Connections UK 2015: Day 3 AAR

The third and final day at this year’s Connections UK wargaming conference started with a panel discussion on wargaming best practice. David England, (Niteworks) talked about gaming, experimentation, and force development; Jeremy Smith (Cranfield) presented on validation and verification of a manual simulation, specifically the Rapid Campaign Analysis Toolset (RCAT); I talked about political-military (pol-mil) gaming; and Capt Ed Farren (British Army) made an excellent presentation on wargaming and officer training.

In my own presentation I made a series of points:

1. The very first step in political-military wargaming is to decide what you are doing and why. Is the game intended to generate ideas, stress-test existing ideas, horizon-scan for possible future developments, or as an experiential and learning exercise?

2. Is a game really the best approach to the problem?

3. Is a big or complex game the best solution to the problem, or can it be addressed as effectively with simpler gaming techniques, like matrix games?

With regard to all of these observation I made the point that we should adopt a “toolkit” approach in which game design components are matched to purpose, rather than promoting a one-size-fits-all approach. I also argued for “responsible games evangelism” in which we addressed the weaknesses as well as the strengths of game techniques.

4. Everyone doing political military wargames ought to read Robert Levine, Thomas Schelling, and William Jones, Crisis Games 27 Years Later: Plus c’est Déjà Vu. RAND Corporation Report P-7719 (1991).

5. How you structure participation, and who is represented in the game, dramatically affects many game outcomes. In many pol-mil games it is difficult to know who to incorporate and how to incorporate them.

6. Idiosyncratic factors can have heavy influence on game play. Partly this is a positive thing, reflecting the ways in which games can generate emotional and personal engagement by players (a point made at the conference by ED McGrady, Peter Perla, Graham Longley-Brown, and others). However, it may also mean that personalities—unconstrained by institutions and politics in quite the same way as real world policy-makers—distort game outputs.

7. Considerable attention must be given as to how to capture and record game play, debrief players, encourage reflections, and carry ideas and findings forward into the policy process.

The subsequent audience discussion of the panel presentations addressed such issues as the value of commercial off the shelf wargames in officer training; the impact of professional subcultures on the behaviour of game participants; and the relationship between learning styles and games-based learning.

The third day of Connections UK 2015 had obligatory diagrams too–this one by Philip Sabin.

After the coffee-break we came back for a panel on the synergies between hobby and professional wargaming. Phil Sabin explored the contemporary use of historical wargames, highlighting their value both in educational and academic settings and well as within the national security community. He placed particular emphasis on how wargaming and learning about conflict simulation helps (future) analysts to better understand and model current and future conflict. At the same time, he also noted that many contemporary hobby games are too complex or too unrealistic to be readily used for analytical or training purposes. John Curry (History of Wargaming Project) also looked at professional use of recreational wargames. He cited a number of examples of games that have been used by both hobbyists and the military, or which might be. He, like Phil, highlighted some of the limitations of commercial games too (accuracy, complexity, duration, process, topic, umpire roll-back). In response to a question about how well commercial wargames explored hybrid warfare, Phil made some excellent points about the way in which rules and victory conditions could incentivize players to engage in realistic behaviours, or be used to assess otherwise incommensurable costs and rewards.

The last part of the conference was devoted to a “skinning the cat” session on wargaming for innovation, in which participants were divided into groups, and each asked to select a topic and develop game ideas around that theme. The potential topics were:

• conflict in the Ukraine
• an election
• mercenaries/private military corporations
• national power cut
• influence operations
• a terrorist attack against a school
• urban warfare
• refugees and migration

My group chose the last three of these, and I facilitated the design discussions for Thomas Crook: A Game of Human Trafficking. In our game proposal—intended as a professional red-teaming resource for those dealing with forced displacement and migrations issues—a half dozen or so players would assume the role of smugglers, and would compete to move migrants to Europe using a variety of possible routes and techniques. It was a great session with excellent input from everyone, and the emerging game design seemed very sound indeed.

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And so it all finally came to an end. Overall, this year’s Connections UK was outstanding—indeed, the best ever. I very much look forward to next year’s meeting.