A screenshot from “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” the most complex and realistic modern battle video game to date. (Creative Commons photo from the Flikr account of bigdigo)

Have you heard about the $1.6 million the Pentagon is giving us to develop, essentially, a video game to train infantry?

Two media outlets have reported it to my knowledge, a Sun-Times blog and this military blog post. But both of them simply copy-pasted from a release by the office of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL):

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 defense spending bill includes funding for the following projects:
· Columbia College Chicago, Chicago. $1,600,000 in funding for the Construct Program at Columbia College Chicago, which will develop interactive simulations for military training that provide soldiers with the ability to train in computerized real world environments. The program requires users to complete training tasks as a team and allows for the tracking and recording of motions and other characteristics of each participant during each training session. This capability, along with Construct’s ability to review session data in multiple visual formats, will allow the Army to better train soldiers for military conflicts at the unit level.

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