My colleague Peter Mosur and I launched the Internet Response League (IRL) at QCRI a while back to actively explore the intersection of massively multiplayer online games & humanitarian response. IRL is also featured in my new book, Digital Humanitarians, along with many other innovative ideas & technologies. Shortly after the book came out, Peter and I had the pleasure of exploring a collaboration with the team at Massive Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) and CCP Games—makers of the popular game EVE Online.
MMOS is an awesome group that aims to enable online gamers to contribute to scientific research while playing video games. Our colleagues at MMOS kindly reached out to us earlier this year as they’re really interested in supporting humanitarian efforts as well. They are thus kindly bringing IRL on board to help them explore the use of online games for humanitarian projects.
CCP Games has already been mentioned on the IRL blog here. Their gamers managed to raise an impressive $190,890 for the Icelandic Red Cross in response to Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda with their PLEX for Good initiative. This is on top of the $100,000 that the company has raised with the program for various disasters in Japan, Haiti, Pakistan, and the United States.
CCP Game’s flagship title EVE Online passed 500,000 subscribers in 2013. The game is extremely unique when it comes to MMORPGs. Rather than having a player base spanning across many different servers, EVE Online keeps keeps all players on one large server. Entitled “Tranquility”, this one server currently averages 25,000 players at any given time, with peaks of over 38,000 [1]. This equates to an average of 600,000 hours of human time spent playing EVE Online every day! The potential good to come out of a humanitarian partnership would be immensely valuable to the world!
So we’re currently exploring with the team at MMOS possible ways to process humanitarian data within EVE’s gaming environment. We’ll write another post soon detailing the unique challenges we’re facing in terms of seamlessly process-ing digital humanitarian tasks within EVE Online. This will require a lot of creativity to pull off and success is by no means guaranteed (just like life and online games). In sum, our humanitarian tasks must in no way disrupt the EVE Online experience; they basically need to be “invisible” to the gamer (besides an initial opt-in).
See the video below for an in-depth overview of the type of work that MMOS and CCP Games envision incorporated into EVE Online. The video was screened at the recent EVE Online Fanfest last month and also features a message from the Internet Response League at the 40:36 minute mark!
This blog post was co-authored with Peter Mosur.
iRevolutions 
I think MMOs have all sorts of interesting real-life applications. For instance, they could be used to test things like economic policies. Even though the money is “fake”, the economies in these games are very real.