FEATURE ARTICLE

December 2005

Navy Video Game Targets Future Sailors

By Michael Peck

With the Army and Air Force using video games as recruiting tools, it was only a matter of time before the Navy followed suit. The Navy Recruiting Command last summer released its own public relations game.

“Strike and Retrieve” is an online game based on shooting skills, aimed at teens and young adults, ages 17 to 24.

At least 29,000 copies of the game had been downloaded by late August, said Cmdr. David Hostetler, director of the advertising plans division for the Navy Recruiting Command.

At first glance, “Strike and Retrieve” seems an odd choice for a Navy recruiting tool, given that the game has little to do with actual Navy life. The plot line is standard for the entertainment shooting genre.

A spy plane carrying secret data has gone down over the Atlantic.

The player’s mission is to locate the plane, crack a security code to retrieve the data, and return the plane to a pickup zone. Instead of wielding a machine gun—as players do in the popular game “Doom”—participants operate remote-controlled submarines that navigate a fantastic world of undersea caves, dangerous fish and enemy subs.

The game is designed to force players to use their decision-making skills. “Our sailors, from the junior most up to the senior enlisted as well as our officers, are placed in positions on a daily basis where they make decisions. The game is obviously futuristic and fantastical. However, a lot of the things that go into the game have to do with decision-making,” Hostetler said.

Players must determine how to outfit the submersible. They must gauge their fuel requirements and decide at what speeds to travel in order to remain covert. “We feel that the way the game is designed takes much more analytical ability than just going in there with guns blazing and knocking down everything in our path,” Hostetler explained.

Indeed, “Strike and Retrieve” does try to insert a bit of military into the fun. When installing the game, players see a screen proclaiming that it is “more than just a game—you are now involved in a U.S. Navy training exercise that is being conducted to help evaluate future recruitment benchmarks. ‘Strike and Retrieve’ is a mental challenge that requires sound reasoning and quick-thinking action.”

Some might question whether by that logic, such video games—including the infamous “Grand Theft Auto”—would constitute mental challenges. However, “Strike and Retrieve” also serves another purpose: It entices players to visit the navy.com Web site.

As they progress through the game, they will come across links to the Navy site. “There will be times when they can back and forth to navy.com to get answers to questions that allow them to get maximum fuel or unlimited weapons,” Hostetler said.

He described the links as basically “cheat codes,” which give them added resources they can take into the game. “It was an interesting experience for me to explain to the leadership what a cheat code is,” Hostetler laughed. “‘Cheat?’ they asked. ‘What kind of commitment does that encourage?’”

Hostetler emphasized that “Strike and Retrieve” will not be used to target individual recruits. Players need only download the 100-megabyte software and then register on a Navy web site that only asks for a valid e-mail address “We are not going to actively pursue them,” Hostetler said. “They are not going to get a barrage of e-mails or be contacted by recruiters.”

The Navy also intends to use “Strike and Retrieve” as a personality research tool. When players register, they are asked to classify themselves as one of six personality types: doer, problem solver, innovator, persuader, advisor or planner. These personality types are copied from the “life accelerator” on navy.com, and were developed in conjunction with psychologists about five years ago. The “Strike and Retrieve” server will track and compare the performance of each group.

“We look to see which group is doing better than the others,” Hostetler said. “Of course, it’s self-classification. A person could say they’re a doer when they’re a thinker.”

Hostetler sees steering young people to the navy.com site as a chance to “dispel some of the myths they have about the Navy. A lot of the folks that we deal with get their information from their parents and grandparents. That’s great. They should. But a lot of that information is outdated.”

Whatever the personality type of the players, Strike and Retrieve is no pushover. Of the 29,000 downloads in the first month, only about 200 players completed the full mission of recovering the secret documents. “It’s not an easy game,” Hostetler said.

But it is an impressive looking one. The fish monsters lurking in the depths are spectacular and even scary. The game was commissioned through the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency, which in turn hired computer game developer Whatif Productions, of Belmont, Mass.

Whatif only had six months to complete the project. “It’s difficult to develop an interactive experience that has any depth to it in that amount of time, especially if it’s a 3-D game,” said Whatif President Fred Skoler. The Navy declined to disclose the price tag for “Strike and Retrieve,” saying only that it was part of the $80 million contract with Campbell-Ewald. Skoler did say, however, that that the game cost under a million dollars.

“America’s Army,” which has become the gold standard for recruitment video games, cost $5.5 million. The Air Force spent just $250,000 and three months producing “USAF: Air Dominance,” a simple flight simulator played on kiosks in Air Force mobile recruiting centers. Depending on the success of “Strike and Retrieve,” there may be sequels featuring surface and air combat, said Hostetler.

Skoler attributes the game’s striking graphics to Whatif’s new GameProcessor computer, which uses a “smart data” system that make the experience more realistic.

“If I have an object that burns in the real world, but the game doesn’t know about burning, I can introduce the concept of fire later in the deployment of that game, and things that can burn within that world will learn how to burn,” Skoler explained.

An unintended consequence of the flashy graphics was a “T” for Teenager rating by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. A “T” rating means that the content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood and/or infrequent use of strong language.

Hostetler said the game was slapped with a “T” rating was because there are explosions of underwater sea creatures that were described by the raters as “fleshy.”

Hostetler said that, even though he was displeased initially by the “T” rating, he recognized that it made sense. “I was upset at first, and then I realized that our target market is teenagers. If it were rated “E” for Everyone, then a teenager might be less likely to play it because it’s not cool.”

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