Hidden Levels #3: This Game Wants YOU

ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread,. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars from 99% Invisible. 

ROMAN MARS: Today we’re bringing you the third episode from our series, Hidden Levels, all about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Speaking of worlds, how familiar are you with the eSports world? 

ROMAN MARS: Um… Like, familiar enough to tell you a definition–but not steeped in it in any meaningful way. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: You’re not following Evil Geniuses or Fnatic or Cloud9? You’re not following these teams? 

ROMAN MARS: No, I wouldn’t say that I am. I don’t… I mean, I know that you’re saying English words, but I have no idea what those things are. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: So, for the uninitiated, eSports is basically organized competitive gaming. Think of all the fanfare, sponsorship, stadiums, tension of your favorite sports league. But instead of dribbling a ball or swinging a racket, eSports competitors are playing multi-person video games for titles, often in front of very large live audiences. 

LEAGUE OF LEGENDS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP (2024): Baker flashes in, and down goes Knight! Once again, when you need someone, when you need anyone to stand up and show just what this game’s all about…

ROMAN MARS: And I know this has been big for a while. But at this point, how many people beyond the stadium are watching people play games? 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: I will say, Roman, I was shocked by this. The global eSport audience is expected to exceed 600 million this year. This is an industry worth more than a billion dollars. Average competitor is in their 20s, and you actually age out in your 20s of being able to play because you can’t click a mouse fast enough after that to compete. 

ROMAN MARS: So I’m not gonna go pro? 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: No, Roman. I’m sorry, you can’t go pro. You can’t go pro. You might be able to coach. You’d be a great coach. You can’t go pro. So, the spectators for eSports are largely male and can actually even skew younger than the players themselves. So, there are a lot of teenagers who watch this stuff. And this demographic–teenage males–is very interesting to a longstanding U.S. organization who needs you. We will let producer Katelyn Harrop take it from here. 

KATELYN HARROP: Picture this. It’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and you’re in a convention center in Philadelphia or Denver. The space is crammed with booths promoting video games like Call of Duty and Halo. You can see an advertisement for G Fuel, an energy formula for gamers. And everywhere you look, there is group after group of young men huddled around gaming demos. 

As you keep walking, you come across a bank of gaming consoles manned by a crew in tight hairstyles and quick dry jerseys branded with a gold and white star. You found the Army eSports team. 

U.S. ARMY ESPORTS PROGRAM PROMO: So, you’re probably wondering to yourself, “The U.S. Army has an eSports program? Why? And how do I join?” The U.S. Army eSports program is a recruiting outreach tool to help the Army connect with the fast-growing eSports audience…

JOSEPH EDWARDS: Fan Expos is one of our bigger events where we’re able to interact with most of the public. And we pretty much bring a 30 by 30 booth. We set up all the games we possibly can. And then we just have genuine conversations with the eventgoers while competing against them and talking a little bit of trash and just having fun. 

KATELYN HARROP: That’s Staff Sergeant Joseph Edwards. He spent most of his career as an Army Intelligence Analyst, stationed all over the world. Now, he’s one of 13 soldiers who has taken on a multi-year assignment, fully devoted to representing the Army in the world of competitive gaming–with one major objective in mind. They want to spread the Army message through the power and passion of gaming and get you interested in joining up in the process. 

JOSEPH EDWARDS: We kind of start off the conversation with gaming. And then if they’re interested, a lot of times they’ll ask, “Are you actually in the Army?” And then that kind of opens it up to us being able to tell our Army story–why we joined, what we’ve done so far, all the different opportunities that the Army’s provided us…

KATELYN HARROP: The Army feels it’s important to adapt to the culture and to the times–to find innovative new ways to reach potential recruits. And this is important because, for decades, the Army has been on edge about recruitment, hitting their goals for a few years and then missing them again. Recently, the Army missed their recruitment goals in 2022 and 2023. They met them in 2024 after lowering their target by 10,000 from the year before. And as they see it, video games are a great way to connect live, in person, and online. 

Members of the Army eSports team are not technically recruiters themselves, but they do sit under the Army Recruitment Division as members of the Army’s outreach company. And at any public event, the Army eSports team is accompanied by at least one recruiter. If someone’s interested in joining up, that recruiter is ready to step in. Nora Bensahel is a professor of practice at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She says that the Army’s presence in eSports builds on a longstanding effort–an effort honed at county fairs and in high school cafeterias–an effort to communicate with young people. 

NORA BENSAHEL: The military considers people between ages 17 and 23 to 24 to be the primary target for recruiting. But of course, 17-year-olds don’t suddenly decide to start thinking about their career when they’re 17. 

KATELYN HARROP: While recruiters focus on “warm contacts,” those of recruitment age interested in signing up, Bensahel says outreach gets to cast a wider net. 

NORA BENSAHEL: So, the Army does try to reach out to people who are younger than 17, not to recruit them–not to say, “Come into the Army right now”–but because most Americans know nothing about the military. They do try to reach out to people younger than that to give them information so that it’s one of the options that they consider. 

KATELYN HARROP: The Army maintains that they do not target kids under recruitment age with their Army eSports team. But it’s also an undeniable fact that many eSports spaces where the team can be found–including expos and tournaments–they bring in people of all ages, including spectators younger than 17. And if these teens and pre-teens are interested in learning more about the Army, the Army eSports team is ready to connect. Captain Mimi Mejia–Commander of the Army’s Outreach Company, which oversees eSports–describes this dynamic as “planting a seed.”

KATELYN HARROP: Is there, like, a youngest age that folks talk to or see at these events? 

MIMI MEJIA: There’s no minimum age, I would say. A recruiter themselves isn’t gonna start talking to anyone until they’re at least a freshman in high school. But the eSports team does pretty well connecting with kids that are younger than that just because those kids still play games, too. So, if a young kid sees a guy that they really respect wearing the U.S. Army logo and they continue to see that over their time in middle school and high school, then they might start to think about the Army a little bit more. 

So, that’s just a seed that we’re planting. And especially when they’re in middle school, we’re not saying join the Army. But we’re more so just getting that idea into their heads. 

KATELYN HARROP: It makes sense that the Army would embed itself so deeply in eSports. Nearly 80% of Americans between 13 and 28 years old play some form of video games on a weekly basis. So, gamers? It’s a market the Army badly wants, full of young Americans prepped for the technological advancements of the modern battlefield. 

This approach is not new. Decades before military eSports teams started facing off against civilians, the U.S. Army took its first steps into consumer video games. 

ARCHIVAL NEWS TAPE: Finally, in January 1973, the draft is ended and replaced by an all-volunteer military force… 

KATELYN HARROP: When the U.S. Army ended the draft in ’73, it was widely seen as good news. The U.S. was no longer forcing the majority of young men who couldn’t afford to go to college or avoid the draft, in other ways, to go to war. But it also meant the military needed to majorly step up its outreach efforts, which they did. 

BE ALL YOU CAN BE AD: We’re here… 

KATELYN HARROP: Campaigns like the Be All You Can Be ads of the ’80s were super popular and led to short-term bumps in recruitment. But it didn’t last. The Army failed to meet its recruitment goals in 1998. It failed again in 1999. And folks at the Pentagon began to worry. If war were to break out, U.S. defense could be stretched thin. 

There’s a common understanding that, as the economy booms, entry-level pay for soldiers doesn’t always keep up with civilian wages. And college attendance goes up, which meant recruitment-age people either already had jobs or they were in school and not so likely to pursue a career in the armed service. They needed a new creative approach to recruitment–one that went beyond TV ads and pull-up contests at the county fair. Enter military economist Casey Wardynski. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: I have a PhD, so sometimes I go by Dr. Wardynski. I’m a retired Army colonel, so sometimes, I’m Colonel Wardynski. 

KATELYN HARROP: In 1999, Wardynski, West Point graduate–steely gaze, strong jawline–was running the Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: We were very interested in government efficiency, particularly with regard to the Army and how to make the best use of resources. 

KATELYN HARROP: Part of Wardynski’s job was to make sure the Army had enough, as his title suggests, manpower. And things weren’t looking great. But Wardynski had an idea–an approach to this recruitment slump that would target not just recruitment-age individuals, but the next generation of potential recruits still open to influence as they consider their future. 

This big idea, as Wardynski saw it, would allow the Army to create their own media image and target future recruits at the same time–a vision born from a very 1990s tradition: the family trip to Best Buy, his two sons in tow. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: While I was off looking at refrigerators or whatever with my wife, they’d be in the computer game aisle looking at games that they wanted me to buy for them. 

KATELYN HARROP: While the real Army was suffering a popularity crisis, battle and first-person shooter games, many based in fictional or intergalactic worlds, were booming–games like StarCraft, Half-Life, and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, each of which were on the list of top 10 best-selling computer games of 1999. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: And the games they were looking at were always in the perspective of a soldier. And that quickly led to an idea that the best way, perhaps for the Army to talk to young adults about being a soldier, is virtually. 

KATELYN HARROP: Wardynski began to envision a video game that pulled from popular shooter-style games. But instead of the fantastical version of combat featured in many blockbuster titles, Wardynski’s game would support recruitment by giving young people an idea of what the Army’s really like, as he interpreted it. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: You really couldn’t take them on an Army post and take them through basic training or let them drive a tank. But virtually, you could get past all those limitations and let a child take a virtual test drive of the Army. They could do it from their bedroom. They didn’t have to go to an Army for it. They could do it when it fit their schedule. And so these are the ideas that drove the concept. 

KATELYN HARROP: To take the ideas from concept to reality, Wardynski focused on the details, like the images, sound, and language of the game. But he knew next to nothing about game design. So he brought in some help–a team of Army modelers and simulation experts from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. To get a better sense of the Army’s story during game development, Wardynski’s team visited bases, filming and studying real-life soldiers and their equipment to make the game’s actions–like running, crawling, and gunfire–as accurate as possible. But Wardynski’s vision went beyond high-end graphics. He wanted the game to communicate the breadth of opportunities available in the Army, just as a real-life recruiter would. Except with the Army game, it could be hands-on and at times mandatory. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: They were really keenly invested in letting you know that this, while like other shooters in certain respects, was not going to simply lead you to your own pursuits. 

KATELYN HARROP: That’s Matthew Thomas Payne, Associate Professor at Notre Dame. He studies the relationship between the military and video games. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: They had a clear agenda in place, and part of that meant that you were gonna go through the drills that a recruit would go through and that you would, along the way, understand the values that the Army embraced while playing this game. 

KATELYN HARROP: While putting together the game, Wardynski and his team developed a series of training modules that taught the players the basics of Army work as they envisioned it, from physical fitness to first aid to target practice. Players were required to pass certain modules before they could hit the battlefield in their chosen roles. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: You’d sit there and go through courses on combat lifesaver… 

VIRTUAL OFFICER: Okay, soldier. There are injured people out there who need your help… 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: Dealing with, you know, gunshot wounds, dealing with compound fractures, and all this kind of stuff. We actually had to back off at one point because we got into, like, how much morphine to give somebody. That probably got too far down the road. 

VIRTUAL OFFICER: Okay, soldier, remember to treat the most critical casualties first… 

VIRTUAL SOLDIER: Am I gonna be okay? 

KATELYN HARROP: Wardynski–a very eat your vegetables kind of guy–believed that you could put in these arduous boot camp trainings and young people would still play the game. And if that was a turnoff, he didn’t really care. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: The whole undergirdment of the game was these army values. And if that wasn’t interesting to you, we probably weren’t that interested in you and you probably weren’t that interested in us. 

KATELYN HARROP: The Army game team created a series of detailed maps–vaguely Middle Eastern cities, war-torn hospitals, disputed bridges–that players, once they passed marksmanship and weapons training, could explore, defend, and conquer with their teammates. Other teens and young adults from around the country and world, represented the virtual U.S. Army. 

But the developers had one big looming question because war can’t exist without an enemy. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: The question was, well, who’s… You know, America’s the good guys. Who are the bad guys? Well, before 9/11, that wasn’t a real easy question to address. And so we were looking at narco-terrorists and people like that to be the bad guy. After 9/11, that solved itself. It was obviously Taliban and that crew. And so that made that more straightforward. 

KATELYN HARROP: The enemy in the game wasn’t directly called the Taliban. But in 2001, the overwhelming cultural consensus that the Taliban was America’s number one real life enemy–it served as a guiding force as Wardynski and his team fleshed out the details of their virtual enemy combatants. For instance, the game’s setting…

CASEY WARDYNSKI: The operations in the game would be in Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere like that. And they would be involved with the War on Terror, which, you know, would be a surprise if they weren’t, given that the United States, by the time we launched the game, was in the War on Terror. 

KATELYN HARROP: And playing as the U.S. Army against this enemy–that was the only choice. While in your average multiplayer game, you got to choose which team you’re on, in The Army game, you would always be Team U.S.A. Think of it like a patriotic mirror. Matthew Thomas Payne again…

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: So you really only see yourself as a U.S. soldier. You never played as anyone other than the U. S. Army. Even in a multiplayer setting where Team A is fighting Team B, both Team A and Team B always see themselves as the U.S. soldiers, and they always see their opponents as a kind of oppositional force, foreclosing the ability for any of the teams to imagine themselves as an oppositional force or as terrorists. 

KATELYN HARROP: And it was against this backdrop that Wardynski began to launch his project, America’s Army, the official U.S. Army game. Cue menu theme…

[AMERICA’S ARMY MENU THEME]

KATELYN HARROP: In May 2002, Wardynski premiered America’s Army at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, one of the biggest industry trade shows in the country. He worked with a marketing team to make the release into an event that felt like a military operation. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: And I said, “Okay, you get us a space, we’ll bring the razzmatazz.” And they’re like, “What does that mean?” I said, “Well, we’ll show up with the Army.”

[TANK SOUNDS]

KATELYN HARROP: Tanks were theatrically placed outside of the venue. Soldiers repelled from the ceiling of the convention center, holding machine guns, while groups of young people crowded around computers demoing the game. The stunt got coverage from the New York Times, CNN, and the LA Times. America’s Army came out on the 4th of July, 2002. And within the first month of release, the game was downloaded more than one and a half million times. 

It was the first of its kind–a video game by the U.S. Army designed for recruitment. Wardynski’s belief that video games could bring the Army to young people had been proven right. The game’s success was partly due to Wardynki’s dedication to realistic gun design and lifelike language of virtual drill sergeants. But America’s Army offered something else–something none of its competitors could. The game was 100% free. If you had an internet connection, it was yours. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: It’s hard to overstate just how important it was that America’s Army be a free to play game. Big budget, free to play games, like we have today with Fortnite and other games, didn’t really exist. Most games that take multiple millions of dollars to produce–you want to return on investment. The Army doesn’t care about that. 

KATELYN HARROP: By the end of 2002, the Army had spent nearly $11 million on America’s Army, according to data obtained by the website GameSpot. It’s a budget Wardynski considers a steal for the Army who, for context, budgeted $55 million for TV ads in 2003 alone. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: Like, they’re not in it to make money from the game quite clearly. They’re in it to get recruits. They’re in it for positive brand recognition or having people think more positively about what a career in the Army might look like. 

KATELYN HARROP: But gameplay wasn’t limited to those of recruitable age. As a commercial game, America’s Army received a rating–T for Teen–which marked the game’s content as suitable for players as young as 13 years old. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: Teen games will have some violence, but there’s typically little gore or explicit blood. Now, of course, producers know all of this, and they use ratings to strategically market their games. Teen and titles designed for younger players are often sold as family-friendly experiences. 

KATELYN HARROP: This meant that America’s Army–the game that promised a true and authentic Army experience–was relatively bloodless. Unlike in a real battle, players shot dead fell to the ground without much of a visible wound, then booted the game back up, and started again. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: I mean, you would see much more kind of graphic detail in even fantasy shooters of the ’90s than you would in something like America’s Army. When we talk about military realism, I don’t think you’re going to design a game that is realistic to a soldier’s experience that is going to sell anybody on being a part of that experience because we know that a lot of the experience is absolute boredom, which is punctuated by these moments of horror. 

KATELYN HARROP: Payne says having America’s Army rated Teen was key to making the game available to its core demographic–teens and pre-teens open to considering a future in the U.S. Army–young people like TJ Bulcher. He was just 13 years old when he started playing America’s Army, about a year after it dropped. He was already interested in video games and curious about the military when he saw a post about America’s Army on the website, PC Gamer. And the price was right. Pretty much immediately, he got way into it. 

TJ BULCHER: I was playing every day, if I could, for several hours a day. 

KATELYN HARROP: In order to play, Bulcher started to make his way through Wardynski’s training modules–the ones he hoped would give players an authentic sense of Army service. And he loved them. 

VIRTUAL OFFICER: Let’s get started…

TJ BULCHER: They make you watch basically a slideshow in-game on the steps to do first aid and what your role as a medic should be in combat. 

VIRTUAL OFFICER: Shock may be caused by severe injury or blood loss and disrupts the normal flow of blood through the body… 

TJ BULCHER: Depending on how well you did, it could take anywhere from a half hour to an hour if you failed the test and had to retake it and rewatch it. 

VIRTUAL OFFICER: This is just pathetic, soldier! 

KATELYN HARROP: Okay, wow, yeah, so that’s kind of a commitment when you’re 13 years old. 

TJ BULCHER: It is a super commitment as a young kid. I found it really interesting that you had to do all this training and even had the ability to train like you were an adult in the Army. 

KATELYN HARROP: After training, TJ got ready to deploy. 

TJ BULCHER: You pick a role, whether it’s a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a sniper… And once you pick that role, you’re in a team based on what role you pick. 

KATELYN HARROP: That rifleman or sniper then picked a map and a mission to play. In one map, it’s your mission to make a preemptive raid on a terrorist training camp. In another map–one of TJ’s favorites–Team U.S.A. had to cross a bridge held by enemy occupants. And it was during this stage of gameplay that the results from those training modules could come back to help or hinder a player. Take the medical training Bulcher mentioned earlier–the one with the final exam. During that module test, players actually had a choice to cheat, which is helpful if you couldn’t remember all the details in the informational slide show. But if you cheated on the test to pass the medical trading, Wardynski says it could come back to haunt you in a firefight on that very bridge. Say you’re playing medic and a teammate gets shot… 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: And the game announces to all the other players, “Hey, Joe over here cheated in basic training in medic. And he doesn’t know how to save any of you.” So the game would keep all that and play it back to a kid at the right moment in time, maybe two years down the road. 

KATELYN HARROP: And the Army message–it wasn’t just woven into gameplay. Looking back, Bulcher remembers the overt marketing and recruitment text included in America’s Army pretty vividly. 

TJ BULCHER: On the landing page of the client before you started the game, they had all their recruiting stuff plastered all over it. 

KATELYN HARROP: What kind of stuff would it say? 

TJ BULCHER: You know, like, “Go Army,” “Click here if you’re interested in joining the Army,” “Learn more about the Army,” and stuff like that. 

KATELYN HARROP: After countless hours of battling as a member of the virtual U.S. Army, Bulcher finished high school and then enlisted in the military for real. He opted for the Marines instead of the Army because it’s the branch other members of his family served in. But America’s army still had a significant impact. 

TJ BULCHER: It definitely influenced my decision to join it. I wanted to be able to do the things that I could do in the game: work as a squad, work as a team, and be leadership. All of those things had a heavy influence on me wanting to do that. 

KATELYN HARROP: It’s impossible to know how many people joined up because of America’s Army. But the player numbers? They show a lot of engagement with the game. In July of 2008, the Guinness World Records named America’s Army the most downloaded war video game ever with more than 42 and a half million downloads. For Wardynski, America’s Army was exactly what he had hoped for–a seemingly successful recruitment tool and a chance to get his version of the Army into mainstream media. 

CASEY WARDYNSKI: Beyond anybody’s dreams–it’s won every award you can win. This is an immersion. They’re in the Army, except for sweating. 

KATELYN HARROP: The Army proved that it could get attention in the commercial gaming industry–that good graphics and a free-99 price tag could get Army recruitment messaging in front of millions of eyes, setting the precedent for a relationship between the military and the video game sector that would continue for decades. But not everyone was on board. When we come back, Army gaming meets the resistance… 

[AD BREAK]

KATELYN HARROP: No one could have predicted the success of America’s Army. But as popular as the game was, from the moment it was released in 2002, it also drew criticism from parents and advocates concerned that the project gamified war to a young and impressionable audience. Remember, at the time, America’s actual Army was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anti-war advocates saw America’s Army not just as a glorification of war, but as a tool for promoting military violence. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: There was no shortage of hand-wringing around… Well, what does it mean to play war while there’s war happening, particularly in these games where they’re advertised for having photo-realistic graphics and surround sound and military vehicles and weapons that look and fire like the real thing?

KATELYN HARROP: In 2006, media artist and activist Joseph Delappe began joining America’s Army games under the handle “dead-in-iraq.” In an act of protest art, Delappe would drop his virtual weapon and begin typing into the game’s chat function for everyone to read. In it, he entered the name, age, and service branch of every American killed while serving in Iraq. Delappe describes this act as a cautionary gesture–a protest to what he described as “this very simplistic representation of warfare.” In a wide-ranging 2008 report, the ACLU even accused America’s Army and the Army at large of violating a UN treaty aimed at protecting children from military recruitment. But these critics were no match for the cultural appetite of post-9/11 America. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: It could have been a situation where you could have had a public–a gameplaying consumer group that said, “No thank you, this isn’t for us.” But that’s not what we had. We had instead: “Yes, this is awesome. Can we have some more of this please?” And so the rest is history, right? 

KATELYN HARROP: Under the leadership of Casey Wardynski, America’s Army continued. America’s Army: Special Forces was released in 2003. Two years later, America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier dropped on Xbox–then comics, action figures, and in-person events, like the Virtual Army Experience, a traveling, interactive, virtual battlefield exhibited in a 10,000 square foot inflatable dome. But by the mid-2000s, the realistic first-person shooter space was radically more competitive. Payne says America’s Army’s later versions–America’s Army 3 and America’s Army: Proving Grounds–they struggled to keep up with some of the flashier opportunities posed by other new games. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: I don’t know if there’s a change in appetite as much as a continuing kind of ratcheting up of what was possible. America’s Army just really couldn’t keep up because of, I think, their correct assumption that they had to remain within certain kinds of representational and simulational parameters. You want to be able to fire a giant machine gun from a helicopter. You don’t want to be doing basic training when you could be jumping out of a jet or fighting with your pals in a session of death match over and over again. 

KATELYN HARROP: In 2022, after a two-decade run, America’s Army was honorably discharged from the virtual battlefield. The Army officially removed the game from its servers and shuttered the game’s website. America’s Army creator, Casey Wardynski, again…

CASEY WARDYNSKI: A lot of really good people made that game happen. I’m just the guy who came up with an idea and then made sure everything came together. But a lot of good people are in the Army because of that game. 

KATELYN HARROP: As trends in video games changed, so did the Army’s approach to using them for recruitment. Major game studios like Electronic Arts and Activision were making blockbuster titles that targeted the same military-interested audience that the Army coveted. So, they pivoted. Instead of making their own games, the Army started to take advantage of opportunities offered by bigger, flashier, more successful games to reach the same objective as America’s Army: connecting with potential recruits. 

MATTHEW THOMAS PAYNE: The military has been largely opportunistic in the way that it approached video games as a technology. When Halo was a really big property, it wasn’t uncommon for recruiters to be part of the game release parties. And they would occasionally appear at retail places, where people were lining up to buy the games, in part because, well, if you like this military space shooter, maybe you’re already predisposed to being interested in the Army as well. 

KATELYN HARROP: Current and former members of the military have also served as subject matter experts for games such as Call of Duty and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, consulting on the game’s realism and offering player feedback, just as they did internally for America’s Army in the early 2000s. And back at Fort Knox, the Army is continuing to build out its outreach efforts in the competitive gaming space. 

PLAYER: Currently, I’m playing for the United States Army sports team. And that’s my dream–to be some sort of organization playing professionally…

KATELYN HARROP: Today, the video games played by Army eSports soldiers aren’t in-house creations like America’s Army. Some of them aren’t even shooter games at all. Like, have you ever heard of the insanely popular game Rocket League? It’s basically cars playing soccer, and the Army eSports team is way into it. The titles they play vary: Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Valorant, Overwatch 2… But they all have one thing in common. They’re incredibly popular with young people. And they’re huge in the eSports world, where about a quarter of those who watch are 20 years old or younger. And as Captain Mimi Mejia, commander of the Army’s outreach company, says, “Some of these young people could make great soldiers–today or in the years to come.”

MIMI MEJIA: I do think that people who have skills in gaming can be beneficial to the Army, especially with the way that we see the future of war going right now. It’s a lot more technologically advanced. So, those types of skills versus–you know–just straight-up war fighters is really coming into play right now. And that’s why this whole company was stood up to be part of that broader recruitment effort–that we wouldn’t just have boots on the ground in high schools, but that we would be able to meet people where they’re at in these different arenas. 

KATELYN HARROP: I asked the Army how they measure the success of their eSports program. Lieutenant Colonel Lyndsey Thompson wrote me back. He’s commander of the U.S. Army Mission Support Battalion, which oversees Army eSports. Thompson said that the Army eSports team gets about 500 direct responses or signups at each event. He added that, in opting to participate in these Army eSports activities, members of the public provide personal information. That includes email and phone numbers, which may be used by Army recruiters to “follow up with respondents who have expressed an interest in joining the Army or those that just want information about the Army.” But the Army’s presence in the eSports arena, in person and online, is a tactic some gamers and political critics find insincere or even disturbing. 

ESPORTS TALK EXCERPT: It’s the action itself of even trying to recruit what could be a very young audience and the tactics in actually doing so– Does Twitch want to allow this? 

GAMERS 4 PEACE EXCERPT: Showcase the talent and hobbies that soldiers have and outlet for outreach. That’s code for recruiting!

YOUNG TURKS EXCERPT: It’s a sign of desperation, I think. It’s obviously, like, incredibly dystopian. It’s horrifying…

KATELYN HARROP: Some of the strongest blowback came in 2020. Back then, the Army was using Twitch to stream its eSports team to thousands of young viewers. 

INSIDE GAMING: Yes, the Army, in particular, is getting a lot of criticism. [SCOFFS] What’s new? For how it’s acting on Twitch…

KATELYN HARROP: Kids as young as 13 can make Twitch accounts. Following reporting by The Nation Magazine, streamers and advocates accused the Army of using the platform to surreptitiously steer kids to an Army recruitment form. The Army disputed these allegations but agreed to remove the links after Twitch flagged them for lacking transparency. And more than 10 years after calling out America’s Army, the ACLU was back, this time accusing the Army eSports team of violating the First Amendment. This was after the team’s Twitch channel banned commenters who asked questions about war crimes and other alleged military transgressions. This public concern gained enough momentum that it even caught the attention of Congress. 

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: I’d like to present this amendment by opening with the stance of the U.S. Marine Corps, which is that war is not a game…

KATELYN HARROP: In July of 2020, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a gamer herself, introduced a draft amendment to the House Appropriations Bill that aimed to ban the military from using funds to maintain a presence on Twitch or other streaming platforms. 

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: This amendment is specifically to block recruitment practices and funding for recruitment practices on platforms such as Twitch.tv, which are live streaming platforms that are largely populated by children well under the age of military recruitment rules. Right now, currently, children on platforms such as Twitch are bombarded with banner ads that link to recruitment sign-up forms that can be submitted by children as young as 12 years old…

KATELYN HARROP: The amendment failed. But today, the U.S. Army eSports team remains dormant on Twitch. 

JONATHAN HANSING: I think many times the view that young, say, high schoolers get about what military service is is extremely one-sided. 

KATELYN HARROP: That’s Jonathan Hansing, an Army veteran and avid gamer. In 2021, fresh out of his Army service, Hansing got involved with a group called Gamers for Peace, dedicated to confronting recruitment via eSports and other forms of gaming. It’s a branch off of the larger advocacy group Veterans for Peace. 

JONATHAN HANSING: The military service members that you do have access to in some of these online communities can only say nice things about their service. And as a 13-year-old to 17-year old, you don’t really have the perspective or the critical thinking skills to ask yourself, “What is the full comprehensive view of what military service is like?”

KATELYN HARROP: And Hansing believes that giving this comprehensive view of what it means to join up–the Army has an obligation to do it. 

JONATHAN HANSING: Not just on, like, a philosophical sense to the American people, but to the people you serve with to make sure that you are recruiting high-caliber people who understand the risks and accept those risks with clear eyes. You cannot do that if you are filling kids’ heads with an incorrect vision of what the military is. 

KATELYN HARROP: And as for America’s Army, the force’s early foray into commercial gaming, the game has found a new life with a small group of highly dedicated players, including early adopter TJ Bulcher. Today, he plays America’s Army 2.5, an adapted version of the original game, with diehard fans around the world. 

TJ BULCHER: I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when it said that they still had a community and the game was actually running and people were playing on it. 

KATELYN HARROP: TJ says he actually sees a lot of the same names he played with back when he started at 13 years old. And a lot those people are now veterans themselves, just like him. 

TJ BULCHER: If you were in the Navy, the Marines, the Army, or something like that, you get a special icon in-game that made you stand out from everybody else. And that’s one of the biggest things I wanted when I was growing up playing this game. 

KATELYN HARROP: Did you end up getting that? 

TJ BULCHER: I did. 

KATELYN HARROP: Was that a big day? 

TJ BULCHER: It was a huge day. I was really excited. 

KATELYN HARROP: For now, the Army eSports team remains quiet on streaming platforms but continues its work at fan expos and other public events. And the eSports team continues to make its presence known to gamers in the competitive eSports sphere too, extending–shall we say–an outreaching hand in the hopes of building up the next generation of American soldiers. 

ROMAN MARS: That was producer Katelyn Harrop. Next time, on Episode 4 of Hidden Levels, the boom and bust of Machinima–the agony and the ecstasy of making movies inside live multiplayer games. 

CHRIS BURKE: There’s so many outtakes I have of me just, like, yelling at the people in the game, you know, like, “Don’t kill the guest!” 

DAMIAN LACEDAEMOAN: We’re shooting… Bad choice of words. We’re recording an interview… 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: This episode was produced by Katelyn Harrop. It was edited by Christopher Johnson. Mix, sound design, and music composition by Paul Vaitkus. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. 

The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. 

Hidden Level was created by myself, Ben Brock Johnson, after reading a study about Tetris reducing the effects of PTSD, with power-ups and cheat codes thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Thread. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible’s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston’s NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious cohost Amory Sivertson, Managing Producer Samata Joshi, editor Meg Cramer, Producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Frannie Monahan, and Sound Designer Emily Jankowski.

See you on Friday.