Could Virtual Worlds Make Better Spooks?

(March 20) -- Realistic video games are being used to help surgeons make fewer errors, train U.S. military forces to operate in urban areas, and even assist soldiers dealing with traumatic memories. But could video games really help spies better predict major security threats, such as the 9/11 attacks?

That's the question being asked by an intelligence agency involved in funding research and development. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is interested in looking at whether immersive games and virtual worlds "could positively impact individual and group analytic performance," according to a recent announcement.

The intelligence community's move into gaming is not a total surprise; the Defense Department, after all, has sponsored a number of video games designed to train soldiers, in some cases melding the entertainment business with military training. The commercially popular Xbox game "Full Spectrum Warrior" was even developed by an Army-sponsored institute as a training tool for soldiers.

There are already a number of commercial video games on the market that involve fictional spies, such as James Bond, but those tend to fall into the "first-person shooter" category. For the intelligence community, however, the issue is not tactical skills but analytical skills. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is looking for research proposals to validate that video games actually help in areas of "problem-solving skills, critical thinking, teamwork and persistence."

Those skills, the agency says, are all highly valued by the intelligence community. "It is well-known that analysts can be hampered by problems of groupthink, premature attachment to early hypotheses, confirmation bias and cultural bias, for example," the announcement reads. "Might gaming environments provide an antidote?"

"Groupthink" and a more general lack of critical thinking have been linked to at least two key intelligence shortfalls in recent years: the misassessment of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the failure to foresee 9/11-type attacks.

While military-funded video games have been touted for their contribution to training, not everyone lauds the blending of warfare and video games.

"The Pentagon's embrace of video games is part of a much larger phenomenon -- 'militainment' -- that is reshaping how the public understands today's conflicts," military analyst P.W. Singer wrote in a recent article for Foreign Policy. "The term was first coined to describe any public entertainment that celebrated the military, but today it could be redefined to mean the fascinating, but also worrisome, blurring of the line between entertainment and war."

Whether the intelligence community will follow the military's lead and actually sponsor its own game development remains to be seen. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity says its plan for now is to just consider the possibilities.