In a 1932 article for the American Historical Review, the legendary maritime historian Robert G. Albion commented on the then-ongoing “communications revolution,” which in his view “has knit the world closer together…widened the horizons of every community, partly through the rapid dissemination of news and partly through the breaking down of provincialism with new facilities for travel.” To highlight this, Albion pointed out the decreasing time lag between momentous events and news of said events reaching distant locations. “When Fort Sumter was fired upon,” he wrote, “the news reached Boston that morning but took twelve days to reach England. When the Maine was blown up, the London Times carried a full account a few hours later. At the outbreak of the World War, even the ships at sea were informed at once.”

In the present day, one could say that the communications revolution has reached a new zenith. It is not just that communications occur in real time, but that they do so for virtually everyone. Moreover, other advanced technologies that were once solely the domain of governments and intelligence agencies are now available to individuals on an affordable basis—if not absolutely free. Both state and private actors can now rapidly build and expand communications networks that are robust and secure.

These developments have led to the emergence of a new phenomenon, which I call gamified intelligence networks, or GINs. A GIN is a network of actors infused, to one extent or another, with game-design elements and principles and has been created—or is used, intentionally or unintentionally—to pursue specific goals, often having to do with information-gathering, intelligence collection, or the conduct of espionage-related activities. These networks are now poised to begin playing an impactful albeit controversial role in modern society.

The idea of the GIN is not entirely new. In British science fiction author Charles Stross’s 2007 novel Halting State, the protagonists discover (spoiler warning) that the popular Augmented Reality Game (ARG) SPOOKS is both a front and cover for a European intelligence agency conducting espionage activities. They meet Michaels, a senior intelligence figure, who explains:

…we’re going through the biggest renaissance in HUMINT—HUMan INTelligence—since the Cold War. It’s all mediated through artificial reality and live-action role-playing games like SPOOKS […]: adding the power of electronic information gathering to human espionage. Would you believe it used to cost us ten thousand euros a day to put a full surveillance team on a suspect? Now we’ve got volunteers who’ll pay us to let them do our leg work!

Some of the applications of a GIN raised by Stross, such as having unwitting civilians conduct the espionage equivalent of grunt work, are likely a bridge too far for serious intelligence services; they would have to give up far too much control over certain activities in exchange for results delivered by unprofessional individuals that aren’t fully trusted. Other possible applications, however, certainly merit interest.

One of these is the usage of a popular game as a cover for conducting espionage-related activities. Consider last year’s release of the wildly popular ARG Pokémon Go: using the GPS device in players’ phones, the game instructs players to find and “capture” virtual creatures (the eponymous Pokémon) through an augmented reality display on phone screens. Readers may recall that Pokémon Go quickly became a global sensation, and is notable for the effect it had on human behavior. In their drive to acquire new Pokémon, people sometimes seemingly abandoned common sense and conventional regard for rules and norms; players often had to be forced away from active railway tracks, fire stations, restricted hospital areas, and even government/military buildings. It is not hard to imagine one of those “players” as a clever, young intelligence officer who took advantage of Pokémania to case a site or conduct some sort of operation. In one known case, a French citizen in Indonesia was caught on the grounds of a military base while searching, he claimed, for Pokémon. He was later released with no punishment.

In fact, governments around the world reacted swiftly in response to this very real possibility of Pokémon Go-enabled espionage. The U.S. Department of Defense banned the playing of the game while inside the Pentagon over concerns that the game could “facilitate foreign spying,” especially since the game’s usage of GPS data could “provide pinpoint accuracy on the locations of rooms and other sensitive facilities where secrets are stored.” The Russian government’s Minister of Communications and Mass Media, Nikolai Nikiforov, stated that he suspected “intelligence services might have contributed to [Pokémon Go]” with the intention of “collect(ing) video-information” about different locations around the world. In a report by Al Jazeera, Hamdi Bakheet, an Egyptian parliamentarian who sits on the defense committee, said that the game “is the latest tool used by spy agencies in the intel war, a cunning despicable app that tries to infiltrate our communities in the most innocent way under the pretext of entertainment. But all they really want is to spy on people and the state.”

Likewise, a GIN working off a game like Pokémon Go could also serve the inverse purpose: to expose foreign agents. Suppose if intelligence agencies created, via an intermediary, a small game that has some form of “official permission” to play in areas near government offices, certain facilities, and such. The game itself is a form of bait, as there is a greater chance that foreign agents interested in casing these sites would sign up for it as a cover for their activities. At the very least, it would help narrow down a list of suspects.

GINs can have other applications for governments and intelligence services. Just as the United States Army uses the video game franchise America’s Army as a tool for military recruitment, so too could intelligence services use specialized GINs to facilitate the recruitment of talented individuals. As an example, consider the contemporary video game/ARG known as The Black Watchmen, which dubs itself as “the first permanent alternative reality game.” The Black Watchmen has players taking up the role of a global paramilitary group dedicated to protecting the public from dangerous occult and spiritual phenomena. Players are given “missions,” distributed through the game client on their computers, that require solving puzzles pertaining to an investigation of the supernatural. The company behind The Black Watchmen, Alice & Smith, devotes considerable resources to research and collaboration with academic and technical experts in order to achieve realism. Alice & Smith are currently working on a new game entitled NITE Team 4,¹ a “hacking simulation game” in which players take up the role of a new recruit in a sophisticated military cyberwarfare cell. Using a system based on real world military and industry cybersecurity tools, the game tasks players with carrying out missions inspired by leaked NSA documents.

The puzzles in Alice & Smith’s games are complex, and more often than not require collaborative teamwork to solve. These include codebreaking, investigating dummy websites that exist to support game narratives, analyzing collected evidence for clues, identifying persons of interest, facilitating infiltration into suspected organizations, and more. These tasks, of course, bear more than a passing resemblance to the work of intelligence analysts: signals intelligence interception, open-source intelligence analysis, collaboration with on-the-ground units engaged in espionage activities, and so forth. It isn’t too difficult to imagine the CIA or NSA deciding to create a GIN like The Black Watchmen or NITE Team 4 with the intent of facilitating the recruitment of the next generation of intelligence analysts.

Indeed some have argued that they have already done so, in the form of the online sensation known as “Cicada 3301.” Claiming that they “are looking for highly intelligent individuals,” the group known as Cicada 3301 has posted a series of puzzles and challenges online on at least six separate occasions. According to an article by the Telegraph, these puzzles require extensive knowledge of a variety subjects, including “number theory, philosophy, and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.” Because of the high complexity and collaborative nature of these puzzles, and because of the placement of clues in over a dozen global cities (including Paris, Mexico City, Seoul, Moscow, Sydney, and so forth), many commentators have speculated that the entire effort is, in the Telegraph’s words, “a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6, or America’s National Security Agency, as a part of a search for highly talented cryptologists.”

In addition to providing operational cover, rooting out foreign agents, and facilitating recruitment, there is a fourth way in which intelligence services can use GINs: the exploitation of unsuspecting civilians. This is a tricky and controversial proposition, and highly unlikely (if not outright illegal) in the case of Western agencies, which must operate under the rule of law. Other nations and their intelligence services, however, might not be so restrained. In Russia, after all, there is a term for such individuals: polezniye duraki, or “useful fools” (often translated as “useful idiots”). Could civilians manipulated by a GIN be unwitting tools, in some manner or another, of a foreign power? Could some limited influence actually be exerted over their behavior?

The evidence suggests that it is at least possible. A 2012 paper titled “Crowd Soft Control: Moving Beyond the Opportunistic,” by John Rula and Fabián E. Bustamante of Northwestern University, explains how researchers were able to “soft control” individuals by tapping into mobile gaming applications. To test this “soft control,” the researchers created an ARG akin to Pokémon Go dubbed Ghost Hunter, in which a player “chases ghosts and other monsters around her neighborhood and ‘zaps’ them by capturing their photo [on their phone] through an augmented reality display, for which she is awarded points.” For this test, these “ghosts” were placed in locations both frequently traveled and well out of the way of pedestrians. The goal was to see if players, motivated by the points incentive, were willing to travel to out-of-the-way locations in order to “zap” more ghosts and thus collect more points. Indeed they were, according to the study.

In addition, Pokémon Go also shows us what is possible when people become too absorbed by a game. Some have played the game while driving, resulting in deaths and injuries through carelessness. A crowd of players in a Japanese city caused a stampede and a massive traffic jam as a result of their efforts to capture a rare Pokémon. In Bosnia players apparently had to be warned not to venture into areas still suspected of containing unexploded mines from the war in the 1990s. One can cite dozens of such stories. Overall the game has proven to have the potential to be both socially disruptive and, if players pay little attention to their surroundings, life-threatening. That an ARG can exert enough influence on individuals as to convince them to literally wander into minefields is a sure sign of its effectiveness as an agent of “soft control.”

It is not hard then to imagine how a foreign intelligence agency or state could take advantage of this capability. Being able to spontaneously cause people to congregate or move around in certain environments can cause confusion, chaos, or even distraction, which is useful in a variety of situations. As a possible scenario, imagine if a foreign intelligence service needed to quickly enter and exit a secure office location while drawing as little attention as possible. Deciding that creating a distraction would be the best way to proceed, the agency could use a popular game like Pokémon Go or a similar GIN (ideally one that they have some level of control over) to suddenly draw a crowd outside the target building—perhaps by reporting the sighting of some kind of “rare Pokémon,” or announcing a spontaneous “limited time event” that will gift participants a limited edition digital item if they show up. Given a popular enough game, this effort could draw a large crowd right to target building’s front door, enabling the agents to carry out their intended operation while the building’s guards are busy trying to handle the sudden mass of people and figure out where they came from.

While the discussion up until now has focused mostly on the possible use of GINs by national intelligence agencies and governments, it’s when non-state actors apply the concept that things truly get interesting. As mentioned before, technologies that were once only available to state institutions are now commercially available, thus enabling private actors to build robust, secure, and scalable networks of their own. How then might private actors, if they can develop their own GINs, make use of them?

The field of political organization will likely be the first where GINs will make an appearance. Political campaigns, after all, share several similarities with intelligence networks: decentralized command structures, the presence of on-the-ground actors, the ability gather information and engage in direct actions on a local basis, and so forth. Yet while there have been some discussions over the past few years about political parties and movements incorporating gamification in their campaigns—with a few ideas like volunteer loyalty programs and randomized reward systems being incorporated—so far no one has embraced the concept to its full extent.

What would a political campaign GIN look like? Presumably, it would take the form of a phone-based app created by the campaign’s headquarters. The players, in this case the campaign’s activists and volunteers, would earn points and achievement badges for completing various campaign-related tasks: registering to vote; reading and taking a basic quiz on a party/candidate’s platform; watching a televised debate; recruiting friends and family to also join the campaign via the app; locating one’s local polling place; voting on election day; ensuring that one’s fellow supporters also vote; and so forth. Other additional functionalities can be incorporated into the app, such as the ability to report changes in local areas. Perhaps a rival candidate has rented a billboard next to a frequently traveled road. A player could send this information to campaign headquarters, which will then act on this information and craft an effective response—perhaps by renting a separate billboard nearby, or by increasing targeted spending on advertising in that local area.

If a standard political campaign can be turned into a GIN, then it is possible that more unconventional political movements could do likewise. This could have numerous implications, some of them worrisome. Suppose for example that a group of pro-democracy activists and foreign NGOs put together an online game and community called Democracy Spring, where players take on the role of pro-democracy activists and aspiring revolutionaries. At first the game serves an educational and advocacy purpose, highlighting the political and human rights situation in a specific country. However, as the community grows and becomes more engaged, the community’s organizers decide to transform the entire effort into a GIN, with the express purpose of fomenting political change in the target country. At this point they could begin encouraging the player base of the “game” to become more active, incentivizing participants via gamification techniques and the promise of virtual rewards. You helped organize a large protest outside an embassy? Congratulations! Your in-game “rank” has just been raised from “Protestor” to “Agitator.” Can you climb all the way up to “Revolutionary Hero” rank?

If all this sounds implausible, consider, as reported by BuzzFeed News, the informal online campaign known as “The Great Liberation of France,” which sought to bolster National Front candidate Marine Le Pen’s campaign. It accomplished this by recruiting foreign English-speaking individuals via chat rooms (especially those commonly used for cooperative online video games) and message boards, guided them in creating elaborate yet fake French-language social media profiles, and directed them to engage in online actions intended to cause “as much chaos on social media as possible to make…Marine Le Pen and her supporters…seem like the most legitimate voice in French politics.” Such actions included helping to spread online rumors about Le Pen’s center-right rival, François Fillon, generating fake “likes,” approving comments on videos posted by Le Pen’s advisors, and more. Participants thought of their efforts like a challenge; it isn’t a stretch to imagine that some played it like a game. Indeed, though in the end it didn’t carry the day for Le Pen, this might become a model for future political GIN operations, both in domestic cases and abroad.

If it’s possible to use GINs in a political context, then surely non-governmental and issue-specific advocacy organizations could also deploy them to advance their own activities and goals. For instance, one place where this could work rather well is in environmental advocacy, which is generally a dynamic scene. There are already some early indicators of gamification at work in this field: an initiative known as RecycleBank encourages recycling and energy consumption reduction with point rewards that are redeemable at mass market retailers such as Walmart, BestBuy, and more, while an Indian-based loyalty program known as m.Paani rewards participants who purchase mobile phone credits from sponsoring companies, with earned points contributing to water-related infrastructure and sanitization projects. The use of GINs in this context might further encourage and drive issue-specific campaigns and initials. Consider the organization Greenpeace, which already has, according to its latest annual report, a permanent staff of about 2,500, as well as more than 36,000 active volunteers, 3.3 million financial supporters, and 42 million ordinary supporters and followers worldwide. A specialized and well-designed GIN encouraging environmental activism would allow them to further leverage and increase those numbers.

GINs could also be used by private actors driven by financial motives, seeing such networks as opportunities to reach new audiences, improve relations with existing customers, or even aid in the conduct of business. Companies that specialize in the gathering of certain kinds of information—such as private intelligence agencies, news outlets, and consumer/market research groups—could feasibly implement new GIN-based programs that help them access new information and reach information sources that they were previously unaware of. Something like this already exists in the form of CNN’s iReport initiative, which allows the news channel to crowdsource images and videos of breaking and developing news stories. iReport has been moderately successful; the most prominent successful case was when Jamal Albarghouti, then a graduate student at Virginia Tech, captured video of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Mr. Albarghouti submitted the video to iReport and was paid an undisclosed amount by CNN for exclusive rights to it. Expanding citizen journalism initiatives like iReport by constructing a GIN—adding opportunities for contributors to work together, point reward systems with special prizes like training and office tours offered by the company, and even offering job opportunities to the highest-ranking contributors—could in theory help the company find undiscovered talent and information, possibly giving rise to the next generation of reporters and journalists.

More elaborate uses can be envisioned. One particularly illuminating scenario emerges from Neal Stephenson’s famous 1992 science fiction novel, Snow Crash. In the novel, millions of stringers upload whatever new and potentially useful information they find to the servers of a company known as the Central Intelligence Corporation, or CIC. The CIC’s clients, usually large corporations and franchises, then trawl the company’s databases in search of useful information. If they find something of value, they’ll negotiate with and pay the stringer who uploaded the information. The novel’s protagonist at one point “uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent’s wastebasket in Burbank. Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. He ate and vacationed off of that one for six months.” The anecdote, though stylized for fiction, points to a concept known as information markets, which have real-world potential.

GINs driven by financial motives raise another troubling prospect: criminal GINs. Some early versions of such networks have already begun to appear in the form of darknet markets; black market commercial websites that exist on the dark web, which is ordinarily inaccessible to regular Internet users. The most famous of these was Silk Road, which in structure more closely resembled a peer-to-peer network than a store: users purchased drugs directly from individual vendors rather than the site’s owner, who merely hosted vendors and extracted a minor fee for facilitating transactions. There’s nothing preventing this structure from being applied to all kinds of stolen information, forged identity documents, human trafficking services, and more. As with technology, capabilities once exclusive to nation-states and intelligence agencies are increasingly available on a commercial basis.

There is one more way in which a GIN could be adapted for private use, and it is by far the most terrifying prospect: that of a GIN being used, operated by, or even controlled by a terrorist organization. Like in the previous examples, such a GIN could be used by the likes of ISIS to facilitate recruitment, slowly drawing in potential new members through efforts like those currently seen in social media, where individuals are gradually converted and radicalized through constant interaction. Thus, something that appears like an online community, or even a new and creative way to proselytize with added gamification elements (“If you can convince five friends to attend an information session about Islam at your local mosque, you’ll earn fifty points, which may be redeemed for X prize”), may in fact be a platform to quietly recruit new extremists.

Going further, GINs could even serve as a platform from which ISIS could launch terrorist attacks with witting or unwitting participants. What if ISIS one day asked community members located throughout the world to deliver several packages to “friends” that are in fact explosives timed to explode en route. The terrorists wouldn’t need to score a hit on every bomb; only a few need to go off in order for such an operation to be considered a success. From a tactical and operational perspective, this is certainly an improvement over having an extremist, who is likelier to be under surveillance, deliver the explosives.

Domestic extremist groups, too, could benefit from GINs. What if, say, an eco-terrorist organization took advantage of Greenpeace’s GIN to recruit new members? Is possible to keep tabs on all such networks?

Former CIA officer “Alex Finley” (a pen name), in a recent article for Politico, notes that the War on Terror changed the culture at the CIA. A “more military-style mentality seep[ed] into the agency,” he writes. “Back at headquarters in Langley, we started to see CIA officers show up dressed in cargo pants and Under Armour shirts. Buzz cuts seemed to appear everywhere.” But with Russian operatives resurgent and other new challenges across the globe, the CIA and America’s intelligence efforts more broadly once again need to tap into the traditional kind of espionage culture that served well in the Cold War. This is the culture of “chalk marks on a street lamp to signal a meeting; dead drops in a park, filled or emptied after hours traipsing through a bustling city to determine whether you were under surveillance.”

Finley is right that a pivot in intelligence culture is necessary. As the past decade and a half of conflicts in the Middle East has demonstrated, modern symmetrical warfare is a prohibitively capital-intensive proposition that is increasingly unappealing to policymakers, military leaders, and domestic populations. As time goes on, conflict will likely continue to become increasingly asymmetrical.

GINs are thus not a merely theoretical construct, but rather a likely direction for the further evolution of conflict. Likewise, GINs are also indicators of the future shape of the capacity and capabilities of future non-state actors. Such groups will be decentralized, able to scale quickly, able to motivate participants through game-like incentives, and able to reach previously inaccessible audiences.

If this is indeed the shape of things to come, then we have to answer a host of questions. For example, how would gamified political campaigns affect the political process? What role should labor laws play in a world of financially motivated GINs? How should governments regulate private GINs and GIN-like networks? In Stross’s Halting State, one of the protagonists notes that “the first SPOOKS campaign got the beta-testers arrested and questioned for a week under the Terrorism Act before the police realized it was a game; that’s why you carry a special endorsement on your ID card.” What kind of laws should we write for GINs? How should police respond to GINs being used for criminal or foreign espionage activity? Would all network users be liable for the actions of some? What about unwitting users? What are the rules of war in a world of GIN warfare?

With so many questions, it is difficult to say where the discussion should start. But start it must, and soon. It is better to be somewhat prepared ahead of time than not prepared at all.

This is, of course, assuming there isn’t a functioning GIN out there already.