All those years playing World of Warcraft may not have been for naught: The United States Navy has begun crowdsourcing ideas for fighting Somali pirates … through a new video game project. The game platform, called MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online WarGame Leveraging the Internet–not a reference to Jungle Book), is the product of years of research, will include more than 1,000 military and civilian players, and is planned for launch on May 16. It marks the first major effort by the American military to integrate both crowdsourcing and gamification into traditional military wargames.

MMOWGLI was developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in order to test the feasibility of using massively multiplayer online games along the lines of Warcraft and Guild Wars to help solve difficult strategic problems. The MMOWGLI game launching in May will focus exclusively on combating Somalian piracy, but the gaming platform is open enough that it can be adapted to other military hotspots.

According to Dr. Larry Schutte, Director of Innovation at the ONR, “We hope MMOWGLI will help us to understand what happens when your insights are combined with the observations and actions of another player–will that fusion result in a game-changing idea or solution, or will the MMOWGLI platform teach us something about our traditional thought processes?”

Or is it little more than some badass, righteous, high seas pwning?

The game will be managed by a “control team” that will vaguely assume the role of a dungeon master and will monitor ongoing events to make sure no one pulls a Leroy Jenkins or that things don’t get too unrealistic.