The US Navy is taking a leaf out of the World of Warcraft book

The US Navy is taking a leaf out of the World of Warcraft book and using the game structure to deal with pirates.

While it would be tempting to think that they are neutralising pirates by parachuting in PCs and copies of the game, thus rendering them useless, apparently it is a bit more convoluted than that.

To fight piracy off the coast of Africa the US Navy has created a "World of Warcraft"-like multiplayer game called MMOWGLI. It brings in boffins from around the government into a virtual environment where they can work together in developing strategies to thwart modern-day buccaneers.

Dubbed "Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet," it has been developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

According to MSN the brains behind it hope to expand the program beyond piracy, and use it to solve some of the world's most difficult military problems.

Players are drawn from universities, defence, government and nongovernment outfits.

At the moment they are working their way through a piracy scenario. Once they have experience, and a bit of gold, they can take on bigger problems like Afghanistan and the rise of the Undead from Berkshire.

You might like:


•Hacking toolkit for Apple gear released
•Microsoft Exchange Online slows to a crawl again
•Microsoft's cloud business depends on Linux
•Windows XP is a security nightmare
•Global software piracy up 14 percent to $59 billion