PaxSims

PaxSims isn’t really a gaming blog, despite the overlaps between gaming and simulation, and despite the game geek backgrounds of its primary authors. Nonetheless, some of the findings from a recent study of The Civic Potential of Video Games by Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Chris Evans may have implications for some of our prior discussion of human-moderated versus computer-moderated simulation, as well as the conversation we’ve been having on using MMOs as a model for multi-player, distributed simulation.

The study as a whole focuses on a range of research questions:

The Quantity of Game Play Do teens who play games every day or for many hours at a time demonstrate less or more commitment and engagement in civic and political activity? Do they spend less or more time volunteering, following politics, protesting?

The Civic Characteristics of Game Play Do teens who have civic experiences while gaming—such as playing games that simulate civic activities, helping or guiding other players, organizing or managing guilds (an opportunity to develop social networks), learning about social issues, and grappling with ethical issues— demonstrate greater commitment to and engagement in civic and political activity than those with limited exposure to civic gaming experiences?

The Social Context of Game Play Do teens who play games with others in person have higher levels of civic and political engagement than those who play alone? Does playing games with others online have the same relationship to civic engagement as playing games with others in person? How often do youth have social interactions around the games they play, for example participating in online discussions about a game? How do these interactions relate to civic and political engagement?

The Demographic Distribution of Civic Gaming Experiences Do factors such as gender, family income, race, and ethnicity influence the frequency of civic gaming experiences that members of these groups have? Do certain games provide more of these experiences than others?

The finding that I found most interesting, and which relates to the issues that I mentioned above, was this one:

Teens who play games socially (a majority of teens) are more likely to be civically and politically engaged than teens who play games primarily alone. Among teens who play alongside others in the same room….

Interestingly, this relationship only holds when teens play alongside others in the same room [emphasis added]. Teens who play games with others online are not statistically different in their civic and political engagement from teens who play games alone

We were curious as to whether the lack of relationship between civic engagement and playing with others online was due to the depth of interactions that occur online. Playing with others online can be a fairly weak form of social interaction, where two players never speak or interact and play only for a short time. It may also include longer and more sustained networks where players join a guild and play games in an ongoing and coordinated fashion. Researchers suggest that the more intensive form of online socializing, for example, in a guild can offer many of the benefits of offline civic spaces that less-intensive online social play may not. To shed light on this issue, we compared those who participate in guilds with those who play alone only. We find no difference between the two groups’ level of civic and political engagement. The relationship between guild membership and two civic outcomes (volunteering and raising money for charity) are marginally significant (p < .10).

Now, there are all sorts of ways in which the relationship between playing together in person and civic engagement could be a spurious relationship. Both, for example, could be a function of a particular personality type. At the same time, however, they might also suggest that the socialization experience is in some ways fundamentally different if it occurs online or in person. If so, it has obvious implications for efforts to design educational and training simulations which attempt to use online communication as a proxy for face-to-face interaction.

It should also be noted that certain types of cooperative online play were associated with greater civil engagement, in particular “organizing and managing game groups and guilds.” Again, the causality here is difficult to entangle, but there could be interesting implications for the way online experiences are constructed (in MMOs, for example), and the socialization that results from this.

Hat-tip: Megan Fitzgibbons, McGill University’s frighteningly-efficient political science liaison librarian.

I recently posted some thoughts (“The Internet is for COIN?“) on an article by David Earnest on “Growing a Virtual Insurgency: Using Massively Parallel Gaming to Simulate Insurgent Behavior” in the most recent issue of The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulations (October 2009). David was kind enough to reply to my thoughts with some additional thoughts of his own, which I’ve moved from the comments section so that they are less likely to get missed:

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Thanks for the review of my article, Rex. I share your sense that an MMO simulation could help the aid and development community. Indeed, the genesis of my article is the finding of complex systems researchers that massively parallel systems–whether simulated or real-world–exhibit surprising abilities to adapt and solve problems. While this adaptability is characteristic of a range of physical and ecological systems, my interest is in human organizations (I’m a political scientist by training).

One thing that interests me is that human organizations, while often very large, are not always “massively parallel” either in the gaming sense (e.g. the architecture of the social network) or even in terms of organization theory. Because human organizations often are bureaucratic and hierarchical–and political scientists typically focus on the most bureaucratic and hierarchical organization there is, the nation-state–they are not very good at tapping into the latent expertise and knowledge of individuals. This is a feature of many fields of human endeavors, not simply COIN operations. While I have no personal experience with aid and development organizations, I wouldn’t be surprised if these organizations also have lots of latent experience and knowledge that needs to be drawn out. How to do so is an interesting question; gaming is but one possible approach.

This interest in latent knowledge highlights a paradox that intrigues me: Organizations exhibit higher-level learning even when no one individual learns. That is, organizations “know” things that even individuals in the organization do know realize they know. A few years back, a colleague at a conference suggested an addendum to Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote about “known” versus “unknown unknowns”. To Rumsfeld’s list we should add “unknown knowns”–that is, organizations have expertise and knowledge somewhere in their ranks, but we don’t really recognize it or know how to tap into that expertise.

Your point about the inaccuracies in Wikipedia is an important one. Massively parallel human organizations may be prone to all sorts of pathologies, from groupthink to cycling majorities and other problems of collective action . But I think (or perhaps hope) that the Wikipedia example illustrates how massively parallel systems cope with bad information. Over time, mechanisms of positive and negative feedback, plus selection pressures, weed out the “bad” information while promoting the “good” information. Thus, while at any given moment in time a massively parallel system may be “inefficient” (in the sense of a signals to noise ratio), over the long run efficiency and the quality of information improves. This can only happen, however, if organizations (or gamers) design appropriate mechanisms of reward, censure, and feedback (or as I say in the article, conservation, selection and innovation). In ecological systems, these mechanism arise endogenously. The challenge of human systems is to endogenize them without either eliminating the massively parallel adaptive architecture or creating too much noise.

On a related note, Mitchel Waldrop wrote an article in 1996 about how Dee Hock, the founder and CEO of Visa (the credit card organization), solved these organization problems. It’s a fascinating read: see the magazine Fast Company, October 1996.

David C. Earnest
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies
Old Dominion University

I was sitting recently in a rather productive meeting of a project on conflict and fragility, and as the group at the table grappled with the many complex aspects of the topic one increasingly stood out to me: the omnipresent, ambiguous, and often problematic role of patronage and informal politics in countries emerging from conflict. I’ve posted a version of my meeting notes below–and, after that, some thoughts on the challenges that this poses for peacebuilding simulation.

In focusing—quite appropriately—on the key role of effective institutional development and state-building approaches, the development and peacebuilding community needs to be careful that it pays adequate attention to the key role that informal institutions (including patron-client relations and neopatrimonial patterns of political management) play in governance in fragile and war-affected countries. In the long term, there is little doubt that effective political institutions operating under the rule of law and enjoying broad legitimacy in the eyes of citizens are a fundamental contributor to both political stability and social and economic development. In the short-term (and sometimes beyond this), however, local leaders may see patronage-based politics not only as a key method of pursuing their own narrow personal, political, or economic interests, but also as a key—and often the single most important—mechanism of political stabilization. Specifically, informal allocation of resources may be used to win the support or acquiescence of key social constituencies, knit together political coalitions, and generate and distribute tangible benefits associated with peace so as to secure the cooperation of potential spoilers. In many cases, this involves creating alternate channels of resource distribution that circumvent, and even erode, the formal institutions of the state. In other cases, it may involve toleration of corruption or organized crime (itself a distributable benefit), or even the use of these to generate off-the-books resources for political leaders.

Donors have dealt this in a variety of ways. Aid agencies have typically stressed the importance of creating structures, upholding the rule of law, and fighting corruption. The international community has also, at other times, turned a blind eye to patronage-based policies when these are seen as strengthening whatever actors the international community sees as essential to peacebuilding. The international community has also been actively involved in such fostering activities, notably in military-lead local development efforts in the context of stabilization and counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find all three orientations present at once, depending on the conflict, the donor, and the donor counter institution involved (aid agencies, foreign ministries, the military/security/intelligence community). Evidence of this can also be found in the frequent disconnect between the assumptions of the development community those engaged in the theory and the practice of population-centric COIN.

Similar complexity is evident in public attitudes within fragile and conflict-affected countries themselves. Perceptions of corruption may be deeply corrosive of the popular legitimacy of institutions and political structures, ultimately contributing to political instability and violence. However, not all patronage (and, indeed, not all corruption) may be seen as “corrupt.” On the contrary, constituents may see such informal politics as evidence of social engagement, service delivery, and political attention. It may also be seen as an essential coping mechanism for ordinary citizens seeking to deal with the alien bureaucratic complexities of possibly (socially, geographically) emerging or reemerging state. Within conflict-affected governments, there may be a similar range of attitudes, with technocrats sharing the globalized notions of modern statebuilding and institution-building, while more “political” leaders, ministers, and functionaries viewing these same issues much more through the prism of local politics and immediate political interests. Moreover, local parties are certainly capable of shaping their message depending on the audience, playing to themes of institutional capacity-building while engaged with donors, while practicing the calculus of neopatrimonialism in practice.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has ever been involved in fragile and conflict-affected countries. Nor is any of this intended to argue the merits of corruption or patronage politics as an alternative approach to conflict resolution and statebuilding. This is particularly true given the perils of path-dependency: consolidation and entrenchment of neopatrimonialism as a response to the imperatives of stabilization risks locking countries into a dangerous and downward spiral of distributive inequalities, rising and/or unmet expectation, fiscal over-extension, increasing corruption, deteriorating efficacy, growing obstacles to reform, and declining legitimacy as a consequence of all of this.

However, it is to suggest that, conceptually, the peacebuilding and reconstruction community has largely failed to deal with this, and that as a consequence there is a current and potentially growing disconnect in both theory and practice. How is it that patronage politics can be limited, contained, channeled, or attenuated in ways that create maximum benefits in terms of stability and legitimization, and the least damage in terms of corruption, inefficiency, inequality, and delegitimization? How is it that we encourage countries emerging from conflict to look more like Jordan and less like Yemen—both places where neopatrimonialism has played a key role in domestic politics, but with strikingly different developmental and institutional outcomes?

If we accept that this is an important underlying dynamic on fragile and conflict-affected countries, how can we adequately capture it in educational training simulations?

One way, of course, would be to include a flow of material incentives, whereby patrons attempt to divert aid and fiscal resources to client constituencies, and clients attempt to maximize their earnings. The problem with this approach is that it fails to adequately capture the normative, cultural, and ideological aspects of this—reducing political loyalty to little more than apolitical rent-seeking. Yet we know that in many cases, however, that clients regard the flow of patronage as a form of political engagement and concern, and that the neopatrimonial allocation or diversion of resources may not been seen by recipients as corruption but as a form of wholly appropriate constituency service.

This normative/cultural/ideological component is important, too. It helps to shape whether informal politics is seen as legitimate and hence legitimizing, or is seen as corrupt, venal, and hence delegitimizing of the state and political elites.

Another simulation approach would be to design the briefing notes in such a way as to stress the social links (whether ethnic, regional, or otherwise) between patrons and clients in an effort to generate some sense of attachment above-and-beyond simple resource maximization. The problem with this approach, it seems to me, is that it might risk portraying neopatrimonialism as simply some sort of embedded and relatively unchangeable primordial politics, thereby understating the potential dynamism of it all.

A third simulation approach would be to assign participants who are close friends to the same patron-client groupings, so as to underpin the resource politics with intangible attachments too. This could be hard to do in many simulation settings, however.

I suppose the best way of doing this might be a combination of all three, to the extent this is possible. Do any of the Paxsims readership have other ideas? If so, feel free to post them as comments!

An ongoing conversation on this blog focuses on the value of electronically simulated worlds as learning environments.  A comment on our first post and the lively discussion at USIP over the summer have reignited my thinking on virtual simulations as learning tools and I think it has bubbled in to something to actually say on the subject – you can be the judge.

At the USIP event, Beth Noveck suggested that avatars are valuable because they reflect back our own behavior.  Skip Cole suggested that our end goal for much of this work would be integrating realistic scenario design with virtual environments, ie. holodecks.  Often we invoke MMORPGs as examples of spaces where social networks evolve in very complex, user created environments (see Rex’s insightful discussion on COIN sims with WoW references below).  Still, I have a fundamental objection to using avatars for training.

Avatars do not and cannot convey complex human signals.  It is possible that they never will.  By design, every action by an avatar is the will of the user.

Take a simple example.  Rexio and Garus happen to bump into each other outside the wailing caverns in the Barrens and Garus starts telling Rexio a long and, frankly, quite boring story about the unusual swift zhevra he just killed.   As Garus goes on and on about the unusual hide and mane of the zhevra, Rexio, stands there in rapt attention, without interruption, and finally concludes with a resounding, “Well fought, sir!”

While Garus was rambling on and the player behind Garus, let’s call him Gary, was feverishly typing his epic tale, the player behind Rexio, let’s call him Amos, King of the Cosmos, could’ve actually been paying close attention, hanging on every word or he could’ve been surfing the web, he could’ve run to the refrigerator for a soda, he could’ve been on the phone to a friend (with the proper technology, he could be doing all three).  None of the typical signals of boredom: rolling of his luminous, heavenly blue elven eyes, constantly looking at his gnomish timepiece, tapping his chain mail clad foot, yawning, etc – would be conveyed.

This is just one rather silly example of human signalling that is vital to every day interaction but completely missing from avatar interaction.  My point is that avatars only convey what the user wants them to convey.  Additionally, I would contend that this is both a function of technology and incentives.

Technology cannot currently integrate human behavior behind the keyboard.  Sure, techies might suggest motion and bio tracking software that uses human signals to overlay behaviors on their avatars – but then, I think, users would be training themselves to avoid the biomedical conditions that lead to negative signals, not the negative signals themselves.  I’ve learned how to be still and balance on a Wii Fit – still, I don’t presume that I’ve learned how to meditate.  I think there is a very interesting analog in poker players that learn online versus those that learn in person – those that play online are very good at not conveying tells, but are often quite poor at reading other players (or tilting other players or resisting tilt or the other sorts of psychological warfare necessary for “good” play) – this is all anecdotal, of course – I’m open to evidence to the contrary.  The point is that avatars can’t convey all of the complexities of human signals that are used in conversations.

And even if they could, why would they?  In addition to the technology limitations, there are incentive problems for individual users in committing to convey negative signals.  If there are negative consequences for negative signals that would otherwise be difficult to control in real human interaction, why not write subroutines that take out yawns, eye-rolling and all the other rude stuff we humans do to each other?

Amos, King of the – err, Rex runs a giant simulation, full of human interaction where his students learn that their actions have real effects on the world, mostly as a result of how they coordinate, cooperate and communicate with each other.  Having run Carana eight or nine times now for more than 200 participants, I am firmly convinced that the main value and worth of the exercise as a teaching tool is that people learn about human interaction in complex social environments with pressing timelines and exogenous (and occasionally endogenous, participant created) shocks.   I’ve had participants ask “What could I have done differently to convince them that they were making a mistake?” and others say “I finally understood what was going on in other similar conversations I’ve had in real situations like this.”  I think this fundamental learning about not just what is said, but how it is said, is a vital component of using simulations for peacebuilding.  Avatars can’t deliver that now, I don’t know if they ever will.

The latest issue of Joint Forces Quarterly 55 (4th Quarter 2009) has a short but interesting piece on designing exercises, games, and simulations. Two observations stand out.

The first concerns the importance of validation in social and political simulations.

If we are conducting an exercise to explore the contours of some ill-defined future problem, for instance, it is crucial that we be able to justify why we reach certain conclusions or how we generalize lessons learned from an exercise.

Answering the “How do I know that I know that?” question is routine in the social sciences, including in qualitative work common in political science and sociology, but not always thoroughly discussed in the exercise design and evaluation community. Nevertheless, it is crucial to a defensible analysis.

As developments in information and computer technology make more complex (and visually-appealing) simulations possible—especially in the military, where there are large R&D budgets and considerable demand for software-based training and planning solutions —I must admit to being worried about the theoretical assumptions that may (or may not) be built in. This is especially so because (to be frank) I don’t think social science yet has a very firm grip on such issues as insurgency, civil war, peace building, and political stability, much less how to model them.

A second important point raised by the article is the difference between exercises and simulations for analytical purposes, as opposed to those that primarily have a training role:

The elements of good exercise design for teaching and analysis can be somewhat different for the simple reason that the lessons to be learned are different. Analytically, what we learn from tabletop exercises usually has to do with whether the model of the problem described in the scenario introduces the right independent variables, whether others should be added, how they could be refined and their relative weight, and how differences in them might require different actions and result in different outcomes.

Exercises for teaching purposes are rooted in an assumption of the value of experiential learning, that giving participants a visceral feel for the exigencies of policy decisionmaking will be an effective way of making theoretical lessons they have learned concrete.

The first observation highlights the “garbage in, garbage out” problem once more, and hence the issues of validation raised earlier. The latter points to the importance of “feel”—something that may have as much to do with the way a simulation is staged as it does with the rules and procedures involved. In my own simulations, I have at times deliberately engineered information overload, exhaustion, and time-pressures into the process to give participants a sense of how these influence behaviour. One can go even further, and modify the physical layout of the simulation, the immediate environment, and so forth to create an additional layer of contextual effect. At the Chatham House simulation of Palestinian refugee negotiations, for example, we deliberately provided players with physical resources (dedicated team rooms, phones, printer access, interns assigned as support staff, etc.) in order to proxy the degree of institutional support each party might enjoy in real life. This meant that our refugees—played in the simulation by actual refugees—were given no room at all, and were forced to make do with whatever corners of the building they could find. One effect of this, in turn, was to place them in a marginalized position that nicely captured how often they are left out of consultative and negotiating processes on the issue.