When War Games Meet Video Games

Thursday, October 21st, 2004

I don’t know how useful this is, but it sounds like a fun project. From When War Games Meet Video Games:

You’d hardly expect to find dozens of defense strategists setting aside two weeks at a time to play a video game. But then, Urban Resolve is no ordinary video game.

Developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or JFCom, a division of the Department of Defense, the $195,000 program is a combat simulation on a massive scale. It pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege, and it’s capable of modeling the behavior of the nearly 1 million entities — the soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks and so on — that might exist in such a conflict.

In other words, it’s one part Risk, one part The Sims and one part raw supercomputing power.

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