Also don't forget what the "simulations" are usually used for!
Did you hear about the modified version of Doom that was supposedly used by the army for training purposes? I used to think "bs", what are they going to train with Doom, but thinking about what can be trained in a video game anyway I came to the conclusion that Doom would work just well:
E.g. if you want to teach soldiers how to storm a room. How to get as many armed men into a room as fast and smooth as possible covering as much of the room as possible. You can either use a drawing board and paint arrows on it with a permanent marker or you can just show them in Doom (use of alternative media). It was a fast real-time renderer and enough to render a schematic room.
Of course then saying "Doom is used by the army to train soldiers" creates a very distorted image, but it could well be true.
Now, of course VBS is much more fully featured and a lot more realistic than Doom, but I think the basic principle remains. Training isn't a huge round of team-deathmatch in VBS. Soldiers can use it to learn how to set up road-blocks. Which item has to go where in what distance to what other item. Or what to do if a team-mate gets shot. What to do when, who to contact when. What angle to cover by whom. Or holding formation in different types of terrain with different types of vehicles in the group. Stuff like that.
Of course they can go at each-other in a mission sometimes too, but I think this would be about as boring as the other examples, with a similar angle. Ie, more about learning procedures than about duking it out in the game.
