14 DAY TRIAL // What does the US Army do when it misses its early recruitment targets? It expands the target demographic so as to meet its recruitment efforts. And one of the segments that caught its attention are gamers.
The Army is planning to create a pilot recruitment center billed as being inspired by the interactivity features of the Apple Store. There's no word yet on where the center will be built, but it aims to give potential recruits a chance to experience virtual simulations of army activity.
Edward Walters, who is the CMO of the U.S. Army, says that "in the past we've focused on traditional media vehicles. The millennial generation is used to engaging in interactive assets and we need to adapt to them".
Robert Passikoff, who is ex-military and president of Brand Keys, a brand and customer loyalty planning consultancy based in New York, believes that "this is a way of engaging possible recruits in a way that may get someone interested and eventually convinced. It makes a lot of sense given how the media environment has changed. It isn't just a matter of providing information, it is a matter of experiential outreach that is really able to provide a broader range of connectivity".
The new recruitment center will have at least three large simulators with full-scale mock-ups of Army equipment and wrap-around 270-degree video screens. Potential recruits will then take part in simulations related to the Apache helicopter, the Black Hawk helicopter and the HMMWV all terrain vehicle.
The setup will be complemented by a zone where gamers can engage in matches of America's Army, the videogame that the Army released back in 2002 also to attract gamers to military service. Maybe they'll end up adding Halo 3 and Call of Duty to the line-up.
While such an interactive center for recruitment might help the Army reach enlistment goals, I have my doubts regarding the morality of such an effort. After all, videogames usually work on the hypothesis that dying in a game is only a nuisance, not a final event, while the Army, and real life for that matter, works on the assumption that dying is definitive.