U.S. Border Patrol Spends $1 Million Making a Videogame Simulating Their Job

Researchers at a government-funded laboratory have built a giant touchscreen video game that simulates the capture of illegal aliens. In a statement made to Kotaku by an official spokesman, the entire project and underlying systems cost "in the ballpark of $10 million [worth] of internal investments," with the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection contributing the final $1 million to create their border simulator.

Sandia National Laboratories, based in New Mexico and California, exists primarily to develop new technologies like supercomputers and atypical weaponry for the U.S. government. (A Super Soaker powerful enough to detonate an IED, for instance.) Unlike some defense contractors, Sandia is more than a privatized research outlet. Their main campus is located on an Air Force base. They were spun out of the Manhattan Project, handed over to AT&T management for a while, and are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, one of the largest aerospace and defense companies on the planet.

So for Sandia, home of the world's largest X-ray machine, a project like the "Borders High Level Model (HLM)" maybe isn't such a big enterprise. While the utility of a touchscreen-based simulation of only 64 square miles of terrain can be questioned when our southern border alone is nearly 2,000 miles long, the Borders HLM project gives border patrol agents and other customs officials a chance to "play through various scenarios and see how people, technology, and other elements all interact," according to the Sandia press release.

Training and simulation are valuable elements of any organization. And while $10 million may seem like a lot of money (about $1 million of which went directly into the Borders HLM project specifically, with the rest spent over the course of several years building fundamental data management systems), the argument is surely that it's better to spend a modest amount of money on simulations before spending even greater amounts of money on implementation. That executives and government wonks look good on video when manipulating touchscreen elements is just gravy.

We just have one question: When can we download an iPad version? If Border Patrol really wants to figure out the best strategy to deal with illegal crossings, there are thousand of gamers in the world happy to come up with the most efficient strategies possible.

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