Computer: Game: Strategy
Joe Brigadier   (-5)  [vote for, against]
A million monkeys approach to finding the country's greatest strategist.

Simply put, a video game distributed by the Pentagon that allows the player to take charge of his own battlefield company in Iraq or North Korea. The graphics are state of the art, the multiplayer network is extensive, the cost is nothing, and the results are monitored.

The government watches the country's top players, using the game as a scouting tool to find brilliant strategists, who might otherwise end up as bag boys or cashiers. Gameplay is kept as lifelike as possible.
-- Cuit_au_Four, Jun 20 2006

"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game
[marked-for-deletion] Not an original idea. [DrBob, Jun 20 2006]

BattleField 2 http://www.ea.com/o...ld/battlefield2/us/
[MoreCowbell, Jun 22 2006]

Quite apart from Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series (of books), has this not been extensively halfbaked elsewhere? I seem to remember some film with Robin Williams.
-- moomintroll, Jun 20 2006


Joe is not likely to have much training in terms of military capability.
-- RayfordSteele, Jun 20 2006


There's a South Park where Kenny gets a PSP and rules at it, and he dies, of course, and is heralded as a Savior in heaven because the PSP is actually a simulation to control heaven's armies. The best part was when Angel Gabriel gave a mission briefing and kept sniffing the markers he was using on the whiteboard. What a mess, that one.
-- daseva, Jun 21 2006


This approach was well set out in Enders Game, but the new idea would be to use this for all endeavors: video games to discover brilliant strategists, skillfull surgeons, gifted porn stars, talented chefs, slick brokers, dextrous bocci players etc. There would really be no need any more for meaningless training and drills - with the right mix of video games we could harvest full grown talent from the existing populace.
-- bungston, Jun 21 2006


You might just find someone who was good at reverse-engineering the game's mechanics, and optimizing against them. And of course, the notional enemy could observe the game, note how the game behaves, and plan to behave differently.
-- pertinax, Jun 21 2006


The skillfull surgeon thing is baked to some extent -- I've seen articles discussing how surgeons get sharper by playing video games.

As to the idea -- everything is already wargamed in pretty advanced simulators. The problem largely is with the unpredictable and with incompetence. The unpredictable tends to not get coded into the simulation, though I suppose building in incompetence quotients is possible.
-- theircompetitor, Jun 22 2006


How about a website set up to allow geniuses to exhibit their inventive prowess. Site is monitored by recruiters for 3M, GM, IBM etc. ;)
-- xaviergisz, Jun 22 2006


Don't forget M&M, S&M, and BM.
What are the odds the brilliant strategist wilts under pressure, that the real world petrifies him/her?
(pay no attention to that man behind the curtain...)
-- Canuck, Jun 22 2006



random, halfbakery