Full Metal Joystick

摘要

Lincoln hall rests close to the bottom in the ranks of West Point's most formidable buildings. On the edge of the stone-clad U.S. Military Academy's picturesque plateau, above New York's Hudson River, it houses policy analysts and administrative types. For the past two years it's also incubated a secret new weapon in the Army's arsenal. The Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis, typically noodling over tasks like the recapitalization of tank fleets, has unveiled a gizmo to solve the Army's most pressing problem: recruitment. Once upon a time, the iconic Uncle Sam poster demanding I WANT YOU was enough. Today the West Pointers have created an online shoot-'em-up videogame (with some Dungeons and Dragons elements mixed in). Called America's Army, it has seen early usage that's server-melting. For two days after its Fourth of July release, Web sites serving up the free, state-of-the-art videogame received 750,000 hits-per second. In the first two months, 2.5 million people downloaded it (a 14-hour endeavor on a standard phone line), while 120,000 people signed up to receive the CD version by mail. One online insomniac played 3,600 10-minute missions. "The expectation was that we were going to put out Pong in camouflage," says Lt. Col. Casey War-dynski, the 45-year-old economist who conceived the game and oversaw its development. Instead, it was as if a Hollywood blockbuster had been hatched in a movie studio's accounting department.