PAXsims is pleased to present some recent items on conflict simulation and serious (and not-so-serious) games that may be of interest to our readers.
Know of items we might want to include in future editions? Please email us!
Daisy Abbott, an interdisciplinary researcher and research developer based in the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art, has developed a useful guide for modifying (commercial, hobby) tabletop games for educational use.
This paper describes a learning-objective-centric workflow for modifying (‘modding’) existing tabletop games for educational purposes. The work- flow combines existing research for serious games design with novel systematic analysis techniques for learning and game mechanics and gameplay loops to improve the understanding and rigour of the process. A detailed worked example applies the workflow to the development of a serious tabletop game with the educational goal of increasing knowledge and confidence of performing postgraduate literature reviews. Systematic application of the workflow to a real example supports the value of this approach and provides a useful template for educators to follow for increasing the quality and feasibility of self-designed serious games.
You’ll find the full paper here. You might also want to check out her recent article on “Game-based learning for postgraduates: an empirical study of an educational game to teach research skills,” at Higher Education Pedagogies 4, 1 (2019).
At the Megagame Assembly website, Ben Moores discusses the challenges (and shortcomings) of megagames addressing military operations.
For anyone who has listened to our megagame podcast, Last Turn Madness, you will know that I have an issue with the manner in which we represent war in megagames. War is an incredibly intense condition yet many of our military games fail to create an experience that is relatively engaging. Many players actually find elements of the theme and the mechanics incredibly dull. This is a poor state of affairs that we need to think more about.
The bad news is that writing a game is hard, really hard. Many of us start out with a vision of throwing out the rule book and creating something unique and seminal. Breaking the chains of what we know about military gaming looks easy in practice as there are so many wargame concepts out there dying to be put out of their misery. The reality is that development is largely incremental and beset with adversity that involves some fairly humbling experiences….
See his concerns and suggestions at the link above. For a detailed discussion of Ben’s game design for Undeniable Victory (a megagame of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War), see his November 2017 piece here at PAXsims.
In a recent article in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 19, 3 (March 2019), Galateia Terti, Isabelle Ruin, Milan Kalas, Ilona Láng, Arnau Cangròs i Alonso, Tommaso Sabbatini,and Valerio Lorini discuss ANYCare, a role-playing game to investigate crisis decision-making and communication challenges in weather-related hazards.
This study proposes a role-playing experiment to explore the value of modern impact-based weather forecasts on the decision-making process to (i) issue warnings and manage the official emergency response under uncertainty and (ii) communicate and trigger protective action at different levels of the warning system across Europe. Here, flood or strong-wind game simulations seek to represent the players’ realistic uncertainties and dilemmas embedded in the real-time forecasting-warning processes. The game was first tested in two scientific workshops in Finland and France, where European researchers, developers, forecasters and civil protection representatives played the simulations. Two other game sessions were organized afterwards (i) with undergraduate university students in France and (ii) with Finnish stakeholders involved in the management of hazardous weather emergencies. First results indicate that multi-model developments and crowdsourcing tools increase the level of confidence in the decision-making under pressure. We found that the role-playing approach facilitates interdisciplinary cooperation and argumentation on emergency response in a fun and interactive manner. The ANYCaRE experiment was proposed, therefore, as a valuable learning tool to enhance participants’ understanding of the complexities and challenges met by various actors in weather-related emergency management.
At Military Review (July-August 2019), Richard A. McConnel and Mark T. Gerges discuss “Seeing the Elephant: Improving Leader Visualization Skills through Simple War Games.”
While Command and General Staff College (CGSC) faculty members have wrestled with the challenge of how to best educate students to improve their visualization and description skills, they have hit upon a return to simple role-playing board games as a low-cost and highly effective means to repetitively improve students’ abilities. Examining the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) publications from the past twenty years has revealed that implementing war-gaming as a training technique has been a systemic challenge during combat training center (CTC) rotations.2 This challenge manifested itself in three ways: players skipped the war-game step altogether; if planners skipped the war game, then the combined arms rehearsal turned into a war game; or staffs conducted war games that resembled a rehearsal in that they did not contain an action, reaction, counteraction methodology. As the faculty scanned the CALL publications for insights, an unrelated event in a single staff group caught their attention. In the fall of 2013, CGSC students who played a simple role-playing board game for a history class, in this case Kriegsspiel (War Game), did a much better job at the war-gaming step of the military decision-making process (MDMP) in the tactics class, in particular in their ability to see (describe) the friendly situation….
(h/t Aaron Danis)
At The National Interest, David Banks suggests that we “Check Out the Very Best Wargames Ever (And What We Can Learn From Them).”
Want to try your hand at negotiating during a crisis? Think you have a plan that could get the U.S. out of Afghanistan? Confident you could keep a nation secure when multi-party international diplomacy is more important than warfare? Strategy-based board games let you test your political and military acumen right at your kitchen table – while also helping you appreciate how decision-makers are limited by the choices of others.
For centuries, military trainers have used board games as tools to help recruits and leaders alike understand fundamental principles of warfare. In the early 19th century, for instance, the Prussian military required its officers to play a board game called “Kriegsspiel.” The high command realized that while individual officers might understand the principles of combat, they might not know how to apply them when facing an actual opponent. And in stepping back and analyzing what happened after a game was over, they might see what factors really mattered, and how the players’ choices influenced each other.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. Navy used war games to design military plans against potential adversaries. By the time World War II arrived, U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz observed, the conflict “had been reenacted in the game rooms at the Naval War College by so many people and in so many different ways, that nothing happened during the war that was a surprise … absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war.”
War gaming continues to offer opportunities for scholars to better understand security dynamics. A growing cadre of experts have turned to war games to show how a Russian invasion of the Baltics might play out or how a shift to robotic warfare might lead to fewer military crises. In my own research, I have used war games to better understand and prepare for what are sometimes called “low-frequency, multi-factor” events – security scenarios that have lots of variables but have rarely, or never, happened, such as a full-scale cyber-conflict between the U.S. and China.
War games are useful intellectual aids because they force players to make decisions under pressure. While people may intellectually understand a problem, gaming forces them to think even harder. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling put it, “one thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.” By facing off against opponents over a well-designed war game, people can come to see how political and military structures interact and appreciate the trade-offs and complications that come with making decisions in a competitive environment.
With this in mind, I present some of my favorite war games. They not only are gripping to play but also offer players a window into some core elements of modern security politics. They are rated for players, time and complexity (where “Monopoly” would score a 1 out of 5). I have no financial or professional relationships with any of the game publishers listed; these games are just personal favorites.
(This article also originally appeared at The Conversation.)
The Poll is an Indian board game that simulates how political parties fight and win elections.
In the game, each player takes control of the affairs of a political party: manages their finances, their policy stand and decides which seats to focus on in the run-up to the General Elections. Each player must draft an inclusive manifesto to fight constituencies all over the country, make promises through arguments and choose which campaign strategies to employ to maximise their own vote share. With the ultimate aim to win the majority of seats in the Lok Sabha.
It is currently available for pre-order.
The King’s Wargaming Newtwork is pleased to announce the first King’s Wargaming Alumni Weekend, which will take place during 21-24 November 2019 at King’s College London.
It will include a public lecture on 22 November by Professor Philip Sabin on the future of wargaming to mark his 35-year service to the university and the first year anniversary of the King’s Wargaming Network.
All are welcome to register for the lecture
here.
Rosenstrasse is a historical role-playing game developed by Moyra Turkington and Jessica Hammer.
Rosenstrasse is an elegaic, immersive historical role-playing game for four players and one facilitator. It explores marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans in Berlin between 1933 and 1943, and culminates in the eponymous women-led protests. Each player takes the role of two characters, at least one of whom is Jewish and at least one of whom is female. As a result, players experience this story of persecution and resistance from multiple perspectives.
No prior knowledge of history is needed to play Rosenstrasse, nor does prior knowledge prevent enjoyment of the game. The game has been successfully play-tested with everyone from historians and Holocaust educators to people who knew almost nothing about the history. Similarly, you do not have to be an experienced role-player to enjoy the game. It is accessible both to long-time role-players, and to people who have never role-played before.
Instead of historical expertise, we ask players to bring human expertise to bear. Each character is paired with another as spouse or sibling. For example, Max and Annaliese are young, romantic, economically vulnerable lovers; Ruth and Izak are siblings who embody close-knit family bonds, but who are treated very differently by the Reich. These relationships are at the heart of the game. If you have cared about another person as a friend, family member, or romantic partner, then you have the expertise you need to play.
You will find further details of the Unruly Studios project at Kickstarter.
You might also want to have a look at this short Carnegie Mellon University Alumni Association webinar by Jessica Hammer, Thomas and Lydia Moran on “transformational games:” Game On! How Leveraging Gameplay Can Change Your Life.
At Studies in Contemporary History, Florian Grenier and Maren Röger discuss “Den Kalten Krieg Spielen: Brett- und Computerspiele in der Systemkonfrontation” (in German).
Playing the Cold War. Board and Computer Games in the System Confrontation
During the Cold War, millions of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain played board and digital games – in living rooms, barracks and schools. They played classics such as Memory or Merk-Fix, but also games with names such as Fulda Gap or Class Struggle. The latter group addressed different aspects of the confrontation between the West and the so-called ›Eastern bloc‹ and offered players a simulation of the Cold War as a battle between good and evil. Cold War Studies have so far neglected games as sources of historical research. In this article, we argue that as a relevant part of popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s, board and digital games contributed significantly to conveying to a popular audience the fundamental characteristics of the East-West conflict. We show how games on both sides of the Iron Curtain adopted a logic of competition; we analyse how they made sense of the system confrontation, which specific national characteristics they had, how they could become critical tools and where the respective authorities saw the limits of what was ›playable‹. Testing one’s own demise as a possibility for action or dystopia often seemed morally and politically questionable, because the scenarios developed in games could perhaps change people’s views of reality and intensify criticism. On the other hand, the games could also support the routinisation of the Cold War: They presented knowledge about military facts and contributed to habituation to the potential nuclear threat.
The Atlantic Council has a released a new report detailing 
PAXsims 