Iran, covert information operations, and the politics of videogames

As has been widely reported in recent days, former US Marine and former video game developer Amir Mirzaei Hekmati has been sentenced to death in Iran for alleged espionage and subversion. According to the New York Times, Hekmati was accused by Iran of, among other things, being involved in the development of video games intended to covertly change attitudes in the Middle East:

According to Iranian state television, a former United States marine who was convicted of spying on Iran and sentenced to death on Monday was also involved in a nefarious plot to brainwash the youth of the Middle East using an unlikely tool: video games.

In a video report broadcast last month, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the former marine of Iranian descent who was arrested during a visit to Tehran in August, allegedly confessed to a career in American intelligence that included a stint at a video game company in New York that was “a cover for the C.I.A.”

According to an English translation of the report published by The Tehran Times, an Iranian state-run newspaper, about one-third of the way through the report, Mr. Hekmati said he had worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, after he left the Marine Corps in 2005. Then, according to the newspaper’s somewhat oddly worded translation, Mr. Hekmati said in Persian:

After Darpa, I was recruited by Kuma Games Company, a computer games company which received money from C.I.A. to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable.

He reportedly added: “The head of Kuma called me and said, ‘I have received your resume from Darpa, and we have a program in which you can help us.’ ” Kuma, Mr. Hekmati explained, “was also a cover for the C.I.A. and only the chief of company knows that you’re working with the agency.”*

The US has officially denied the Iranian charges.

The game publisher for whom Hekmati worked for a period, Kuma Games, certainly does publish Middle East themed games. Most of these are simply plug-in episodes for its Kuma\War series (108 of them and counting) in which players refight various semi-historical incidents, ranging from the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein in Iraq to Aghanistan to Muammar Qaddafi’s last stand in Libya. While the perspective is rather American, these games are essentially generic modern first-person shooters, mostly set in post-9/11 Iraq or Afghanistan (although you can also refight the UK’s Operation Barras rescue mission in Sierra Leone). A couple of episodes involve Iran, two based on the failed 1980 American hostage rescue mission in Iran and one (published in 2005) based on current nuclear tensions:

As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran’s capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won’t be easy. Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Never before has so much hung in the balance… millions of lives, and the very future of democracy could be at stake.

There’s really not much much of a political message in these games at all, beyond the notion that it’s generally not a good idea to get shot in a firefight.

Rather more interesting is Kuma Games’ newer episodic game Sibaq al-Fursan (Race of the Knights), the first episodes of which were published in 2010. This is sort of an apocalyptic Speed Racer-meets-Mad Max adventure, in which a group of heroes drives around an Arabia that was devastated by nuclear weapons (including the radioactive “Desert of Glass” and the “lost city of Dubai”), rescuing friends, battling the army of the False Caliph, and collecting gold-covered thorium beans (GTBs) to trade for various in-game upgrades. The game has been translated into Arabic (in Levant, Egyptian, and Gulf dialect), French, Urdu and Farsi—you’ll find the Arabic website here.

After a few introductory episodes, Iran pops up in this game quite a few times when the beautiful Princess Dima is kidnapped by the evil “False Caliph” to be dragged off to Isfahan (lovely city by the way, Princess!).  The evil military forces also subtly sport a sort of hybrid Iranian flag-IRGC logo (see above), and drop North Korea-branded bombs on the brave Knights, their muscle cars, and poor radiation-afflicted refugees alike (see below). The bombs, incidentally, don’t seem that much more effective than the real North Korean ones, and fizzle as often as they explode.

In Episode 4, we’re explicitly told that Zulfiqar al-Harabi, the “False Caliph,” is a former arms merchant who is supported by North Korea and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The dastardly villain seems to have kidnapped the princess in order to force her father, a scientist, to finish work on the ultimate weapon, which may soon be used against Damascus.

Is this a US-sponsored information operation intended to subtly promote the view among target audiences that Iran’s current nuclear program is a dangerous one? Or is it simply an episodic videogame that draws on current history, much as Hollywood movies or digital games have variously featured the Communist menace, evil South Africans, Latin American drug cartels, Middle Eastern terrorists, or even Canada? I have no idea. Certainly, however, one can imagine how already paranoid Iranian security officials might have been suspicious of an Iranian-American ex-Marine who worked under a DARPA contract, and also worked for the company that produced Sibaq al-Fursan, especially in a context of escalating US-Iranian geopolitical tensions. (Needless to add, however, Hekmati’s “confession” on Iranian TV is meaningless as evidence of anything at all. Forced confessions and show trials are a staple of Iran’s autocratic government, and some of the things he says—for example, about US policy, oil pricing, and OPEC—make no sense at all.)

At Slate yesterday, Will Oremus had a piece asking “Does the CIA really make video-game propaganda?” He notes that a great many games today address contemporary conflict themes, sometimes generating political controversy for doing so. Moreover, not all game playing societies have the same view of history, for obvious reasons. A case in point is the Vietnamese game company Emobi Games, which has just released 7554—a first person shooter videogame about the Viet Minh struggle against the French that commemorates the Vietnamese victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954 (it looks rather interesting too).

Getting back to the case of Iran, what might a covert, videogame-based information operation aimed at that country look like? Oremus asks that question to games researcher Ian Bogost, who suggests it might not look at all like Sibaq al-Fursan:

If U.S. intelligence agencies were making secret video games to foment unrest in Iran or elsewhere, they would likely be less violent and more focused on realistic decision-making scenarios. According to Ian Bogost, a Georgia Tech professor who co-founded a company that designs games as marketing tools for clients, the most persuasive games are those that model real-world systems and give users a chance to see the consequences of different courses of action. A game aimed at Iranians might seek to demonstrate the pitfalls of Islamism or the value of participation in a democratic opposition movement. (It would probably not be called, as one Kuma title is, Assault on Iran.) One model might be People Power: The Game of Civil Resistance, a single-player, turn-based strategy game developed by the nonprofit International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in which the player builds alliances and chooses tactics to secure rights and freedoms for an oppressed populace.

I’m not so sure, however. People Power is not a terribly immersive game, and it is an open question whether that sort of politics-as-strategy -game approach would ever garner an adequate number of users. If I were trying to develop a game-with-a-message for casual users in a crowded digital game market, I would probably go with something a little more engaging.

UPDATE: Since this report was first published, Sibaq al-Fursan’s Arabic-language website has been taken offline, and replaced with an English language “coming soon” page. The videos are still available at YouTube.

simulations miscellany, New Year 2012 edition

A few recent items that may be of interest to PAXsims readers (or older items that we missed at the time):

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Back in early December, Michael Peck had a column in the Training & Simulation Journal asking “Tools or toys? Training games are popular, but no one knows how well they work.” Important question, that—there’s a real danger in being attracted to the whiz-bang modernism of digital educational or training games without asking whether they actually deliver more than other lower-tech training or educational approaches.

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A couple of weeks ago at Policymic, Jonathan Dowdall wrote about what he calls the “Skyrim effect,” arguing  that while there has been much attention to the morality of commercial conflict-based video games, there has not been enough recognition of the extent to which “contemporary video games now give a mature and sophisticated treatment to issues of war and politics.”

Strangely, misperceptions and prejudice towards the game industry — and the hobby of gaming itself — are proving difficult to dispel. Despite the average U.S. gamer’s age being 37-years, and 43% of gamers being female, this multi-billion dollar entertainment sector is intellectually derided by critics.

At best, it is labelled a shallow light show for adolescent boys, and at worst, a perverse industry that is breeding a generation unhinged from basic morality by casual violence.

Now admittedly, Middle East pounding shoot-em-ups and vicious criminal fantasy romps may not be the highest art form. But recent games have demonstrated the ability for this fast-growing medium to engage with complex political ideas.

Take Eidos’ Deus Ex Human Revolution – a startlingly imaginative detective story that explores, amongst other things, themes of social justice, the complexities of international law, and the Prometheus-like pitfalls of modern medicine.

Or Bethseda’s Skyrim, whose depiction of a civil war deftly avoids the clichés of good and evil and instead paints an ambiguous picture of a society gripped by elements of racist nationalism, imperial hubris, and violent revenge. From public executions to competing demands of treachery, no side emerges untainted from this conflict. This is a particularly moving morality play – as well as visually stunning.

If this moral depth is not good enough, many games are also increasingly relevant to the challenges of contemporary governance. Intrigued by the theoretical complexity of international relations? Try Sid Meier’s Civilization 5, where everything from taxation to religious policy can be tailored by your government in a game of world-spanning competitive empire building.

In fact, from the logic and costs of nuclear deterrence to the challenges of strategic counter-insurgency, computer games have provided thoughtful, well-researched and, of course, entertaining explorations of some of today’s biggest political challenges.

Undoubtedly there are a number of the games on the market that offer more complex political narratives (Skyrim indeed being an excellent example of this), and there is certainly much discussion in the broader gaming industry about the complexities of modelling complex moral choices. In many games now the moral choices you make affect game dialogue, options, abilities, non-plater character reactions, and plot development. Still, the industry still tends to do this in relatively unidimensional ways, such as one’s karma total in the Fallout series, or the extent to which your choices mark you on the “Dark Side” or “Light Side” of the Force in the new online Star Wars: The Old Republic MMOG. The Mass Effects series is a little different in that its paragon and renegade points are two separate but somewhat parallel variables rather than a single continuum, but it still doesn’t fully capture the complexity of moral (or political) choice. In general, we’re generally still not quite at the point that the pencil-and-paper RPG Dungeons and Dragons was over thirty years ago, with its two-axis crosscutting measures of good versus evil and lawful versus chaotic.

It should also be noted, moreover, that moral or political complexity in a game narrative is not necessarily the same thing as being a good simulation of piece of virtual politics or political science or war.  Games, after all, frequently play to stereotypes—including stereotypes of political process. A narrative might be compelling and engaging, and the politics or war-fighting all rather stupid. Equally a game might be hyperrealistic, and boring as all hell.

This isn’t to disagree with Dowdall–overall I think he’s right that games are becoming complex in much more interesting ways. However, it is to say that I think we’re perhaps a little less far along than his piece suggests.

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Finally, Paul Webber’s has a very useful list this week of the top 20 “must play” games (old or new) for 2012 over at Wargaming Connection. He discusses what makes the game approach or mechanics particularly interesting in each case, so it is a useful list not only for entertainment purposes but also for looking at a number of outstanding examples of game design. (I’m particularly pleased that he included on the list one of my all-time favourite SPI boardgames, Freedom in the Galaxy (1979)—which also remains one of the best insurgency/counterinsurgency games ever published, I think.)

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Speaking of D&D, New York Times has a piece today on the decision by Wizards of the Coast to reboot the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game with (yet another) edition:

True believers have lost faith. Factions squabble. The enemies are not only massed at the gates of the kingdom, but they have also broken through.

This may sound like the back story for an epic trilogy. Instead, it’s the situation faced by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, the venerable fantasy role-playing game many consider to be the grandfather of the video game industry. Gamers bicker over Dungeons & Dragons rules. Some have left childhood pursuits behind. And others have spurned an old-fashioned, tabletop fantasy role-playing game for shiny electronic competitors like World of Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls.

But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.

This wouldn’t exactly be serious gaming news if it weren’t for the fact that D&D has had profound impact on the development of the entire RPG genre. Moreover, it is the place where a large percentage of game designers and even professional wargamers got their gaming start. As a D&D veteran (all the way back to very first version of the game), I certainly have to say it is the place where I learned a great deal of my gaming and game facilitation skills.

On that note, my advice to WOTC would be: stop rebooting the damned game. I’m not going to fork out a fortune for endless rulebooks and supplements for a 5th edition. Also, stop trying to make it into a simplified collectable card game or copying videogame approaches. It works fine at what it does best: a flexible, customizable, pencil-and-paper RPG. Certainly don’t go the route suggested by this (very clever) parody website….

Simulating spooks? The CIA, simulations, and analyst recruitment

While many might associate the CIA with dissimulation as much as simulation, the Agency uses serious games and simulations in a number of ways. They are used, for example, in analyst training at CIA University (indeed, one well-known game designer teaches there). They are also sometimes used as an analytical technique, whether directly or through intelligence contractors and outside experts. Some argue they aren’t used enough—one CIA tradecraft primer warns that they are “advanced analytic methods” that “usually require substantial commitments of analyst time and corporate resources.”

A winning paper in the 2007 Director of National Intelligence “Galileo” essay competition (and subsequently published in Studies in Intelligence) suggests that skills in this area are unevenly distributed within the intelligence community, and proposes a “National Security Simulations Center” (somewhat modelled on both the Gaming Department at the Naval War College, and the Centre for Applied Strategic Learning at National Defense University) to act as a sort of IC center of excellent to “strengthen the accuracy and insight of intelligence analysis, improve IC collaboration, and create a testing ground for new analytic tools and methods.”

Be that as it may, I wanted to flag another area where the CIA’s use of simulations has certainly been expanding dramatically in recent years: specifically, the use of crisis simulations as part of its outreach and recruitment efforts at American college and university campuses. Initially, these exercises seem to have formed part of individual campus recruitment visits. Last year, however, they were expanded to become multi-school competitions. The November 2011 competition at Georgetown University, for example, included teams from twelve colleges and universities in the Washington DC/Virginia/Maryland area. According to a press release by the CIA, by the end of 2011 almost  one thousand students across the US had participated in several dozen CIA simulations.

In a typical session:

Each five-person team was presented with the CIA-authored scenario: Printouts containing raw intelligence surrounding a fictitious—but plausible—developing international crisis. They had three hours to sort through the information and prepare a cogent half-page brief outlining the situation and suggesting a course of action for the United States.

Each team was also assigned an Agency mentor, to observe and offer advice

At the end of the simulation, the analysts reviewed the written briefs from all eight teams. The top two teams in each group engaged in a “brief-off” in front of the entire CIA contingent.

Further accounts of these simulations by some of the participating institutions and students can be found at the following links:

• University of Chicago (October 2009)
• William & Mary (February 2011)
• Old Dominion University (February 2011)
• Washington College (February 2011)
• Sweet Briar College (February 2011)
• Florida State University (Spring 2011)
• University of Michigan, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy (June 2011)
• George Mason University (November 2011)
• Virginia Tech-Howard University Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (November 2011)
• University of Maryland, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (November 2011)
• Washington College (November 2011)
• William & Mary (December 2011)

h/t Google

First reflections on a brown bag lunch about “gamification” with Gabe Zichermann

The Knowledge and Learning Council (KLC) here at the Bank hosted a very interesting discussion on gamification with Gabe Zichermann, author of  Game-Based Marketing  and Gamification by Design – you can see his blog here.   Gabe’s presentation was really well done and very well received.  It was mostly a Bank audience (about 60 folks), though there is clearly some selection bias in who attended (people interested in games).  Gabe is a really engaging speaker and, despite his digs on economists, I was happy to act as a discussant for the presentation.

Gabe described the concept of gamification (the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences – see the gamification wiki here).  He explained why this is effective, concentrating on the feedback loop from challenge to achievement.  He focused a lot on incentives, status, access, power and “stuff” – which resonated a lot with the Bank audience.  He then proceeded to provide some really good examples of where incentive structures have been adapted – including lotteries tied to speed cameras to incentivize obeying the law in Sweden and virtual pets built into driver interfaces in hybrid cars.  I’ll link to his actual presentation once the KLC has it up, but a similar presentation is found here.

The "Singification" of work in the 1800s...

All that being said, I still find myself lost in vagaries in the ongoing discussions of gamification.  For all of my love of games, I wondered, during my role as a discussant, whether we aren’t just calling anything that makes work more engaging or in which incentives and feedback are better designed “gamification”.  This is not a new critique, I had the same concern after finishing McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken (Yes, I did finally finish).  This is exacerbated by the fuzziness around the definition of game and gamification which included even facebook in the discussion today.  The gamification concept reminds me of the “singification” that labor underwent in the 1800s, when we were working on the railroad… all the live long day.  What is different about gamification that isn’t just us making work more bearable?

On the flip side, maybe I am just too critical and this is just semantic.  It seems to me that the principles of gamification are right on – we should be looking at systems, teaching and processes and considering where our incentives, feedback and engagement can be improved to provide additional impact and effectiveness.

Another question that concerns me when thinking about gamification is the cultural bias we have/enjoy about games – especially at the Bank.  Gabe is Canadian (and Rex!), I am American – but I am conscious of the different perspectives other cultures have about games – ranging on the spectrum from foolish childsplay to evil gambling.  While we might agree with the principles of gamification, the concept or the language might need to be adapted to context if we want to be effective in different cultures.

Lastly, I still find myself brought back to Gladwell’s three qualities of rewarding work: autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward.  I wonder how many people play games or browse blogs or update facebook at work because they simply are bored or aren’t challenged by their work.  Gabe was brutally honest about how boring and banal many jobs are today (and I thought economics was the dismal science!).  It raised the question, though, about competition for our engagement.  Are the benefits we get from increased engagement due to gamification only because of competition for our limited attention?  If this is the case, then we can expect diminishing returns from gamification as it we would expect to see a ratcheting up of competition for our attention from other sources.  Are there limits to how much engagement we can give?

Serious gaming the challenges of humanitarian preparedness

Pablo Suarez (associate director of programmes at the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre) was kind enough to drop us a note highlighting some of the work that they have been doing over the past few years using serious games to highlight and address the humanitarian consequences of climate change and extreme weather events. Some of this work has been done in conjunction with the PETLab at  the Parsons—The New School for Design, who have also put together a website (here) devoted to this particular case of “developing public interest games for better crisis-decision-making.”

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Weather or Not is a simple game where participants are given the probability of a major storm, and then must decide whether or not to pre-position relief supplies. If they DO and there IS a flood (or if they DON’T, and there is NO flood) all is good. However if they DO and there is NO flood (or if they DON’T and there IS a flood) they are punished for over-reacting or failing to prepare. The game can been seen in use in the video below, with a graduate class at Columbia University: 

The best game strategy here seems rather blindingly obvious (prepare if the chance of a flood is above 50%), so presumably this would best be used to either familiarize people with probability estimates or to spark a larger discussion of the emergency preparedness.

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Before the Storm is a card-based game where groups of participants are given a series of weather forecasts (at 10 days, 48 hours, and 12 hours) and are asked to select the appropriate preparedness measures from the deck. They can also develop their own ideas, and summarize them on their own card. This seems to me to be a much richer use of a game mechanism, with participants not only encouraged to weigh the pros and cons of various options but also challenged to think of new approaches of their own. In the video below the game can be seen being used in Senegal. In this case, once the game had been played and new various options had been generated, the group visited a flood-prone village to get community feedback on their ideas.

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Spreading the Word is a version of the party/children’s game telephone, used to highlight problems of communication between scientists, relief workers, and local communities. You can see it at work here (at 04:00 to 17:45 in the video) in a workshop in Bangladesh. While the outcome isn’t surprising to anyone who has played the game before, it does seem a very entertaining way of highlighting the point in a lecture or workshop setting.

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Choices in a Changing Climate looks at the twin challenges of flood and drought (longer version here). Again, the game is as important for the way that the game mechanics stimulate and facilitate discussion as it is for the lessons built into the game rules themselves.

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Dengue, Catch the Fever! is designed to teach primary school children (and, secondarily, their parents and other stakeholders) about the risk factors for Dengue Fever, and the way these relate to issues of climate change. You’ll find an overview of the game here, and the game instructions here. Very clever, and it looks fun to play!

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The Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Change Centre also has links to other serious games used by national Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies:

• Goose Escalera, a Spanish-language snakes-and-ladders type game for children (board, instructions) used to highlight environmental and climate change issues in Colombia.
• Earth Savers, an Arabic-language boardgame on climate change for children, this time prepared by the IFRC for use in North Africa.
• A Syrian computer game on the same theme.

One also shouldn’t forget a couple of other browser-based games with somewhat similar themes that we’ve discussed before at PAXsims, namely Stop Disaster (developed for the United Nations’ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction) and Inside Disaster (an interactive videoclip game on the Haiti earthquake). I’ve used both of these with students with great success.

Overall, there is a lot here to spark ideas as to how similar approaches can be used to address other humanitarian and developmental issues.  Moreover, as the work of IFRC and PETlab shows, you don’t need to make these complicated or electronic to get the basic point across. From a gaming perspective,it  is also easy to think of a number of existing card and boardgame techniques that might be applied to the issue of disaster preparedness. It would be interesting, for example, to design a cooperative card-driven game somewhat akin to Pandemic that whereby event cards generated disaster risks, forcing players to adaptively switch emphasis and limited resources from longer-term mitigation strategies to shorter-term emergency preparedness and response.

(Coincidentally I spent part of the holidays designing and play-testing a disaster response game. On the plus side, it was a hit with my local gaming group. On the other hand it may not be of much practical use, since it involves a future zombie apocalypse. Even without prodding from the IFRC, however, we did work climate change into the basic game setting!)