(slate) Iraq: The Computer Game. (...) But during the past year, the Defense Department has been sniffing around the online gaming community: The Army just hired gaming firm There Inc. to develop a virtual world that can be used for anti-terrorist training, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has signed at least one online gaming expert as a consultant. There's good reason for the U.S. government to be interested in these virtual worlds now. These games—in which societies are built from nothing—may offer useful lessons for rebuilding broken nations in the real world. (...)