I was a little surprised to run across a simulation game being used in military training, available in "Tactical Iraqi", "Tactical Pashto", "Tactical French" (they make a point that it is an African variety, not European... so I guess they can sleep safely in Paris for now), and coming soon in "Tactical Dari"! Tactical is the new "communicative", right?
The simulation game seems to serve its purpose too: some have learned more in one day playing the game than during a whole tour overseas (per the promotional video).
I wonder how we would feel about another country using a "Tactical English" videogame where the avatar is dressed in military getup, and the American responds becomes uncooperative when the rules are not respected.
The game designers made great efforts to respect the culture and individual differences (they mention this in the civilian version, "Mission to Iraq"), but some of us just won't ever be pleased when culture and interaction are reduced to prescriptive actions... But, in reality, some cultural and linguistic features are "fixed", and if this provides a means of learning about the culture and acquiring language, that is certainly a plus.
My main concern is that the learning not be LIMITED to the videogame, and I fear that with the military, the game is IT. By taking language learners out of contact with a teacher, they are only able to learn the set of skills the computer programmers included in the game- there is no dynamic aspect to the learning. The cultural learning is largely facultative to accomplishing the mission, rather than as a real context to language.
This is a decent, developed example of a beginning level language simulation game... with some sticky cultural implications.
