Hidden Levels Ep. 3: This Game Wants YOU

For decades, the U. S. Army has been on edge about recruitment, hitting its goals for a few years, only to miss them again. As part of their strategy to combat recruiting concerns, the Army has turned its focus online: to the world of gaming and competitive eSports. With nearly 80% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 28 playing video games weekly, the Army has identified this community as a vital demographic for potential recruits. The core goal of this outreach is to use gaming as an entry point, which is nothing new — the precedent was set decades ago. With the end of the draft in 1973, the U. S. Army found itself faced with new recruitment challenges. Campaigns like the “Be All You Can Be” ads of the 80s were popular and led to short-term bumps in recruitment, but they didn’t last. The Army failed to meet its recruitment goals in 1998. It failed again in 1999. In response, a U. S. Army lieutenant colonel spearheaded the development of America's Army, a free-to-play first-person shooter launched in 2002. The game was designed to offer a "virtual test drive" of Army life. Before the players could enter the full combat portion of the game, they were required to complete certain training modules covering topics like physical fitness and weapons use. The game was designed to reflect the Army’s values and structure. And despite the game’s promise to represent the true Army experience, the relatively limited depiction of gore and gruesome violence raised concern from some critics. Other critics, including anti-war activists and the ACLU, condemned the project for "gamifying war" and serving as propaganda that targeted impressionable youth by design. America's Army became a significant cultural and recruiting success, accumulating over 1.5 million downloads in its first month and eventually earning the title of the "Most Downloaded War Video Game" from Guinness World Records with more than 42.5 million downloads. After a two-decade run, the U. S. Army officially shuttered America's Army. The way Americans played video games had changed since the game launched in the early 2000s, and the Army began to pivot its approach to gaming to leverage the success of existing games and opportunities posed by the increasingly popular competitive eSports scene. Today, the Army eSports team competes in commercial titles like Rocket League, Call of Duty, and Valorant, continuing its outreach. This modern presence remains contentious — critics continue to question the ethics of military outreach in spaces that include children. Credits: This episode was produced by Katelyn Harrop and edited by Christopher Johnson. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vaitkus. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez. "Hidden Levels" https://99pi.org/hl is a production of 99% Invisible https://99percentinvisible.org and WBUR's Endless Thread https://link.mgln.ai/99percentinvisible. The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread.

• 1:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Roman Mars from 99% Invisible.

• 1:25Speaker 04

  Today, we're bringing you the third episode from our series, Hidden Levels, all about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games.

• 1:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Speaking worlds, how familiar are you with the esports world?

• 1:40Speaker 04

  Um, like, familiar enough to tell you a definition, but not, like, steeped in it in any meaningful way.

• 1:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're not following Evil Geniuses, or Fnatic, or Cloud9? You're not following these teams?

• 1:54Speaker 04

  No, I wouldn't say that I am. I don't, I mean, I know that you're saying English words, but I have no idea what those things are.

• 2:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, for the uninitiated, esports is basically organized competitive gaming. Think of all the fanfare, sponsorship, stadiums, tension of your favorite sports league, but instead of dribbling a ball or swinging a racket, esports competitors are playing multi-person video games for titles, often in front of very large live audiences.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  And down goes night once again when you need someone, when you need anyone to stand up and show just what this game's all about.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  And I know this has been big for a while, but at this point, how many people beyond the stadium are watching people play games?

• 2:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  I will say, Roman, I was shocked by this. The global esports audience is expected to exceed 600 million this year. This is an industry worth more than a billion dollars. Average competitor is in their twenties and you actually age out in your twenties of being able to play because you can't click a mouse fast enough after that to compete.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  So I'm not going to go pro?

• 3:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, Roman, I'm sorry. You can't go pro. You can't go pro. You might be able to coach. You'd be a great coach. You can't go pro.

• 3:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  So the spectators for esports are largely male and can actually even skew younger than the players themselves. So there are a lot of teenagers who watch this stuff and this demographic, teenage males, is very interesting to a longstanding US organization who needs you. We will let producer Caitlin Harrop take it from here.

• 3:45Speaker 06

  Picture this. It's 10 a.m. on a Saturday and you're in a convention center in Philadelphia or Denver. The space is crammed with booths promoting video games like Call of Duty and Halo. You can see an advertisement for G Fuel and Energy Formula for gamers. And everywhere you look, there is group after group of young men huddled around gaming demos. As you keep walking, you come across a bank of gaming consoles manned by a crew in tight hairstyles and quick dry jerseys branded with a gold and white star. You've found the Army Esports team.

• 4:25Speaker 07

  Fan Expos is one of our bigger events where we're able to interact with most of the public. And we pretty much bring a 30 by 30 booth. We set up all the games we possibly can and then we just have genuine conversations with the event goers while competing against them and talking a little bit of trash and just having fun.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  That's Staff Sergeant Joseph Edwards. He spent most of his career as an Army Intelligence Analyst, stationed all over the world. Now, he's one of 13 soldiers who has taken on a multi-year assignment, fully devoted to representing the Army in the world of competitive gaming, with one major objective in mind. They want to spread the Army message through the power and passion of gaming and get you interested in joining up in the process.

• 5:17Speaker 07

  We kind of start off the conversation with gaming, and then if they're interested, a lot of times they'll ask, "Are you actually in the Army?" And then that kind of opens it up to us being able to tell our Army story, why we joined, what we've done so far, all the different opportunities that the Army's provided us.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  The Army feels it's important to adapt to the culture and to the times, to find innovative, new ways to reach potential recruits. And this is important because for decades, the Army has been on edge about recruitment, hitting their goals for a few years and then missing them again. Recently, the Army missed their recruitment goals in 2022 and 2023. They met them in 2024 after lowering their target by 10,000 from the year before. And as they see it, video games are a great way to connect, live, in person, and online.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  Members of the Army eSports team are not technically recruiters themselves, but they do sit under the Army Recruitment Division as members of the Army's Outreach Company. And at any public event, the Army eSports team is accompanied by at least one recruiter. If someone's interested in joining up, that recruiter is ready to step in. Nora Bensahel is a professor of practice at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She says that the Army's presence in esports builds on a longstanding effort. An effort honed at county fairs and in high school cafeterias. An effort to communicate with young people.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  The military considers people between ages 17 and 23 to 24 to be the primary target for recruiting. But of course, 17-year-olds don't suddenly decide to start thinking about their career when they're 17.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  While recruiters focus on warm contacts, those of recruitment age interested in signing up, Ben Sahel says outreach gets to cast a wider net.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  So the Army does try to reach out to people who are younger than 17, not to recruit them, not to say, "Come into the Army right now." But because most Americans know nothing about the military, they do try to reach out to people younger than that to give them information so that it's one of the options that they consider.

• 7:45Speaker 06

  The Army maintains that they do not target kids under recruitment age with their Army esports team. But it's also an undeniable fact that many esports spaces where the team can be found, including expos and tournaments, they bring in people of all ages, including spectators younger than 17. And if these teens and preteens are interested in learning more about the Army, the Army esports team is ready to connect. Captain Mimi Mahia, commander of the Army's Outreach Company, which oversees esports, describes this dynamic as, quote, "planting a seed." Is there like a youngest age that folks talk to or see at these events?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  There's no minimum age, I would say. A recruiter themselves isn't going to start talking to anyone until they're at least a freshman in high school. But the esports team does pretty well connecting with kids that are younger than that, just because those kids still play games, too. So if a young kid sees a guy that they really respect wearing the US Army logo, and they continue to see that over their time in middle school and high school, then they might start to think about the Army a little bit more.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  So that's just the seed that we're planting. And especially when they're in middle school, we're not saying join the army, but we're more so just getting that idea into their heads.

• 9:16Speaker 06

  It makes sense that the Army would embed itself so deeply in esports. Nearly 80% of Americans between 13 and 28 years old play some form of video games on a weekly basis. So gamers, it's a market the Army badly wants, full of young Americans prepped for the technological advancements of the modern battlefield.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  This approach is not new. Decades before military esports teams started facing off against civilians, the US Army took its first steps into consumer video games.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Finally, in January 1973, the draft is ended and replaced by an all-volunteer military force.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  When the US Army ended the draft in 73, it was widely seen as good news. The US was no longer forcing the majority of young men who couldn't afford to go to college or avoid the draft in other ways to go to war. But it also meant the military needed to majorly step up its outreach efforts, which they did.

• 10:25Speaker 06

  Campaigns like the "Be All You Can Be" ads of the 80s were super popular and led to short-term bumps in recruitment. But it didn't last. The Army failed to meet its recruitment goals in 1998. It failed again in 1999, and folks at the Pentagon began to worry. If war were to break out, US defense could be stretched thin.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  There's a common understanding that as the economy booms, entry-level pay for soldiers doesn't always keep up with civilian wages. And college attendance goes up, which meant recruitment-age people either already had jobs or they were in school and not so likely to pursue a career in the armed service. They needed a new, creative approach to recruitment, one that went beyond TV ads and pull-up contests at the county fair. Enter military economist Casey Wodensky.

• 11:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have a PhD, so sometimes I go by Dr. Wodensky. I'm retired Army Colonel, so sometimes I'm Colonel Werdenski.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  In 1999, Werdenski, West Point graduate, steely gaze, strong jawline, was running the Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis.

• 11:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  We were very interested in government efficiency, particularly with regard to the Army, and how to make the best use of resources.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Part of Werdenski's job was to make sure the Army had enough, as his title suggests, manpower. And things weren't looking great. But Werdenski had an idea, an approach to this recruitment slump that would target not just recruitment-age individuals, but the next generation of potential recruits still open to influence as they consider their future.

• 12:10Speaker 06

  This big idea, as Werdenski saw it, would allow the Army to create their own media image and target future recruits at the same time. A vision born from a very 1990s tradition: the family trip to Best Buy, his two sons in tow.

• 12:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  While I was off doing, looking at refrigerators or whatever with my wife, they'd be in the game, the computer game aisle, looking at like games that they wanted me to buy for them.

• 12:38Speaker 06

  While the real Army was suffering a popularity crisis, battle and first-person shooter games, many based in fictional or intergalactic worlds, were booming. Establishing battlefield control. Standby. Games like Starcraft, Half-Life, and Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, each of which were on the list of top 10 best-selling computer games of 1999.

• 13:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  And the games they were looking at were always in the perspective of like a soldier. And that quickly led to an idea that the best way, perhaps for the Army to talk to young adults about being a soldier, is virtually.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  Werdenski began to envision a video game that pulled from popular shooter-style games. But instead of the fantastical version of combat featured in many blockbuster titles, Werdenski's game Would support recruitment by giving young people an idea of what the Army's really like, as he interpreted it. You really couldn't like take them on an Army post and take them through basic training or let them drive a tank. But virtually, you could get past all those limitations and let a child sort of take a virtual test drive of the Army. They could do it from their bedroom. They didn't have to go to an Army for it. They could do it when it fit their schedule. And so these are the ideas that drove the concept.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  To take the ideas from concept to reality, Werdensky focused on the details, like the images, sound, and language of the game. But he knew next to nothing about game design. So he brought in some help, a team of Army modelers and simulation experts from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. To get a better sense of the Army's story during game development, Werdensky's team visited bases, filming and studying real-life soldiers and their equipment to make the game's actions, like running, crawling, and gunfire, as accurate as possible. But Werdensky's vision went beyond high-end graphics. He wanted the game to communicate

• 14:50Speaker 06

  the breadth of opportunities available in the Army, just as a real-life recruiter would. Except with the Army game, it could be hands-on and at times mandatory.

• 15:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  They were really keenly invested in letting you know that this, while like other shooters in certain respects, was not going to simply lead you to your own pursuits.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  That's Matthew Thomas-Payne, associate professor at Notre Dame. He studies the relationship between the military and video games.

• 15:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  They had a clear agenda in place. And part of that meant that you were going to go through the drills that a recruit would go through and that you would, along the way, understand the values that the Army embraced while playing this game.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  While putting together the game, Werdensky and his team developed a series of training modules that taught the players the basics of Army work as they envisioned it, from physical fitness to first aid to target practice. Players were required to pass certain modules before they could hit the battlefield in their chosen roles. You'd sit there and go through courses on Combat Lifesaver.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Okay, soldier, there are injured people out there who need your help. Dealing with, you know, gunshot wounds, dealing with compound fractures and all this kind of stuff. We actually had to back off at one point because we got into like how much morphine to give somebody. And that probably got too far down the road. Okay, soldier, remember to treat the most critical casualties first. Am I gonna be okay?

• 16:25Speaker 06

  Wardinsky, a very eat-your-vegetables kind of guy, believes that you could put in these arduous boot camp trainings and young people would still play the game. And if that was a turnoff, he didn't really care.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  The whole undergirdment of the game was these army values. And if that wasn't interesting to you, we probably weren't that interested in you and you probably weren't that interested in us.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  The Army game team created a series of detailed maps. Vaguely, Middle Eastern cities, war-torn hospitals, disputed bridges that players, once they passed marksmanship and weapons training, could explore, defend, and conquer with their teammates. Other teens and young adults from around the country and world, representing the virtual US Army.

• 17:16Speaker 06

  But the developers had one big looming question. Because war can't exist without an enemy.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  The question was, well, who's, you know, America's the good guys. Who are the bad guys? Well, before 9/11, that wasn't a real easy question to address. And so we were looking at narco terrorists, you know, and people like that to be the bad guys. After 9/11, that solved itself. It was obviously Taliban and that crew. And so that made that more straightforward.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  The enemy in the game wasn't directly called the Taliban. But in 2001, the overwhelming cultural consensus that the Taliban was America's number one real-life enemy, it served as a guiding force as Wardinsky and his team fleshed out the details of their virtual enemy combatants. For instance, the game setting.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  The operations in the game would be in Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere like that. And they would be involved with the war on terror, which, you know, would be as surprising as they weren't, given that the United States...

• 18:22Speaker 06

  By the time we launched the game was in a war on terror.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  And playing as the US Army against this enemy, that was the only choice. While in your average multiplayer game, you got to choose which team you're on. In the Army game, you would always be Team USA. Think of it like a patriotic mirror. Matthew Thomas-Paine again.

• 18:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  So you really only see yourself as a US soldier. You never played as anyone other than the US Army. Even in a multiplayer setting where Team A is fighting Team B, both Team A and Team B always see themselves as the US soldiers and they always see their opponents as a kind of oppositional force, foreclosing the ability for any of the teams to imagine themselves as an oppositional force or as terrorists.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  And it was against this backdrop that Werdenski began to launch his project, America's Army: The Official US Army Game. Cue menu theme.

• 19:35Speaker 06

  In May 2002, Werdenski premiered America's Army at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles,

• 19:44Speaker 06

  one of the biggest industry trade shows in the country. He worked with a marketing team to make the release into an event that felt like a military operation. And I said, OK, you get us a space. We'll bring the Razzmatazz. And they're like, what does that mean? I said, well, we'll show up with the Army. Tanks were theatrically placed outside of the venue. Soldiers rappelled from the ceiling of the convention center holding machine guns, while groups of young people crowded around computers demoing the game. The stunt got coverage from The New York Times, CNN, and The LA Times. America's Army came out on the 4th of July 2002. And within the first month of release,

• 20:29Speaker 06

  the game was downloaded more than 1.5 million times.

• 20:37Speaker 06

  It was the first of its kind, a video game by the US Army designed for recruitment. Werdensky's belief that video games could bring the Army to young people had been proven right. The game's success was partly due to Werdensky's dedication to realistic gun design and lifelike language of virtual drill sergeants, but America's Army offered something else, something none of its competitors could. The game was 100% free. If you had an internet connection, it was yours.

• 21:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's hard to overstate just how important it was that America's Army be a free-to-play game. Big-budget free-to-play games like we have today, right, with Fortnite and other games, didn't really exist. Most games that take multiple millions of dollars to produce, you want a return on investment. The Army doesn't care about that.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  By the end of 2002, the Army had spent nearly $11 million on America's Army, according to data obtained by the website GameSpot. It's a budget Werdensky considers a steal for the Army, who, for context, budgeted $55 million for TV ads in 2003 alone.

• 21:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like, they're not in it to make money from the game, quite clearly. They're in it to get recruits. They're in it for positive brand recognition or, you know, having people think more positively about what a career in the Army might look like.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  But gameplay wasn't limited to those of recruitable age. As a commercial game, America's Army received a rating, T for Teen, which marked the game's content as suitable for players as young as 13 years old.

• 22:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Teen games will have some violence, but there's typically little gore or explicit blood. Now, of course, producers know all of this, and they use ratings. To strategically market their games. Teen and titles designed for younger players are often sold as family-friendly experiences.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  This meant that America's Army, the game that promised a true and authentic army experience, was relatively bloodless. Unlike in a real battle, players shot dead, fell to the ground without much of a visible wound, then booted the game back up and started again.

• 22:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, you would see much more kind of graphic detail in even fantasy shooters of the 90s than you would see in something like America's Army. When we talk about military realism, I don't think you were going to design a game that is realistic to a soldier's experience that is going to sell anybody on being a part of that experience, because we know that a lot of the experience is absolute boredom, which is punctuated by these moments of horror.

• 23:26Speaker 06

  Payne says having America's Army rated teen was key to making the game available to its core demographic: teens and pre-teens open to considering a future in the US Army. Young people like T.J. Boulter. He was just 13 years old when he started playing America's Army, about a year after it dropped. He was already interested in video games and curious about the military when he saw a post about America's Army on the website PC Gamer. And the price was right. Pretty much immediately, he got way into it.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  I was playing every day if I could, for several hours a day.

• 24:08Speaker 06

  In order to play, Boulter started to make his way through Wodensky's training modules, the ones he hoped would give players an authentic sense of army service. And he loved them.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Let's get started. They make you watch basically a slideshow in-game on the steps to do first aid and what your role as a medic should be in combat. Shock may be caused by severe injury or blood loss and disrupts the normal flow

• 24:33Speaker 06

  of blood through the body, leading to-

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Depending on how well you did, it could take anywhere from a half hour to an hour if you failed the test and had to retake it and re-watch it. This is just pathetic, soldier!

• 24:44Speaker 06

  Okay, wow, yeah, so that's kind of a commitment when you're 13 years old.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  It is a super commitment as a young kid.

• 24:51Speaker 06

  I found it really interesting that you had to do all this training and even had the ability to train like you were an adult in the army. After training, TJ got ready to deploy. You pick a role, whether it's a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a sniper, and once you pick that role, you're in a team based on what role you pick. That rifleman or sniper then picked a map and a mission to play. In one map, it's your mission to make a preemptive raid on a terrorist training camp. In another map, one of TJ's favorites, Team USA had to cross a bridge held by enemy occupants.

• 25:31Speaker 06

  And it was during this stage of gameplay that the results from those training modules could come back to help or hinder a player. Take the medical training Bolcher mentioned earlier, the one with the final exam. During that module test, players actually had a choice to cheat, which helpful if you couldn't remember all the details in the informational slideshow. But if you cheated on the test to pass the medical training, Werdensky says it could come back to haunt you in a firefight on that very bridge. Say you're playing medic and a teammate gets shot. And the game announces to all the other players, hey, Joe over here cheated in basic training in medic, and he doesn't know how to save any of you.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  So the game would keep all that and play it back to a kid at the right moment in time, maybe two years down the road. And the army message, it wasn't just woven into gameplay. Looking back, Bolcher remembers the overt marketing and recruitment text included in America's army pretty vividly. On the landing page of the client before you started the game, they had all their recruiting stuff plastered all over it. What kind of stuff would it say? Uh, you know, go, like, go army, click here if you're interested in joining the army, learn more about the army and stuff like that.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  After countless hours of battling as a member of the virtual US Army, Bolcher finished high school and then enlisted in the military for real. He opted for the Marines instead of the Army because it's the branch other members of his family served in. But America's Army still had a significant impact.

• 27:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  It definitely influenced my decision to join it. I wanted to be able to do the things I could do in a game. Work as a squad, work as a team, be leadership. All of those things had a heavy influence on me wanting to do that.

• 27:36Speaker 06

  It's impossible to know how many people joined up because of America's Army. But the player numbers, they show a lot of engagement with the game. In July of 2008, the Guinness World Records named America's Army the most downloaded war video game ever, with more than 42.5 million downloads. For Wodenski, America's Army was exactly what he had hoped for. A seemingly successful recruitment tool and a chance to get his version of the Army into mainstream media.

• 28:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Beyond anybody's dreams. It's won every award you can win. This is an immersion. They're in the Army, except for sweating.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  The Army proved that it could get attention in the commercial gaming industry. That good graphics and a free 99 price tag could get Army recruitment messaging in front of millions of eyes, setting the precedent for a relationship between the military and the video game sector that would continue for decades. But not everyone was on board. When we come back, Army Gaming meets the Resistance.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI? Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 30:17Speaker 02

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• 30:47Speaker 06

  No one could have predicted the success of America's army. But as popular as the game was, from the moment it was released in 2002, it also drew criticism from parents and advocates concerned that the project gamified war to a young and impressionable audience. Remember, at the time, America's actual army was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anti-war advocates saw America's army not just as a glorification of war, but as a tool for promoting military violence. ...of hand wringing around, well, what does it mean to like, play war while there's war happening?

• 31:29Speaker 06

  Particularly in these games where they're advertised for having photo realistic graphics and surround sound and military vehicles and weapons that look and kind of fire like the real thing.

• 31:47Speaker 06

  In 2006, media artist and activist Joseph Delap began joining America's Army Games under the handle Dead in Iraq. In an act of protest art, Delap would drop his virtual weapon and begin typing into the game's chat function for everyone to read. In it, he entered the name, age, and service branch of every American killed while serving in Iraq. Delap describes this act as a cautionary gesture, a protest to what he described as, quote, "this very simplistic representation of warfare."

• 32:26Speaker 06

  In a wide-ranging 2008 report, the ACLU even accused America's Army, and the Army at large, of violating a UN treaty aimed at protecting children from military recruitment. But these critics were no match for the cultural appetite of post-9/11 America. It could have been a situation where you could have had a public, a game playing consumer group that said, "No, thank you, this isn't for us." But that's not what we had. We had instead, "Yes, this is awesome. Can we have some more of this, please?" And so the rest is history, right?

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Under the leadership of Casey Wardinsky, America's Army continued. America's Army: Special Forces was released in 2003. Two years later, America's Army: Rise of a Soldier dropped on Xbox. Then comics, action figures, and in-person events, like The Virtual Army Experience, a traveling, interactive virtual battlefield exhibited in a 10,000-square-foot inflatable dome. But by the mid 2000s, the realistic first-person shooter space was radically more competitive. Payne says America's Army's later versions, America's Army 3 and America's

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Army: Proving Grounds, they struggled to keep up with some of the flashier opportunities posed by other new games.

• 33:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't know if there's a change in appetite as much as a continuing kind of ratcheting up of what was possible. America's Army just really couldn't keep up because of, I think, their correct assumption that they had to remain within certain kinds of representational and simulational parameters. You want to be able to, you know, fire a giant machine gun from a helicopter. Like, you don't want to be doing basic training when you could be jumping out of a jet or fighting with your pals in a session of death match over and over again.

• 34:34Speaker 06

  In 2022, after a two-decade run, America's Army was honorably discharged from the virtual battlefield. The Army officially removed the game from its servers and shuttered the game's website. America's Army creator Casey Wardinsky again. A lot of really good people made that game happen. You know, I'm just the guy who came up with an idea and then made sure everything hung together. But a lot of really good people are in the Army because of that game.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  As trends in video games changed, so did the Army's approach to using them for recruitment. Major game studios like Electronic Arts and Activision were making blockbuster titles that targeted the same military-interested audience that the Army coveted. So they pivoted. Instead of making their own games, the Army started to take advantage of opportunities offered by bigger, flashier, more successful games to reach the same objective as America's Army: Connecting with Potential Recruits.

• 35:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  The military has been largely opportunistic in the way that it approached video games as a technology. When Halo was a really big property, it wasn't uncommon for recruiters to be part of, you know, the game release parties. And they would occasionally appear at retail places where people were lining up to buy the games, in part because, well, if you like this military spaceship.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  Shooter, you know, maybe, maybe you're already predisposed to being interested in, in the army as well.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Current and former members of the military have also served as subject matter experts for games such as Call of Duty and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, consulting on the game's realism and offering player feedback, just as they did internally for America's Army in the early 2000s. And back at Fort Knox, the Army is continuing to build out its outreach efforts in the competitive gaming space. Currently, I'm playing for the United States Army Esports Team, and that's my dream, to be some sort of organization playing professionally. Today, the video games played by Army Esports soldiers aren't in-house creations like America's Army. Some of them aren't even shooter games at all.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  Like, have you ever heard of the insanely popular game Rocket League? It's basically cars playing soccer, and the Army Esports Team is way into it. The titles they play vary: Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Valorant, Overwatch 2, but they all have one thing in common: they're incredibly popular with young people, and they're huge in the esports world, where about a quarter of those who watch are 20 years old or younger. And as Captain Mimi Mahia, commander of the Army's Outreach Company, says, "Some of these young people could make great soldiers, today or in the years to come." I do think that people who have skills in gaming can be beneficial to the Army,

• 37:39Speaker 06

  especially with the way that we see the future of war going right now. It's a lot more technologically advanced, so those types of skills versus, you know, just straight-up warfighters is really coming into play right now. And that's why this whole company... was stood up to be part of that broader recruitment effort that we wouldn't just have boots on the ground in high schools, but that we would be able to meet people where they're at in these different arenas.

• 38:10Speaker 06

  I asked the Army how they measure the success of their esports program. Lieutenant Colonel Lindsay Thompson wrote me back. He's commander of the U.S. Army Mission Support Battalion, which oversees Army esports. Thompson said that the Army esports team gets about 500 direct responses or signups at each event. He added that in opting to participate in these Army esports activities, members of the public provide personal information. That includes email and phone numbers, which may be used by Army recruiters to, quote, "follow up with respondents who have expressed an interest in joining the Army," or those that just want information about the Army.

• 38:58Speaker 06

  But the Army's presence in the esports arena, in person and online, is a tactic some gamers and political critics find insincere or even disturbing.

• 39:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's the action itself of even trying to recruit what could be a very young audience and the tactics in actually doing so. Does Twitch want to allow this? Showcase the talent and hobbies that soldiers have and outlet for outreach. That's code for recruiting.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a sign of desperation, I think. And it's obviously incredibly dystopian.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  It's horrifying.

• 39:36Speaker 06

  Some of the strongest blowback came in 2020. Back then, the Army was using Twitch to stream its esports team to thousands of young viewers. Yes, the Army in particular is getting a lot of

• 39:47Speaker 07

  Criticism, what's new for how it's acting on Twitch? For one, they've been scolded by Twitch.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  Kids as young as 13 can make Twitch accounts. Following reporting by The Nation Magazine, streamers and advocates accused the Army of using the platform to surreptitiously steer kids to an Army recruitment form. The Army disputed these allegations, but agreed to remove the links after Twitch flagged them for lacking transparency. In more than 10 years after calling out America's Army, the ACLU was back, this time accusing the Army esports team of violating the First Amendment. This was after the team's Twitch channel banned commenters who asked questions about war crimes and other alleged military transgressions. This public concern gained enough momentum

• 40:37Speaker 06

  that it even caught the attention of Congress.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  And I'd like to present this amendment by opening with the stance of the US Marine Corps, which is that war is not a game.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  In July of 2020, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a gamer herself, introduced a draft amendment to the House Appropriations Bill that aimed to ban the military from using funds to maintain a presence on Twitch or other streaming platforms.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  This amendment is specifically to block recruitment practices and funding for recruitment practices on platforms such as twitch.tv, which are live streaming platforms that are largely populated by children well under the age of military recruitment rules. Right now, currently, children on platforms such as Twitch are bombarded with banner ads that link to recruitment signup forms that can be submitted by children as young as 12 years old.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  The amendment failed, but today, the US Army esports team remains dormant on Twitch.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  I think many times, the view that young

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Say, high schoolers get about what military service is is extremely one-sided.

• 41:57Speaker 06

  That's Jonathan Hansing, an Army veteran and avid gamer. In 2021, fresh out of his Army service, Hansing got involved with a group called Gamers for Peace, dedicated to confronting recruitment via esports and other forms of gaming. It's a branch off of the larger advocacy group Veterans for Peace.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  The military service members that you do have access to in some of these online communities can only say nice things about their their service. And as a, you know, 13-year-old, a 17-year-old, you don't really have the perspective or the critical thinking skills to ask yourself, what is the full comprehensive view of what military service is like?

• 42:42Speaker 06

  And Hansing believes that giving this comprehensive view of what it means to join up, the Army has an obligation to do it.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Not just on like a philosophical sense to the American people, but to the people you serve with, to make sure that you are recruiting high-caliber people who understand the risks and accept those risks with clear eyes. You cannot do that if you are filling kids' heads with an incorrect vision of what the military is.

• 43:20Speaker 06

  And as for America's Army, the force's early foray into commercial gaming, the game has found a new life with a small group of highly dedicated players, including early adopter TJ Bolcher. Today, he plays America's Army 2.5, an adapted version of the original game with diehard fans around the world. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when it said that they still had a community and the game was actually running and people were playing on it. TJ says he actually sees a lot of the same names he played with back when he started at 13 years old. And a lot of those people are now veterans themselves, just like him. If you were in the Navy, the Marines, the Army,

• 44:04Speaker 06

  or something like that, you get a special icon in game that's made you stand out from everybody else. That's one of the biggest things I wanted when I was growing up playing this game. Did you end up getting that? I did. Was that a big day? It was a huge day. I was really excited.

• 44:24Speaker 06

  For now, the Army esports team remains quiet on streaming platforms, but continues its work at fan expos and other public events. And the esports team continues to make its presence known to gamers in the competitive esports sphere, too. Extending, shall we say, an outreach hand in the hopes of building up the next generation of American soldiers.

• 45:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  That was producer Caitlin Harrop. Next time on episode four of Hidden Levels, the boom and bust of machinima, the agony and the ecstasy of making movies inside live multiplayer games.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  There's so many outtakes I have of me just yelling at the people in the game. Like, don't kill the guest!

• 45:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're shooting a bad choice of work. We're recording an interview.

• 45:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was produced by Caitlin Harrop. It was edited by Christopher Johnson. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vicas. Additional mixing by Martine Gonzalez. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vicas. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. Hidden Levels was created by myself, Ben Brock Johnson, after reading a study about Tetris reducing the effects of PTSD with power ups and cheat codes, thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Thread.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  99% Invisible's executive producer is Kathy To, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Le, Laish Madon, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nester. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet includes

• 46:49Speaker 04

  my illustrious co-host Amory Sivertson, managing producer Selma Tajoshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monahan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski. See you on Friday.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 47:36Speaker 07

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 47:38Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh, in the visualized support, right, personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in, because it is very different, depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new Fall Arrivals in-store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.