Vital Passage, Sudden Thrust and Rapid Onset: their names sound almost pornographic. But these are the titles of serious games — that is, games not intended primarily to entertain — that will be used by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to train real-life spies in a more compelling manner than classrooms afford.
Developed under government contract by serious games company Visual Purple, the three titles cost the DIA $2.6 million — a drop in the bucket for a triple-A title like Gears of War or even America’s Army, reputed to have budgets of $10 million and $7 million respectively — but a pretty penny nevertheless. So what are taxpayer dollars buying for U.S. spies?
Wired.com has the scoop: they got their hands on all three games to bring you the answer to that very question. And despite (or perhaps because of) their subject material, these games actually sound pretty fun:
Rapid Onset can best be described as Zen Buddhism meets the National Intelligence Estimate. It begins with the rookie analyst dreaming of meeting a white-robed guru on a mountaintop. The guru proceeds to throw him off the mountain; clinging to a rope, the analyst can only climb back up if he recites the Eight Questions of Intelligence Analysis.
Young Grasshopper then wakes up and goes to the office, where his boss (who just happens to look like the guru) asks him to analyze the implications of a Chinese purchase of a rusting ex-Soviet aircraft carrier. He can only solve the problem by applying the eight analytical questions. For example, does a foreign news report on the sale have a bias or point of view that might color its conclusions? Does the article cite evidence, or does it rely on opinion and conjecture?
Important lessons for modern day news readers in any country, Chinese firewall or no…
The second game, Vital Passage, is a whodunit that begins with scenes of a tanker under attack in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. The question is, who attacked the tanker and how? In a reminder of the dangers of jumping to conclusions, our young analyst finds himself in a conference room full of bickering colleagues, each stridently advocating his or her particular theory (It was Iran! No, It was Iraq! It was a missile! No, it was a torpedo!). Our hero must use the approved analytical process to analyze and choose among competing hypotheses.
Logic problems have recently been proven fun and profitable by the good people at Level 5…
Written by Hollywood screenwriter David Freed, Sudden Thrust is the closest of the DIA trilogy to an action-packed videogame. Our analyst finds himself in a crisis situation when terrorists sail a hijacked natural-gas tanker into New York Harbor. Despite limited and inconclusive information, he and his colleagues must determine what the terrorists are up to, and send the analysis to the secretary of defense.
Sudden Thrust has scenes of helicopters and Navy Seals, but those are just atmospherics, like spooky music during a horror flick. The goal of the games is to focus players on epistemology, or how we know what we know. As our hero’s boss puts it, “In our business, conjecture is a four-letter word.”
Sounds like Metal Gear Solid 2, but with a non-linear plot that actually makes sense. Sign me up!
Read more about the intelligence community’s new games at Wired.com… and let us know in the comments if these sound as compelling to you as they did to me.
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