On May 8, 2023, the Navy released an article about a special sea lion named Spike, who the Navy taught how to play video games. Spike is one of many sea lions the navy is trying to teach how to play video games, though it is not for any militaristic purpose. In fact, this program was created as a form of cognitive enrichment for sea lions during their pastime.
The program they are teaching sea lions like Spike to play is a system called the Enclosure Video Enrichment (EVE) system. This system was created by the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, using a simple design focusing on just four big buttons that the sea lions click to move a cursor through a maze according to Gamespot.
The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, which uses scientists from other programs such as Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific and the National Marine Mammal Foundation (NMMF) to take care of and train marine animals. These animals are trained to aid the Navy in reconnaissance and rescue missions.
The reason for EVE is to help these animals live happier and longer lives than they already do. Through this research, the Navy has discovered that, at least in the case of Spike, sea lions enjoy playing video games. Spike and the other sea lions have played a collective 750 sessions of the game and rarely, if ever, seem to get upset with it.
The researchers originally needed to use food to incentivize these animals to use EVE, however as time progressed and they learned how to play the game, the sea lions began playing the game voluntarily.
This research has been going on over the course of a three-year period, through which, they have found some correlations between sea lions playing games and the effect it could have on their health. Though there is no proof saying that video games cause sea lions to have improved health, the scientists have noted that since the sea lions have started using EVE, they have shown improved weight maintenance and performance in voluntary health checks.
With this new type of implementation of video games, it will be interesting to see if other branches of the military or even other companies implement video games into the lifestyle of animals in their care. If they work as well as EVE has seemingly worked on these marine animals so far, there might be a lot more gamers in the world in our future.