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A paragraph snippet from the longer post
"Visual Studios developed the games Rapid Onset, Vital Passage and Sudden Thrust under a US$ 2.6 million contract between the DIA and Concurrent Technologies. In all of them, players assume the role of a young DIA analyst. Each game has its own way of making the student think."
More detail here including this
"Intelligence videogames are an example of the way in which the government's training methods are changing. Traditional decision-making exercises have been done through the classroom BOGSAT (Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table). But videogame technology offers the possibility of running long-distance exercises with human- and computer-controlled avatars.
The National Defense University in Washington, D.C., for example, is experimenting with virtual conference rooms in Second Life. However, network security administrators are less then thrilled with videogames on their systems, which is why the DIA had to purchase standalone laptops so the games are kept separate from the main computer network. By 2009, the three games will be browser-based and capable of operating from classified servers. "In the intelligence world, we don't necessarily have the latest equipment," Bennett says."
At the end of the article, this musing addresses what is the third learning challenge after problem solving and thinking skills in the individual: putting the organizational egos and competition aside and communicating with others. If you don't, you lose the game... kinda like in real life but in a more immediate time window to see how failure results from information hording.
"The next step is to figure out a way to use gaming technology for training in working with other agencies -- an oft-noted weakness within the intelligence community. "Maybe it's pie in the sky, but can we link multiple computers, so that I can have eight or 10 people in the room playing the same game," Bennett says. "I can be the DIA guy, someone else in DIA can play the CIA guy, and somebody else can be an FBI or a DEA person. If we don't share information, we lose the game."
