Published in Science last week….
What Can Virtual Worlds and Games Do for National Security?
V. S. Subrahmanian and John Dickerson
Second Life, World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs have become hugely popular consumer games. The military has used computers to study war for close to 50 years. Although there have been attempts to use off-the-shelf games to train our military (see Doom goes to War), they fall flat in their inability to incorporate real-world models of terrorist activities or sociopolitical groups. World of Warcraft allows players and groups of players to fight with one another, but fails to model the circumstances leading up to the battle.
The military is now using virtual worlds that allow defense analysts and military leaders to bring their expertise in-world, incorporating complex, multifactorial background information into the game models. The models allow the analysts/leaders to explore the response to and eventual outcome of strategic decisions.
The models are not perfect. The infinite number of potential responses could quickly make the model unwieldy. Scientists counteract this complexity by limiting each branch point to choices of the highest probability.
Commanders can walk through virtual environments to see how potential decisions might play out. This allows them to consider both the strength and weakness of each decision well in advance of real-world implementation.
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