Gaming for Peace

ended

EU Personnel in Conflict Prevention and Peace Building missions come from diverse organizations and nations, yet must coordinate together in the temporary network or umbrella organization that comprises each CPPB mission. Coordination is challenging strategically and operationally. Even if the structures to coordinate together are in place, diversity in organizations (militaries, police forces, civil organizations), gender and culture (national, ethnicity, religion) make understanding of diverse personnel, and effective communication and cooperation in contexts of diversity difficult yet vital in order to achieve CPPB missions' goals. Current training puts few resources into training personnel in these critical soft skills. Gaming for Peace (GAP) provides an efficient and effective means of developing and delivering a curriculum in those skills. Deriving a base curriculum from CPPB relevant soft skills and end user identified training gaps in this area, GAP designs a multiple player online role playing game which simulates scenarios from CPPB missions. The GAP project launches an iterative process of curriculum development and refinement through end users (military, police and civilian personnel) evaluating the game and embedded base curriculum by playing the game and in doing so, bringing their own experiences to the game, thus further developing the curriculum of CPPB relevant soft skills. The game can be accessed anywhere via the Internet and there is no limit on the number of personnel who can be trained. The game can be customized at low cost by different stakeholders. The GAP consortium is multidisciplinary with expertise in the social sciences, computer science, end users (including militaries and police), and SMEs in game design, curriculum development and skill standardization and harmonization, and has support from stakeholders including the ESDC, UN bodies and NATO.