MacKinnon, Douglas J.

The Massive Multiplayer Online War Game Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) is a Web-based idea-exploration game that encourages innovative thinking. MMOWGLI is designed to support large number of distributed global players working together on idea generation and action planning, with an eye towards surfacing innovative outlier strategies. MMOWGLI project capabilities were produced with baseline support by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) which chartered and sponsored MMOWGLI platform development. This open-source Web-based software is developed at NPS and currently operates on the nps.edu infrastructure, supporting any user's Web browser. Funding is provided for Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) to conduct, using the MMOWGLI collaborative game platform, a brainstorming game around the broad topic “Assuring Multi-national Freedom of Navigation in the South China Sea.” The NPS Littoral Operations Center will host a multinational Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) as a distributed workshop focused on multinational freedom of navigation in the SCS leading up to, and informing, possible follow-on “wargaming” and to provide a foundation for further discussion at an anticipated Operational Technical (OpTech) conference in 2017. Players in the MMOWGLI will include students and faculty at NPS, NWC, the Indonesian Navy Technical College and/or the Indonesian Defense University, the Japanese Command and Staff College, the Indian Command and Staff College, and the Australian Defense University in Canberra. There is clearly room to expand this to include military institutions from the Philippines and Vietnam. Specifically, the intent of the MMOWGLI game is two-fold: (1) explore avenues for multinational cooperation to ensure access to international waters and sea lanes of communication in the South China Seas, and, (2) to discuss aspects of cooperative maritime operations to support prosperity and security among partner nations.
Modeling, Virtual Environments & Simulation Institute
Office of Naval Research
Navy
2017