Training 20,000 soldiers to negotiate with games

Sandia National Labs and and BBN Technologies predict that 20,000 soldiers a year may soon be trained in nonkinetic strategies (read: negotiation and cultural awareness) in a game developed by Sandia scientist Dr. Elaine M. Raybourn. "We have a multi-player game and we have a methodology that is designed to help people see the same problem from different perspectives," explained Raybourn. "We're trying to work with the assumptions our trainees bring. We're trying to change that."

In what Raybourn describes as an exercise in meta-cognitive agility, soldiers enter into a virtual environment roleplaying as themselves and encounter a representative of the native culture played by an expert, instructor, or second soldier from the training cadre. The networked environment can host up to 64 participants. They then work together to learn negotiating skills, interpersonal relationships, or simply how to diagnose a situation.

"You've got your platoon and your squad and they're being trained together because we want people to become more familiar with the way their team works in a non-kinetic sense," says Raybourn. "That's problem solving and using your interpersonal skills. In other words, it's not resorting to force to solve a problem and working with a host national. We say a lot of what we do are cognitive trainers."

From a devil's advocate point of view, it doesn't sound that different from what teenagers across America are put through in D.A.R.E., youth camp, or any number of situations. Roleplaying isn't new, and Raybourn admits that.

"You could do all of that with a piece of paper," she says. "The virtual environment, what it adds, is a couple things. We try to do the interpersonal communication and meta-cognitive training in as close to the real environment as possible. The virtual environment adds the sights and sounds the person will have in country without having to go there. They may be negotiating, but all of a sudden something happens in the environment that creates a stressful situation. Now they've got to work through their goal, but they have to deal with this situation. And maybe the situation is stressful in the way that the civilian acts. You've got another dynamic. It allows trainees to get a little bit closer to understanding how they would react."

"Real-world" dynamics include celebratory firing of guns, cars driving by, radios squawking, and other civilians filling the side of the environment. It's a lot more crowded than a pen-and-paper simulation would allow. Even that doesn't account for everything. Raybourn says her group has worked with multiple platforms, and technologies, and each offers a different environment that changes the lesson.

"In a negotiation scenario with avatars, we're both interacting, but judging your reactions to me through facial affects is probably not the best thing I could do at the time," explains Raybourn. "Your avatar's facial affect probably does not reflect what you would do. The virtual environment right now doesn't reflect that reality. I wouldn't focus on that in this environment. You have a better opportunity to focus on the speech aspects and verbal strategies. We design this simulation in the context of all the other training that's going on."

So while 20,000 soldiers may be training in Raybourn's game, they're first sitting through a much more typical day of class. She explains that in reality the game would probably come at the end of a day that becomes progressively more interactive. Students may start off in a classroom for a lecture and note taking before moving on to in person roleplaying, though in the much more sterile classroom environment. From there they'd move to a single-player environment and only then to a multiplayer environment filled with cars and noise.

Even with the focus on augmenting existing capabilities, Raybourn says she encounters resistance for stepping up to a technology-based solution.

"We really had to overcome a lot of scrutiny," she says. "Face-to-face communication is usually the benchmark for what communication should be. 'Why do we want to train people using a virtual environment?' generals ask me. The reasons are this: You can record the environment. You can elevate the levels of stress and moderate the other variables. You can record and play it back to see the human performance in real-time. You can use that as a talking point to illustrate later all these training objectives that are tied to non-kinetic engagements and objectives. The tools we provide help them train faster."

But those are problems with any new form of communication, she adds. You wouldn't use personal interaction as a benchmark for SMS, and you shouldn't for simulations either. Moreover those measures aren't even appropriate for battlefield communication. Raybourn cites the troops' radios, which can be used as a part of the games for communication, as a completely different, less robust form of communication. And that's something the games will help soldiers acclimate to.

The street, or communication channel, isn't one way, though.

"I think the tendency form a scientific perspective is to make it very realistic and replicate in a literal way our real-life experience," says Raybourn. "I think we may find a happy medium somewhere. As simulation changes, so does our human experience. It's similar to quantum physics. We've got two things changing, but they may not be changing in the same way. I look forward that participatory design dialog."