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Appreciated. I’ve now got your slides, look forward to seeing the book-chapter.
One of your slides mentions “delicate balance between cooperative and adversarial play”. I came up with a game concept addressing that directly, but it would be best played by two decent SF writers who also happen to be well-matched at chess. The two players play a game of chess, to win, while explaining each move in turn fictionally in such a way that the narratives of their combined moves in sequence constitute, renga-like, a co-authored story — thus pitting the zero-sum motives of the chess game against the win-win possibiities of collaborative story telling.
Again, thanks.
Matrix games have no fixed rules, other than a process for adjudicating outcomes based on the input and assessment of players. Consequently, a player is free to argue (for example) that morale or leadership issues affect the combat power of units, or that the imperative of territorial control will shape ISIS behaviour in particular ways. This approach is unlike the vast majority of (rules- and capabilities-based) games, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to such a free-form gaming approach.
For a broader discussion of “gaming the non-kinetic,” have a look at my chapter in Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, eds., Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (MIT Press, 2016): https://mitpress.mit.edu/zones-control
Hu Dr Brynan:
I have two questions for you about the generalized ISIS Crisis game-concept, I guess.
The first has to do with the way ISIS “appeared” out of Zawahiri’s Jama’at, to include the splicing between ex-Baath and Salafists that occurred at Camp Bucca, and the splitting from AQ resulting in the Caliphate. How would games like ISIS Crisis be able to predict (at a strategic level) such splicings and splittings?
The second, which is my perennial interest, is how games in this genre capture ideological shifts, eg from a leader-based (and arguably Mahdi-awaitng) system like AQ to a territory-based (and explicitly caliphal) system like IS?
More generally, how do games in military and intelligence use today make sure that “morale” (to include cultural & theological factors, martyrdom, paradise, &c, but also the trauma & mental devastation of war, PTSD &c) are as fully represented as war’s measurable physical elements (troops, munitions, logistics, economics, &c)?
I’m coming at all of this from the “games of ideas” side, with an awareness of my ignorance of the current state of war-gaming, and very little sense of how the two could be brought together either conceptually (in game design) or practically (in the form of contacts, conversations &c).
If CvC isn’t completely off the mark in saying that in warfare, “the physical factors seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade” — surely the gaming of those moral factors must be a matter of considerable interest?