US Army Mad Scientist Initiative calling all wargamers

Originally posted to X.

Zenobia II

The website for the Zenobia Award II is now online.

The Zenobia Award is both a competition and a mentoring program in which game designers from underrepresented groups develop and submit historical tabletop game prototypes. Throughout the design process, competitors will receive mentoring and feedback from industry leaders, to help them move towards successful game publication.

The Zenobia Award seeks to attract and reward more diverse design talent in order to improve historical tabletop game design and participation and to diversify historical topics simulated in published hobby board games. It seeks to apply the Derby House principles for diversity and inclusion in professional wargaming to hobby gaming.

NATO wargame design challenge

NATO is sponsoring a wargame design challenge, intended to identify innovative ways to design wargames in support of NATO operations. The winners will be invited to an Award Ceremony at the Wargaming Initiative for NATO 2023 (Rome, 26-27 Jun 2023) at NATO’s expense. The winning solution will also receive design and/or development support from the NATO Innovation Hub and Fight Club International.

The contest is not asking for a fully-developed wargame, but rather a detailed proposal that would address:

• purpose
• intended impact
• target audience
• players
• scenario
• dimensions and domains
• objectives and winning conditions
• game system
• game space
• gameplay
• core mechanics and concepts
• other mechanics
• adjudication and combat scoring
• innovation

Proposals will be assessed for innovation, usefulness, feasibility, and model accuracy. Full information can be found at the link above.

The submission deadline in 30 April 2023. The NATO Wargame Design Challenge is cosponsored by Fight Club International, NATO Allied Command Transformation, and the NATO Innovation Hub, and is part of the Wargaming Initiative for NATO (WIN). A PAXsims report on the WIN 22 conference in Paris can be found here.

WHO GOARN RFP: infectious disease outbreak response online game

The WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) has issued a request for proposals “to develop a serious online gaming prototype, targeting multidisciplinary public health emergency responders from around the world and utilising an outbreak response scenario, to build the large-scale multidisciplinary human response capacity with the cross-cutting knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to respond to COVID-19 and other infectious disease outbreaks.”

You will find the full details of the RFP here. The closing date for applications is 2 August 2021.

Connections US: Call for game lab proposals

The organizers of the Connections US professional wargaming conference have issued a call for proposals for their “game lab” sessions. If you wish to proposal a topic for discussion, USE THIS LINK (since the ones in the image below won’t work here).

As noted above, the deadline for proposals is May 30.

“Disaster of the JOADIA Islands” AI gameathon

In conjunction with Australian Department of Defence, the Data Science and AI Association of Australia (DSAi) is hosting a virtual Gameathon to help generate ideas around the use of AI in the field of wargaming. The Gameathon is centred around the Defence Science & Technology Group (DSTG) wargame “Disaster of the JOADIA Islands” (outlined below) and has 2 challenges which cover Game Design and AI Assistance.

• Challenge 1 – Game Design: Design new game systems and rule sets for the original game to explore concepts applicable to a HADR scenario.
• Challenge 2 -AI Assistance: Exploring ways that modern AI techniques can enhance decision support for wargaming.

Prizes for each challenge = 1st $1000, 2nd $500, and 3rd $250

Contestants can register as individuals or as teams and create submissions for either or both challenges. The deadline has been extended due to COVID and DSTG and DSAi will judge the entries and award prize in late February/early March 2021.

Disaster of the JOADIA Islands is a turn-based wargame that models a Joint Task force assigned with the goal of rescuing civilians in a fictitious humanitarian aid disaster relief (HADR) scenario.

For full details visit https://joadia.dsai.org.au/

Zenobia Award: Underrepresented designers, underrepresented topics

The following announcement was written by  Dan Thurot. PAXsims is a proud supporter of the Zenobia Award.

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History is big. So big that it belongs to everybody. Every individual, no matter their background or identity, connects to history in unique and important ways.

So why do historical board game designers seem to fit into the same mold? You know the type. White, male, straight, usually academic, often a part-time dabbler in spurious facial hair.

We’ve wondered the same thing. Which is why we’re pleased to announce the Zenobia Award, a board game design contest for underrepresented groups.

That could mean you! Whether you’re a woman, person of color, LGBTQ+, or otherwise underrepresented, the Zenobia Award is all about helping you break into the tabletop game industry. That can mean boards, cards, dice, tiles, miniatures—whatever your game requires, if it’s about a historical setting, we want to help your voice be heard.

How will we do that? Good question. The Zenobia Award is more than a fancy name. It’s a mentorship, intended to pair you with industry veterans who will help develop your game into its best form. It’s an entry point, with partner publishers standing by to discover the most interesting titles and help bring them to print. And it’s a contest, complete with a cash prize, public celebration, and genuine wooden trophy analog—that’s right, a plaque!

Is there a hitch? Nope. There’s no cost of entry, no obligation to list your mentor as a co-designer, and you keep the rights to your game—unless you sign a contract with a publisher, of course. That’s entirely up to you. Being a game designer, you know the importance of the little rules. So, take a look at the fine print over at www.zenobiaaward.org and welcome to the Zenobia Award. 

RFP: Serious game application to enhance Protection of Civilians (POC) in conflict

The Center for Civilians in Conflict is seeking proposals to produce a serious game (playable on smartphones and laptop computers) aimed at soldiers and/or civilian law enforcement. The goal is to improve the behaviour of these forces towards civilians in conflict zones. Scenario content will be provided by CIVIC.

Project Information 

CIVIC seeks concise and tailored proposals to design and develop a serious game (playable on smartphones and laptop computers) aimed at soldiers and/or law enforcement members. The goal is to improve these forces’ behavior towards civilians when they encounter them in zones of armed conflict or other situations of violence.  

To achieve this goal, the serious game will first put armed actors in the shoes of civilians trapped in conflict and thereby sensitize them to the various protection needs and rights civilians have. Topics to be incorporated in the gaming content can include: stigmatization of civilians, consequences suffered from a lack of applied distinction (by armed actors) between combatants and civilians, disproportionate use of force, conflict-related sexual violence, extortion, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced displacement, and suffering caused by excessive use of force by security forces in law enforcement contexts.  

The game will then permit the armed actors to practice modifications to their behaviors and actions so that they better respect the rights of civilians, such as when operating checkpoints, calling in for close air support or plan for civilian evacuations. The content for storyboard(s) and connected decision-making trees for the players to navigate through will be provided by CIVIC.  

CIVIC is a nonprofit organization. We welcome creative, effective and cost-sensitive proposals that take a Good/Better/Best approach.  

Project Description 

The serious game app in this project will support and strengthen the pedagogical teaching by CIVIC’s Nigeria team when engaging with the Nigerian military and other security forces to instill a Protection of Civilians (POC) mindset and practical POC reflexes towards civilians when they encounter them before, during, and after their operations. The serious game app will support and complement face-to-face analog or ‘face-to-face’ virtual training sessions (including scenario-based exercises) that CIVIC has been undertaking with the Nigerian security forces at various institutional levels. This serious game app will be the first for CIVIC. It should be developed with a view to potentially expand upon with ease, so as to include more protection issues and different storylines and avatars.      

By realistically immersing the player in Nigeria’s conflict contexts, the game seeks to sensitize Nigerian security forces to the protection challenges civilians face. The game will test the players’ understanding and recognition of the various dilemmas and vulnerabilities that different civilians face when trapped in conflict (e.g., children, women, the disabled, and the elderly). As a subsequent step, the game will instill different protection reflexes amongst the players to adapt their specific behavior as a security force member to avoid and/or mitigate civilian harm. The contractor will be expected to creatively think through how to provide interesting formats, including with engaging audio and visual support to meet the deliverables above. 

The game may be displayed on our website, shared with our donors, and used in presentations by staff to illustrate the variety of approaches CIVIC uses to influence the mindset and behavior of armed actors towards civilians. The selected contractor will be expected to work closely with CIVIC’s Senior Protection Advisor based out of Washington D.C as well as CIVIC’s Nigeria program team, particularly the Nigeria Country Director and Senior Military Advisor.  

You will find full details here. The deadline for proposals in 25 August 2020.

King’s Wargaming Network support for COVID-19 serious games

Ivanka Barzashka, Director of the Wargaming Network at King’s College London, has announced a programme of grants to support serious gaming on the current COVID-19 global pandemic:

King’s has an important opportunity and responsibility to use our research expertise in support of the international response to the COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) outbreak. This goes beyond efforts to find treatments – for example into the effects of the outbreak on mental health (including through isolation), broader social and economic questions for society, the functioning of healthcare systems (including in developing countries). How can wargaming contribute to these questions?

King’s College London is offering pilot funding for King’s Wargaming Network research teams to engage with strategic partners on rapid research on this topic. Through the King’s Together programme, we will offer grants of up to £20k for groups of researchers to start work, across all disciplines.

Proposals are due 18 March and decisions will be announced on 20 March. Please contact me as soon as possible if you have an idea for a project.

Ivanka Barzashka
Director, Wargaming Network
School of Security Studies
King’s College London

The PAXsims team stands ready to assist applicants—email us if we can be of help. Please note that this is a time for client-driven, needs-driven serious gaming: it isn’t useful to propose projects that do not meet identified needs, which distract attention from more urgent tasks, or which consume human resources (such as subject matter expertise) better used in other ways. 

Dstl wargaming “show and tell”

Dstl is being sent to Coventry!

To be more specific, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) is seeking potential new suppliers to help influence future wargame development. A free “Show and Tell” event is planned with their partners at The Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry on 7 November .

Wargames can be used to explore tactical, operational and strategic issues across the business, security, emergency services, humanitarian and military sectors. Wargames encourage players to: think innovatively and creatively in a safe to fail environment; identify emerging issues; test hypotheses; assess alternate options and highlight the potential consequences of choices.

Under its Searchlight initiative, Dstl is looking for industry partners, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to help develop innovative wargaming tools, techniques, technologies and analysis. Companies need not have any experience in the defence sector. Opportunities exist across all aspects of wargame design and analysis, especially in the field of data capture, analysis and visualisation.

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Dstl will also offer the opportunity to access its expertise and peer review of the potential utility of innovative approaches and subsequently to test the best of these live in Dstl’s Defence Wargaming Centre.

The 7 November event will outline Dstl’s aims and give participants the chance to network with potential new collaborators. The dual focus will be on closed pitches from SMEs to the Dstl team of specific offers that may improve wargaming outcomes and on an open event where there will be the chance to present ‘Lightning Briefs’ to a broader audience and network informally with other participants and exhibitors.

The event is being hosted by The Manufacturing Technology Centre and supported by KTN; the UK’s Innovation Network; ADS, The Federation of Small Businesses; Team Defence Information and techUK. Dstl will also provide more information on its role in encouraging SME innovation and growth as partners in Venturefest South.

To secure a place at the event, register online at Team Defence Information.

MMOWGLImania and some thoughts on purposive social media

The impending online playtest of MMOWGLI (the “Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet,” developed for the Office of Naval Research) continues to draw considerable media coverage. One of the most recent contributions is an article in yesterday’s Washington Post:

To combat Somali pirates, the U.S. Navy has relied on warships, snipers and SEAL teams. Now, it is turning to the heavy artillery: Internet gamers.

This month, the Office of Naval Research will roll out the military’s first-ever online war game open to the public, crowd-sourcing the challenges of maritime security to thousands of “players” sitting in front of their computers.

The project — named MMOWGLI (the acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet) — is a video game for policy wonks. It aims to replicate a traditional military strategy session on an exponentially larger scale, bringing together a diverse mix of government and outside experts that would be impossible even in the largest Pentagon conference room.

Through virtual simulation and social media tools made popular on Twitter and Facebook, players will work together to respond to a series of make-believe geopolitical scenarios set off when private ships are hijacked off Somalia’s coast.

“We live in an echo chamber,” Lawrence Schuette, the naval research office’s innovation chief, said of the military. “The challenge is you always want to have an audience that’s diverse in background, diverse in thinking. It’s those intersections where you see creativity occurring. The advantage of online crowd-sourcing is obvious: You have many more intersections and many more diverse backgrounds.”

Thanks in part to pre-launch publicity, more than 7,000 people have signed up for MMOWGLI, far beyond the 1,000 that developers had anticipated for the $450,000 pilot project. Programmers from the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, Calif., that is making the software, have postponed the launch date to be sure the game has enough capacity.

There are, of course, the inevitable comparisons with the World Bank’s EVOKE online development education project. PAXsims gets a mention in the Washington Post article too, specifically in connection with the challenge of “crowd-sourcing” ideas in a way that encourages useful innovation rather than trendy (but potentially unrealistic) internet populism:

But as anyone who has spent time in an online chat room knows, moderating the debate against online bullies and sifting through thousands of comments to find quality ideas can be nearly impossible. During the EVOKE project, players coalesced around proposals that were unsustainable, such as floating greenhouses that would produce food 25 times too expensive to afford, said Rex Brynen, a professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal who blogs on strategic gaming.

“There was not enough quality control,” Brynen said of EVOKE. “Trendy development ideas that appeal to the 15- to 30-year-old age demographic catch on because they’re trendy, not because there is proof they would work.”

The quotes make me sound somewhat more negative than I am about the potential of crowd-sourcing, and certainly very more negative than I am about the remarkable innovative potential of the 15-30 demographic. Rather, my major point would be that a “build it and they will come” approach to purposive social media is a potentially self-defeating: one needs to think not only how one will hook in participants, but also how to best utilize their energy and ideas towards a clear goal. A key part of this, in turn, is thinking very strategically about the explicit and implicit reward structures and filters that might encourage high quality contributions in a way that empowers creativity but keeps it reasonably grounded in reality. In this regard, technology and flashy interfaces can be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In the case of EVOKE, while the approach has considerable potential, I did not feel that it had been executed as well as it might have been. (The World Bank Institute’s own evaluation, which you’ll find here and here, was understandably more positive. Also, have a look too at the game designers’ own reflections here.) Hopefully Season 2 of EVOKE will build on the successes of the project while addressing the weaknesses.

Since MMOWGLI has been developed to spur the development of innovative policy ideas, and since its first playtest addresses a form of hybrid warfare and emerging security threat (maritime piracy), there is another point of comparison that ought to be made, one that has yet to be raised in the media and tech commentary: Small Wars Journal. SWJ is an online community which integrates traditional online publication with a blog, discussion fora, and limited social networking tools. It does so, moreover, in a way that flattens hierarchies and encourages everyone to participate: corporals and colonels are listened to equally, and their contributions judged on the merits.

SWJ, however, does NOT have a particular trendy interface. It has no “gamification” to it at all—no built-in systems for gaining thumbs-ups, for winning avatars, or for earning status points. Despite this, the website has been widely recognized as having had substantial effect on thinking about insurgency, stabilization operations, and similar issues, within the US and around the world. SWJ even made it (together with Lady Gaga) onto Rolling Stone’s 2009 Hot List, despite having the rear end of a donkey as the focal-point of its logo.

I’m not aware that anyone who studies online communities and crowd-sourcing of policy ideas has yet looked systematically at what makes SWJ works (attention graduate students: thesis topic!). As a fairly frequent participant there, I think it has an awful lot to do with the quality of the moderation. Trolls are soon banned. Most of the participants are respectful, and the bounds of productive and unproductive dialogue are fairly well understood. Plus, of course, the “Small Wars Council” discussion forum at SWJ has Ken White. Really, what more do you need? Certainly there are weaknesses with SWJ. As they’ve expanded their publication (and received ever more contributions) they’ve had to work hard to maintain quality. Some discussions can get a bit repetitive (suppressive fire, anyone?). The participant community is not as diverse as it could be (more NGO folks, diplomats, and journalists would be useful, as would more contributors from outside NATO countries). Overall, however, it is hard to see SWJ as anything other than a success.

I think MMOWGLI is a really interesting experiment. They’ve clearly done some thinking, and I hope it works out well. In assessing its contribution, EVOKE—for all its technological parallels—is probably the wrong comparison, given its very different (educational) goals. Rather, the question that needs to be asked is how does MMOWGLI fare in generating ideas compared to a more conventional face-to-face workshop, such as the recent NATO experiment on countering hybrid threats? How does it fare compared to the more traditional online model of SWJ, or the various elements of the policy blogosphere more broadly? How do we measure this, especially given that “cost per clever idea” seems a very difficult metric to generate? And how can the project be used to further advance our understanding of leveraging the internet for purposes of policy discussion, debate, and innovation?

We’ll be following the MMOWGLI experiment with interest.

Serious games and teaching intelligence analysis

Kris Wheaton, who teaches intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College, is among those who have used serious games in the classroom—in this case, to help students develop and sharpen their analytical skills. He also writes about it on his excellent blog on intelligence matters, Sources and Methods, which is very helpful for the rest of us too.

As a recent press report on his graduate course notes:

Wheaton has embraced what’s called “game-based learning” in his graduate level strategic intelligence course for the past two years.

“I think the students expected it to be more fun than it was,” Wheaton said. “But since it began I can see an obvious increase in the quality of work.”

The course is the capstone for Mercyhurst’s applied intelligence master’s program, graduates of which go on to fields such as Homeland Security.

Students are graded on how well they learn theories behind strategy and not how well they do in games.

Second-year applied intelligence graduate student Regis Mullen said this approach to teaching allows students to take a new approach to learning.

“Students generally tailor their learning to getting a good grade,” Mullen said. “But this has to do more with reflecting on what you’ve done, and it sticks a lot better.”

Most of the games in Wheaton’s course are video games, but they aren’t all just the most popular strategy games.

You’ll find more on his classroom use of games here.

In his most recent blog post, Kris discusses “gamification, and what it means for intelligence,” including a forthcoming request for proposals for the Sirius Program of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (Office of the Director for National Intelligence). Sirius aims to produce “serious games” for analyst training:

The goal of the Sirius Program is to create Serious Games to train participants and measure their proficiency in recognizing and mitigating the cognitive biases that commonly affect all types of intelligence analysis. The research objective is to experimentally manipulate variables in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and to determine whether and how such variables might enable player-participant recognition and persistent mitigation of cognitive biases. The Program will provide a basis for experimental repeatability and independent validation of effects, and identify critical elements of design for effective analytic training in VLEs. The cognitive biases of interest that will be examined include: (1) Confirmation Bias, (2) Fundamental Attribution Error, (3) Bias Blind Spot, (4) Anchoring Bias, (5) Representativeness Bias, and (6) Projection Bias.

A “proposer’s day conference” for this is to be held in Washington DC on February 24, to inform potential partners of the impending request for proposals. I’m not sure if the meeting is FOUO or subject to non-disclosure agreements, but if it’s not and it isn’t, we would love to hear what was said.

h/t: INTELST listserv and Sources and Methods blog

UPDATE:

Kris Wheaton, who attended the event, has posted some comments below. As he notes, the SIRIUS presentation can be downloaded from the IARPA website.

World Bank = gaming geeks?

One might be excused these days from thinking that the World Bank is becoming the Games Workshop or Electronic Arts of international financial institutions. They have the Carana simulation on fragile and conflict-affected countries (which my PaxSims co-conspirator Gary Milante moderates). They have the award-winning Evoke game that Jane McGonigal designed, intended to “encourage [African] students to engage in local communities and develop innovative solutions to local development challenges.” There is SimSIP, a “set of user-friendly simulation tools that make it easier to conduct policy-oriented empirical work on a wide range of social indicators and poverty.” The World Bank is also using a role-playing simulation to help build national capacities to address problems of money laundering and corruption (designed, in this case, by another good friend and gaming buddy Tommy Fisher —which helps to explain why we haven’t been able to play D&D, 40k, Labyrinth, or steampunk Victorian zombie adventures in weeks, since he’s off travelling the world).

Now the World Bank Institute has issues a request for proposals for two new (computer) games to address processes of political coalition-building (with an initial focus on the issue of procurement reform) and urban development:

Both products are intended to enhance existing multi-national training programs and activities that emphasize the key role of coalition building in leadership. These digital games would be added to traditional materials WBI is utilizing in its leadership workshops. Preference will be given to a vendor who has already developed similar game simulations and can re-purpose an existing technology and game structure to serve this project. Each game is conceived of as a single player strategy game. Relevant examples include Executive Command and Peacemaker. The interface is expected to be simple and accessible, with easy to use game mechanics, targeted at non-gamers.

If anyone is interested, they’ll find the full RFP here. The closing date is 28 February 2011.

FURTHER THOUGHTS:

You’ll notice that the World Bank’s RFP suggests that game designers “re-purpose an existing technology and game structure to serve this project.” Well, in that case, what better lesson could there be in the importance of coalition-building stakeholder consultation—or, more accurately, the costs of failing to do those things—than World of Warcraft’s legendary Leeroy Jenkins?

It’s all there. Shared interests. Teamwork. Coordination. Dragon eggs. Chicken. They just need to somehow integrate that part about “Procurement Reforms – from legislation (passing the law) to law implementation and acceptance.” How hard can that be?