Navy computer game wants players’ bright ideas on energy use

A Pentagon-funded computer game created to tap players’ ideas on how the Navy can meet energy needs will launch on May 22, the agency announced.

The game, called energyMMOWGLI -- or Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet -- is part of a growing wave of crowdsourcing experiments that the government is funding to engage gamers to solve some of its problems. EnergyMMOWGLI was created by the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Postgraduate School and California-based research group Institute for the Future.

The game offers players a hypothetical crisis scenario as a launch pad for discussions on how the Navy can consume energy more efficiently. Gamers will generate suggestions that others will help score. It is scheduled to run for three days.

An earlier version of the game, created to generate ideas for the Navy on how to combat Somali piracy, launched May 2011, NextGov previously reported. Within 10 weeks of its launch, 16,000 people signed up and 832 played.

(Image via Mikael Damkier /Shutterstock.com)