Gamification of Military Problem Solving

Image from the video game Call of Duty showing what the Navy's new Multiplayer game might look like.

The military has always been a huge advocate of games for learning. They deal with life and death and are serious about training and have found that games make an impact on learners. So they use all kinds of game-based techniques for learning. If those techniques did not work, I can tell you, the military wouldn’t use them…too much is at stake.

They do war games with actual units and soldiers, they use game techniques to conduct briefings. In short the military “knows games.” That is why I always chuckle to myself when some executive or manager voices a concerns that 1) games aren’t serious enough for “real learning” 2) and that games don’t work for learning. I think the military proves both of those arguments are spurious.

A new wrinkle for the military is to use games to solve military problems or to gain insights into how to solve hostile situations. The newest effort is a combination of crowdsourcing and the gamification of problem solving.

In an article in FastCompany, the author, Neal Ungerleider explains how through a new video game project the U.S. military is crowdsourcing ideas for fighting Somali pirates. The military is creating a game platform they are calling Massive Multiplayer Online WarGame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) that will have over 1,000 online players who will playout the environment and situations involved with the problem of the Somali pirates. The article states that this effort is the “first time the American military to integrate both crowdsourcing and gamification into traditional military wargames.”

MMOWGLI was developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in order to test the feasibility of using massively multiplayer online games along the lines of Warcraft and Guild Wars to help solve difficult strategic problems. The MMOWGLI game launching in May will focus exclusively on combating Somalian piracy, but the gaming platform is open enough that it can be adapted to other military hotspots.

According to Dr. Larry Schutte, Director of Innovation at the ONR, “We hope MMOWGLI will help us to understand what happens when your insights are combined with the observations and actions of another player–will that fusion result in a game-changing idea or solution, or will the MMOWGLI platform teach us something about our traditional thought processes?”

According to Navy documentation, the purpose of the project is to demonstrate the utility of an Office of Naval Research-sponsored Massive Multiplayer Online Anti-piracy Wargame; with potential benefits of:
-Scaled up participant pool offers the ability to explore more novel combinations and complex interactions of ideas.
-May yield insights that otherwise might not emerge from more traditional wargame approaches.
-Encourage out-of-the-box thinking about contemporary piracy issues.

Check out the Military online information here.

Check out the Fast company article, Wannabe SEALs Help U.S. Navy Hunt Pirates In Massively Multiplayer Game

How could such an environment be used to solve business or societal problems? Could crowdsourcing in a massively multiplayer game produce better products, more engaging customer interactions. The possibilities are intriguing.