America Army

America's Army (also known as AA or Army Game Project) is a tactical multiplayer first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment. more...

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The PC version, subtitled Recon, was first released on July 4, 2002. Subsequently Operations was first released on July 12, 2002. The most current version Coalition debuted Dec 21, 2006 and has had many upgrades since Recon. It is financed through U.S. tax dollars and distributed for free. It was originally developed by the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School and continues to use the Unreal Engine.

Rise of a Soldier is the subtitle for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 version that was developed by the U.S. Army, Ubisoft and Secret Level.

Overview

The game falls into the sub-genres of an advergame, serious game and militainment. America's Army has been developed since 2000 and still changes through add-ons and patches. The Windows version can be found as a download on the Internet or as free DVDs at U.S. Army recruiting centers. The Macintosh and Linux versions are no longer updated.

Professor Michael Zyda, the director and founder of the MOVES Institute, acknowledged Counter-Strike as the model for the game.

America's Army is relatively authentic in terms of visual and acoustic representation of combat, especially pertaining to its depictions of firearm usage and mechanics, but its critics have alleged that it fails to convey wartime conditions as accurately as it claims.

America's Army is the first computer and video game to make recruitment an explicit goal and the first well-known overt use of computer gaming for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. It is often pointed out that the game bears resemblance to the movie The Last Starfighter and to the novel Ender's Game, two popular science fiction stories of the 80s and 90s.

A counter on the homepage of the PC version claims over seven million registered accounts as of 2006 which is often confused with the number of players. Statistics show that the game has had an average of roughly 3,000 to 6,000 players playing online at any one time between 2002 and 2005 and thus ranking in the ten most played online games tracked by GameSpy. By comparison, under the same counting conditions the most often played online game, Counter-Strike, has between 70,000 and 100,000 players.

History

Background

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had plans for using video games since the early 1980s. However, it was not until 1996, shortly after computer-based wargames were permitted on government computers for U.S. Marines, that U.S. Marine simulation experts modified the commercial game Doom II to create Marine Doom as a tactical training tool.

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