It's 'World of Warcraft,' But for Illegal Fishing

​According to Pew C​haritable Trusts, about $23.5 billion worth of fish, or about 40 percent, are caught illegally, but don't worry. Video games can help.

The Satellite Applications Catapult, a not-for-profit company that helps organizations take advantage of satellite technologies, recently revealed that it's been working with P​ew, which hopes to end illegal fishing within 10 years.

Using ship-tracking data from exactEa​rth 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.

An overview of Pew and Satellite Applications Catapult collaborative project.

Keegan Neave, a software engineer with Satellite Applications Catapult, told me that the idea for this system was inspired by massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, and real-time strategy games like StarCraft.

"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."

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.

Satellite Applications Catapult also created the data visualization and interface for Project Eyes on the Seas with Unity, an increasingly popular game engine that was used to create simple, 2D iPhone hits like Th​rees, more complicated 3D games like The Fo​rest, and everything in between.

Keegan Neave said they chose Unity for the same reasons many budding game developers do. The community around Unity has produced tutorials that allowed them to quickly get up to speed and rapidly prototype solutions for any problems that popped up.

Neave stresses that this isn't like gamification, a terribly overused term that essentially means incentivizing people with traditional gaming conventions (get points for brushing your teeth, etc.). Instead, Satellite Applications Catapult uses game technologies and collaboration concepts to make the job of stopping illegal fishing easier.

"We've faced some fairly unique challenges due to the amount of data we are playing through, but despite us being new to such technologies and the fact the technologies aren't being used as intended, it's working really well," he said.