The following item was written for PAXsims by Nicholas Kauza and James Fielder.
2d Lt Nicholas Kauza, USAF graduated from Colorado State University with a BA in History and minor in Political Science and was commissioned through CSU’s 90th Air Force ROTC Detachment, where he founded the CSU Wargaming Club. LinkedIn
Lt Col James “Pigeon” Fielder, Ph.D. USAF (ret.) is a political scientist at Colorado State University, where he researches emergent player behavior in computerized, tabletop, and live action games and serves as CSU’s Wargaming Club faculty advisor. He is also the director of professional and educational gaming for Mobius Worlds Publishing and consults on organizational wargaming and crisis response exercises. CSU, LinkedIn
The authors would like to thank Col Tim Childress, USAF (ret.), Col Gregg Johnson, USAF, and LTC Matthew Tillman, USA for their command support.
The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of Air University, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Wargaming is an integral part of developing strategy for the DoD and is used in a variety of ways, from moving pieces on a tabletop to launching real fighter jets. However, there is a very real gap in executing those wargames and developing the capabilities for our future officers to learn how they work and fit in our strategy.
To fill this gap, 2d Lt Nicholas Kauza (Nick) and Dr. James “Pigeon” Fielder created the Wargaming Club at Colorado State University. From this club emerged a team that conceptualized, designed, and successfully executed a strategic level wargame for Air Force ROTC Detachment 090, training 165 cadets in core leadership tasks. Below we describe a six-step development process for sister ROTC programs: securing buy-in, setting clear objectives, creating an immersive environment, design and playtesting, execution, and gathering lessons learned.
BUY-IN
Mountains of literature demonstrate that wargaming works for training, education, experiments, and immediate real-world applications. Wargames still require expending time, hours, and in the case of large unit exercises, monetary costs to execute. Superiors, peers, and subordinates need assurance that spending resources will meet training objectives–and without command support, wargames will die on the vine. We garnered command support by presenting our plan to the detachment commander and following up with a detailed wargaming briefing for both the Army and Air Force detachment commanders, their cadre, and interested cadets that built excitement that extended from the top down.
OBJECTIVES/DELEGATION
The next step is setting objectives and delegating among your team to successfully execute those objectives. Start with one or two clear and measurable objectives that are always visible to your team and work backwards from the objectives. If your team can’t physically see the objectives it can become too easy for your team members to get tunnel vision on one facet of the game or for scope creep to set in. We’d periodically check our design against the objectives to ensure everything contributed. Be ruthless! Our cutting room floor was littered with ideas that didn’t pass our objectives test.
The game had to not only be measurable and ideally fun–more on fun later–but the game also had to demonstrate how the Air Force employs assets in the joint global fight, from the potential of deploying bombers to say Libya to delivering humanitarian aid in Haiti. With such a wide range of capabilities, finding a way to narrow the scope to make it measurable was paramount.
With such a large scope it can be easy to overdevelop and make the game too intricate and then not playable or of interest for the players. With several documents from the DoD regarding objectives to hit and samples of behavior to have cadets emulate it can quickly become too large and too daunting, however these are the opportunities to be creative and follow the path you want to create the best experience for training. Since this game was executed specifically for the Air Force ROTC Detachment, we specifically incorporated Air Force ROTC training objectives from AFROTCI 36-2011 Volume 1 Leadership Lab Curriculum related to resource management, situational awareness, team management, and delegation.
Wargames are abstractions of reality, even when highly detailed. Well-designed wargames have verisimilitude, however, or the sense of being real to players in consistency and coherency. For our wargame, we took an expansive view that combined narrative roleplaying components with tabletop wargaming mechanics. Roleplay elements encouraged cadets to immerse themselves in their positions, while tabletop mechanics built in elements of chance to foster risks and potential failure that couldn’t simply be waved away through narrative.
IMMERSION IN WARGAMES
Although learning was paramount, player immersion is crucial for internalizing learning, let alone immersive play encourages active learning that engages multiple senses. First, immersive games are fun. But what is fun? We used Raph Koster’s theory of fun, or that fun is the brain learning and mastering new things. Indeed, an intense, dive-under-tables wargame might not appear fun at all to an observer. But when immersed in the game, players (and their brains) try their best to overcome obstacles to master objectives.
Next, liminality occurs when players cross from the real world in the game. Also referred to as the magic circle, synthetic experience, and in video games, presence, player experiences in liminality are psychologically real. When players work together to overcome a difficult challenge in liminality, they will remember it decades later as if it happened in real life. Added disorienting stressors such as time limits, dimmed lights, unfamiliar surroundings, and making the game space even slightly warmer or cooler add to the effects.
Finally, symbolic correspondence comes from religious rituals in which a ritual performer wears a mask, clothing, or other dress to represent a being. However, while inside the ritual space (also liminality), the performer isn’t pretending to be a spirit or animal, but rather becomes a spirit or animal in the minds of ritual participants. In game usage, players apply symbolic correspondence by embodying characters, roles, or positions. For training purposes, the theory of fun, liminality, and symbolic correspondence result in risk-free leadership laboratories that are highly visceral experiences for players. The U.S. Marine Corps crucible is a premier example of these three concepts in action.
DESIGN, PROTOTYPE, AND PLAYTEST
With relevant and measurable objectives in hand, we then worked backwards to identify core game mechanics. Per Sicart (2008) game mechanics are, “methods invoked by agents [or players], designed for interaction with the game state.” For example, players invoke a limited list of scorable hands to interact with poker, or placing map tiles to build a scenario in the game Undaunted: Normandy.
With the chosen scenario having to capture the feeling of something real enough to create player buy-in and allow cadets to learn and demonstrate knowledge of what the Air Force brings to the joint fight, it was chosen for our wargame to create an airlift-centered scenario. An airlift scenario also allowed the game itself to become the opponent of the players.; when you make a plan, when you execute that plan it can fall apart, that is where leadership comes in. How do you adapt and change your plan to lead your team and complete this mission in a dynamic and stressful environment?
The design process in action.
Additionally, conscious decisions were made to have the cadets (playtesters and players for actual game execution) play the game in uniform, this was to model the feeling players would have so we could better understand the effect of liminality on our game. The decisions made all tied back to, “does this support the scope of the game we have been given?” and “does this support the narrative we are trying to create buy-in for?”
Playtesting iterations helped created liminality for the end-product game, such as interviewing playtesters after the game (in and out of uniform) and seeing which ones got most excited. For instance, we asked the question of using C-17 versus a level-2 cargo plane, did that feel or add more realism? As the answers evolved over the course of playtesting to see the reaction from the playtesters we were able to fine-tune the game into a digestible product for a cadet and could successfully be executed.
EXECUTION
We harnessed liminality by running the game in a different location than the detachment classrooms. Players navigated an unfamiliar classroom with the added bonus of discomfort from the stadium-style room layout. Second, we projected a countdown clock at the front of the classroom, which created decision-making stress. As the clock was counting down the cadets had to scramble within their teams to organize an executable airlift plan given their time constraints and supply issues.
Cadet teams in action.
While planning the airlift, they had to “battle” against various issues such as communication breaches, infrastructure failures, and even adapting to continue work under a simulated air raid. As the cadets pushed through the various objectives and challenges, they became more invested into the game and believed they had stepped into an air and space operations center. Shifting papers, calculating cargo capacity, designating fighter escorts, all while maintaining operational security to ensure overall mission success.
As the execution rolled out, players stayed invested in the overall vision of the game and learned how to apply the leadership they were given in the classroom, translating directly to teamwork and delegation to success in a deployed theater. While the cadets worked within the simulation, the white cells (both builders of the game and evaluators watching the teams) were able to stay in lock step with each other and run independently to game completion. The seamlessness of the white cells to interact where white cells could only interact with other white cells aided the players in not feeling like they were evaluated and were more empowered to lead their team. Meanwhile this freed the white cells from having to overly interact with players and make sure they could provide valuable feedback at the end, or address questions as they came up to the player team leader.
Raising stress with an event timer.
DEBRIEF AND AFTER-ACTION REPORT
The design team held two verbal debriefs following the exercise: the first immediately following execution with the players and evaluators, and the second at the next wargaming club meeting with the design team. The debriefs were subsequently compiled into a written after-action report for the detachment commander, cadre, and cadet wing leadership. The road to wargaming hell is paved with unread after-action report binders, but the detachment followed up with a Fall 2022 exercise that built on training and design lessons learned from our Spring 2022 exercise.
Two evaluators observing players
Initial evaluation was that the team was relieved and simultaneously excited about completing the game, but also that the execution was an unmitigated success. The following week, during the debrief the club ran a “3 ups and 3 downs” discussing what went well and what we can do to improve next time. We stated at the beginning that any improvements for next execution are solely focused on the team’s effort and how well the team performed, not outing any one person or group of people, keeping all accountability with the team as a whole and not dumping it onto any one individual.
Debriefs also mitigate “bleed,” or negative in-game experiences that carry out of the game. It’s far better to take a risk, fail, and learn in a game than in combat operations. Indeed, we argue that players learn more from failure in games than from winning. However, subordinates, peers, and supervisors might hold real-world animosity towards an individual for making an in-game mistake. By talking out and walking through errors, you bring learning and confidence building out of the game and leave negative feelings inside.
CONCLUSION
Wargaming has become somewhat of an emergent technique of teaching in classrooms, both defense and academic based, and a prevalent topic among leaders of all branches, specifically when CEO of War on the Rocks Ryan Evan sat down and talked with USMC Gen. David H. Berger and part of the discussion was developing strategies through wargames in a dynamic world. Wargames require resources to implement—notably in our case, time—but provide leaders risk-free training that feels real when well-designed. In addition to training, the design team also gains invaluable, hands-on wargame development experience that’s generally unavailable at the commissioning source level (although the US Air Force Academy’s Military & Strategic Studies department offers a wargame design course, MSS 372).
To the best of our knowledge, though, AFROTC Detachment 090 at Colorado State University is the only AFROTC detachment executing wargames like this within a chain of command and a training plan (but if not, please contact us!). We offer this as a simple template that Detachments can adopt, and thinking ecumenically, useful for sister service ROTC programs as well. We also hope this cultivates larger wargaming conversations within Detachments, between Detachments, and up through the AFROTC chain of command. Not only can we apply wargames to train our future leaders to meet, fight, and win over adversaries, but also give future leaders experience in designing training wargames. Game on!
The design team, clockwise from top left: Isaac Mount, Shawn Crook, Tyler Ortega, Nick Kauza, Saej Awa.
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