According to Pew Charitable Trusts, about $23.5 billion worth of fish, or about 40 percent, are caught illegally, but don’t worry. Video games can help. Using ship-tracking data from exactEarth and other sources, The Satellite Applications Catapult created Project Eyes on the Seas, a system that visualizes fishing ships’ locations around the world, allowing analysts to more quickly and intuitively analyze their movements and alert officials to any suspicious activities: a ship’s speed, which can indicate if it’s fishing, whether it turned off its transponder, and the type of license it has compared to the type of fishing related to its location. Basically, online games are really good at letting large groups of players spread across the world complete a complicated task by looking at the same data. Project Eyes on the Seas uses the same model to address illegal fishing. (source).
“We’ve no specific game we are looking to emulate, but we’ve all experienced raiding in various [massive multiplayer online, or MMO, games] and at uni I regularly played RTS [real time strategy] games on our internal network,” he said. “The key concepts we are intending to use are the ability to share information, by chatting or VOIP [voice over internet protocol], the ability for someone to create adhoc virtual teams on the fly to monitor specific vessels or fleets, and also companion apps that allow for remote access when out of the office.” – Keegan Neave
