Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Here's the ref and the opening paras:

"A Computer Game for Real-Life Crises: Disaster Simulator's Maker Gives It to Municipal Emergency Departments," By Mike Musgrove, Washington Post30 August 2006; Page D01.

Just over a year ago, Joe Barlow, a paramedic in Illinois, spent a week testing a computer game called Incident Commander, a training simulator that gives players a lead role in managing crisis situations such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Days later, he used his virtual experience in a real-life situation: the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He was put in charge of an 800-bed hospital in Baton Rouge, La., and found that many of the decisions he made there stemmed from what he learned by playing the game.

Yesterday, on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, game developer BreakAway Games Ltd. released the final version of Incident Commander free of charge to municipal emergency departments, part of an agreement with the Justice Department, which invested $350,000 in game development.

BreakAway Games put in the remaining $1.5 million toward the development.

Most cities do not have the budget for real-world emergency exercises, said BreakAway Games founder Douglas Whatley.

"Most municipalities are manned by only a handful of policemen, and a major incident only happens every few decades," he said. "There's just not enough money for training."

The game tutors players in how to build a budget and start a commissary under U.S government guidelines. The training could help prevent a repeat of the administrative fiascos after Katrina, Whatley said...

1) to prep the mind for logical decisions

2) to find gaps in thinking and capabilities and assets and nets

3) to create the social nets that will eventually get activated (the reason pushed by Eric Rasmussen, leader of recent Strong Angel III game in CA).

I have always maintained, like Rasmussen, that mil ex's are primarily about updatiing your rollodex. But the rise of repeatable vid games raises the issue of #1 as being quite important. Just watching my kids learn all sorts of decision-making skills that I wasn't exposed to until much later in life--through these vid games--makes you realize their great potential.

Steve and I argue that once we build up this corporate knowledge and experience, we should be able to translate those rules into automated responses: not the big calls, but all the little ones you need to wade through in order to see the big calls that need to be made and then make them wisely.

And when we do that overseas post some military intervention, we call that goal Development-in-a-Box. Not a product. Sure as hell not something we could own or market on our own. But an approach that's both logical and inevitable.

We simply have to get better, and many tools already exist or are being developed today to make that goal a reality. Enterra has its niche and we're ready to roll (hell, Steve should be in Iraq within two weeks working a DiB on-the-ground prototype effort that will lead to both new learning regarding the "flexible framework" model and actual, immediate results for Iraqis looking to build up their nation instead of tearing it apart--and no surprise, it'll be on an Enterra job for the Pentagon, where the SysAdmin is being born), but we don't pretend this capability will be anything but a national-level effort that unites tons of smart people, like those inventing games like this one.

Thus we network all day long and dream of it in our sleep.

And yeah, it's cool to have a job where you're trying to change the world--while building your start-up...