The cartoon rat submerged in a fishtank? He's here to up your game at buying stuff for the military. Just have him hook-shot his hunk of cheese into the right treasure chest to make sure his supervisors and colleagues are adequately briefed on the costs and timeframe for his project.
"Treasure Cheese" is one of 13 extremely bureaucratic computer games that the Defense Department's acquisition team rolled out last week to hone bean-counters' skills at budgeting, finance, congressional compliance and stopping fraud. The effort is in keeping with occasional attempts at using formats like science fiction to spruce up a pretty dry subject.
So far, the skills being tested are pretty basic. Some are as simple as memorizing statutes. In "Procurement Fraud Indicators," you've got to determine what's wrong with a lieutenant colonel limiting a solicitation for a contract to fix an Army base so his son-in-law could win. (If you said "Excluding Qualified Bidders," you're correct!)
And the two-dimensional, cartoon-heavy graphics match the content. You control Ratner The Rat's cheese shot with your arrow keys and space bar; you're not going to be on your headset talking to other players. "We’re not talking about Halo here," says Alicia Sanchez, the Florida-based games czar -- yes, a real job -- at the Defense Acquisitions University.
Sanchez told a blogger conference Wednesday call the games were about "reinforcing core competencies" among the Defense Department's 147,000 acquisitions workers. She's been working on them for two years after figuring that there were probably a fair amount of gamers coming through the acquisitions training course, and matched the skills tested with the curriculum. In "Charge," you get a requirement from a combat team for a weapon they need. If you can't award a contract for the weapon that meets the team's needs at the right price -- in one case, a "Discombobulator" laser gun -- the enemy wins. (In order to build esprit d'corps, the cut-scene instructor informs the Dedicated Acquisition Professional, "Things are far less dangerous for you, but just as important.")
Speaking of budgeting: Sanchez said that she had the games built at under $100,000 apiece using local designers, including some from the University of Central Florida and the government simulation-builders at Advanced Distributed Learning. She'll have a "more complex game," this time with 3-D graphics, rolled out by February. "The goal is to launch one a month for the next year," Sanchez said.
You don't have to be a Pentagon money counter to play: registration isn't necessary on thegames website, and they'll soon be on the Defense Acquisitions University's Facebook page and an affiliated Second Life island. Now to see if manipulating a swimming rat makes any planes, tanks or guns cheaper and more powerful.
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