Design Matters: Tiny Epic Zombies…and Glasses

Design Matters: A series on matters relating to design, and why design thinking matters. Rex Brynen and I recently play tested Rex’s brand new copy of Tiny Epic Zombies. Our ensuing after-play discussion got us thinking about the game and certain common, irksome points we thought were design pitfalls to be avoided in any games, […]

Zombies and stabilization operations

A distant village in a war-affected country. The Visiting Foreign Official meets with village elders, as his nervous personal security detail scans for threats. Then it happens. An IED explodes. Moments later the village is assaulted by ravenous hordes of hungry undead…. Yes, that’s how it unfolded at the recent HALO Counter-terrorism summit in San […]

Prine does zombies!

Over at his website Line of Departure, investigative reporter, mil-blogger, and fashion aficionado Carl Prine has an interview with James Ian Burns (of the Dragons and Dragoons game shop in Colorado Springs) on “the growing popularity in board games amongst the troops and defense intellectuals.” The piece is entitled “Brain-eating Xmas Zombies Attack!” because it contains some […]

Zombies and simulating disaster response

In recent years we’ve seen a creeping infiltration of decaying abominations shambling into the academic and professional classrooms of the world, in search of fresh brains to prey upon. I’m not speaking of tenured professors, of course, but rather those ravenous creatures of the undead: zombies. In social sciences, for example, Daniel Drezner has used the […]

Cuba, zombies, and training psychopaths

PaxSims readers may remember the controversy over the play-as-Taliban option in the recent videogame Medal of Honor (subsequently resolved by simply renaming the Taliban-looking team in multiplayer mode “OpFor”). Now we have another case of videogames and international sensitivities:  Cuban furor at the try-to-assassinate-Castro mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops. According to the pro-Cuban website CubaDebate: What […]

Wargaming with Unity

One good thing to come out of the pandemic has been another, much more enjoyable, pandemic: Rex Brynen’s zombie appocalypse skirmish game, Viralpalooza: Played in a dark inversion of Mr Roger’s Neighbourhood, the webcam-view of the game turns regular tabletop miniatures gaming into something closer to a first person shooter. We also played a modern […]

Inside James Bond’s gaming lair

We’re inside the UK’s Defence Academy. It’s where Bond would come if he lived in the real world. Today, Major Tom Mouat MBE a specialist in gaming, modelling and simulation is briefing his visitors the Guild of Entrepreneurs on the importance of gaming. …so begins an article by David Dunkley Gyimah at Viewmagazine (Medium) on […]

Teaching conflict simulation at McGill: pandemic edition

As regular readers of PAXsims may know, I teach an undergraduate course on conflict simulation each year at McGill University. You can find reports on previous editions of the course here (2018) and here and here (2019). In Winter 2020, of course, the pandemic hit part way through the term—forcing a quick shift to online […]

Serious games – Humanitarian User Research

  In December, PaxSims’ own Tom Fisher (Imaginetic), and Matthew Stevens (LLST) were contracted by Save the Children UK to develop a research project on the potential use of serious games in humanitarian aid training. With the help of their team: Johanna Reynolds (LLST), Bianna Proceviat (Imaginetic), Catherine Benedict (Imaginetic), Sterling Perkins (Imaginetic) and Alejandra […]

Facing the apocalypse

Last week, (simulated) federal and provincial officials and members of the PAXsims team met in a top secret nuclear bunker outside Ottawa to respond to the grave threat of global pandemic. This wasn’t COVID-19, however, or even African Swine Fever. This was the zombie apocalypse. The occasion was the decidedly not-serious Apocalypse 2 North megagame and […]

Using games to explore potential conflicts between emotional reactions and analytical decision making

The following piece was written for PAXsims by Patrick Dresch. Patrick is based in Salisbury (UK), and is interested in the application of board games as training tools for emergency and disaster response. In 2019 he completed an MSc in crisis and disaster management at the University of Portsmouth, supported by a dissertation investigating the potential […]

Journal of Political Science Education special issue on simulations and games

A recent issue of the Journal of Political Science Education 15, 1 (2019) is devoted to the topic of simulations and games. Editorial JPSE 15-1 Introduction Scholarship of Teaching and Learning  Bet Out the Vote: Prediction Markets as a Tool to Promote Undergraduate Political Engagement Lukas Berg & John Chambers Teaching Judicial Politics Through a Supreme Court […]

Armchair Dragoon: wargaming civilians

  The latest edition of Armchair Dragoons’ Mentioned in Dispatches podcast features a discussion of how civil-military and non-kinetic factors are—or, more frequently, are not—represented in wargames. Following up on an earlier episode of Mentioned in Dispatches, Doug & Jim are back to join guest Rex Brynen in talking about all those non-military considerations during armed conflict, […]

Alas, poor Windsor: An APOCALYPSE NORTH megagame report

On February 17, some one hundred participants took part in the fourth annual McGill megagame, APOCALYPSE NORTH. The United States is descending into chaos as it is overrun by mindless undead abominations. Can Canada survive the murderous zombie menace from the south? Can Ottawa, Québec, and Ontario overcome their differences in time? Players assumed the […]

Simulation & Gaming (October 2018)

The latest issue of Simulation & Gaming 49, 5 (October 2018) is now available. Symposium: Research in Health and Healthcare Simulation Editorial Healthcare Simulation Research in Simulation and Gaming: Past, Present, and Future Taylor Sawyer and Mindi Anderson Research Articles A Brain-Based Instruction Simulation Approach to Improve Code Team Response in an Internal Medicine Unit Timothy C. […]