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CBS News Texas featured a new project by èßäÊÓƵapp Guildhall as they investigate research efforts to turn a video game into a crime fighting tool, using a $1.187 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice to create a sex trafficking data warehouse.

"Researchers are taking information from law enforcement databases and combining it with data that video game players will help collect by playing "Dark Shadows." Gamers will solve fictitious crimes by sorting out traffickers' names and crime locations from real U.S. Department of Justice press releases." — Article Excerpt

Gameplay Saves Valuable Time

As users play Dark Shadows, they act as an investigator extracting and organizing clues. In fact, they are actually sorting through real U.S. Department of Justice press releases, which researchers have embedded into the game, to extract data on traffickers' names and crime locations. The èßäÊÓƵapp ManeFrame supercomputer houses a data warehouse that is used to combine and centralize existing law enforcement and court databases, enabling the paired gameplay to search victims, traffickers, and emerging crime spots across datasets that are owned by various agencies.

Project lead Dr. Corey Clark, Ã¨ßäÊÓƵapp Guildhall Deputy Director of Research, said this will help investigators substantially by speeding up what is currently a long and tedious job. "Right now, you have investigators, people…manually searching the internet looking at these releases, trying to pull information out, putting in their own database systems, their own reports," Clark said. "This will save detectives from having to manually read every federal document."