OK, so it’s not exactly Call of Duty: Somali Coast. Your avatar won’t get its SEAL Team Six on and shoot pirates in the head. But the Navy still wants you — yes, you, gamer — to join in its online gaming effort to figure out what to do about the scourge of piracy.
Starting on Monday, the Navy will host one of the least likely online games ever: MMOWGLI, its Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet, something it’s been building since 2009. In a literal sense, the game is about counterpiracy, as the game encourages players to offer their best suggestions for clearing the seas of the resurgent maritime scourge. But the real point of MMOWGLI — pronounced like the Jungle Book protagonist — is a social experiment.
“We want to test this proposition: can you get a crowd to provide you with good information?” Larry Schuette, the director for innovation at the Office of Naval Research, the Navy’s mad scientists, asks Danger Room. “Is the wisdom of the crowd really that wise?”
Working with the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley nonprofit, Schuette produced the Navy’s first foray into the gaming world. Other services have put together videogames before, like the America’s Army recruitment game. In fact, the Army has a whole office dedicated to gaming. But those games have been internal affairs, aimed at getting people to enlist or sharpen a servicemember’s skills. MMOWGLI wants you involved, even if your only experience with the Navy comes from Village People songs orCharlie Sheen movies.
Here’s how you play it.
“This isn’t World of Warcraft,” Schuette says. That’s an understatement. MMOWGLI tweaks the choose-your-own-adventure style of a war game. On Monday, after you visit a website hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School and sign up for the game, you’ll see a pirate scenario pop up onto your screen:
Three pirate ships are holding the world hostage. Chinese-U.S. relations are strained to the limit and both countries have naval ships in the area. Humanitarian aid for rig workers is blocked. The world is blaming the U.S. for plundering African resources.
What do you do? Two text boxes pop onto the screen. The first reads “Innovate,” and asks: “What new resources could turn the tide in the Somali pirate situation?” The second reads “Defend” and asks: “What new risks could arise that would transform the Somali pirate situation?” Beneath either are two boxes to import and record your brief answer: 140 characters.
“You’re tweeting, basically,” Schuette explains.
Then comes the crowdsourcing. During the first week of the game, your fellow players will vote on your suggestion. If they think it’s noteworthy, they can tweak it. New cards allow players to Expand (“Build this idea to expand its impact”), Counter (“Challenge this idea”), Adapt (“Take this idea in a different direction”) or Explore (“Something missing? Ask a question”).
Players are awarded points based on the number of affirmations their ideas get from their peers. “Based on that, we invite you to the next round,” Schuette says. There are three rounds, with each lasting a week, so the ideas can marinate. “People with good ideas will win.”
At the end of the third week, the game will display “a logical treeing of those ideas,” Schuette says. “This is almost systems analysis, as opposed to wargaming.”
Especially because it’s unclear just what the game can actually add to counterpiracy. After all, the truism is that piracy is a problem that takes place on land, where failed states and wrecked economies breed brigands, with seaborne attacks being a lagging indicator.
But maybe that’s what the game will determine, as it’s open to anyone who wants to sign up to play, in order to draw in the widest range of perspectives. So far, Schuette says, about 1000 registrants are split about evenly between dot-mil, dot-com and dot-edu email addresses. “I’ve had this tension in my mind,” he says, “between ‘Let’s get the entire world to join in,’ versus, ‘I’ve got some servers at the [Naval Postgraduate School] and we could go down in flames.”
The technical capabilities are about as important to the Navy as the specific piracy scenario. The MMOWGLI software is “scenario agnostic,” says Peter Vietti, a spokesman for the Office of Naval Research. “It can be used to tackle other tough challenges. What if the next scenario was the future of Navy spending, and how we respond to significant budget cuts across the Department of the Navy?”
If it does, it’ll be despite the cerebral style of gameplay. Schuette’s happy with the format, but confesses a nostalgia for the more visceral games of yore. “My favorite video game? Doom,” he says. “There’s nothing more pure than Doom.”
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