14 DAY TRIAL // The Office of Naval Research is developing a new MMO type experience that will be used by the United States Navy in order to simulate counter piracy efforts taking place off the Horn of Africa and will use crowdsourcing to make the process more effective.
The official name of the project is Massive Multiplayer Online WarGame Leveraging the Internet, or MMOWGLI for short, and the launch date is currently set for Monday, May 16.
Initially, more than 1,000 military and civilian players were appointed to work together to simulate the events of a pirate attack on the high seas and develop new ways of thinking about it, with the ultimate aim of developing new strategies to focus on the phenomenon.
It seems that MMOWGLI will initially have three different scenarios: one that focuses on protecting sea lanes from attack, one dealing with preventing attacks on civilian ships and merchant ships and another that is concerned with rescuing a group of hostages that are being kept in a Somalian coastal down.
The game is capable of generating briefings for each mission based on real world events and fictional extrapolations and then they need to develop strategies while working in groups.
MMOWGLI also features a control team that polices the game and makes sure that the teams are working within the confines of the game and do no try to break its rules in order to succeed.
Doctor Larry Schutte, who is the director of innovation at the Office of Naval Research, the entity which led the development project on the Navy MMO, has stated, “We hope MMOWGLI will help us to understand what happens when your insights are combined with the observations and actions of another player.”
He 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?”