U.S. Navy Launches Problem-solving Platform
The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) launched yesterday a new Internet wargame designed to solve the real-world problem of piracy facing the Navy.
The ONR has recruited 1,000 players from across the government, education and private sector to participate in a three-week Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise.
The initial challenge of combating piracy off the coast of Somalia is a demonstration of the platform, which is designed to support large numbers of distributed players in synchronous and asynchronous ideation and action planning, with an eye to surfacing innovative, outlier strategies.
Potential participants should be warned that this game is no World of Warcraft. Rather, players respond to questions about a particular scenario and provide input into answers from others. People with good ideas will win, and are invited to the next round. There are three rounds, with each lasting a week, and at the end the game will display “a logical treeing of those ideas”, said project manager Dr. Larry Schuette in an interview with Wired Magazine.
ONR intends to produce varying results from a diverse group of players drawn from the ranks of academia, defense, and government and nongovernment organizations. The plan is for MMOWGLI to identify solutions to difficult challenges by tapping into the intellectual capital of a broader community.
“We hope MMOWGLI will help us to understand what happens when your insights are combined with the observations and actions of another player,” project manager Schuette added. “Will that fusion result in a game-changing idea or solution, or will the MMOWGLI platform teach us something about our traditional thought processes?”
Anyone can register to participate in future MMOWGLI simulations.
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