Enjoy the video game? Then join the Army.

Unlike many "shooter" games that require pistons for thumbs, "America's Army" is less about racking up kills and more about building skills, players say. And once the battle erupts, survival is difficult. To make a hit, for example, a player has to not just aim but synchronize his shooting to his breathing – just like with a real rifle. The main idea is to develop skills that move the player from lowly grunt to decorated Green Beret.

"When you shoot someone, it's not glorified," says Sgt. Jerry Wolford, a Silver Star recipient for combat valor who is now digitized into the game as a "Real Hero."

But critics say such games are a disingenuous way to tempt children as young as 12 who have little capacity for understanding the dark side of soldiering.

"It's the 21st-century version of a John Wayne movie," says Winslow Wheeler, a military expert at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "Because they don't show people's best friends getting their arms blown off ... these kinds of games can be very deceptive."

Some military experts also say that recruiting gambits like MySpace.com advertisements and video games are indicative of an Army scraping the bottom of its working-class recruiting pool. Nearly 40 percent of recruits now score in the bottom half of the Army's own aptitude test, according to David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness. More high school dropouts are now recruited than five years ago. There are fewer "washouts," meaning the Army is holding on to more borderline soldiers, critics say.

The upshot, says military sociologist Charles Moskos of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is that the Pentagon and Congress should be aiming higher than recruiting by video game. By drastically changing recruitment benefits to pay off college loans, he says – and even offering short-term enlistments – the Army could tap into the 1.2 million college graduates looking for work every year, few of whom now enlist.

"If we enlist 10 percent of college graduates, all our recruiting woes would be over," says Mr. Moskos. "Twenty percent of my students said they'd consider the Army with the right benefits."

But if the Army needs athletes and high-tech wizards from middle-class America, they did find them in Matt and Doug Stanbro. Though the brothers are very different – Doug is a football letterman, Matt a self-described computer geek –they say "America's Army" had a common appeal. They spent nights playing games with their friends, barking orders through headsets. They say the game prepared them at least in part for what the real Army embodied.

On the other hand, they acknowledge, some things can only be learned by crawling through the South Carolina woods with a rifle: Poison ivy, for one, doesn't translate well to the screen, Matt says.

• Staff writer Mark Sappenfield contributed to this report.

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