Marines turn to modified Call of Duty 4 to train new sergeants
The Marine Corps hopes that a modified version of the nearly two-decade-old hit video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare can help newly promoted sergeants level up as leaders. A group of researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Memphis developed a training adaptation of the genre-defining game to help teach students in the Sergeants School at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va.
Stars and Stripes — The Marine Corps hopes that a modified version of the nearly two-decade-old hit video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare can help newly promoted sergeants level up as leaders. A group of researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Memphis developed a training adaptation of the genre-defining game to help teach students in the Sergeants School at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va.
The effort, funded by the Office of Naval Research, is known as Research into Competency Acquisition with Novel E-gaming.
The fourth installment of the Call of Duty franchise, a top seller after its release in November 2007, was the first to bring the series out of World War II and into the modern era, though much about modern warfare has changed since, with the advent and growing use of drone technology and artificial intelligence.
In the game’s modified version, which was introduced to the first cohort of Marine students in January, players participate in over a dozen scenarios tailored to help them hone skills in leadership, critical thinking, decision-making and communication in real time, Virginia Tech said in a statement this week.
“The actual skills translate directly into making good decisions under high stress,” said Brig. Gen. Matthew Tracy, commanding general of Marine Corps Education Command and president of Marine Corps University, according to the statement.
Sergeants School is designed to prepare newly promoted sergeants to take on more significant leadership roles as noncommissioned officers, according to a description on the Marine Corps University’s website. The curriculum emphasizes Marine Corps doctrine, tactical decision-making and maneuver warfare concepts. Course instruction is typically delivered through guided discussions, case studies, practical applications and other exercises.
Traditional modes of instruction provide students with the necessary knowledge, but the video game lets them develop that knowledge into skills “through practice, reflection and refinement,” said Lt. Cmdr. Mike Natali, a program manager with the Office of Naval Research.
The students see “how their thoughts, decisions, and interactions with teammates affect performance and mission success in real-time vice theoretical talking points,” Natali said in the Virginia Tech statement.
Having the chance to work with the military on something with a real-world impact “instead of something sequestered away in the ivory tower” was a plus for Louis Hickman, assistant professor of industrial-organizational psychology at Virginia Tech, who leads the research project.
“This is one of the few things in the course that allows for active practice and a more engaging experience,” Hickman said.
The similarity of the game’s setting to the real world was also part of the reason the researchers chose Call of Duty 4 over something like Halo, which is set on other planets centuries in the future, Hickman told Stars and Stripes this week.
‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’ — released by Activision in 2007 — is being used at the Marine Corps University’s Sergeants School to train newly promoted Marines in real-world leadership skills needed to level up as noncommissioned officers. (Brian Bowers/Stars and Stripes)
Before he had two jobs and a family, he was an avid player of first-person shooters and even played the first installment of the Call of Duty franchise competitively in his younger days, he said.
Hickman’s gaming skills also showed in the team’s weekly testing of the game and associated software.
“When Louis is there, it’s like having Rambo on your team,” said Ryan P. McMahan, director of the Blacksburg, Va.-based university’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction, as quoted in the university’s statement.
The team needed to ensure the software could collect data and function perfectly before being deployed because it could not be updated later, which was a unique constraint on their work, said Brandon Booth, a third member of the team and an assistant professor in the University of Memphis Department of Computer Science.
The researchers used existing modification tools to create a custom campaign through 14 levels, some of which have several variants. Fire teams of five Marine players battle together through these levels against much larger numbers of opposing forces than the “drip feed” of enemies they would see in the game’s original single-player campaign mode.
“Sometimes they’re encountering up to 20 opposing forces at a time,” Hickman said, an intensity of combat that “requires coordinating in terms of where you’re looking and covering, as well as when you’re reloading, just like you might encounter in the real world.”
Before each scenario, the fire team gets a briefing and the team leader develops a plan. During the gameplay, researchers gather data from players’ voice chats, video of the gameplay, and information about their in-game movements, shooting, kills, and deaths. Afterward, the team does what the Marines call a “hot wash,” facilitated by a large language model, a type of artificial intelligence that helps them discuss what went well, what didn’t, and what to do differently the next time, Hickman said.
In a later phase of the project, researchers plan to feed the player data into the large language model to help it improve the after-action review and better aid Marines in developing lessons learned, Hickman said.
Ultimately, the skills the young sergeants practice in the game, and the lessons they learn from it, are tested and evaluated in realistic scenarios over several days during the school’s culminating field exercise.
While Marine Corps University plans to deploy the software at a Sergeants School on Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms in California, Hickman said students were already asking to take it back to their units.
“They thought it was so valuable that their units would benefit from it as well,” he said in the university statement.
Chad Garland Chad Garland Chad is a Marine Corps veteran who covers the U.S. military in Vicenza, Italy, for Stars and Stripes. He previously covered military operations downrange in the Middle East and elsewhere for the paper. An Illinois native who’s reported for news outlets in Washington, D.C., Arizona, Oregon and California, he’s an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University.