Peace Bomb: turn homeland security over to 10-yr. old gamers?

5.24/06

My involvement with the world of online gaming is usually limited to forking over the credit card to pay for them (and, occasionally, to show what a good sport dad is, to humiliating myself by playing a round in typically spastic, slow-to-respond style. I typically lose at Slugfest about 50-1, even if I do have David Ortiz on my team…).

However, in going through some old SmartMobs stuff, I ran across something Howard posted about a concept Harvey Smith of Midway Games presented at this year’s Game Developers Conference (hmmm: the Serious Games Summit looks interesting, BTW).

For their annual Game Design Challenge, the theme this year was to involve the Nobel Peace Prize in some way — which could range from creating a game that would win the Prize to another concept that Smith floated, “a Subvert-the-Nobel game where the player works for an evil corporation and must win the Nobel prize through nefarious means like killing Asian Bird Flu carriers through the use of oil spills” (I could see that one working..).

At any rate, Smith picked up on the smart mobs meme, and presented the”Peace Bomb” game:

“Harvey conceived Peace Bomb as a web-enhanced Nintendo DS title that had players creating social networks not unlike those in place in conventional MMO [Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing gameMMORPG) (] games. The game however isn’t in the social networking so much as it is in the constructive projects that it can engender. The game is designed to spill into the real world by having flash mobs erupt out of the wheeling and dealing that happens in the virtual space. The social networking happens not just over TCP/IP, but also over a sort of sneakernet, where people get together to do constructive projects on various levels.

“Ideally, the game would create many, many little and not-so-little project groups all over the world that would plant, clean, or build spontaneously. Peace Bomb could also leverage groups like Habitat for Humanity to build its projects around. While Harvey didn’t talk much about the lower-level game dynamic, he noted that the game would have to be incredibly fun to spread the way it should to create the needed sneaknet infrastructure. With that size also comes meaning; ‘I wanted a game that affords the player a sense of higher purpose,’ he said.”

Other than providing another proof of Stephenson’s Law #3 (”in a crisis, turn communications over to the 15-25 year olds — they know how to route around obstacles, including adultss — and are the most familiar with exploiting the full power of emerging communications technologies”) it really seemed to me that Peace Bomb might have real legs when it comes to homeland security. After all, Reed’s Law says that the exponential power of a network is even greater when it enhances social networks, so people, especially kids, who had played the Peace Bomb game in advance of a homeland security situation — especially if they’d not only met virtually but also formed smart mobs in the real world (yet another example of the power of real-time, location-based information) could seamlessly apply their collaborative techniques to the immediate challenge. Not to mention the fact that, with their hair-trigger fast responses to fast-changing situations, they’d have just the right kind of mindset needed to deal with rapidly evolving (or devolving…) situations. 10-year-olds rule!

The more I think about it, the more I think that gaming, especially the massive multiplayer online version, is really an ideal metaphor for the attitude, and probably the technology, we need to bring to networked homeland security strategies. What do you think?

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