‘Wargaming for Education, Education for Wargaming’: The development of the MA Wargaming and Resilience Planning at Brunel University

The following item was written for PAXsims by Dr, Iain Farquharson, Brunel University.

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Brunel University London has launched the first-ever Master of Arts in Wargaming and Resilience Planning. The programme is designed to educate students about wargaming as a tool for research, education, and decision support. It bridges professional and academic wargamers, offering a bespoke, garden-walled programme which will develop students’ core skills in design, analysis, and leadership. We initiated the MA amid a rise public sector interest wargaming. Having a critical mass of experienced academics and practitioners, our staff are bolstered by a resurgence of scholarly literature on wargaming in recent years.^[1]  

Wargaming for Education

Lecturers on the MA in Wargaming and Resilience Planning are experienced using wargaming in their existing teaching. Final year students on the Security Strand of the BASc Global Challenges programme, led by Dr. Iain Farquharson, must complete a wargaming scenario as part of their final assessment. These have consisted of scenarios from the MaGCK Matrix Game Construction Kit. The 2023 cohort undertook ‘The Caliphate Reborn’ (following the early stages of the rise of ISIS in Iraq) with the 2024 cohort tackling ‘A Reckoning of Vultures’ (political manoeuvring and coup plotting in a fictional state).^[2]

ISIS Crisis: The Caliphate Reborn

Similarly, wargaming is a compulsory assessment in Dr Steven Wagner’s module, Intelligence History: Case Studies in Failure and Success, in Brunel’s MA Intelligence and Security Studies. For three years, this involved a matrix game simulating a crisis of colonial security in Palestine. More recently, students on the module have participated in a megagame modelled on the 1983 Able Archer war scare. Students representing NATO and the Warsaw pact role-play the critical decisions taken during the months leading up to the November 1983 NATO exercise wherein NATO rehearsed a nuclear first-strike on the Soviet Union. In this way, students practice their intelligence analysis skills, and explore whether the true events really brought the world close to Armageddon in November 1983.

In both instances, students received briefings and had one practice session prior to undertaking the games. During the games, students were reminded to undertake actions based on their faction’s requirements, rather than to play as themselves. Finally, they were required to record their actions, why they chose those actions and how the plans of other players affected their decisions. As part of the assessment, students were required to produce reflective portfolios critically examining how effectively they and their team undertook their roles, and the insights gained from the challenges of playing as a security actor with different world views to their own.

These wargames encourage the students to understand the decision-making processes that underpin the responses to security challenges. Matrix gaming, with its less rigid structure, allowed students the latitude to test the limits of their existing knowledge and engage in debate and discussion of decisions and their potential outcomes.

Education for Wargaming

In designing the MA Wargaming and Resilience Planning, we were keen to ensure that this thread of applied learning was heavily embedded into the course content. We prioritised design, analysis, play and facilitation as core elements of the course. We also recognised that to be successful, we needed insight from public and private industry leaders to ensure that there was a direct path from the Wargaming and Resilience MA to either doctoral research or employment. Discussions were held with key industry contacts at each stage of programme development to identify skills that are highly sought after by employers. These discussions echoed our own aim in highlighting the importance of understanding and competency with core design mechanics and the ability to facilitate wargames with a range of audiences.

We also wanted to employ the skills and knowledge within Brunel’s Games Design department, who provide world-leading teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. The resultant programme combines the teaching philosophy of our Games Design Team with existing experience of designing wargames to specifications, and their use in a range of military and non-military settings. Key to this is a heavy focus on applicatory learning (or learning by doing) to facilitate design knowledge and skills. 

To develop skills in designing and facilitating, an approach of paired sessions was devised. Here, students will be briefed on a particular design challenge, given appropriate theoretical grounding, contextual knowledge and understanding of the various aspects of the problem and game approach. Students will then have one week to plan, design, and deliver a game to the specifications provided. The following session will see the games played and discussed in class to understand the approaches chosen and the type of data that can be extracted from it. 

Linked to these classes are a series of analysis and research method sessions. These form the bridge between the Games Design and Wargaming elements of the course, while also providing the academic grounding in Social Scientific research methods that are crucial to developing wargaming as an academic research method. The analysis component takes the data accrued from the wargames and examines how this data can be used to draw useful conclusions, and how best to present these conclusions to stakeholders. To meet these criteria, the programme provides sessions on qualitative and quantitative research methods, elements of Operational Analysis, ethics and organisational culture and its impact on the assimilation of information.

Optional courses are also provided on the Wargaming and Resilience MA, allowing students to contextualise their wargaming knowledge in real-world scenarios. Optional modules included topics such as military history, international politics, law and international development. These options, combined with coverage of resilience topics and the use of wargaming in non-military settings, allow students to fully explore the range of contexts in which wargaming can be applied as a tool. 

The culmination of the degree is a design project which sees the students undertake a larger scale design to a specification agreed with their project supervisor. This will be accompanied by a write up to justify their design thinking, decision-making processes and their engagement with design literature and subject specific knowledge. There will then be an ‘industry day’ to allow students to present and facilitate their games to wargame professionals to both demonstrate their skills as facilitators and network with potential employers.

Conclusion

Wargaming at Brunel University London has a bright future. The Department of Games Design has a long-term plan to introduce further degrees on Serious Games and envisions a suite of professional facing postgraduate degrees which look beyond commercial gaming. We have a group of academics dedicated to establishing Brunel as a centre for wargaming in the UK both in its provision of training for aspiring professional wargamers, and as a centre for research into the foundations of wargaming as a research method and its application across a range of professional and academic disciplines. The MA Wargaming and Resilience Planning represents the first step on this developmental path which seeks to push the boundaries of knowledge and practice beyond their current limits and engage with wargames academics everywhere to strengthen and enhance the discipline.

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^[1] Some of which includes David Banks, ‘The Methodological Machinery of Wargaming: A Path towards Discovering Wargaming’s Epistemological Foundations,’ International Studies Review, 26(1) (March 2024); Aggie Hirst, ‘Wargames Resurgent: The Hyperralities of Military Gaming from Recruitment to Rehabilitation,’ International Studies Quarterly, 66(1) (September 2022); Erik Lin-Greenberg, Reid B.C. Pauly & Jacquelyn G. Schneider, ‘Wargaming for International Relations Research,’ European Journal of International Relations, 28(1) (2022) and Peter Perla & ED McGrady, ‘Why Wargaming Works, Naval War College Review, 64(3) (Summer 2011)

^[2] Rex Brynen, Thomas Fisher, Tom Mouat, MaGCK: The Matrix Game Construction Kit, PAXSims (2027).