Army Discovers the Weapon to Kill PowerPoint Briefings…Video Games

Recently, there has been a lot of calls for the death of PowerPoint especially from the US Army.

From We’ve Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint where the article discusses perhaps the worlds most challenging PowerPoint slide.

Complicated slide explaining inter-relationships, hard to read.

The article states:

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

To Army Brains: Kill PowerPoint, ‘Counterinsurgency’ where they discuss how the Army wants to get away from PowerPoint. As this article states:

If this year’s Unified Quest (an event where the Army discusses what’s working and what’s not) is any indication, PowerPoint hater H.R. McMaster, a one-star general serving in Afghanistan, is going to go from slideshow dissident to prophet in a few short years. Several participants derided the Army’s over-reliance on PowerPoint openly. One recounted stories of briefings in tactical-operations centers where otherwise intelligent officers simply read PowerPoint slides out loud — even as the slides were visible on an overhead projector.

(sound familar?)

So, the cries to get rid of PowerPoint sound all well and good but what is the alternative? Can the Army get rid of PowerPoint and still conduct training and briefings?

The answer is a resounding YES!

There is a military unit tasked with using videogame tools and techniques to help soldiers and commanders understand how to not only train smarter, but also to understand how their enemy thinks. Part of that mission is occasionally playing the role of insurgent in a video game-type environment.

Looking at a battle from multiple perspectives is one of the advantage of video-game based briefings

The adaptation of video game-tools is done under the Joint Training Counter-IED Operations Integration Center, or JTCOIC.

And the problems they are solving with video game technology sounds like the problems of almost every organization I’ve encountered.

• The turn around for traditional training methods was too long
• The “training” or practice the learners did wasn’t equivalent to the real event.
• The perspective of the instruction was one dimensional and linear

So now they use video game technologies to recreate battle situations and then “play” the battle from different perspectives to learn what the enemy was doing and where they were located at the time of the engagement.

As First Sergeant Mark Covey describes in the article:

“When I joined the army in the early ’80s, most of stuff was canned and scripted and it took weeks or months or years to change training content,” said Covey. “Often it was based on a target that didn’t exist, a made up location like ‘Transnovia.’ Today, we make training based on actual locations, actual villages and actual events. The geographies are accurate and, more importantly, the activity is accurate.”

(shouldn’t all our training be based on actual situations, events and locations and not on the facing forward rows of seats set up in a classroom or the mind numbing virtual classroom with a PowerPoint slide and a disembodied voice?)

The article goes on to say:

While the team offers a variety of services (machinima movies of downrange incidents, playable scenarios based on battlefield engagements, movies and playable scenarios strictly for specialized training and many more products…it boils down to training using game software. The team takes a scenario — whether based on actual events or invented by a trainer — and using a variety of software, creates a 2-D or 3-D virtual training event of that scenario.

As replacement for PowerPoint, here is what they say.

“Before we started, there were reports that no one wanted to read, then there were PowerPoints that put everyone to sleep,” said Covey. “Now, [with video-game re-enactments, we put you in the battle

There’s not a better way to train or to present.

You NEED to read the entire article: U.S. Army Turns to Videogames for Training