Walt on the Harvard Iran simulation 14/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation report.add a comment
Following on from my earlier blog post on Harvard’s recent Iran nuclear simulation, I’ve come across additional pieces on the simulation by Gary Sick (who participated as part of the Iran team) and Stephen Walt (who participated as part of the US team). Both provide additional detail on what transpired during the exercise.
What is especially interesting from a PaxSims point-of-view, however, are Walt’s comments on how the technical design of the simulation may have shaped the validity of its outputs. Given their broader applicability to simulation design, they are worth quoting at length:
In my view, what one might call the “external validity” of the game was limited by three unrealistic features.
First, the timetable of the game was extremely compressed. In effect, we were trying to simulate a full year of negotiations in a mere six hours. Thus, each hour of the game covered two months, which meant that a team could send a message to another team and receive a reply in due course, only to discover that a month or more had passed and the original message was now effectively obsolete. More to the point, the breakneck pace of the game did not allow for any time for reflection, for the weighing of alternatives, or even the formulation of clear or novel strategies. (Each team was given about twenty-five minutes to plan its approach before the game began, and I like to think U.S. leaders do a bit better than that in real life. Heck, Obama just spent several months deciding what to do in Afghanistan). Yes, time is a precious commodity and policymakers are often forced to juggle multiple commitments, but I believe a more realistic timetable would have produced very different results.
Second, trying to simulate a complex multiparty negotiation with four or five-person “teams” was problematic, particularly when some team members (myself included), had to leave the game temporarily to teach their regular classes. This constraint required me to be absent for 90 minutes, which in terms of the game’s timetable meant that the U.S. Secretary of Defense was effectively incommunicado for three “months.” The same problem sidelined the person who played the Secretary of State for a similar period. Moreover, given that team members had no staff and thus no subordinates to give orders to, there was no one to delegate to and it was impossible to conduct continuous consultations with all of the relevant parties, even when both sides may have wanted to. What must have looked to some like Bush-era “unilateralism” was instead simply an unavoidable artifact of the game’s structure.
Third, the composition of the different teams was unavoidably slanted. The U.S., Russian, Chinese, Iranian teams were all populated with and led by Americans, while the Israeli team was made up entirely of Israelis and the EU team was composed of Europeans. To have confidence in the validity of the results, therefore, you have to assume that each of the teams actually played the way that their real-life counterparts would have. That might be true in the case of the U.S., Israeli, and European teams (though I wouldn’t assume it), but it’s obviously more of a stretch with the others.
These difficulties are not the fault of the game’s organizers, who faced obvious constraints in putting the exercise together. Ideally, such a simulation would have been played over a long week-end and covered a shorter time period, but it would have been far more difficult to assemble an equally impressive array of participants for an entire weekend. Putting together a genuinely multi-national participant list (including appropriate Iranians?), would have been even harder if not impossible.
The bottom line is that one ought to be exceedingly wary about drawing any conclusions about what this artificial exercise actually teaches. To me, its real value is not as a crude crystal ball that allows us to divine the future, or even as an analytical device that helps us identify particular barriers to resolving some thorny diplomatic problem. After all, it’s not exactly headline news to discover that resolving the Iranian nuclear issue isn’t easy, that there are certain tensions within the P5+1, or that Iran’s objectives are at odds with those of the other participants.
Rather, the potential value of such an exercise lies in forcing participants to take on different roles and see how a problem looks from a wholly different perspective. With hindsight, I wish we had mixed things up a lot more: with some Israelis on the Iran team, with real Russians, Chinese or EU citizens playing on the U.S. or Israeli side, and so forth. That might have taught us about some of the sources of misunderstanding that have made this issue so hard to resolve, whatever the actual “outcome” of the game might have been.
simulating civilian populations in war 10/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation journals.add a comment
The latest issue of the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology 6, 4 (October 2009) has an article in on it by Jonathan K. Alt, Leroy A. ‘Jack’ Jackson, David Hudak, and Stephen Lieberman on “The Cultural Geography Model: Evaluating the Impact of Tactical Operational Outcomes on a Civilian Population in an Irregular Warfare Environment”—or, in plainer language, how one might set about modeling the politico-military behaviour of a civilian population amidst an insurgency:
The civilian population has been described as ‘the center of gravity in irregular warfare’. Understanding the behavioral response of the civilian population in irregular warfare operations presents a major challenge area to the joint modeling and simulation community where there is a clear need for the development of models, methods, and tools to address civilian behavior response. This paper provides a conceptual and theoretical overview of the Cultural Geography (CG) model, a government-owned, open-source agent-based model designed to address the behavioral response of civilian populations in conflict environments. With an embedded case study, we describe the development of cognitive modules to represent the civilian population and their implementation as Bayesian belief networks (BBNs), the social structure module implemented using homophily, the process of adjudicating the effects of tactical level outcomes on a population segment within the model, and a sample case study analysis using a designed experiment.
Despite the array of variables that the model uses to generate agent behaviour—age, gender, education, tribe, political affiliation, with various social, economic, and political orientations associated with each of these—I remain dubious about the extent to which one can then determine collective behaviours as a consequence. This is partly because the range of actual variables shaping behaviour is so large, the relationship between them contingent and unclear, and the high probability of exogenous variables arising that haven’t been anticipated. Then again, is there really any other way of trying to get a simulation handle on the behaviours of large groups of individuals over time, especially in a way that lends itself to use as either a training or operations planning tool?
As work on such issues continues, and computing power continues to grow, it is inevitable that we will see more of this. The critical issue may be only in part how the simulations are constructed, how agents are modeled, how attitudes and behaviours are correlated and aggregated, and how the complex interactions between these operate. Just as important may be the pedagogical approach that is used in utilizing such simulations, and how they are framed as heuristic learning devices. If they are used as a substitute for critically interrogating social assumptions, they run the risk of abstracting from reality in dangerous ways. If, on the other hand, the simulation itself is used as an entry into larger discussions of how we understand social, economic, and political dynamics in societies—and the limits of our knowledge (what I’ve earlier termed “simhumility“)—it could prove a much more useful approach.
Harvard KSG Iran simulation 10/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation news.add a comment
The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University recently held a simulation examining Iran and the nuclear weapons issue, with the key roles played by a rather impressive list of former officials and subject matter experts. The Israeli paper Haaretz has a quite extensive summary of the outcome:
Haaretz, 10 December 2009
10/12/2009
Experts say Iran has clear path to nuclear weapons
By Yossi Melman
Last week the Harvard Kennedy School held a simulation game of the Iranian nuclear crisis, and Israel should be very concerned about its course and its outcome.
The game made it clear: Iran will not stop on its path to producing nuclear weapons. The United States will not embark on a military action and will find it difficult to enlist support at the United Nations for imposing more severe sanctions, while relations between Israel and the United States will deteriorate.
Prof. Graham Allison, a leading analyst of American security policy for decades, conducted the game, whose participants were representatives from countries and organizations likely to be affected by the real outcome.
Israel was represented by Dore Gold, former ambassador to the United Nations, and Dr. Shai Feldman, currently at Brandeis University, and by a former brigadier general and a nuclear physicist. Their decisions were made by consensus. The U.S. team, headed by Nicholas Burns, who was an assistant to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice during the administration of George W. Bush and was responsible for the “Iranian portfolio,” included Admiral William Fallon, head of U.S. Central Command from 2007-2008.
Iran was represented by Prof. Gary Sick of Columbia University, who was a member of the U.S. National Security Council under Jimmy Carter.
Also participating were American and European academics (some of them former government officials), representing Russia, China, U.K., France and Germany and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar). Also present as observers – the game lasted an entire day – were journalists David Ignatius of the Washington Post and David Singer of The New York Times, who “played” the media. All the participants promised to maintain secrecy about the game and not to reveal the identity of the participants, but details have leaked in the United States and now here as well.
…
Conclusions: The U.S. will not attack Iran. Russia and China will not agree to imposing serious sanctions. The U.S. will pressure Israel to prevent it from attacking Iran, and so a serious crisis is liable to develop between the two countries. Under these circumstances and in view of operational capability, Israel does not in effect have a real option of attacking Iran. If it so desires, Iran can produce nuclear weapons.
You’ll also find a report on the simulation from David Ignatius of the Washington Post (one of the participants) here.
SIMUTools 2010 10/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in conferences, simulation news.add a comment
The 3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques will be held in Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain – March 15-19 2010:
SIMUTools 2010 is the Third International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques. This edition, which builds on the success of 2008 and 2009, will focus on all aspects of simulation modeling and analysis. High quality papers are sought on simulation tools, methodologies, applications, and practices.
The aim of the conference is to bring academic and industry researchers together with practitioners (from both the simulation community and from the numerous simulation user communities). The conference will address current and future trends in simulation techniques, models and practices, and foster interdisciplinary collaborative research in this area. While the main focus of the conference is on simulation tools, the conference also encourages the submission of broader theoretical and practical research contributions.
Sponsored by the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, the conference–not surprisingly–focuses on the hardware end of things, with some attention to agent-based modeling. To get a sense of typical content, have a look at the programme from last year’s conference.
International humanitarian law and electronic gaming 02/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation publications.add a comment
While this rtecently-published report by Pro Juvente and TRIAL isn’t really about the use of simulations for peacebuilding, it does intersect the topic enough that I’ll stretch the PaxSims mandate and post it anyway. Moreover, I’m enough of an academic and a geek to find the material interesting:
Frida Castillo, Playing by the Rules: Applying International Humanitarian Law to Video and Computer Games (Geneva: Pro Juventute and TRIAL: Track Impunity Always, October 2009).
In computer and videogames, violence is often shown and the players become “virtually violent”. While much research has been done on the effect of such games on the players and their environment, little research exists on whether, if they were committed in real life, violent acts in games would lead to violations of rules of international law, in particular International Humanitarian Law (IHL), basic norms of International Human Rights Law (IHRL) or International Criminal Law (ICL).
Pro Juventute Switzerland and TRIAL (Track Impunity Always), a Swiss NGO assisting victims of grave violations of human rights and aiming at the promotion of international criminal law, have tested various computer and videogames for their compatibility with internationally valid and universally accepted rules of IHL and IHRL. The question they posed themselves was whether certain scenes and acts committed by players would constitute violations of international law if they were real, rather than virtual.
The selected games were played by young gamers under the auspice of Pro Juventute and TRIAL and the legal assessment of the critical scenes was done by three lawyers, particularly trained in the areas of IHL, IHRL and ICL. Professor Marco Sassóli from the University of Geneva, a well known expert in the area of IHL, supervised the legal analysis.
…
The aim of the study is to raise public awareness among developers and publishers of the games, as well as among authorities, educators and the media about virtually committed crimes in computer and videogames, and to engage in a dialogue with game producers and distributors on the idea of incorporating the essential rules of IHL and IHRL into their games which may, in turn, render them more varied, realistic and entertaining.
…
If I did teach an IHL course–which I don’t–it would be interesting to assign a fairly realistic military simulation of first person shooter, and have students prepare an IHL analysis of it—including those grey areas within existing IHL and the laws of war (regarding military proportionality, for example).
Georgetown crisis simulation in Qatar 02/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation news.add a comment
The Gulf Times (25 November 2009) had a recent report on simulation activities at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service campus in Qatar:
Students turn diplomats to resolve ‘crisis’
Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Qatar) and the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) at Georgetown hosted a crisis simulation exercise for students at Education City recently.
The two-day event, centring on a fictional stalemate scenario between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh, gave 21 SFS-Qatar students and a select group of top secondary school students a unique opportunity to personally explore the process and dynamics of conflict resolution and hone their skills in negotiation, diplomacy and critical thinking.
Participants were divided into seven groups, each representing parties to the conflict – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh – along with representatives of Russia, Turkey, Iran and the US, with the aim of conducting intensive negotiations in an effort to reach a settlement over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The exercise, administered by SFS-Qatar assistant dean for academic affairs Daniel C Stoll, as well as James P Seevers and Col Bryan P Fenton of ISD in Washington, DC, was organised as part of an ongoing series of simulations held each semester at SFS-Qatar.
More at the link above.
new simulation links 02/12/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in latest links.add a comment
I’m buried under end-of-term grading at the moment and haven’t had much chance to post to PaxSims. I have, however, added a few new links to our list on the right, including these:
- CRISP: Crisis Simulation for Peace
- Santa Clara University: Conflict Resolution Simulation
- University of Michigan Interactive Communications and Simulations: Arab-Israeli Conflict Simulation
If there are ever any links that readers think should be added to the list, please send us the URLs!
reflections on Carana 20/11/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation ideas, simulation review.add a comment
Aimé Saba, who recently participated in the Carana simulation as part of a World Bank/AUSAID course on fragility, sent us on the following reflections on the course and the simulation.
———-
The World Bank’s course on Fragility and Conflict designed for officials in donor organisations was extremely useful. The use of the fictional country called “CARANA” was perhaps more useful for officials with limited analytical abilities of political and security issues common to conflict-affected countries. Nearly half of my colleagues whom I took the course with had either theoretical knowledge of peace and conflict issues, through either post-graduate studies, or short courses delivered by academic institutions. The trainers – Gary Milante and Erik Johnson – were excellent. And it helps to have well experienced trainers with sufficient knowledge (I have benefited from numerous training opportunities in this field and I am now in good position to distinguish excellent trainers from average ones. Knowledge of facilitation techniques is a very good asset, but content is more important). Coming from a conflict-affected region (the Great Lakes region of Africa) and having done post-graduate peace and conflict studies, I had a number of critiques, some of which I am sharing here:
- Courses delivered for, or by donor organisations rarely touch on the key, critical issues which lie behind failures of external organisations in responding to conflicts. Sensitive issues of lack of coordination which explain ‘waste’ tend to be discussed in a way that blames only others. Bilateral donors tend to blame other multilateral and non-like minded bilateral donors. And local elites. Rarely themselves. They all acknowledge the need for coordination, but avoid a serious analysis of the cost of lack of coordination and harmonisation.
- There is no doubt that there is a minimum standard of abilities in conflict analysis required by donor officials. And it is true that courses such as the World Bank’s can serve the purpose of equipping officials with those skills. But increasingly, I doubt whether a junior official without a strong foundation in political history within a 2 day course, the crisis of post-coloniality (i.e. countries whose processes of state-building was either never finished, or started on wrong foundations (refer to Rene Dumont’s 1960s book: false start for Africa).
- The other issue I observed throughout the course (and common in most courses on conflicts) was the fascination with differences – whether religious, ethnic, racial –. It is true that local ruling elites are responsible for manipulating and magnifying those differences, but outsiders’ analyses continue to highlight these as if they are part of the root causes of most conflicts. They are not. In most conflict-affected countries, there are always good opinion leaders who transcend those ‘differences’ and have more objective views, different from those held by ‘tribal’ ruling elites with a seat at donors’ roundtables. The challenge is of course, how to make sure that these positive leaders become decision makers and influence dialogue processes between external and local actors.
- The other issue, related to the first one, is the disconnect between reality and rhetoric. In courses, one seems to have a good picture of what is not working and what needs to be done to respond to the situation of fragility. In board room meetings though, one realises quickly how certain innovative ideas such as ‘do no harm principles’, or ‘conflict-sensitive development’ or the ‘use of conflict and fragility lens’ etc, suddenly become labelled as “concepts belonging to academia with less practical use to policy makers”.
So, would I recommend the course to others? Absolutely yes. I participated in train-the trainer program and participated in adapting the training module to the Asia-Pacific context in which AusAID works. In general, and regardless of the regional specificity, I think that trainers should well prepare and devote sufficient discussion time on the session on ‘state-building and nation-building’. All sorts of things are said, but it is important to manage well the discussion, as it is in my opinion, a good foundation in explaining everything related to assisting developing countries faced with conflict and fragility. Once again, I would recommend it, but I would encourage attention be given to content of some modules.
———-
Gary adds:
Thanks for the review, Aime. Glad you enjoyed the course and the simulation!
To clarify, the AusAID experience is a little different than the Bank experience. At the Bank we have four days and a lot more coursework interwoven with the simulation. AusAID started with a two day course and my understanding is that it is now three days. Since there is not a lot of fat in the Carana simulation, the whole course will have a higher Carana to Coursework ratio in AusAID than we have at the Bank.
I agree that the AusAID staff are highly trained and skilled, indeed, they’ve delivered some of the better Carana recovery plans I’ve seen (and have been the impetus for making the game harder in recent versions). The audiences are a bit different between the Bank (economists and development specialists) and AusAID (whole of government including everyone ranging from development specialists to treasury to defense to police).
It is possible that the ethnic differences are overemphasized in the design of Carana, but it is, I think, because those ethnic differences are often underemphasized in the actual realization of the simulation. All too often participants revert to their technocrat personae and concentrate on trying to “solve the puzzle” of Carana’s recovery, often at the expense of realism – the main characters of Carana have been embroiled in a difficult ethnic conflict for nearly a decade and should have serious trust issues. We can’t force people to roleplay, but we can alert them to issues which might be present at the negotiating table, overtly or not.
With regards to (2) and (4) above – I totally agree - indeed, Carana is designed to be a sandbox where participants can only really scratch the surface and get exposed to how complicated and difficult working in these environments can be.
Reacting to the Past: The Struggle For Palestine 17/11/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation news, simulation publications.add a comment
Newly-developed in the Reacting to the Past series of historical simulations for the classroom is a new simulation on the conflict in Mandatory Palestine, based around the 1936 Peel Commission:
Barnard College was one of 26 higher education institutions to receive $100,000 for academic programs to promote campus environments where sensitive subjects can be discussed in a spirit of open scholarly inquiry, academic freedom and with respect for different viewpoints. The Ford Foundation made the awards in its “Difficult Dialogues” initiative in New York City on Dec. 12, 2005.
The Difficult Dialogues initiative was created in response to reports of growing intolerance and efforts to curb academic freedom at colleges and universities. The goal is to help institutions address this challenge through academic and campus programs that enrich learning, encourage new scholarship and engage students and faculty in constructive dialogue about contentious political, religious, racial and cultural issues.A key component of the Difficult Dialogues initiative at Barnard was the development of a new “Reacting to the Past” game, The Struggle for Palestine, under the direction of Natasha Gill (Research Associate) and Mark C. Carnes (Creator, “Reacting to the Past”).
The Struggle for Palestine game was created to offer students an insight into the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, and especially in the 1930s.
In the Spring 2009 pilot (shown below), students were able to enter the universe of life in Palestine before 1948, when so much of the conflict was determined, and to learn about the positions of the Arabs of Palestine and the Zionists at the time. The game was based around the work of the Palestine Royal Commission (also known as the Peel Commission) which arrived in Jerusalem in 1936 to try and determine the causes of conflict and make recommendations for the future.Most students in the game took on positions and personalities that clashed with their backgrounds, their world views and narratives of the conflict. Nevertheless, the students dove into their tasks because the game gave them the opportunity to by pass the traditional debating style and to focus intently on understanding the world that the Jews and Arabs inhabited at the time, to hear how the parties themselves interpreted the conflict, and to immerse themselves in the details of life on the ground.
The designers hope the “Reacting” pedagogy will help break down myths and immerse students in the different politics that shaped Middle Eastern identities. Although conceived as part of the First-Year Foundation, we are leaving open the possibility that the game may be more appropriate for advanced students.
You’ll find a video of the pilot section on the announcement page linked here.
The Gaming of Policy and the Politics of Gaming 16/11/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation publications.add a comment
The December 2009 issue of Simulation & Gaming is now out, and among the articles is a useful review by Igor Meyer on the “Gaming of Policy and the Politics of Gaming”
This article examines the foundations of gaming and related concepts, such as policy exercises and serious gaming, in a public policy making context. Examining the relevant publications in Simulation & Gaming since 1969, the author looks back at the development of gaming simulation for purposes such as public policy analysis and planning, and reviews the underlying theories and empirical evidence. The author highlights the recognition that the success of gaming for policy making derives largely from the unique power of that gaming to capture and integrate both the technical-physical and the social-political complexities of policy problems.
The piece is useful both for the historical overview that it offers and for the extensive bibliography it includes.
forthcoming USIP SENSE simulation 12/11/2009
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The United States Institute of Peace has announced another in their regular series of SENSE post-conflict economic simulations:
November 2009 Interagency SENSE Simulation
November 17-19, 2009, 8:00am-5:00pm
November 17th-19th, USIP, in partnership with George Mason University (GMU) and the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), will conduct the Strategic Economic Needs and Security Exercise (SENSE) simulation at USIP headquarters in Washington D.C. The primary target audience is the USG interagency community, but other interested parties are also welcome. Participation is free, but space will be limited. Breakfast and Lunch will be provided; participants must commit to the full three-day simulation. To apply, or for further information on ETC/I’s upcoming SENSE simulation, please contact Jeff Krentel by e-mail at jkrentel@usip.org or by phone at (202) 429-4701 or visit http://sensenovember.eventbrite.com/ to register online.
SENSE, developed by IDA, is used to strengthen capabilities of decision-makers to prevent conflict in fragile states and manage post-conflict transitions successfully. SENSE is a computer-facilitated simulation that focuses on negotiations and decision-making, including resource-allocation challenges and cross-sectoral coordination, for the full range of national and international actors. Sophisticated computer support provides participants with rapid feedback on the interactions of all the decisions in terms of political stability, social well-being, and a foundation for sustainable economic progress.
Over the course of three days, SENSE models the conditions in an imaginary country (“Akrona”) that is emerging from a destructive internal conflict. Players representing government officials, private firms, civil society, and international actors must identify, coordinate, and integrate economic, social, political, and military policies to foster recovery and reconstruction. SENSE participants must integrate all of these challenges; develop and decide on options; and deal with the consequences (both intended and unintended) of those decisions….
The USIP courses and simulations webpage is here, although at the moment it has no information on the event (use the link in the announcement instead). If anyone is participating, we would love to hear your feedback after the event (as would the USIP folks too, I’m sure).
Review: Kumar, ed., Negotiating Peace in Deeply Divided Societies 27/10/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation review.add a comment
Review of: Radha Kumar, ed., Negotiating Peace in Deeply Divided Societies: A Set of Simulations (New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2009).
This book contains a series of six ready-made simulations, each of which addresses issues of peacemaking in politically of ethnically-divided societies. Four of these address current or recent conflicts: the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, a hypothetical constitutional renegotiation in Bosnia-Herzogovina; hypothetical civil society negotiations surrounding the ethno-tribal conflict in the Nagaland region of India; and prenegotiations related to the Kashmir conflict. Two others deal with fictional settings: peace negotiations amid a stalemated secssionist civil war in the Asian country of “Aboltabol,” and a meeting of the international community to discuss possible humanitarian intervention in the war- and famine plagued African country of “Samia.” In each case, the book provides an overview of the conflict, information on the key actors represented and their respective interests and positions, a timeline, and relevant background documents (including, where appropriate maps).
While most of the simulations presume open-round-table discussion, many also suggest staging the simulation in particular ways so as to mirror the dynamics of the conflict or particular negotiations. The Northern Ireland simulation, for example, calls for both plenary and working group meetings, and makes concrete suggestions as to the seating and relative size of delegations. The Aboltabol simulation, on the other hand proposes that actors be assigned to one of five separate physical locations (such as the federal capital or the outskirts of the regional capital), with a negotiator shuttling between these. These procedural issues are much more than mere atmospherics: in the real world, as in a simulation setting, they are often themselves the subject of intense bargaining precisely because they can shape both negotiating dynamics and outcomes.
According to the Radha Kumar’s introduction to Negotiating Peace in Deeply Divided Societies, some 42 trial runs of the simulations were undertaken across several Indian universities. Certainly the chapters are well-written and clear, and the background materials would serve very well as the core briefing documents for participants (ideally, supplemented by some additional research). Most of the simulations are written by regional experts with a rich understanding of local history, actors, and the conflict itself.
What is missing from this interesting collection, however, is solid guidance for neophyte simulation moderators. The editor’s introduction does little more than summarize the simulations that follow. The appendix “Note for Simulation Setters” is a disappointing half page long. It emphasizes the importance of briefs and debriefs (but says nothing about how to do this), suggests that students should undertake a minimum of four simulations (although one can easily imagine instructional settings in which a single simulation would be a more optimal use of scarce instructional time), and (wisely) suggests that instructors show flexibility in adapting the simulations to their particular needs. The book certainly would have been strengthened by a full-length chapter discussing the various ways in which the simulations could be staged, and the participant, staff, time, and resource demands of these; approaches to briefing and debriefing; modes of communication (including in person and electronic means); potential challenges or difficulties, and how to overcome these; approaches to course integration; and other useful issues.
In all six cases the simulations take the form of role-play exercises, in which participants are largely constrained only by their understanding of their briefing notes. There are, therefore, no material resources to be allocated, and no opportunity costs arising from such decisions. While this is not likely to be a problem in the more historical, political negotiations (such as the Good Friday Agreement or Bosnian constitutional renegotiations), it might well lead to problems in the abstract Samia humanitarian intervention simulation (How many troops do I have? How much money? Can I spend a billion dollars?). Indeed, this latter simulation seemed the one problematic chapter in the book, since it seems to be asking students questions (for example, how many troops will be needed to stabilize humanitarian conditions) that will not be answerable on the basis of either the information in the text or their own research and background knowledge. Overall, the military/security and especially development/economic dimensions of peacebuilding are less well covered than the political/diplomatic/constitutional aspects in all of the cases, although one could perhaps supplement these simulations with additional materials to more fully address these dimensions.
Despite this shortcoming, this book is nonetheless a valuable contribution. It will be especially useful to instructors seeking ready-made conflict resolution simulations for the classroom. Negotiating Peace in Deeply Divided Societies also provides a useful model for how simulations can be presented, with the models offered in the volume providing useful templates that could be applied to writing up simulation materials for other cases.
* * *
(While on the subject, another useful source of similar negotiation exercises is available online from the Public and International Law Group.)
civic engagement, in-game and out-game 21/10/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation ideas.add a comment
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.
David Earnest on “unknown knowns” and MMO-based similation 19/10/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in simulation ideas.add a comment
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
ISAGA 2010 17/10/2009
Posted by Rex Brynen in conferences.add a comment
The annual conference of the International Simulation and Gaming Association will be held 5-9 July 2010 in Spokane, Washington.
ISAGA is an international organization for scientists and practitioners developing and using simulation, gaming and related methodologies. They include: simulation, gaming, role-play, structured experiences, policy exercises, computerized simulation, play, virtual reality, game theory, debriefing, experiential learning, and active learning. They are used in a broad range of professional areas, including: university, industry, government and business. Note: ISAGA is not concerned with gambling. The term “gaming” refers to learning games.
The main goals of ISAGA are:
- to enhance the development and application of simulation and gaming methodologies;
- to encourage a wider use of simulation and gaming methodologies, particularly in the social, human and technological domains;
- to facilitate communication among specialists of simulation and gaming throughout the world;
- to exchange information about and experience of simulation and gaming methodologies;
- to encourage interchange between the profession of simulation and gaming and other professional areas and disciplines.
ISAGA has members in all parts of the world. ISAGA runs an international conference every year in a different country. ISAGA is involved with several resources, including an international journal, an Internet search engine and conference proceedings.
You’ll find details on the conference website here.
