SGS Feature: 'Pragmatic Solutions and America's Army'

Today's main feature written for Gamasutra sister site Serious Games Source, which deals with games created for training, health, government, military, educational and other uses, takes a look at Pragmatic Solutions, and how the company has been involved with the game America's Army in tracking in-game data. The site spoke with Robert Brown, the company's vice president of Business and Legal Affairs, to get his insight into the game, as well as with Pragmatic Solutions' tool concepts in general. In this excerpt, Brown describes the current stats for America's Army, and how his company helps track what's happening in the game/recruitment tool, commenting: "The first installment of the game, America’s Army: Operations, was released on July 4th 2002. More than 7 million registered users have played America’s Army for more than 160 million hours since its debut. On average, players complete more than 120,000 hours exploring the Army in America’s Army each day." He continues: "We recently launched a new statistics reporting site that is available to everyone to monitor their server and players on that server, the site has been a valuable tool to show that America’s Army is truly a global phenomenon. Not only are Americans playing the game in record numbers here in the US, but also abroad. We are also seeing tremendous penetration by non-Americans as well that simply enjoy the game as an FPS. Since the Army does not collect personal information, we do not track demographic data specifically, so we have to tell our “story” in different ways by giving the user as much information as we can about their server, and gameplay information, and allow them to compare and contrast their own user experience to others. This is one reason the Honor system has served the game so well: by allowing users to compare their levels of success against one another, the spirit of competition is introduced along with the other values the Army promotes." You can now read the full Serious Games Source feature on the subject, including more of Brown's comments on his company and America's Army (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).