Different Use

Decades ago, military command centres might have looked like this, where scenarios were played out as part of routine military training at the height of the Cold War.

Games as in the arcade would give rise to games at home.

Many of you had this at home, no doubt, the Atari system. Nearby this display, it was possible to play Missile Command in the very same fashion as the Atari game was played- poor graphics and all. As the panel above notes, it's a game that is impossible to win, and I failed spectacularly at giving it a go. 

A more contemporary military table top, dating from the Afghan War.

I found a set of displays fascinating. Nancy Dudek is a doctor at the Ottawa Hospital with a speciality in rehabilitation. Mike Trauner is an Afghan War veteran who was seriously injured in battle. His rehabilitation is with CAREN (Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment), a VR concept used by Dudek and her colleagues. Veterans with amputated limbs are placed into the system with their prosthetics and put to work moving through a realistic looking environment- so much so that they are distracted from the physical effort of their rehabilitation work.

VR can also assist in the treatment of PTSD.

Virtual training can also be beneficial for soldiers in working on battlefield scenarios.

The exhibit touches on first person shooter games, like Call of Duty. But it also highlights Spec Ops: The Line. Unlike the more mindless violence of those other games, this one starts presenting increasingly ethical dilemmas to the player as it goes along, with text asking "do you feel like a hero yet". The sort of thing that gets under the skin- which is kind of the point.

Military war gaming can transfer over in other areas, and the concepts can be picked up by civilian agencies as well, who might work hand in hand with the military. This is where we get a Pandemic table top exercise, which has seen more than its share of use in recent years.

Aftershock is another such concept- using the idea of a natural disaster and asking how multiple agencies, civilian and military, can be used in response to that.

Girl Security, which is an American company working with young women going into national security roles, developed a war game scenario, Tangling With Tigers, to get women collaborating on a war scenario with their own ideas.

The military took part in the response to Covid, and this photograph dates back to the time, as scenario training was used for Operation LASER.

Major Trisha MacLeod is the title of this work by Gertrude Kearns, done in 2021.

 MacLeod took part in the Covid response in long term care homes in 2020.