Thursday, May 12, 2011

U.S. Navy wants gamers to help them catch Somali pirates

Just a few weeks after DARPA launched that sub hunting game, the U.S. Navy is going to try a little crowdsourcing of its own, with game designed to come up with new ways to fight those pesky Somali pirates.

The Navy's Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet, or MMOWGLI, will launch this coming Monday, and looks to be more like a corporate brainstorming session, than something that might pry a 15 year olds attention away from Call Of Duty: Black Ops.

Basically, you make suggestions about what you might do to fight the pirates, then other players vote your idea up or down, or suggest ways to build on your idea. After a week the field of players is thinned out based on how people voted, and a second round starts. By the end of three rounds the Navy will see if anyone has really come up with a head-slapping could have had a V-8 type idea.

I'm all for the Navy trying to find new ways to get some fresh ideas to work with, but I think they're going to have to make it a little more compelling than this if they want to entice some real whiz kids into working on it. perhaps on Monday we'll find out that it's a great game that just suffers from a lousy description, but for now, it looks way to much like a lame classroom exercise.

Source: DVICE

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