http://fcw.com/Articles/2011/11/07/QA-Jason-Tester-Institute-for-the-Future.aspxIt isn’t your typical war game, video game or even virtual training exercise. When the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research group, launched the test version of its Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) in June, it opened the door to a new way of solving complex, global problems: by asking around.
The institute designed the game for the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Postgraduate School. In the test, about 800 players were asked for their ideas for resolving the problem of Somali pirates attacking ships in the Gulf of Aden. No magic-bullet solution came out of the exercise, but that wasn’t the point. The goal was to use crowdsourcing to bring in ideas and perspectives from around the world and up and down the chain of command.
The project was a success, according to lead researcher Jason Tester. In a conversation with staff writer Amber Corrin, Tester discussed how MMOWGLI works, what its implications are for training and how it could demystify the search for good ideas.
FCW: Tell me about the MMOWGLI pilot exercise.
Tester: It was originally an experiment, and what we were testing was the question: Could we use games to discover novel ideas that we can apply to major, global problems? Could the use of games motivate more people to participate and get ideas that could be contributed and build off each other, more than any one person or any one way of thinking would be able to?
Our pilot project was run over three weeks in June. The scenario was Somali piracy, with the situation at a stalemate. We asked the players, “What can we do to turn the tide?” We wanted to find novel tools, strategies and technologies that we weren’t thinking about, that were on no one’s radar.
The players were people in the military, in other parts of the federal government or in foreign governments. We had people from NATO and Europe. We had some academics, people following African issues or Somali piracy specifically.
FCW: How was the game played?
Tester: Over the three weeks, we took them through three different chapters of gameplay. The first took place in the year 2012, under the premise of an elite anti-piracy conference convened to think out of the box. This was a safe space to bring ideas that may otherwise seem a little crazy or a little silly on the surface — or not applicable.
For the second [chapter], we advanced the calendar to 2014. Here we assumed that some of the efforts of the first chapter had been successful and piracy as we know it had partially declined. We tweaked the geopolitics, with Yemen and Somalia linking forces. It wasn’t quite piracy in a black-and-white way. It was these two countries trying to exert economic terror over ships passing through those same straits. We kept the situation a bit ambiguous, which ......
