Jeremy Antley on 1989: Dawn of Freedom

The website Play the Past always has great material on “the intersection of cultural heritage (very broadly defined) and games/meaningful play (equally broadly defined)”—which is why we feature it in the RSS feed here at PAXsims. Most recently, Jeremy Antley examines the boardgame 1989: Dawn of Freedom (which we reviewed here), and in the process makes a couple of important points about the way in which we intellectually engage with games themselves.

First, Jeremy rightly emphasizes that to understand a game one must experience it. As he puts it, “games are kinetic objects that surrender the nuances of their design only through active operation.  Just as you cannot fully understand the feeling of riding a roller-coaster by sight alone, so too will the integration of a games play-design mechanics elude you if you do not engage with the game on its own terms.”

This is true not only for what might be termed (to use the kinetic metaphor) as the “physics” of the game, but also especially for its “metaphysics.” By this I refer to the many intangible ways in which its game creates the experience of play, such as the sense of excitement that it generates, or the degree to which rules, player interactions, and physical presentation all combine to create an immersive sense of being elsewhere (whether that be in in Eastern Europe as communism falls, exploring  derelict spaceship, or anywhere else that a game seeks to depict). Even games that don’t aim at immersion in a historical or imagined world derive much of their value from things like the social interactions they encourage among players, something that is hard to envisage from the rules alone.

Second, Jeremy emphasizes the extent to which our ability to understand the features, designer’s intent, and played experience of a game is greatly enhanced today by a vibrant community of online discussion. BoardGameGeek, ConSimWorld, and other sites provide opportunity not only for player discussions and reviews, but also for thoughtful interaction with designers themselves. The result is a truly rich array of perspectives, experiences, and analysis.

For more of Jeremy’s thoughts on games, history, knowledge, and understanding, visit his blog Peasant Muse.

Invading America (the boardgame edition)

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Michael Peck is preparing for the 4th of July by discussing the rerelease (by Fantasy Flight Games) of that classic let’s-invade-America board game, Fortress America.

Fortress America is a spawn of the Cold War. The game was first published by Milton Bradley in 1986, just two years after the memorably over-the-top movie Red Dawn, where the late Patrick Swayze led the Wolverines, a band of Colorado high school kids who shot, blew up, and all around terrorized Cuban and Soviet occupation troops. The plot holes could have swallowed a B-52 (crack Soviet paratroopers who couldn’t defeat the 12th-grade remedial math class?), but the timing was exquisite.Red Dawn arrived at the height of Ronald Reagan’s anti-communist crusade, as defense spending swelled, arms flowed to Nicaraguan Contras, and films such as The Day After warned us that the unthinkable — nuclear war — was not just thinkable, but imminent. For all its clichés, the film succeeded because it appealed to classic American individualism: rugged, rural, and armed to the teeth. Not to mention that Red Dawn was the wet dream of post-Vietnam adolescent boys who could dream of ditching school and running around in the woods, dodging Soviet gunships and blowing up tanks with rocket launchers.

That Cold War spirit lives on in the 2012 remake of Fortress America, by Minnesota-based publisher Fantasy Flight Games. In fact, the game is so 1980s that it should come with a Rubik’s Cube and a Devo cassette. The rules booklet offers a brief, nano-thin prologue: In the 21st century, America has developed a laser-based missile defense system (not unlike Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative) and then refuses a demand by the rest of the world to dismantle it. So, naturally, the world decides that the best way to disarm a nuclear superpower is to invade it with conventional armies.

The invaders are straight out of a Chuck Norris movie. They include the Asian People’s Alliance (whose pieces are an un-politically correct yellow) and the Central American Federation (in blue, just like the Nicaraguan flag), while the Soviets — I mean the Euro-Socialist Pact — have red pieces and an emblem with a white star on a red background (I half-expected to see Obama’s portrait)…

My local gaming group has been known to play this too.

In the same spirit, we thought we would offer a list of a few other military boardgames set in the modern U-S-of-A:

Invasion America (SPI, 1976). This is the game that inspired the original 1986 (Milton Bradley) version of Fortress America, upon which the recent Fortress America rerelease is based. Once again, a triple invasion of the US, this time by European Socialist coalition, the South American Union, and the Pan Asiatic League—but with a classic hex and unit counter approach, as opposed to the much simpler RISK-type play in Fortress America.

Minuteman: The Second American Revolution (SPI, 1976). Anti-establishment rebels take on the US government in the mid-1980s.

After the Holocaust (SPI, 1977). Variously competing or cooperating regional governments attempt to rebuild America after a nuclear war. This is a game very heavy on the economics, with some  deadly unproductive-guns-versus-radioactive-butter trade-offs.

Mason-Dixon: The Second American Civil War (XTR Corp, 1995). As you might have guessed from the title, the US civil war erupts once more (in 1917, 1940, or 1985, spending on the scenario).

Battle for Seattle. (2000). Game designer Brian Train turns anti-globalization protester, and trashes Seattle. Or he turns cop, and trashes protestors—take your pick.

Twilight Struggle (GMT Games, 2005). Refight the entire Cold War in this hugely influential card-driven strategy game.

War on Terror (Terrorbull Games, 2006). Not just the US, but the entire world is ravaged by competing oil-hungry empires and shadowy terrorists in this tongue-in-cheek game. It even comes with an “evil” balaclava. Now available as an iPhone app!

Crisis 2020 (Victory Point Games, 2007). Ten different scenarios are featured in this game, all of which involve rebellions against the government: military coups, angry young high-techers, terrorists, jihadists, civil war, and an authoritarian federal government are all possibilities. Units include elite strike forces, black helicopters, cybernauts, and more, and warfare is both armed and virtual (“data conflict.”)

Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? (GMT Games, 2010). Previously reviewed (twice) on PAXsims. Jihadists who detonate a WMD in the United States win instantly!

I’m not including, of course, the entire Creature that Ate Sheboygan (SPI, 1979) genre of monsters-eating-America boardgames, nor All Things Zombie -type zombie apocalypse board and miniature games. My own local gaming group has certainly has been known to imagine a future in which America is overrun with slavering undead hordes and dubious megacorporations.

Did we miss a game? Add it in the comments section below. And, in the meantime–happy 4th of July to our American readers!

simulations miscellany, 3 July 2012

Yes, it’s time for another edition of PAXsims’s regular simulations miscellany, offering a selection of recent simulation-related items from around the net. If you have suggestions for future blogposts, please send them on!

* * *

At the gaming website Kotaku, Michael Peck discusses “Why It’s So Hard to Make a Game Out of the 21st Century.” His answer? Because we’re just guessing:

These are not trick questions. They are merely unanswerable, or at least the answers don’t appear until after the fact. Lots of people in the Pentagon, think-tanks and universities get oodles of taxpayer money to devise forecasts, mathematical models and even make games to predict what will happen. Their answers may be better informed than yours and mine—perhaps they have access to classified intelligence data—but this doesn’t necessarily mean that their answers are more accurate than yours or mine. The pros often blow it in spectacular fashion (practically none of the experts on the Soviet Union predicted its abrupt collapse). This is not to say that Civ is a better predictor of the future than a mammoth $300 million Pentagon simulation likeWarsim. What it means is that predicting the future, whether you’re a game designer or a talking head on TV, is to guess. The problem is that often these guesses are cloaked as expert opinion, or game marketing copy that boasts of impressive research. They’re still guesses.

I partly agree. Political experts have a pretty poor record at prediction, although there is evidence that intelligence analysts tend to be right somewhat more often—not so much because of access to classified material (which helps much less than you might think when it comes to long-range political-military prediction), but rather because of the analytical methodologies that they tend to use. It is particularly hard to predict something that is twenty years out. When you do, moreover, this is best framed as a thought exercise intended to promote discussion and original thinking (as with the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 and Global Governance 2025 projects), rather than a hard-and-fast prediction of the future to be.

That being said, these are much more than guesses. Moreover—and I think, more importantly—game methodologies allow you to actually explore the effects of a broad range of future outcomes by changing only a few variables at a time. Think that cyberwarfare will become increasingly common, as capabilities outgrow and proliferate faster than countermeasures? Then try a simulation with that assumption. Thing that cyberwarfare will favour technologically advanced states? Then try that. Want to know the impact of global warming or energy shortages? Try keeping most other variables constant, but alter those particular sets of variables. Done well (with a “sage” rather than “seer” approach to the process), the exercise can be quite useful.

* * *

A Facebook discussion of Michel’s piece launched by Adam Elkus led me to come across an interesting discussion by Kelsey Atherton on how games model covert action.

When covert action shows up in strategy games, on the other hand, controlling agents is all about picking objectives and using the people available to best execute that.  For example, in the Total War series, agents are either spies or assassins, whose presence only becomes known to opponents if they have failed their mission, or if they have been observed by enemy spies. If they fail a mission against a high-enough value target, they are likely to be executed, but all the calculations behind that are beyond player control. Agents are useful for much the same way we imagine them now: information on enemy developments & deployments to better plan ones own military moves, targeted killings on individuals otherwise beyond the reach or purview of conventional forces.  That said, there are limitations on how useful this is as a form of modeling. Agents here operate within strictly coded boundaries, and so they cannot, say, spread false information amongst the enemy leadership (so no Dudley Bradstreet’s here), or engage in any other behavior that breaks the established rules.

It is well worth a read for those interested both the in the political-military content of contemporary digital games, and for those interested in simulation modelling more generally. Adam’s comments on the same issue are also worth reading.

* * *

Among other things, the Training & Simulation Journal has recent short reports on how hard it is to replicate human behaviour and lessons from the recent Unified Quest wargame.

* * *

Training and simulation needs often get seen through the prism of the US military (by far the largest single consumer in the world of digital simulation, training, and education material) or NATO allies. In a presentation to the recent Simulation & Training Africa 2012 conference, Major General Luvuyo Nobanda (Chief Director: Force Preparation, South African Army) offers the perspective of a developing country of more limited means.

* * *

Meanwhile back in the US,  the Department of Navy has added the computer game Starcraft to its military officer training curriculum in an effort to provide realistic leadership simulation. Enemies will no doubt soon discover the fearsome power of the Zerg rush…

(OK, no it hasn’t really, but it’s another funny piece of satirical military reporting by the folks at Duffel Blog.)

* * *

My own annual Brynania classroom civil war simulation was recently profiled in the Spring-Summer 2012 issue of the McGill News alumni magazine. There are also a couple of earlier videos on Brynania that give a real flavour of what 120 bright students can get up to that week, one by the folks at TV McGill and the other by McGill’s Headway TV series. Oh, and there’s also this year’s UNHCR team asking a couple of improv coffee shop musicians to sing about their fictional jobs…

Iranian video games, nuclear weapons, and the scourge of international terrorism

Actually, this blogpost has nothing at all to do with nuclear weapons or terrorism (unless online castle-and-resource management games count), but we thought we would go with a dramatic headline, FOX News-style.

Instead, the Second International Computer Game Festival was recently held in Tehran at the Mosalla (mosque) of Imam Khomeini on 26-30 June 2012. Iranian PRESS TV offers a report:

Despite the “international” label, this is largely a showcase for made-in-Iran games (which, in terms of genres, differ little from made-outside-Iran games, as you’ll see—notwithstanding the reference to “Islamic and Iranian culture and values” in the report).

Of particular interest—well, to geeky political science gamer types—is the forthcoming game Battle in the Gulf of Aden, a military/first person shooter based on Iranian anti-piracy patrols. Needless to say, it features exciting things like heliborne insertions and raids against pirate strongholds, rather than a more accurate (and infinitely more boring) rendering of the patrol/patrol/search dhow/patrol/patrol/escort freighter/patrol sequence that characterizes most of what is actually done by naval detachments in the area.

Public unveiling of the game by the government (although not by the developers) also came with some political spin:

In a ceremony attended by the commander of the Iranian Navy and Head of the military’s political ideological organization, the first computer game involving Iran’s army was launched. According to Head of the Cultural and Public Relations Division of Iran’s Armed Forces, Hojatoleslam Vahdi, the Battle of Aden is a top-quality computer game that is comparable to foreign games. He further stated that when news leaked of the army’s plans to produce this type of game, the foreign media claimed that Iran is taking its young people, through the game, to the shores of the Gulf of Aden so that they can fight pirates. Vahdi emphasized that Iran recognizes no geographical boundaries in its fight against its enemies and is prepared to defend its interests, even those that in a distant location. He added that Battle in the Gulf of Adenis just the first step of its kind in the cyber arena.

Report from Caranas #39, 40 and 41

Just returning from another delivery of Carana in Nairobi – our 13th delivery of the core course and 14th class of Caranas (or our 39th, 40th and 41st parallel universe Caranas). We had a very good group of students, the whole range of expertise and seniority in the Bank, from junior staff on their first assignment to some managers and senior team leaders, resulting in a tremendous amount of exchange between students. This is an important feature of the success of the course – our course participants often don’t realize until the end of the week how we’ve tricked them into helping us to teach their peers through the simulation and other group work. If we were to ask them in advance to teach their peers, we’d get a few hours (if we were lucky) of powerpoint dumps of varying quality, but for the course we just stick the participants in the fictional (yet fairly realistic) world of Carana. In the simulation, the participants need to apply their knowledge and they can actively debate policy and practice with just a bit of guidance from us – ending up training each other very intensively for four days.

The recovery plans for this group of Caranas were basically “okay” – no major missteps, no massive failures, one of the teams resorted to using the military to break the coal strike, a few lingering security issues persisted that could go horribly wrong, one group completely ignored the threat from the Presidential Guard despite repeating warnings. For this delivery, our fearless troupe of SimMasters (Marcelo, Anne, Alys, Sarah and I and Khadija in training) agreed that we got a particularly technocratic response to the issues – basically the teams ignored a lot of the ethnic tensions, their roles’ own personal motives (patronage networks they represent, personal incentives) and the history of the country (that got Carana into the civil war) in favor of recommending the kind of blanket solutions we, the international community, often push – demobilize to hit some target, often with disregard for the composition and purpose of the resulting army; treat elections as a milestone to hit rather than a national discussion and opportunity for reconciliation; provide health and education for “development as usual” and build roads and get the infrastructure repaired so that the economy can get going again, regardless of who benefits (again, often ignorant of the drivers that led to the conflict). This happens a lot in Carana – while we give people roles with backgrounds that connect them to particular ethnic groups or even personal incentives for malicious behavior, we rarely can replicate in the simulation the kind of cross purposes or even antagonism that we see in real life. In that respect, I think we fall short a bit in our simulation in tapping some of the real power of “role-playing”.
As we rarely get a “really good” plan, these outcomes generally serve as teaching moments. Even with the best of intentions and cooperation, this kind of work is difficult.

Map of the 8th Continent used as background “color” in Carana deliveries

That is, despite the tendency of people to “play nice” in the Carana simulation and work well together to come up with a plan, even the most technocratic and cooperative solutions are often inadequate to resolve the issues. I think this is partly by design (everything is a priority and there are insufficient resources to do everything), but also partly because a really good plan requires a deep understanding of the underlying drivers of conflict in the simulation. In effect, a cooperative and congenial atmosphere often results in the players ignoring the deeply divisive issues the plan is meant to resolve. Rarely do players step back and consider the ramifications of their interventions. Will their plan result in continued disenfranchisement of the West and South? Have they resolved the tensions around control of the diamonds and timber that were the principal source of financing for the rebels? Have they neutralized the threat of coup from the ousted president who still has links to loyalists in the military? Even after 40+ Caranas, we’ve yet to see a recovery plan that really considers these types of questions and provides “real” answers.
More than 400 people have visited Carana (not including the UN, African Union or AusAID deliveries), and we have extremely positive responses. I continue to believe it is a valuable teaching tool and intend to use it for many more courses to come, but I’m concerned that we’re still missing the mark on simulating the kind of contentious environment that exists in a post-conflict or fragile, highly corrupt and unequal society, where priorities and planning are driven by patronage and personal interests. I’m not disposed to creating “victory conditions” or other artificial incentives for people to play their part, but I am still looking for something to encourage participants to roleplay and replicate the more realistic friction that exists in these environments. Any ideas?

Orangelandia jihadists strike back

Last month, we recounted the iterative scenario/counter scenario that had cropped up at Carl Prine’s Line of Departure blog, based on a scenario by Stephanie R. Chenault whereby near-future US troops seize an airfield in the fictional country of Orangelandia.

That scenario was later updated last month to include an alternative (more futuristic) invasion scenario offered by blog reader “Move Forward,” followed by Carl’s riposte on how the Orangelandia jihadists would counter this. Both blog posts feature lively commentary by others in the comments section.

I tend to think that Move Forward’s invasion scenario (based on a proposed amphibious/air-droppable Joint Access Vehicle) would likely get stalled in the development phase for a decade, involve billions in cost overruns, prove too risky to actually airdrop, never meet the original design specifications, and turn out to only incrementally augment US military capabilities. I certainly like Carl’s point about the ability of local opponents to adapt cheap low-cost counters for high-cost Western weapons systems, although I think some of the responses are a little too tactical and would have less impact than he suggests. Still, my money is on the brave brothers and sisters of Orangelandia in this fight. For those who read the piece closely, there are quite a few undisguised jabs at recent US policy, from the development of US counter-insurgency doctrine (by “maverick warrior-scholars”) to the 2011 intervention in Libya.

Moreover, the whole exercise is—like Stephanie Chenault’s earlier blog post—an interesting example of how simple off-the-shelf blog capabilities can be used to sustain wargame-ish alternative analysis exercises. Perhaps he’ll make it a regular feature (hint, hint).