MMO War Games For The Military

Filed under Technology, Videos by on March 1, 2013 at 7:35 am {no comments}

There aren’t a lot of jobs that would allow (I said ALLOW) you to play MMOs at work.  This should come as no surprise, though; clearly there are reasons for that.  There are, however some careers that welcome massively multiplayer online gaming as a part of their work week.  Video game designers.  Blizzard employees. Escapist Magazine reviewers.  The Navy.

Yeah.  You read that right.  The U.S. Navy.

Ah-ah-ah, not so fast shipmates.  This doesn’t mean you can abandon your proverbial (or in some cases literal) ship and hop online to help your guild blaze through the next dungeon.

Okay, lemme explain.

No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.

em2 MMOWGLI Screen Shot

Introducing the Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise.  Ha.  Only the military could create such a crazy acronym for an already complicated acronym to describe online gaming.

Anyway…

MMOWGLI is a joint effort between the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Institute for the Future (IFTF).  It’s an online game designed to crowd source ideas and strategies that may provide insight into some of the Navy’s toughest problems.

Combining the military mission with online gaming, MMOWGLI creates an environment where players are asked to share new ideas and collaborate with others to earn innovation points and win the game.

The em2 MMOWGLI round that’s currently being played is an effort to generate innovative ideas advancing the Navy’s capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum.

“em2 MMOWGLI is my first crowd sourcing experience and an idea that I viewed with skepticism before joining the fray,” says Gerald O’Donnell, concepts developer at Navy Warfare Development Command.  “Experiencing the game has made me a believer.”

Here are the details:

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MMOWGLI: An Experiment in Generating Collective Intelligence

Filed under Education & Culture, Social Sciences, Technology by on April 28, 2011 at 10:10 am {9 comments}




Garth Jensen is currently the Director of Innovation at the Carderock Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center. Garth was previously an Office of Naval Research Science Advisor at the Pentagon.

mmowgli is both the coolest project I have ever worked on and the hardest to describe in words, but here it goes: mmowgli is an experiment in generating collective intelligence and a pilot project being developed by the Office of Naval Research.

Beyond that, mmowgli is ultimately the answer to a few questions, ones that haunted me every day during my tour as a Science Advisor at the Pentagon: why did I experience such a disconnect between technologists and “innovators,” on one hand, and warfighters and end users on the other? Why didn’t “game changing innovations” generate more enthusiasm from those who were “in the game?” And what was I doing to make it better?

As my Pentagon tour drew to a close, these questions nagged at me and morphed into a thousand others: What if we took a heavy, formal approach, and made it lighter and more of a continuous conversation instead of a blueprint? What if you didn’t need a fully formed idea to make a contribution? What if ideas, even half-formed ones, could meet up in space and recombine with other ideas to form new ones? What if this conversation engaged more stakeholders and tolerated more excursions? Finally, what if this conversation became so rich and compelling that, instead of truncating the debate, it actually enlarged the universe of possibilities?

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