders and intelligence at us as we took off, scanning the unfriendly world projected on the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling screen for enemy forces.

Men with guns appeared on rooftops. I shot at them. Sometimes my fellow players did, too. We blew up gas tanks, which led to more explosions, more lifeless pixels. I couldn't really tell when I'd hit my targets. Five minutes later, the convoy arrived safely at its destination. My teammates had snatched victory from the jaws of my liberal arts-induced incompetence. It all felt rather disorienting.

Leaving the simulator, I made a self-deprecating comment about my performance to Maj. Dillard, who responded that indeed, I could work on my "technique." Most of the teenagers present seemed to have a pretty good handle on it.

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Daniel Denvir is a Quito, Ecuador-based journalist in the process of moving to Philadelphia, and a 2008 recipient of the North American Congress on Latin America's Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Grant. He is an editor at caterwaulquarterly.com.