Virtual Tourism and Tours of Duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq

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Virtual Tourism and Tours of Duty in Tactical
Iraqi and Virtual Iraq

• Elizabeth Losh
• University of California, Irvine

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Military Users and VR

• More accustomed to bulky gear and wearing
  specialized goggles.
• More familiar with navigating a screen
  environment that represents local real-world
  topography.
• More habituated to displays with functions that
  can reshape landmarks and terrain.

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A Rhetorical History in Classical Rome
According to a famous narrative by Cicero, the
Method of Loci originated in a personal disaster
that took place in the life of the rhetorician
Simonides of Ceos, who then created artificial
memory.
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The Palace of Memory

• Memory was one of the five canons of classical
  rhetoric, although it is often considered less
  important in the era of computing technologies.
• The Method of Loci orients a rhetorical subject
  in a 3-D environment to create particular mental
  associations while moving through sequences of
  discrete scenes.
• The contemporary research of Yates and Carruthers
  attempts to relegitimize these cultural practices.

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Abbey Memory System

• Johannes Romberch, Congestorium Artificiose
  Memorie, 1533

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Paradise as Artificial Memory

• Cosmas Rossellius, Thesaurus Artificiosae
  Memoriae, 1579

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Is Memory Obsolete?

• For much of the twentieth century memory was
  devalued in the canon of rhetoric, and invention
  was lauded.
• Now, with ubiquitous computing and powerful
  search engines, is the construction of organic
  memory of any continuing importance?

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Wong and Storkerson

• In virtual environments, however, associative
  processes of cognition could assert their
  importance again.

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The Reverse Memory Palace

• Making Environments to Suit Rhetoric
• Michael Heim on Avatecture in
• the CyberForum_at_ArtsCenter that also uses the work
  of W.S. Mitchell

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The Human Terrain

• Policy analyst Max Boot in an editorial in The
  Los Angeles Times
• The FlatWorld mixed reality facility at USCs ICT

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Tactical Iraqi

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A Pre-History of Tactical Iraqi
The Center for Advanced Research in Technology
for Education (CARTE) at the Information Sciences
Institute of the University of Southern
California previously authored a range of
imaginative but seemingly disconnected distance
learning initiatives that featured computer
generated animated agents, software capable of
expressive speech analysis and synthesis, and
programs organized around the presentation of
pedagogical drama.
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Mission Game

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Skill Builder

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Arcade Game

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What are the core problems that Tactical Iraqi is
designed to solve?

• A chronic shortage of Arabic speakers among
  military personnel
• A combat environment in ambiguous urban warfare
  settings of occupation and reconstruction
• A resistance to classroom language instruction in
  the planned population of learners

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Social and Perceptual Realism
What common rituals make us more likely to
identify a given situation as realistic? Alison
McMahan How does the agora function in digital
spaces?

(The agora is the environmental bubble in which
social exchange and mutual appropriation is
permissible according to Ostwald.)
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A Pre-History of Embodied Language Learning
Georgi Lozanov Suggestology and Suggestopedia
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Constraining Transgressive Play

• James Paul Gee has argued that there are
  pedagogical benefits to challenging the norms of
  explicit instruction in situated learning
  contexts.
• Yet military videogames generally punish
  transgressive play and limit exploration of the
  virtual environment, to such an extent that human
  subjects at first avoided the game space of
  Tactical Iraqi entirely or cheated to reach the
  ostensible rewarded objective.

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The Commercial Market for Language-Learning
Software
The Living Language series models norms of
politeness in which interactions are highly
regulated and proprietary rights to the physical
space is not contested.
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Knock and Talk Missions

• How do soldiers learn to follow very different
  rhetorical rules?
• How is personal space negotiated?
• How do strategies and tactics differ?
• Is there a role for politeness?

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Positive and Negative Face

• Brown and Levinson recommend negative politeness
  as the safer course.
• Yet military missions may necessarily constrain
  the spatial freedom of others during
  interrogation, search, or arrest.

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Virtual Tourism

• What are the effects of architectural pastiche?
• How is the area of game play constrained?

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Virtual Iraq
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A HMD exposure therapy simulation that uses
digital assets from other ISI/ICT projects
and Full Spectrum Warrior. The object of the
simulation is to allow the patient to create
personal narratives about real-life traumatic
events that foster psychic integration rather
than the symptomology or dissociation of PTSD.
Some versions of the simulation use a motion
platform and/or scent release device.

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A Pre-History of Virtual Iraq

• Brain injured patients or stroke victims need
  spatial cues to reacquire particular cognitive
  associations.
• A modern form of the method of loci operates by
  rebuilding intellectual function by fostering
  interaction with the virtual environment.

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Telemedicine

• Rehabilitation and training in virtual
  environments
• for amputees, spinal injury patients, the blind,
• and the developmentally disabled.

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Virtual Classroom

• Albert Skip Rizzo
• ADHD Children

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Virtual World Trade Center

• Cornell and the University of Washington

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Virtual Vietnam

• Jarrell Pair and researchers at Georgia Tech

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Virtual Bus Bombing

• Tamar Weiss, University of Haifa

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The Spatialization of Memory in the work of Jacki
Morie

• The Memory Stairs
• 
  DarkCon

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The Rhetoric of WalkingMichel de Certeau

Ian Bogost, the figure of the flaneur, and the
concept of Procedural Rhetoric
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Differences

• Tactical Iraqi is a game, and Virtual Iraq is a
  simulation.
• Tactical Iraqi has pedagogical goals, and Virtual
  Iraq has therapeutic ones.
• Tactical Iraqi uses third-person perspective, and
  Virtual Iraq uses first-person.
• Tactical Iraqi rapidly switches contexts, and
  Virtual Iraq is immersive.

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Similarities

• Both programs recreate segments of the landscape,
  built environment, and population of Iraq in 3-D
  worlds.
• Both are developed by teams in close physical
  proximity under the auspices of the same
  university.
• Both require a high degree of trust from
  user-participants.
• Both use off-the-shelf game technology that has
  had a history in the consumer market.
• Both have attracted considerable news coverage in
  the mainstream media.
• Both connect memory development to discrete
  scenes in digital experience.

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Showing pervasive problems being solved could
potentially create political spectacles

• The shortage of Arabic speakers
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among the veteran
  population
• The difficulty of locating improvised explosive
  devices

Ambush! from BBS, another DARWARS project
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Mainstream Media Coverage

• Tactical Iraqi
• Newsweek
• USA Today
• The Los Angeles Times
• The New York Times
• National Geographic
• Forbes
• BBC
• National Public Radio
• ABC News

• Virtual Iraq
• BBC
• National Public Radio
• CNN
• ABC
• CBS
• Reuters
• Newsweek
• The Washington Post
• The Los Angeles Times

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Is there a rhetorical function to making
training, language-learning, or therapy visible
to the public?Regardless of the intentions of
their creators, are policy-makers motivated to
fund projects that show intractable problems
being tackled regardless of their efficacy?If
audiences for broadcast media in the general
public do not participate in interactive
experiences do they have any opportunity for
ideological critique?

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Slavoj iek Welcome to the Desert of the Real

• By using the film The Matrix as an analogy,
  iek argues that until the attacks of September
  11th, the U.S. was shielded by an artificial but
  ideologically comforting socio-economic,
  political, and cultural virtual reality
  environment that separated it from the violence
  and privation of the rest of the world.

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• If there is any symbolism in the collapse of
  the WTC towers, it is not so much the
  old-fashioned notion of the center of financial
  capitalism, but, rather, the notion that the two
  WTC towers stood for the center of the VIRTUAL
  capitalism, of financial speculations
  disconnected from the sphere of material
  production. The shattering impact of the bombings
  can only be accounted for only against the
  background of the borderline which today
  separates the digitalized First World from the
  Third World desert of the Real.

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• Ironically, since those attacks, government
  agencies have created even more VREs so that
  games and simulations can safely model military
  and public health situations of crisis.
• When the consequences of error are so high, VRE
  simulation would seem to create a logical testing
  ground for purposive action.

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• In particular, a number of Virtual Iraqs were
  to have been recreated these included plans to
  construct a digital replica of the looted
  National Museum in Baghdad.
• Yet the portability of digital assets poses
  challenges to designers state-side who are not
  cleared for secure access to certain photographic
  reference materials, such as those from the Green
  Zone.

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Making Things Public

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Taxpayer-Funded Games as Public Property

• Scientific laboratories, technical
  institutions, marketplaces, churches and temples,
  financial trading rooms, Internet forums,
  ecological disputes without forgetting the very
  shape of the museum inside which we gather all
  those membra disjecta are just some of the
  forums and agoras in which we speak, vote,
  decide, are decided upon, prove, are being
  convinced.
• Bruno Latour

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Summation Whats unsettling about these games
and simulations?

• The Palace of Memory is actually underutilized.
• Interaction with the spatial environment is
  highly regulated.
• Secondary audiences can only experience the
  spatial environment passively.
• The danger of creating political spectacles is
  not acknowledged.
• Virtuality creates an ideological alienation
  effect.

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Acknowledgements

• My thanks to Lewis Johnson of the
  Information Sciences Institute for allowing me to
  interview him about this project and for access
  to his published studies, game scripts, character
  descriptions, and personal reflections in several
  follow up e-mail exchanges. I am also very
  grateful to Albert Skip Rizzo of the Institute
  for Creative Technologies, who permitted an
  extensive interview allowed me to use the system
  twice and shared his rich archive of digital
  files that demonstrate virtual reality exposure
  techniques and clinical findings.

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What isnt here about Tactical Iraqi . . .

• A critique of its assumptions about the identity
  position of the user, particularly in regard to
  nationality, class, sexuality, and gender.
• An exploration of the cryptohistory of the games
  development and its migration from face to
  trust to etiquette as the core explanatory
  narrative.
• An analysis of the debate in the game development
  community about working on a military-funded
  videogame by looking at competing philosophies of
  instrumentalism.

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My e-mail and web addresses

• lizlosh_at_uci.edu
• http//eee.uci.edu/faculty/losh
• http//www.virtualpolitik.org
• http//www.digitalrhetoric.org