Want to Know More? AA, gameplay data and the issue of recruitment

There’s one aspect of the online version America’s Army which fascinates – the fact that they can collect huge amounts of data about the aptitude and interests of each player. (This is quite a complex matter, so I didn't refer to it in the Guardian article, for fear of simplifying the issues at hand.)

In the Smart Bomb book, one of AA’s progenitors, Mike Zyda, admits that the Army had considered using the aptitude profiles of players as a means of direct recruitment, but that they decided against it. As Heather Chaplin, one of the book's co-authors, put it to me in an e-mail, "they were pretty far along going that way and pulled back at the last minute...As far as I understand it, they considered it then realized it 'wouldn't play'".  I presume that means they feared being portrayed as underhanded or covert in their recruitment techniques, particularly given the target age of the game (early teens to early twenties).