Virtual Peace: Swords to Ploughshares

In the newly renovated subterranean level of Duke's Perkins library, it is game time--literally. And virtually, too. Students of Dr. Natalia Mirovitskaya's Policy Analysis for Development course have gathered in a hi-tech classroom, where they will spend the next few hours engaged in Virtual Peace: Swords to Ploughshares. A HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning competition winner, Virtual Peace is a simulation-game in which players deliver emergency humanitarian aid to a scene of disaster.

But first a comment about language. "Game" suggests skill, strategy, rules, and learning. Just as often, it suggests Pong, Bingo, checkers and fun, the latter a word not often seen in the context of education. Virtual Peace, however, includes the best of all definitions plus the latest in digital technology, blowing traditional memes of gaming wide open. For those who regularly slip into fantastical roles inside massive multi-players games like World of Warcraft, Virtual Peace makes instant sense. And yet, the two virtual realities could not be more dissimilar--in Virtual Peace, dungeons and monsters are replaced by natural disasters and a quest for humanitarian aid. Here, we find skill, strategy, rules and learning seamlessly paired with role-playing in a virtual reality, and all this in the name of education and international development.

Today, students enter a Virtual Peace scenario featuring Hurricane Mitch, a storm that devastated Nicaragua and Honduras in 1998. It is surprisingly hot in the classroom, a result, perhaps, of so many bodies and even more computers powering the simulation. Dr. Mirovitskaya, one of Virtual Peace's project leaders, notes the heat when she addresses the class, pointing out that disaster situations often lack niceties such as air-conditioning. It's a comment that gets nods from the students and murmurs of agreement--some have already worked in conditions that were less than ideal, including Rotary Peace Fellows from the Duke-UNC Rotary Center for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution. For tonight's game scenario, the heat is uncannily fitting.

For several minutes, footage of Hurricane Mitch plays simultaneously on rows of flatscreen computers, a stark reminder that human suffering is antithetical to the concept of play. Tonight's humanitarian aid training simulator will give students an opportunity to immerse themselves in situations that are nearly impossible to prepare for. Kacie Wallace, Senior Research Scholar at Duke's Information Science and Information Studies (ISIS) and a Virtual Peace project leader, helped design the scenarios, write the scripts, and create the avatar roles based on real people and real NGOs that delivered emergency aid to post-Mitch Honduras and Nicaragua.

Wallace, who currently teaches a class at Duke in Conflict Resolution and Film, explains that professors can use "curveballs," messages they send to individual students during the game, altering the dynamics of the scenario with unexpected crises. As students attempt to work among a variety of government and non-government agencies from around the world, these unpredictable moments can create powerful learning experiences that will better prepare them for working in the field.

But the game is only one part of the immersive experience, explained Dr. Tim Lenoir, Duke Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society and a Virtual Peace project leader. Professors can tag certain moments in the game and re-visit them during after-action reviews, and a complementary website provides context for Hurricane Mitch, describes NGOs involved in the disaster, and offers a social network for classmates. Add to this the ability to archive the games and Virtual Peace appears primed to become a staple training tool for the international development community.

Lenoir watches students from the back of the classroom, helping to make sure that the simulation runs smoothly. While the students take a few moments to log in, he explains to me that Virtual Peace can be played simultaneously by people located all over the world, an important feature given the international scope of the project. It is really this moment that confirms how cool Virtual Peace is, a word I reserve only for things that have a true wow factor. There are cross-cultural issues in most international crises, and being able to role-play in a high-stakes scenario with global players takes this game-simulation to a whole new level.

Jerry Heneghan, another Virtual Peace project leader, is CEO and founder of Virtual Heroes, a company whose motto is "play, learn, become." A quick look at VirtualHeroes.com reveals previous work with virtual realities, and a theme emerges: America's Army and HumanSim represent environments that are too risky, too expensive, or too unpredictable to immerse people and train them in real life. Heneghan is on hand, working with his team to solve any last-minute glitches as Virtual Peace gets ready, literally and virtually, for the world stage.

By the time I gather my things to head home, the students and professors are well into the game, role-playing as representatives of the world's great aid agencies, from Oxfam to UNICEF to the World Health Organization, each immersed in post-Hurricane Mitch disaster relief. Over the next few weeks, they will revisit their experience together, re-playing moments where human action and decision changed the course of the game, for better or worse. Students will post observations, questions, answers and insights to their social network, thinking through the game affordances as a means to solving some of our most pressing human conditions. I can picture them now, seated at their computers with headsets on, wearing their game face and solving the world's problems.

****

For more information: Virtual Peace (http://virtualpeace.org), the humanitarian assistance training simulation. Brought to you through the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC. Virtual Peace was created by Duke's Tim Lenoir (full project team: http://virtualpeace.org/people.php) in collaboration with Virtual Heroes, Duke-UNC Rotary Center, Duke's Computer Science Department, and Duke Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS).