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The article mentions opportunity for redesign. Has anyone come up with specific hacks that add value to any level of play?
hard game
Mr. Brynen makes some mention about game theory and it’s lack thereof in the game. Trainer At Large makes a valid observation about multi-level games in response. In truth, the game contains several game theoretical constructs (chicken, dollar auction). These inclusions were not accidental. The alliance rules even enforce Nash and Pareto optimal solutions within the context of overall strategies. Initiative bidding is set up as a dollar auction specifically to represent the sunk cost element involved, but they also set the price of Arms Bazaar cards, which describes the level of political clout purchased by the expenditure, and the level at which other would-be political operators must operate. The interplay of the initiative bidding structure, the alliance rules, and the selection of first player (and the relative political and military advantages and disadvantages that process implies) actually set up prisoner’s dilemma situations on a fairly regular basis.
So while game theory is not a theory about games, it was certainly considered a great deal in the formulation of this particular game design.
As one of the game designers, I also want to add that the game does, in fact, allow you to test actual political strategies, but these are done by the player’s choice, not enforced by the game system. We did exactly that in the development process of the game, but specifically chose not to straitjacket players into behaving like their real-life counterparts. The dilemmas, however, are very close to what we knew about the real-life ones at the time we designed the game (2004-2005).
Regardless, I, for one, am very proud of this game, and am honored to have been a part of its genesis.
I also get the impression that Mr. Brynen, whoever, Trainer At Large is, and myself may have attended some of the same conferences.
“Similarly, the game largely omits the dynamic of two and three-level games whereby parties are not only interacting with rivals, but with their constituents and external sponsors. ”
Wow, did you even play the game? They interact with their constituents by collecting political points, and interact with their sponsors via the victory conditions.
Game theory is not a theory about games.
Seems to me the system could only mirror the situation if players played in lock-step like their real-life counterparts, and with the same sets of capabilities. This is an unreasonable expectation, given that the game seems to allow players to execute any sort of strategy they like, and that it tries to emulate the uncertainty of the environment, more than the certainty of what’s already happened. And, again, the game was designed while the event was occuring, only 2 years after it began. Your insistance on a replication on the exact environment is unreasonable despite what the ad copy says. Also, I came to this discussion from seeing the rating you gave it at BBG. A 4.5 rating seems, frankly, petty given that your only probelm with the game is the advertising.
First, I would like to thank the Battle for Baghdad design team, and everyone else, for their thoughtful and extensive comments. I should probably also mention at the outset that the review is meant to primarily focus on my evaluation of its educational and training value, not its enjoyability as a game.
Battle for Baghdad certainly is based around the notion of bargaining, cooperation, and conflict. It isn’t the only game out there with negotiations built into it, of course: games from Diplomacy to Chinatown to Settlers of Catan involve this too. Does Battle for Baghdad do it better than others? In one important respect, yes: the differing victory conditions and potential for coalition play generate some interesting non-zero-sum play possibilities.
On the other hand, do those play possibilities particularly mirror the situation in Iraq, or of civil war, COIN, or stabilization operations? Not so much, in my view. At a theoretical level, there are too many important aspects that are missing. The game rule that renders agreements made during the coalition phase binding throughout the game turn, for example, runs counter to the cooperation-under-anarchy and prisoners’ dilemma relationships of civil conflict. Similarly, the game largely omits the dynamic of two and three-level games whereby parties are not only interacting with rivals, but with their constituents and external sponsors. Finally, I don’t think that players particularly “replicate in the minds of the players the mindset of their real world counterparts.” Rather, we found a lot of what one play-tester called “gaming-the-game,” with actions taken regardless of how consonant that action was with the real-life behaviour of the actual parties.
Considering the game as set in the “backdrop” of Baghdad, rather than attempting to actually replicate the Iraqi experience, would certainly offset many of the criticisms in my original review. So too would the idea that game moves can merely be metaphors for a variety of other things–that, in other words, a “terrorist attack” card used by the UN might really represent a UNICEF vaccination program, or an amnesty when played by the Iraqi government player. However, I don’t think this is exactly what the game box promises with its references to modelling the “real world situation” or “historical tactics.” This abstraction is also problematic from a learning perspective. If a WMD card (for example) has identical effects in the hands of all actors, how would students learn about the very different, asymmetrical capabilities, vulnerabilities, and constraints operating in either the Iraqi context or comparable cases of conflict? Without substantial pregame and postgame briefings, might they not draw quite the wrong conclusions about who does and does not do what (“the US uses WMD in Iraq!”) in the real world?
Let me say again how much I appreciate MCS Group’s response above, even if I’m not swayed–at Paxsims we welcome constructive criticism of our constructive criticism. It certainly beats all those adbot-generated Viagra posts that the WordPress spam filters work so hard to keep out of the comments section! I’ll also resist the urge to comment further, instead leaving it open to everyone else to add something…
Have to agree with MCSG’s response. We played the game several times and saw immediately how it applies to the political situation. Agree that it’s short on the military sim aspect, but as a trainer who has to teach people how to play such games before they can be of any practical use, this game is somewhat of a Godsend. I disagree completely that it doesn’t hold up to its advertising. If anything, it exceeds it. The inovations in the design alone make it stand-out. It even has a dollar auction representing political positioning. Great stuff.
Thank you for the review of our new Battle for Baghdad game, and the kind comments regarding the Nicaragua game design. We would like to clarify Battle for Baghdad’s design and purpose. The game is not intended to be a military simulation of operations in the Iraqi capital, nor is it intended to reflect historical realities of the specific military aspects of the campaign. Rather, the game is more political than military, and the design intent was to place players in a situation of modern political conflict using the situation in Baghdad as a backdrop.
Several examples exist of intense simulations of modern insurgency/counter-insurgency (see Nicaragua, Holy War: Afghanistan, SEALORDS). However, these often become number-crunching exercises. Although number-crunching has a place, it is not an appropriate tool in this situation. The idea in Battle for Baghdad is to replicate in the minds of the players the mindset of their real world counterparts. To this end, game functions are abstracted and concentrate on qualitative factors. In most other designs, qualitative factors often get short shrift.
We all know how force-on-force works, so the combat model is very simple. Where it becomes complex is through the interplay of cards, which bring in many risk factors such as loss of a major command organization, or conceding large numbers of political points to the other side. Think of what happened with the US Marines in Beirut in 1982, or the Rangers in Mogadishu — a tactical success can have negative political ramifications. It’s also important to understand that many game mechanics are heavily abstracted concepts. Neutralization of a Command, for example, does not necessarily represent destruction of that command, but a degradation in its owning Faction’s capacity to act through that channel.
We want players to be on the shifting sands of many chaotic factors, and have to use their skills to win through. Thus, players expecting the surety of calculating factors to insure success cannot help but be disappointed by this game design, just as they would be in the actual event. A bad hand of cards can be mitigated by forging the right strategic alliance. A player can lose a battle, but use a Collateral Damage card to draw a political victory from a military defeat. This is more of a game of poker than chess.
Regarding lessons specific to Baghdad, we elected to open up a broader array of possibilities than those that occurred specifically in the event. Battle for Baghdad is not a history lesson. How could it be? It was designed while the events were still occurring. The game posits that the options available were greater than the sum of those actually taken. Thus, the game forces players to react to specific situations as the game unfolds with the tools that they have available, while still trying to execute a larger strategy.
There is an audience for the game, and its interests and capabilities must be considered. We want people to be able to set it up and play in the course of an evening. This meant conflating many things down to a playable rules set (only four pages!) and a limited number of turns.
For example, the Jihadi player has control of several divergent groups. These seeming anomalies are accounted for by things such as the Defection rule, which causes forces to switch sides. Look at Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan—the operation fizzled in large part because US command control broke down and different American-controlled forces went different ways. There are any number of ways these sorts of situations can be handled, but the defection mechanism is the easiest. Again, it’s an abstraction that represents an abundance of potential real-world possibilities, but distilled into a single metaphoric mechanism.
“In Battle for Baghdad you gain political points by controlling turf and killing things, not by legitimizing government authority, addressing grievances, and building institutions for non-violent conflict resolution.”
We believe that this statement epitomizes a severe misconception regarding what is going on in the game. When political points are placed on the map due to Arab Street cards, the point placement represents demands for services in that area. By deploying infrastructure and security to that area, you collect those points, which now represent political capital. The abstraction is that those deployments are made to address whatever demand or grievance is occurring. The entire mechanism represents exactly the process of legitimizing authority and addressing grievances.
In the game you can build infrastructure and thus address grievances, which is what collecting political points generated by the Arab Street cards amount to. You can build institutions (infrastructure) as a cost-effective means to defend territory and gather political capital (points), but this is not forced on the players. Rather, it is one of several rational strategies one can employ. That controlling turf and killing things was used more frequently as a strategy represents the disposition of the players more so than that of the game.
Using combat as a mechanism to gain political points directly tends to be very inefficient. This should be one of the lessons learned in the first play of the game. Combat inflicts casualties on both sides, and reacquiring and reallocating those assets tends to cost most, all, or more than the points gained from the combat itself.
More specifically regarding legitimatizing government authorities, we have some disagreement here. This might have made sense during the Cold War era when fighting communist insurgents, but our interpretation of today’s conflict is that the government is only one player among many. A player of Battle for Baghdad has to look at other factions, and get them on your side, to win. This is the case today in Afghanistan as well, where the US is trying to force a government model that has little relevance to the conditions in country. It just may be that a tribal or religious-based solution is more appropriate. In the game, of course, you can align with the government, but this does not guarantee success, as we have found out. The answer may be in aligning with religious groups, or international NGOS, or even Jihadis. The game allows you to explore these options. History is rife with examples of where we have covertly allied with forces that we find otherwise unacceptable, so the notion of such alignments we felt had to remain a real possibility within the game. Abstraction, again, is the rule here. Prior to the invasion, there was a great deal of very good research that said we needed to bring Muqtada al-Sadr into the political fold very early, yet we elected not to for ideological reasons more than practical ones, and we paid a high price for that decision. A US/Jihadi alliance in the game does not necessarily represent a formal alliance with Al-Qaeda, but rather other more transient factors that may include manipulation and environment shaping.
We hope you will give the game another look with these comments in mind. We believe that the game is in fact a highly useful tool for seminars and classrooms (and has successfully been used as such), provided you are trying to teach how to manage unfolding situations as opposed to teaching history about a specific conflict. Battle for Baghdad is definitely not a history lesson; it is a cognitive exercise in coping with chaotic situations where each player’s goals and actions must be tempered by the goals and actions of the other players. Should you elect to modify the game to be more specific to your particular understanding of the Baghdad situation, please do send us a copy of what comes out the other end. We would be more than happy to entertain the contribution as a variant of the game and offer it to appropriate parties.
Brian, I think you’re absolutely right in what the game is, and isn’t. However, the publishers have set expectations otherwise: the game box blurbs describe it as “model[ling] the real world situation,” and allowing players to “test historical tactics.” The PR materials go even further, with reference to having made “Battle for Baghdad as representative of the situation as possible” and highlighting that it is “intended as an educational tool.” By those criteria, I don’t think it works.
I do think I might set designing a more accurate game variant as a potential assignment for one of my Winter 2010 term courses, however–it would force students to look in depth at both Iraq and contemporary COIN doctrine, and it would be interesting to see what they come up with. I might even post the results to PaxSims!
Rex, thanks for your thoughtful review.
I think Joe Miranda and the other people who worked on this design (full disclosure: though I have worked with Joe to develop several of his designs in the past, I didn’t do much more than play this one a couple of times while it was still in prototype and make some comments) may have intended the game design as a framework to hang player interactions on, and used the Baghdad setting as the “hook”, instead of meaning to present an intensive and detailed analysis of the kaleidoscopic Iraq situation. I think it does lend itself to extensive redesign, or at least development of different scenarios and situations.
I would also note that the game was first designed in 2005/06, and took until now to reach its Pxxx break-even point and get published.
Thanks for the comment. However, it’s not really relevant to the subject of the post, which is about a conflict simulation boardgame–not the “online gaming industry.”
Over the years, the online gaming industry, most products videogames for males in general. In fact, there are many games oriented towards the action of male protagonists. Currently, the video game industry opened its doors to women players and games are designed to meet the needs of female fans. However, games for girls are not like that model global game.