Institute For The Future

energyMMOWGLI, Navy Tackle Energy Challenges

Can the U.S. Navy be resourceful with fewer resources? The Navy invited the public to play energyMMOWGLI the week of May 22nd to share ideas for how to be resourceful without resources.

Everyone knows the saying: necessity is the mother of invention. And what we need now is invention on the scale of the world’s strongest navy—the U.S. Navy:

• 283 ships in active service
• 3700 aircraft
• 300,000+ active personnel
• serving 280+ million citizens

That’s a lot of energy demand. But it’s also a lot of potentially untapped resources for meeting that demand. "A crowd-sourced approach is perfect for this particular topic of energy efficiency and Naval readiness," says Jason Tester, IFTF's lead game designer. "The only magic bullet to achieving incremental efficiency improvements is working together and casting a wide net for the best ideas."

Play energyMMOWGLI and share your best ideas for how to be resourceful without resources. You could have the winning strategy for the world’s strongest Navy. Play the game, change the game.

 
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MAY 18, 2012

To Help Ensure Operational Readiness, Navy Recruits Players for Online Wargame to Tackle Energy Challenges

NORFOLK, VA – The Navy’s Energy and Environmental Readiness Division (OPNAV N45), together with the Office of Naval Research (ONR), invites civic and military collaboration in energyMMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet). The game will build on efforts to improve the U.S. Navy’s combat capability and energy security, particularly by promoting energy efficiency and diversifying its energy supply (use of alternative energy), which will ultimately reduce reliance on fossil fuels from overseas.

Scheduled to run for three days starting this Tuesday, May 22, energyMMOWGLI will immerse players in a future energy scenario from the year 2022 (view scenario at portal.mmowgli.nps.edu), and will ask them to generate ideas around how to reduce energy consumption, improve energy efficiency, and diversify its energy supply for the sake of future strategic readiness.

The game will be “an examination of what our energy future looks like if we fail to act now. Every day that petroleum prices increase, it erodes our ability to train for and execute operations that our nation demands of us. Little by little, that results in decreased combat capability, and that is something we simply cannot accept,” said Cmdr. James Goudreau, director of the Navy Energy Coordination Office.

Through use of the energyMMOWGLI, Cmdr. Goudreau says, “We hope to increase the awareness of energy security as a national security issue as well as stimulating discussion that will allow the Navy to achieve greater energy resiliency and combat readiness.”
Inviting broad-based participation—both civilian and military—is part of the strategy for a more secure energy footing in the context of a more uncertain energy future. “We’re hoping for an extremely diverse set of players including talented thoughtful players from academia, industry, military, government, NGOs, and global citizens,” said Goudreau.

The game invites players to bring everything they know about energy—from strategies they use at home to their workplace conversations, from their professional knowledge to their wildest imaginings. MMOWGLI is “an online game platform designed to elicit collective intelligence from an engaged pool of world-wide players to solve real problems facing the Navy and Marine Corps,” says Dr. Larry Schuette, director of innovation at ONR. The energyMMOWGLI game motto? Play the game, change the game.

Players can view the future scenario and pre-register now online at portal.mmowgli.nps.edu.

The Naval Postgraduate School and Palo Alto, California-based Institute for the Future are partnering with N45 and ONR on the energyMMOWGLI project.

NOTE: Media interested in additional information should contact Katherine Turner, OPNAV N45 ([email protected]), Peter J. Vietti, ONR ([email protected]), or Jean Hagan, Institute for the Future ([email protected]).


Press Coverage

The New York Times: "On Our Radar: An Energy Challenge for Gamers"
Scientific American: "Navy Recruits Players for Online War Game to Tackle Energy Challenges"
PBS NewsHour: Calling All Gamers: US Navy Wants You!
TPMIdeaLab in "Navy Crowdsources Future Energy Strategy with Wargame"
SmartPlanet: "U.S. Navy turns to online gaming to solve energy woes"
Environmental News Network (ENN): "To Help Ensure Operational Readiness, Navy Recruits Players for Online Wargame to Tackle Energy Challenges"
Biofuels Digest: "Navy invites civic, academic, military online participants for three-day alternative energy wargame, based on 2022 scenario"
Navy.mil: "Navy Recruits Players for Online Wargame to Tackle Energy Challenges"
 

About Previous MMOWGLI Events

IFTF, Somali Piracy, and the MMOWGLI Project
Federal Computer Week interviews Jason Tester on MMOWGLI in "Navy Looks to Crowdsourcing for Problem-solving."
Wired writes about MMOWGLI in "Navy Crowdsources Pirate Fight To Online Gamers."
MMOWGLI is covered by Fast Company in "Wannabe SEALs Help U.S. Navy Hunt Pirates In Massively Multiplayer Game."
Official news release from the Office of Naval Research.
Blog post on MMOWLGI from Armed with Science by Garth Jensen, the Director of Innovation at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division.