Australian Defense Force: The Game?

A three year project has been announced by the Charles Sturt University, located in New South Wales, working with the Australian Defense Force to create gaming software for military personnel to train with. The project will use animatic avatars modeled on human speech and movement to create lifelike battle scenarios, training the military personnel in crisis management from a communications perspective. Zoe Hibbert, part-time CSU communications lecturer and researcher on the project spoke on the research and development in mind for the project.

The game will be media communications driven and that is the focus, and the use of avatars is very important as players have to assume a role and relate to it emotionally rather than just playing a role."

"Essentially the project has received the highest level research grant you can get and that recognizes the work we are doing is of national importance and highly competitive. The idea is we would like to create a serious computer game simulating crisis management from a communications perspective and while defense has first-person shooters we are trying to simulate exactly what happens from a communications perspective. It is a game but it will simulate crisis communication and look at management decisions on the way through.