Comments Off on Ace of Aces: or, why you should Do Maths as a game designer
Posted by Kit Barry on 02/03/2024
Every now and again you come across something that stretches your brain in a new direction. Last week I stumbled on a magic trick of a Choose Your Own Adventure: Al Leonardi’s Ace of Aces, a paper computer running a first-person shooter, programmed in 1980—eleven years before Wolfenstein 3D, the “first” first-person shooter.
Wait what? A physical game can be a computer?
There are of course, all sorts of early “computers” of various flavours that predate what we generally mean when we talk about computer programs:
Jaquet Droz’s The Writer: a 1770 programmable automaton that could hand-write tweets
All of these devices share a common limitation: they may be programable to a degree, but they solve a singular problem: the Writer can only hand-write a message stored in his main cam “memory”, the Difference Engine and Curta perform particular mathematical operations, fire control computers perform only that calculation…the device is the program, in the same way that Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter, not the computer or operating system or programming language used to make it run. And when you start to think of programming in these terms, all sorts of interesting “computer programs” are there to be explored:
Computer programs are just algorithms—often big and quite complex—but at their heart, just a list of mathematical instructions:
Add two numbers
Subtract two numbers
…and from there all mathematics is possible… (seriously. That’s what a slide rule does: “multiplication” is just adding the value several times.)
You can encode these operations in a (real) computer program by writing code. You can encode them mechanically. One of my favourite YouTubes of all time is the 1950s US Navy educational film explaining how mechanical computers perform maths:
And if you know a little about analogue electronics, you know that basic electrical circuits just do maths, and from there you can create all the complex logic of analogue and digital computing. Which is a long way of saying: if you can say something with maths, you can construct an algorithm that computes it.
Board games are doing this all the time and we just don’t think about it so much:
Sometimes the player performs operations to physically compute for the game: rolling a dice for a random number.
Sometimes the state of the board is the computation. You see this kind of trick used to modify player abilities directly inside game mechanics: when you “score” with pieces otherwise used to play the game, removing them from the board to track your score imposes a mechanical disadvantage: in the 2-player game Yinsh, you move one of your three rings to construct 5-in-a-row patterns—but when you connect five, one of your rings comes off the board to signal this, reducing the options you have to connect five again.
From a particular frame of reference, this is an algorithm encoding some pretty sophisticated maths.
Sometimes the computation is encoded in a look-up table. These can be simple conversion factors, like the 4:1 ratio to trade resources with the bank in Catan, or fairly complex range tables for weapon class vs armour class used in the Wargames Research Group games.
Choose Your Own Adventures are essentially a look-up table: after each page the player is presented with a list of options and the page to turn to if you choose that option—a look-up table that converts their choice into the next page number.
What’s so interesting about Ace of Aces?
First: what is Ace of Aces? It’s a two-player World War One dogfighting game. One of you is the Red Baron, one of you is Snoopy Biggles, and you attempt to line the other up in your sights for some dakka dakka dakka. So far so several other board games. What sets Ace of Aces apart is the ingenious interface: you play with a pair of picture books, one for the German pilot, one for the Allied pilot. Each page of the book shows you the view of your enemy given your current position.
Each page has a list of manoeuvres you can choose from and the page to turn to that “performs” the manoeuvre. I’ve put “performs” in quotes, but as we’ll see, the look-up table actually has this maths encoded into the page numbers, it’s some sneaky-clever design.
Your opponent tells you the page number for their move and you turn to that page. Then you look up your move in the look-up table you find there, and—by the Power Of Awesomeness it will take you to the same page number as your opponent gets to by turning to the page for your move and then looking up their move.
The entire game is encoded into these paired books:
No matter what manoeuvres you and your opponent pick, you always end up on the same page number.
For any given page number, the relative positions of the two planes are the same in both books. One shows the view from the German aircraft, the other shows the view looking back the other way.
Both players are on page 170. The Allied player sends the German player to page 64, the German player sends the Allied player to page 54:
…where we see the Allied player side-slips left, and the German player makes a stall-turn right…
Both players end up on page 15
There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here! But before we dive into how the magic trick works (maybe your maths brain has an inkling of what may be involved ?), let’s take a minute to appreciate:
The sheer simplicity of play:
You look at a picture of the game state
You choose a move
You and your opponent turn to the page number for each-other’s moves
You look up your move on that intermediate page, and turn to that page number which is the new game state
Repeat.
There are no dice, no counters, no moving parts. You don’t even need to be in the same place as your opponent, you just need to be able to give each other page numbers. It takes less than a minute to learn how to play—even though you now have full control over a pretty sophisticated flying machine—and creates quick-fire play that makes total sense in the seat-of-your-pants early aviation era.
Error correction is effortlessly built in: if you don’t end up on matching page numbers, one of you goofed.
The framing is brilliant. The first-person view from the cockpit is so immersive, and it’s key to the simplicity of play. The state of the game and manoeuvre options (drawn as pictures of the manoeuvre) are intuitive—but that rare kind of intuitive that makes sense to subject matter experts who know how to fly a plane for real, and casual gamers who know nothing about flying or WW1.
One of the reasons the game works so well is the lever you’re given to pull is perfect. The game moves at the speed of your thoughts: you don’t have to pull the yoke and throttle and set the flaps correctly, you can’t “fail” to perform your action—the game is that your opponent isn’t sitting still while you do it.
You are in full control of this aircraft: it’s not like you pick “do you want to break left or right?” and then sit back and watch a cut scene of the dogfight where the next dozen decisions are made for you. There’s no system to beat your opponent at beating—and that is part of what makes this game endlessly re-playable.
When I talk about this game as a paper computer, it’s because you’re playing something much closer to a genuine flightsim than a board or card game.
And it turns out that the framing is the secret sauce to everything about this game.
It’s all about perspectives.
One of the big lessons to learn in programming for game design is that the visuals and the game state are not the same thing—the visuals at the front end isn’t necessarily driving how the back end works. Tetris has “falling” blocks but the game is not about gravity and “falling”, that’s just a visual representation of a time limit. (Not Tetris illustrates this point perfectly.)
Ace of Aces is doing something sneaky-clever in the background:
First of all, the game is secretly a hex-based game.
But Kit! You said this game was not like the other hex-based WW1 dogfighting games. And that’s true for the player 😉 and also true for the game, because yes, the game is using hexes, but not like Richtofen’s War or any other hex-based wargame.
In these games, the map is made of hexes. You have hex-based movement relative to a fixed point of reference—the topology of the map. The movement is absolute—the value itself matters.
Ace of Aces is using hexes, but there is no map. Movement is relative to your current position. The absolute value is irrelevant, the change in the value between one turn and the next is all that matters. This works because the game is first-person: the only thing that matters is where is the enemy relative to your current position. Not only is this the first-person perspective, but it’s what makes the system manageable in an analogue format—the first-person view of every possible relative position of the German aircraft from the Allied aircraft is 222…almost exactly the number of pages in the paired books (page 223 is the “ohnoes! You lost them” page).
If the German plane is dead ahead of you, it looks the same regardless of how you got here. If there were a map, the view of the aircraft would be the same whether the two aircraft where head-to-head over the field or the stand of trees or the country lane between them. If there was a map and the map actually mattered, the first-person perspective would require ~1,400 pages per map hex to show the appropriate landscape under both planes (223 unique relative positions of Allied and German aircraft, times the six unique orientations of the perspective aircraft relative to the map hex).
This trick of stationary player, moving world, is another reason why calling Ace of Aces a program feels right: this is how computer games work. Your monitor is a stationary window onto the game world that is moving relative to you. It’s an easy trick for the computer to pat its head and rub its stomach and have the dogfight happen in relative space—hexes that aren’t map hexes—while simultaneously moving the map beneath you as a separate calculation.
This relative frame of reference is also going to be familiar to anyone who has done old-school air-to-air lethality analysis: the endgame of a missile versus an aircraft doesn’t care about where they are in absolute space, just relative to each other—and in fact you especially don’t care about any permutation of endgame geometry where the missile isn’t on an intercept course with the aircraft (duh, it’s going to miss), so it was common to separate out the different computations of “do they intercept?” and “if they intercept, what’s the damage?”, the latter being stuffed into a lookup table that gives you the lethality that your six-degrees-of-freedom flightsim can call on. The frame of reference called GW372 is explicitly relative to the aircraft (or missile) being shot at. So, yes, Ace of Aces is a FORTRAN flightsim.
The other sneaky trick that Ace of Aces is doing comes back to the reciprocal perspectives again, but from another angle. Hold onto your hats, here comes the maths!
A Transformation Matrix is a magic number you can multiply by, to get from one position and rotation to another. It’s sort of like converting between degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, or meters and kilometres—the transformation matrix is the “conversion factor” to teleport from a given position and rotation in the world to another.
Why that’s important is the magical property they have when our world position is not absolute, but relative:
Let’s say the Allied aircraft is at A, and the German aircraft is a G
And we say the transformation matrix of the Allied aircraft’s manoeuvre is a
And the transformation matrix of the German aircraft’s manoeuvre is g
Then Aga = Gag
That is, if we apply the enemy’s manoeuvre to ourselves, then do our manoeuvre, we end up at the correct position and rotation relative to the other aircraft, given our respective starting points and manoeuvres. And because the books are paired, that’s also the same page number: the books show the two aircraft in the same relative positions on any given page, just one book shows the view of that is from the German perspective and the other book is from the Allied perspective.
The clue to this is in that intermediate page: if you pay attention to the pictures, the page your opponent sends you to is literally showing you their aircraft’s movement relative to your current position, before you’ve taken your move.
You can tell because of another concept called the Identity Matrix: the transformation matrix that does no movement and no rotation—the “multiply by 1” or “add 0” equivalent. Because we’re not using the hexes for a map—because it’s relative movement, not absolute—there is a “no movement, no rotation” option, and if your opponent chooses it, they send you to…the page you’re currently on as the intermediate page, because no relative change in position or rotation! Remember the intermediate page shows you their movement relative to you while you’re not moving. And if you look up the Identity manoeuvre on any page it always says the page number that you’re currently on.
Ok but how on earth do you make a book that does this ?!?!
You can read the fairly obtuse patent here. It’s not particularly easy to parse, because of a lack of good diagrams and the generalisation to all possible interpretations of the IP, but I managed to unpick how it works and how to make my own paired-books. Hats off to Leonardi who did this (literally) with string, transparencies, and a banda machine. I ended up creating the tools to create my own paired-books as the by-product of trying to visualise the patent description.
The game takes place on a hex grid. Coordinate systems for hex grids are…interesting…but in this case we don’t need an x or y axis, we just need a notation system for each cell of the grid, and the six possible orientations an aircraft can have in any given cell. Leonardi’s system puts hex 0 at the centre, and winds the cell numbers clockwise from the top left. The orientations take a letter, and also wind clockwise from the top left.
Secretly, you start every turn at the centre of this grid in position 0A, the origin in this notation.
The enemy aircraft can be in any position and rotation on the grid, giving you all possible relative positions and rotations to each other. They have some relative position and rotation to you. Meanwhile they see themselves from position 0A and see you at the reciprocal of that relative position. That can make your brain ache a little.
The first thing to do is construct a list of the reciprocal positions: if you move the Allied aircraft to any given position and rotation on the grid, taking its frame of reference with, which cell position and rotation of the Allied aircraft’s grid is now at the “origin”. This is the kind of thing my brain finds extremely slippery, so I drew a picture—or, rather, I constructed the grid in Unity, wrote some code that let me set the position and rotation of the Allied aircraft, and asked Unity “hey, what cell number and letter is in that position now please?”
(Well spotted: these are not aircraft 😉 more on that later.)
I did this initially so I could follow the example in the patent and set the Allied player to the position in the worked example and confirm what the obtuse language was even talking about. But, having written a script that lets me set the values by hand, it was a short step to writing a loop to iterate through all of them to read the result and write out the table to Excel. What you end up with is a somewhat symmetric result: when the enemy is in front of me, I am behind them. When they are to my east, I am to their west.
This is the key to determining the page number for any given relative position: you go through the list of all possible positions and rotations and assign each a unique page number for the Allied book. For each page in the Allied book, the reciprocal view in the German book shares that page number—so position 0B in the Allied book shares a page number with position 0F in the German book. This is easy to conceptualise if you iterate through the German positions and rotations in the same order as the Allied ones, but instead of copying the page number directly, you look up the Allied page number for the reciprocal position.
This has created you a lookup table for the correct page number for Allied and German relative positions on the hex grid. You can put it aside while we change gear to think about manoeuvring.
We know that the transformation matrices we need work independent of the other player, which is super-handy. It simplifies everything that follows to just thinking about one aircraft moving at a time.
How does a manoeuvre work ? You begin your turn at the origin. In purely mathematical terms, your available moves are to any other position and rotation on the grid, but in practical terms your aircraft is only so manoeuvrable. The allowed moves in Ace of Aces are:
This is how the manoeuvre symbols match the hex grid movement. You’ll notice it’s not entirely symmetric, because the torque of a rotary engine makes it much easier to turn and spin with the propeller, not against it. You can also tune “allowed” moves to match the capability of a particular aircraft (and that’s why there is a whole series of these books that you can use interchangeably in any Allied-German pair: the underlying reciprocal page numbers, hex grid and movement are the same, but some planes don’t have access to all the manoeuvres).
A particular manoeuvre will change your position and rotation by the same amount regardless of your starting position and rotation—the manoeuvre is a transformation matrix—and the Identity manoeuvre, that has zero change in position and rotation, is the clue to what happens next:
The intermediate page number for any given manoeuvre—the one you tell to your enemy—is the page number that corresponds to your destination taking that move from 0A. That destination encodes the movement of your aircraft relative to the origin in a transformation matrix that can be applied to your enemy to make it the movement relative to their current position and rotation. …if that makes your hair catch on fire, think about vectors and co-ordinates:
If you have a point (2, 4) that’s the same as having a vector—a line—that goes from position (0, 0) to position (2, 4). If I add another vector (3, 1) to this point, we’re taking the vector that goes from (0, 0) to (1, 3), moving it to put the (0, 0) at position (2, 4) and then drawing the line from (2, 4) to whatever position (2, 4) + (3, 1) is. The addition can happen in either order, we still end up at (5, 5).
(This is literally the maths we’re doing to add an Allied aircraft manoeuvre to the German aircraft’s position. It is just 2D vectors, but because hex grid it’s ugly.)
What we need to do is construct a matrix of every possible position and rotation we could land at vs where the enemy could land at—this is easy to do in code by iterating through all combinations for each aircraft—and for each, reduce it to the corresponding unique situations in our first table. We only care about relative positions. This is what I mean when I say secretly the Allied aircraft starts every turn at 0A. That relative position is the intermediate page you’re going to send the enemy aircraft to, and you get the page number for it by looking it up in that first table.
What you end up with is this monster matrix of all possible intermediate destinations, and one strip of it is what you find at your intermediate destination: for a given actual manoeuvre your enemy chose, the row or column of your manoeuvres is the final destination for all the manoeuvres you could have chosen. If you go to the one for the manoeuvre you already told your enemy, then magically you both end up on the same page. Otherwise, the maths breaks, because you’re not applying the same transformation matrix to both aircraft.
Instead of Aga = Gag
You’ll have Agb =/= Gag
The page numbers won’t match because (in an absolute frame of reference) the Allied aircraft will be at 0A looking towards the German aircraft at (say) 5B, while the German aircraft will be at 9F looking towards the Allied aircraft at 0A. And if you both gave the other one manoeuvre and then performed a different one from your intermediate page, we’d have a situation where Agb =/= Gah.
In both these situations you get a view of the world (because that’s the nature of the book!) but it’s not reciprocal, which breaks everything about a relative frame of reference. Given this, isn’t it a brilliant idea to have the reciprocal positions have matching page numbers? The game contains its own parity check.
It would be entirely possible to make the paired-books where the relative positions don’t have matching page numbers, but you’d never know when the two hex positions were actually out of sync, you’d just be chasing your own tail with nonsense page turns.
This has made the manoeuvre table that’s common to both players. Leonardi did this by hand for all 222 permutations. Praise be for C#, which whips through all the combinations for me quicker than I can blink and writes them out to an Excel file.
This is all the possible moves; you can narrow it to only certain moves.
Certain permutations result in the two aircraft further apart than our little hex grid. These are the manoeuvres that will take you to that “ohnoes! You lost them” 223rd page. You’re out of range of the other aircraft.
All possible moves for the Allied player across the top, German player down the side. Lost Contact at the red cells.
Next you need to convert the hex cell references (position and rotation) to the page numbers for the Allied player, and German player, using the first table as the look-up. That last bit using the reciprocal value for the German book is the thing that closes the loop on our transformation matrices, because remember we computed the whole table from the perspective of the Allied aircraft. Now with a reciprocal pair of tables, it works that you’re giving a page number to your enemy for your move, and they’re giving you a page number for their move. Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I’m blown away by Leonardi’s conception. It’s fiendishly clever.
The final step to make the books is to pair up the starting position page with the strip out of this matrix of possible intermediate pages. That’s where Leonardi had to put down the slide rule and start drawing pictures. 446 of them. But since I’m using Unity to move hex grids around to generate all these page numbers…why don’t I attach 3D objects to the grids and cameras and take a screenshot of each relative position while I’m working out its cell reference?
This is art: using a game engine to write a program to encode a program into paper computer. (I wonder if there’s a way to 3D print a game engine out of a paper computer…?)
Oh, and also: because I’ve automated this process, it takes…less than a second…to generate the pages of these books. And the same program can write the Excel spreadsheet that allows me to automate turning them into a hyperlinked pdf (it’s Turtles all the way down), which means I can easily generate more complicated grids than Ace of Aces. So I did.
Behold: Ace of U-boats:
Open fire with the deck guns!
a 4-hex grid…
…with two layers for the U-boat—surfaced, or submerged
and (hold onto your hats) non-euclidean geometry: I cheated the hex grid scale at the different ranges because close-up you need to be working at a roughly-one-ships’-length scale (70 yards), but I want to play out to asdic ranges (3,500 yards) without having a gaziilion grid cells in between. Because we’re in relative geometry space, this totally works; the reciprocal distances are always self-consistent.
Also, I used minimap tricks to create the asdic screen for the screenshot, which feels like adding one more layer of inception: using a games engine to program a computer game to encode a program in a paper computer. If I can get Midjourney to play the game for me, I’m pretty sure there’ll be a phone call for Professor Falken.
Contact! The Asdic always shows contacts relative to your ships’ orientation, but the look out view is looking in the direction of that contact. The indicator shows the relative bearing your looking towards, with 0deg being ahead of the ship (also, the stars are a fixed point of reference 😉)
But how can I apply this to games that aren’t 2-player first-person shooters?
A particularly rich vein of interesting maths for boardgames are nomograms: the paper version of cam-based mechanical computing. They are a close-cousin of slide rules (nomograms with moving parts) like theslide rule for general maths, the planimeter for integration (measuring the area under a graph), or for solving relative motion problems: the manoeuvring board, the Battenberg Course Indicator, and the U-boat Attack Disc.
They’re basically just a multi-dimensional look-up table—one that’s much easier to use than cross-referencing a bunch of look up tables (I’m looking at you, weapon vs armour class vs range charts!) Here’s a nice example from the Conduct of Anti-U-Boat operations in WW2:
Suppose you are in command of an escort, and you get a report of a U-boat sighting. You want to steam over and then find the U-boat, obviously…but by the time you get there, the U-boat will have moved. The longer it takes you to arrive at its last-known location, the bigger the area you’ll need to search to find it. How big an area ? Well, that depends on how far away you are, how fast you travel, how long you wait before starting out…
Brian Train, a renowned figure in the world of wargaming, has dedicated his life to the art of designing and playing war-themed board games. With a background in political science and a passion for history, Train has become a respected authority in the field. His impressive portfolio includes games that cover a wide range of conflicts and historical periods, from guerrilla warfare in Algeria to the intricacies of modern warfare. Train’s extensive knowledge and innovative game designs have earned him a well-deserved reputation as a wargaming expert.
Recently, Train had the unfortunate experience of coming across a book about wargaming that left much to be desired. While he maintains a respectful and constructive approach to most aspects of the wargaming community, he couldn’t help but express his disappointment with this particular publication. Without delving into specifics, Train noted that the book lacked the depth, insight, and accuracy that wargamers typically seek in their literature. While not going into detail, Train’s critique is a reminder that even the most seasoned experts can encounter underwhelming resources in their field, and it serves as a valuable lesson for those seeking to expand their knowledge in the world of wargaming.
Well, that’s the ChatGPT summary of Brian’s recent review of a wargaming book, coupled with some AI artwork. Go read what he ACTUALLY said about this ill-fated purchase here.
The following item was written for PAXsims by Ivanka Barzashka. Dr. Barzashka is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Analytica, a British-American tech startup dedicated to powering the emerging science of wargaming through technology for national security and defence applications. She was a founding director of the Wargaming Network at King’s College London, serving as its co-director (2018-2019) with Professor Philip Sabin, director (2019-2020) and managing director (2020-2022) working with Dr David Banks as academic director.
A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed a surprising lack of scientific and ethical oversight over analytical wargames, which inform UK defence decisions. According to the MOD, only a single study was submitted for Ministry of Defence Research Ethics Committee (MODREC) review over the past five years.
This is not a uniquely British problem. The 2023 King’s College London survey of over 140 wargame designers across 19 countries suggests that 80 percent bypassed ethics reviews of their analytical wargames, disregarding norms for research studies involving human participants.
MOD Ethics Requirements
The MOD mandates MODREC ethics review for all studies that meet three criteria: (1) are MOD-funded or involve MOD-funded staff or participants, (2) are research defined as “the attempt to derive generalisable or transferable new knowledge to answer or refine relevant questions with scientifically sound methods”, and (3) gather data from human participants.
According to these criteria, all analytical wargames that are sponsored by the MOD or involve MOD participants should undergo ethics review. Low risk wargaming studies still require the MOD sponsor to submit a MODREC application, but this will trigger a “proportionate review process allows for a rapid (10 working day) turn-around,” as opposed to a full committee review.
All applications go through a two-step process. First, they undergo a scientific review “to ensure that the research is properly designed and planned” and ensure the “quality research will also be safe, ethical, legal and feasible.” This assessment is done by a Scientific Assessment Committee. If this review is successful, the application proceeds to an ethics review during a full meeting of MODREC, except where there is “minimal risk, minimal burden and minimal intrusion for research participants” and “minimal risk to researchers”. In these circumstances, applications are reviewed “by a sub-committee rather than at a full meeting of MODREC”.
However, the FOIA response suggests most MOD analytical wargaming studies fail to comply with these guidelines.
The Need for Ethics Compliance
Analytical wargaming should adhere to established academic integrity and ethics standards. These principles include mitigating risks, ensuring informed consent and privacy, and promoting participant welfare. Independent oversight provides accountability for these protections. Institutional research ethics committees help assess and address these risks.
The single 2021 application released under our FOIA request provides a valuable example of MODREC’s rigorous scrutiny of an observational wargaming study. Before granting an approval, the committee asked the researcher to improve their protocols around participant exclusion criteria, the consent process, data usage policies, and risk mitigations. This enhanced protections for the study participants.
Why Has Wargaming Lacked Oversight?
For one, authoritative guidelines, like NATO’s wargaming handbook released in September 2023, and the UK’s 2017 variant, do not mention ethics requirements. Additionally, government institutions that sponsor these games often do not mandate formal compliance with research ethics standards. Furthermore, ethical reviews can be time-consuming because they require extensive documentation and lengthy approval processes, which can conflict with the pressing timelines of policy decisions.
Conclusion
Strengthening protections for human participants must remain a top priority. As universities and militaries conduct more wargaming research, robust, independent ethics review will be essential to uphold integrity and minimize risks. The current oversight gap highlights the pressing need to reinforce MODREC and expand review of defence wargaming studies.
Urban environments are crucial in modern warfare and will remain so in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the analysis of urban operations is among the key functions of conflict simulations in professional and educational environments. An interesting example intersecting the educational and hobby wargaming is We Are Coming, Nineveh, a game designed and developed by Harrison Brewer, Juliette Le Ménahèze, Rex Brynen, Brian Train, and published by Nuts! Publishing. Here, I provide my impressions of it as a game along some considerations on how it can be used educationally.
The game itself is available from Nuts! Publishing. It was first developed in my conflict simulation course at McGill University, and you can find more on its design here at PAXsims.
I did a presentation on We Are Coming, Nineveh! recently for the San Diego Historical Games Convention, discussing both the Battle of Mosul and how it is represented in the wargame design. Here it is for those who might be interested.
The following article is written by Elizabeth “Betsy” Joslyn, a Research Associate for the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division for the Institute for Defense Analysis. Her game research and design has largely focused on great power competition, mis/disinformation, and risk literacy. She received a Master of Science in Terrorism and Homeland Security Policy at American University’s School of Public Affairs. In addition, Betsy served in the Peace Corps in Zambia working as an aquaculture specialist. She recently joined PAXsims as a Research Associate.
In the last decade, the boardgame industry has had an unprecedented surge. The global boardgame market value is currently estimated between $11 billion and $13.4 billion and is projected to grow in just the next 5 years.[1]
One of the driving elements of this surge is connected to the rewarding sense of community and fun that gameplay elicits. In addition, many of us find ourselves slowly crawling out of Gollum’s COVID-cave blinded by excessive computer screen lighting and desperate for some human interaction. Board games have come to the rescue.
To match the demand, there has been an explosion of new games from not only seasoned game designers like Volko Ruhnke and Jamey Stegmaier, but also of new game designers such as Kevin Bertram, founder of Fort Circle Games and Tory Brown, who was empowered by Fort Circles to design the game Votes for Women.
A historical view of wargames and traditional table top games shows us that many of these games were made by men for men and usually feature topics, characters and strategies represented in gendered ways.[2] The recent uptick in game design and game play has given way to more categories and themes, prettier boxes and higher quality game pieces. In many cases, the rules are simpler and there are more offerings that focus on cooperation rather than competition.[3] The result of these significant additions has opened the gaming community, expanding the player base and inspiring topics and themes within the genre of gaming that have not yet been tapped. Despite the bigger game table, your average gaming organization, club, and community still seem to be male dominated.
In a recent review of gender dynamics in boardgames, Tanya Pobuda, foundthat 92.6 per cent of the designers of the 400 top-ranked board games on BoardGameGeek were men. After reviewing 1,974 figures from board game cover art analyses, Pobuda’s analysis showed that male imagery was predominant. Images of men and boys represented 76.8 per cent of the human representation on covers, or 647 images in games such as Great Western Trail (2016) and War of the Ring: Second Edition (2012), compared to 23.2 per cent of the images of women and girls, which represented only 195 of the images counted as seen in games with more gender representation like Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015).[4]
All this say, there are still more men sitting at the table than there are women. I recently had the opportunity to interview Tory Brown to discuss her game that was publicly released in December 2022. Votes for Women, a card driven game on the ratification of the 19th Amendment, captures and celebrates the struggle by inviting players to join the suffrage movement, organize support, and campaign for victory across the 48 states in 1919-1920. Tory’s game is highly relevant to the centennial celebration of Women’s Suffrage Movement, but another significant biproduct of a game on women’s rights has appropriately inspired more women to play games.[5]
During our conversation, Tory noted that “for many people, gaming is an escape. It’s a reprieve from day to day responsibilities; an activity to do with friends and peers. In terms of wargaming, it is not a usually a family activity. However, there are many gamers who want to include their loved ones in an activity they love so much. That being said, their wives and daughters might not be as interested in battling (or sometimes playing) Nazis as much as they are.” Rather than using trickery to get new players to the table, it is so much more effective and rewarding to coax new players with a story that they can resonate with and connect with.
“People see Votes for a Women as an entry point,” Tory commented. “Dads especially want to play this game with their wives, with their daughters, with their loved ones. In this way, Votes for Women has become the vehicle that men are using to bring the women in their lives to the gaming table as it hits a sweet spot for people that want to play something a little more complicated than Monopoly and want to play a game on an issue that retains some salience or resonance for them. Votes for Women will expose players to core ideas, concepts, and mechanics in a way that can make other games, like Twilight Struggle by Jason Matthew, more approachable and easier to understand because you’ve already mastered these elements at an entry level.”
Bringing more women into gaming is crucial for two reasons. The first being that diverse players enrich gameplay by bringing different perspectives, and thus creative strategies, to the table. Divergent viewpoints encourage players to challenge biases.[6] Tory added “being tied to tradition creates a bias that can stifle innovation; yet, there is a language to game play and game design.” Tory’s expertise highlights that understanding that language can unlock the ability to take stories that resonate with people resonate and create an educational and engaged experience via games. In theme with the game, a fresh perspective on game design seems to fall perfectly in line with the vision of the suffrage movement in breaking traditional biases and showcasing the benefit of diverse representation.
The second benefit is that a diverse gaming demand will inspire more diverse game designs. As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons we see more male game players is typically because many of these boardgames have been made for men by men. As the player base becomes more diverse, the demand for more diverse games will increase, prompting even more games that cover and address topics and themes that have seldom been explored and that deeply resonate with society.
Votes for Women is so much more than an excellent historical and artistic review of a crucial moment in history. It is so much more than an extremely relevant and educational lesson on campaigning strategies and ratification challenges. This is a story that men, women, gamers, and the gamers to be have joined so that the boardgame torch can be carrying to new heights. If it’s not on your shelf, it should be.
This text is a must read for those using simulations in their classrooms and seeking to demonstrate their utility to sceptical colleagues or institutions. The book is useful in bringing together a range of arguments in favour of the pedagogical contribution of games to classrooms as well as some clears guides of ‘how to’ incorporate games, how to design games and how to tie them to methods of assessment. I think the book also does an excellent job of demonstrating that simulations and games can be used in a range of teaching settings in political science – for example in teaching political theory classes (chapters 4 and 13), government courses (chapters 7, 8 and 10), law courses (chapter 11) and electoral politics (chapter 12) – as well as in the more traditional area of international relations (chapters 14 and 15).
To achieve these aims the text is organised into three parts: pedagogical foundations of games and simulations; designing and teaching games; and conclusions. Essentially, this structure means the editors take a reader through the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of games in the political science and international relations disciplines. A core strength of this approach is in how the chapters speak to one another. For example, Edmond Hally’s chapter (pp.42-55) makes an argument for lengthier and more realistic games for achieving a range of student learning outcomes (SLOs) in particular when games are incorporated into the structure of teaching within modules/units. Hally discusses the relationship between SLOs and games as being either intrinsic or extrinsic to module or classroom, noting that extrinsic incorporation of an abstract game “has a connection to the most basic class SLO – knowledge of course political theories – but never produced any statistically significant learning gains for the final exam.” (p.49) In contract Hally notes that the more realistic role play game produced better overall scores in the final exam and intrinsically connected to more of the SLOs for the course.
David Clayborn and Mark Harvey, acknowledge this conclusion but then argue that shorter games with simpler design may be a better entry point for convincing colleagues who are less convinced of the educational value of games, offering structures for the games and how to simplify them but also lists of prompts or discussion questions . As such this chapter does an excellent job of providing “tips, ideas and visions” (p.71) of how to incorporate games into their courses/modules/programmes. My slight critique here is that this chapter might perhaps have been better at the front of the section of the collection rather than at the end.
Lucy Britt’s chapter on Medicare and lobbying (pp.114-126) is both practical (in terms of how to use this simulation in your own class) as well as providing a grounding for this activity in relation to debates on ‘active learning’ (p.114) and pedagogy. The way this chapter is presented also means that teachers can adapt this simulation to a range of classes and levels (pp.121-122).
Mark Harvey’s chapter on “Taking a Risk” (chapter 14, pp.233-255) is useful in demonstrating the utility of using the game ‘Risk’ for international relations. This chapter as two objectives which it clearly achieves: to demonstrate how to use the game Risk in the classroom (and tie it to learning objectives); and to set out evidence for the contribution of this approach for student learning.
I would argue this book is therefore a must read for those considering using games or simulations in a variety of political science settings. I would also argue that it is useful for anyone already using games who wants to adapt their approach, try different styles of games, deepen, or change the connection of their games to their pedagogy, or even as a discussion text for teaching forums within universities and colleges.
Influence, Inc. Curious Bird, 2022. Game designer: Amanda Warner. USD$11.99 via Steam and Humble, for Mac and PC.
As a political scientist, influence games have always interested me. Information management, message framing, propaganda and disinformation figured prominently in the Brynania peacebuilding simulation and in many of the megagames I’ve designed or helped run. Last year I was involved in several influence games being conducted by or for NATO members, variously swaying elections, undermining democracies, and supporting all sorts of nefarious activities as a leader of the Red team. Most of the matrix games I’ve been involved in—whether exploring the war against ISIS or the dangers of African Swine Fever—have had messgaing and influence as a central game dynamic. Even as I write this review, I’m involved in two game design projects that have information as a central elements: the second phase of the READY project on infectious disease response (which will focus, in part on, risk communication and community engagement), and a newsgathering simulation for CNN Academy.
I’m also impressed with Amanda Warner’s work as a game designer. For those reasons, I was excited to play her latest game, Influence, Inc.
In Influence, Inc. you are a senior executive in advertising/social media firm, seeking to influence public perceptions to support your clients. Some of this is quite benign, for example adding clout to a new product launch. Some of it is a little more dubious, like helping public figures recover from scandals. And some of it is downright nefarious, working for political leaders and governments to defame opponents, undermine (or support) popular protests, and influence elections—often covertly, in a way that provides your client with a degree of plausible deniability. It’s all very Madison Avenue meets Cambridge Analytica.
To do all this, you have access to a network of social media accounts (“online persona” or bots) to insert and signal-boost messages. You can use your team to turn boring press releases and other information into potentially viral content and memes. You can target social media advertising at selected demographics. On the darker side, your “compromiser” can dig up dirt on selected targets, and you can leak information to various media outlets if you would prefer to insert it into the public domain through an intermediary.
Throughout, you’ll have access to information on what content is trending, opinion polling, and the status of petitions. The objective of the game is to earn as much money as possible by accepting and completing contracts within specified periods of time. Be careful which contracts you accept, however, or you might be messaging against yourself!
I though Influence, Inc. was lively, witty, and addressed key elements of modern influence operations and social/media ecosystems. Anyone designing an influence game—including manual ones—would be well advised to play it for inspiration.
I also see the game having potential instructional value as a homework “play” assignment for courses on the media or modern information technology. My only caveat here is that, despite a tutorial mode that explains game controls and options as they become available, some students will feel overwhelmed by the plethora of information, choices, and interface options presented to them—despite everything you hear about Gen-Z “digital natives,” a quite significant proportion of contemporary students still struggle when asked to play an unfamiliar game. Here, I recommend you explain the main interface items in class before sending them off to play it at home. You should also urge students to make liberal use of the pause button to stop the clock as they decide what to do. In the longer term, an instructional guide addressing core game components and interface, key assumptions and game dynamics, and debrief questions to consider after the game is over would be very useful.
Give it a try yourself!
No shadowy foreign interests, bots, media leaks, or covert funding were involved in the writing of this review.
First, there are stark limits as to what any wargame “not about Ukraine” can teach you about the current war in Ukraine, especially a commercial hobby or entertainment game.
I've played over 1,000 hours of Civilization VI. Here's how Ukraine can defeat Russia. (1/47)
Second, as Nicholas Moran noted in a recent video, it is tempting to draw conclusions based on the images and videos available on social media and elsewhere. However, this is problematic in many respects: not only do they represent only a very small part of what is going on, but most have been recorded, edited, and disseminated in support of various narratives.
Having said all that however, I want to reflect on two sets of “not Ukraine” wargames I was involved in that did generate some interesting insights, viewed in the context of recent events.
The first was a series of tactical miniatures games in 2020 in which I served as umpire. These used 1:285 microarmor, a hybrid, updated set of the old Wargame Research Group “modern” rules, and Zoom to allow distributed play and ground level cameras for “fog of war.” All of them looked at a potential Russian invasion of Estonia, pitting most or all of a Russian battalion tactical group (represented on a 1:1 scale) against Estonian and other NATO defenders. Most of the participants were Canadian or British defence analysts, who look at modern warfare for a living. A central part of the process of what we were doing was trying to understand what was and was not changing in modern high-intensity conflict.
Some things we got right. Even mechanized forces still struggle with woods and mud. The ISR capabilities provided by modern UAVs can be a powerful force multiplier.
Other aspects were prescient: light or dismounted infantry could do real damage with ATGMs, despite explosive reactive armour (ERA) and active protections systems (APS).
Still other things we got wrong. Russian artillery can be devastating, but in our games the Russian military was far more adroit using it in a fluid battlespace than seems to be the case in Ukraine. Much the same could be said about Russian electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Fundamentally, therefore, we assumed that Russian C4I was far more agile and capable than it seems to be in Ukraine. We assumed that thermal sights, APS, and other systems were more widely installed in Russian armoured vehicles than appears to be the case. We overestimated the availability of other capabilities, such as sensor fuzed submunitions. We also overestimated morale and subunit performance. Finally, like most tactical games, we didn’t model the effects of supply and maintenance.
I also took part, generally as a RED or BLUE team leader, in a series of day- or days-long games last year that looked at influence operations in a “not-Ukraine-but-rather-like-Ukraine” setting. These were undertaken for a serious purpose, namely to explore how one could model messaging and influence, and the effect of non-kinetic operations more broadly, rather than trying to understand any particular country or conflict. The game did this by creating an independent social media community, with participants assigned social, ethnic, and political backgrounds but otherwise free to interact as they wished. The teams then sought to influence this “jury” to advance their favoured discourse and narratives in support of their broader their strategic goals.
Not everything went right here either, but that was expected: the whole point of the exercise was to develop the methodology. Overall I think the designers and sponsors should be proud of what they achieved, which really did generate a dynamic and responsive social media environment.
In these games, a team was most successful when:
they were quick off the loop, getting inside the other side’s informational OODA (decision) loop;
they crafted stirring or witty messages that addressed real grievances, fears, and events;
they targeted different communities with different messages;
messaging was multi-faceted and pushed along multiple channels, but linked to a convincing set of narratives.
influencers responded to, built upon, worked with, and even adopted memes, themes, and narratives that emerged organically within key communities.
Above, Bobr the Beaver from the not-Ukraine influence game. Below, the Ukrainian National Guard tweeting cartoon cats.
In short, what worked looked very much like what has worked for the Ukrainians in the current war, right down to heroic leaders and cute memes. While the dynamics of influence have been changed by the internet and social media, I have been struck that good messaging hasn’t changed that much at all: it would be recognized by the propagandists of WW II, a most every advertising writer or political campaign advisor of the past century. No technology in the world is going to make your influence operation work if the basic messaging is weak.
Review: Karen Schrier, We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics (Oxford University Press, 2021). 229pp, appendices to p. 252, notes to p. 384, index. $99.00 hc, $39.95 pb, $14.57 Kindle.
In We Are the Gamers, Karen Schrier examines how games can be used to teach about ethics and civics. Games, she notes, “have always mattered and do not need to be legitimized, but the pandemic further showed us that games can serve as publics: as places and communities for learning, for connecting, for problem-solving, and for ethical and civic engagement.”
What follows is a far-reaching exploration of how games can and have been used to address civic and ethical issues. Broadly, the book is divided into five major sections. In Part I, two chapters address the value of teaching ethics and civics, and what it is that should be taught. In Part II, the author addresses games for knowledge and action, asking what knowledge is needed to empower citizens and how games can support real-world change. Part III turns attention to using games for connection and community, and better understanding both ourselves and others. Part IV devotes four full chapters to the development of critical thinking skills. Finally, Part V offers some overall reflections on how to select the right game, how to design supporting and complimentary activities around a game, and how to assess learning. Schrier also considers the possible future of serious games for ethics and civics.
As regular readers of PAXsims will know, I tend to be rather dubious of unbridled and uncritical evangelism for the magic of educational games—serious games can deliver excellent results, but only if they are designed well, used appropriately, and supported in other ways. In each chapter of We the Gamers, Schrier certainly provides enthusiastic discussion, well illustrated with examples, of the good that games can do. However she is also careful to identify potential pitfalls: entire sections of the book are devoted to how fostering communication can have negative effects, and how games may be insufficiently diverse or inclusive, trigger or emotionally overwhelm a player, misrepresent cultures, do a poor job of encouraging critical reflection, or confirm biases—to cite but a few. She also notes how the “fun” of games can itself be problematic. Having identified these risks, she then goes on to suggest how these problems can best be addressed.
The value of her analysis here goes well beyond games designed to teach ethical and civic engagement and would be of value to almost anyone who designs or uses games for learning or analytical purposes.
The book includes several length appendices, which offer sample lesson outlines, a design checklist and toolkit, a summary of key game design principles, and a series of recommendations for designers, educators, and researchers. Some of this is likely to find its way into my own game design syllabus. The endnotes and references are very extensive indeed.
Overall, this is a very readable, yet deeply thoughtful, book on the design and use of serious games. I recommend it highly.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the value of serious gaming for supporting health sector preparedness and government policy response. Indeed, in my own case, during the past year I have found myself designing games on pandemic-related food security issues, working with the Public Health Agency of Canada and Department of National Defence in red teaming Canada’s national vaccine roll-out plans (including a major national tabletop exercise), and I’m currently working with the READY Initiative on digital games-based training for epidemic disease preparedness and response in the humanitarian sector.
All of that is to say that I wish Roll to Save: Gaming Disease Response had been published a year ago, because it is a very useful resource indeed for anyone working in this area. Some of the chapters address general design issues, including the value of serious games; gaming at the strategic (policy), operational, and “tactical” levels of disease response; and important considerations in professional game design. Other chapters discuss particular game designs, addressing topics as wide-ranging as vaccination/prophylaxis; bioterrorism (anthrax, melioidosis); particular epidemic outbreak scenarios (ebola); mental health support; and pandemic recovery (COVID-X). It also contains brief chapters discussing some of the basics of infectious diseases, epidemiology, public health planning, outbreak investigation, and the importance of information, politics, and the media. My only disappointment was the bibliography, which lists some of the sources cited in the book but which doesn’t provide a wider reference to the substantial literature on medical and emergency preparedness gaming.
Above and beyond the very considerable value of this publication for those designing disease response games, it also stands as an excellent example of how serious gaming should be undertaken. McGrady not only has extensive experience in designing and implementing serious games on a wide range of national security and policy issues, but also has keen insight into what works in what context. He thus underscores the importance of designing a game around not only the topic, but equally the game objectives, available resources, participants, and client/sponsors.
The following series of articles was written for PAXsims by Ola Leifler, Magnus Persson, and Ola Uhrqvist.You can read Parts 1 and 2 hereand here.
Concluding thoughts
One of the first impressions was that we were rather overwhelmed by the experience, which is one of the reasons this blog post, long overdue and way too long, did not materialize until at least one academic period had transpired after the main CCM event. However, now that we have gathered our thoughts a bit, we realized that we have probably learned a great number of things so far. For instance:
1. Reasons for creating a megagame on climate change and social transformation
There are many types of games that relate to climate change and negotiations, but few that we feel concern the types of negotiations, dilemmas and interactions that may be common for professionals in companies and citizens in local regions facing the prospect of societal change. One of us, Ola Uhrqvist, had previous experience developing a game about city planning to take both climate adaptation into account— but there, few negotiations were conducted as the game was primarily a single-player web application.
In the literature on learning for a sustainable development, engagement and various pedagogical forms is stressed as key to ensure that learners experience first-hand the dilemmas and difficulties they need to overcome. Furthermore, we noticed that when we pitched the idea of a “Climate Change Megagame”, it immediately piqued people’s interest in a way that acted as an icebreaker and helped us to engage rather diverse groups in conversations. Even though there were practical issues with every single version of the game we have tried, the concept itself has been intriguing enough to make people joining as players or contribute as control team and even contributing to game development. However, to understand exactly which difficulties to subject players, and what type of realistic situations to simulate, has proved to be almost as elusive as real societal transformation.
2. The eternal challenge of playable realism
Serious games always needs to balance between relevance and playability. The activities players engage in, and the type of experience they have, must be of relevance whether it is “realistic” or not. We learned that some types of realism, such as players getting bogged down by managing their daily lives, may not be helpful in ensuring that the resulting experience is relevant to the end goal of understanding dilemmas and options for societal transformation. We wanted the game to offer interesting challenges without directing players too much with respect to what they would want to do. As designers, we can include mechanisms that reflect aspects of reality such as economic capital being vital for investments in infrastructure, say, without going so far as to say that without a growing economy, people would starve to death. We wanted to provide enough context and feedback mechanisms to stimulate discussions and make different visions apparent, without constricting players in such a way that their room for creative discussions and maneuvering would be artificially restricted.
A golden rule for how to ensure players understand the rules well enough to be comfortable about breaking them and understanding just how much freedom they have to negotiate freely probably don’t exist but we understand much better now than before what would count as interesting and relevant challenges compared to “realistic” ones. In our experience minimalism of game mechanics is desirable in order to let participants focus on the content.
3. Recruiting and maintaining a committed and diverse design team
Including more people from the early playtests in game design and discussions made it apparent that it was difficult to ensure equal commitment among all when the game concept changed quite a lot, partly as a result of feedback. Also, we wanted to be open to suggestions about how different groups could contribute to the project, which placed high demands on participants to express clearly what they wanted to contribute to and what they expected. Some of the early contributors who provided invaluable feedback on the game and made it much better in the end still did not feel comfortable joining at the end as the game changed quite a lot between playtests. Though it was necessary to make the changes, it became difficult for all members of the design team to keep up with the ideas for changes that the core group brought forward, especially as we became limited to digital meetings during the pandemic. The take home lesson is the value of a clear aim, participants roles and modes of decision making and communication is increasingly important in a dynamic, explorative project.
4. Going digital
Going digital opened up new opportunities for players from around the world to join and it greatly simplified our ability to collect data on how the game progressed, but also introduced a whole host of new issues. We spent quite some time even after the core game mechanics and graphical elements had been decided to ensure that the digital platform (Miro) could handle all graphical components and the 50 players with decent latency. Therefore, some graphical optimizations were required before the main event took place. For instance, components were merged into bitmaps instead of hundreds of separate graphics components. The communications channel (Discord) was set up very professionally by our Megagame colleague Darren Green from Crisis Games in the UK and that enabled players to have both private and public spaces for communications. Even with such a setup though, some players felt lost between all the channels and the Miro board. Having a technical setup and preparation before the main event, just focusing on the technical aspects of the game would probably have helped some participants who were struggling.
The main event was hosted at a venue where we broadcast everything live from a studio over Vimeo. This worked rather well as a compromise between having only an internal event and only having a studio with professional talking heads but having dual roles as hosts for both the game and the “show” was hard to manage. It would have been better to have studio hosts who could have focused on being hosts. Then again, a digital event that plays out through discussions on Discord and board changes on Miro might not offer enough continuous action for a continuous live show.
5. The importance of good debriefing
The main event was intended to let people experience and reason about the needs for mitigation and adaptation, as in the needs for making changes to our societies that will reduce emissions versus the needs to adapt to climate change we cannot avoid. The primary aim of the debriefing was to capture the perceptions of these potentially conflicting needs, but it became apparent that the participants were mostly preoccupied with thoughts about the game mechanics, graphical elements and direct experiences. A debriefing is very important for a proper learning experience, and for us, the fact that people became preoccupied with the mechanics and graphical elements indicated that these were in fact the objects they thought mostly in terms of directly afterwards. Maybe the game was too heavy on mechanics since it became hard to talk about abstract things such as mitigation and adaptation in direct connection to having played. It would probably have been easier to first address game-specific issues and then later broaden the horizon to comprise the real world.
6. Future development
The project had until this point been run exclusively on a small amount of seed money for a pedagogical project and a lot of personal commitment. We realized that continued work with this require us to leverage our initial experiences and gain access to proper funding for work that could significantly expand on what we have been doing. The game itself is not a goal, it is not even a product that may be finished but at best a way to help us think better, as designers and players, about what a sustainable society may be like. With some luck, we may have a chance to build on all we have learned and enable others to learn as we have about how to move constructively towards a societal transformation to sustainability.
Ola Leifler is a senior lecturer in software engineering at Linköping University who, over the last ten years and upon learning more about the state of the world and the effects of how we educate, has formed a strong interest in learning for a sustainable development. With a special interest in boardgames, role-playing games and simulations, he now explores how they can be harnessed to promote more constructive thinking about global challenges.
Magnus Persson is a translator and academic proofreader with an interest in board game development who has been serious about games for as long as he can remember and only in recent years came into contact with the megagame genre and the concept of serious games.
Ola Uhrqvist is a teacher and researcher in the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education with a special interest in using serious games as a tool to enhance engagement in and understanding of complex issues, such as environmental and social change.
A few weeks ago, a number of us at PAXsims had a opportunity to see a demonstration of WarPaths—an online, browser-based application for managing distributed, asynchronous matrix games. WarPaths is the brainchild of Dr. Tom Nagle, a retired US Army strategist and former armor officer.
I think we were all very impressed. The application offers a lot of functionality, from mapping and icons to tools for communications, matrix arguments, and adjudication. Moreover, Tom was also enormously responsive to comments and suggestions. Since recording the walk-through above he has added support for probability polling of participants as well as percentage dice resolution (in addition to the traditional d6s).
Despite the military theming, warPaths has utility well beyond military or POL-MIL wargames—it could be used in any serious game setting where a matrix games might be useful. To this end he now also plans to develop a non-military version on the same principles, but politically/humanitarian oriented.
For more information on WarPaths, contact Tom at the weblink above.
Matthew A. Schnurr and Anna MacLeod, eds., Simulations and Student Learning (University of Toronto Press, 2020). CAD$56.25 hc, CAD$22.46 pb or ebook.
This edited volume provides a vitally important basis that will enable colleagues and students to understand the role of simulations in their teaching and learning. I identify three central contributions of this book:
First, it tackles the transdisciplinary opportunities of using simulations in teaching and learning. The book is divided into three sections: social sciences, natural sciences, and health sciences. Each section explores approaches to how simulations can contribute to the teaching in these areas, however, readers can gain a lot of insights from reading the sections that they may consider to be outside ‘their’ disciplinary home. The accessible writing style makes doing this possible.
Second, the book is honest about what simulations can and cannot achieve in educational contexts and the need for effective management, incorporation and evaluation of their contribution to achieving intended learning outcomes.
Third, the book carefully considers that not all students are the same, all will react to and engage with experiential learning differently. As a result, there are many moving parts to getting the simulation type, the design, the objectives and the outcomes, right.
The book itself promises a lot, especially in terms of its objective to cross-disciplinary lines and to fill a gap (p.2) identified by Ellett, Esperanza, and Phan (2014). From my reading this book makes an exceptional contribution to achieving this objective. Overall, the book treads a delicate line here between presenting the challenges but also the payoffs for teachers and students. I think a particular strength of this book is that the authors haven’t ‘advocated’ but instead adopted a highly practical and pragmatic approach to using simulations in the classroom.
As I am developing a training course on simulations as tools for assessments. To do this effectively, I need to engage with a range of disciplines and demonstrate the utility of simulations to them, rather than inviting them into my research space and asking them to adapt and apply the tools for themselves. This book provides me with a language to be able to start that conversation. The accessible and jargon free writing style is particularly helpful as it will enable me to assign this text as reading for the course participants especially those who have never used simulations before.
A particularly well-considered element of the book is that it clearly acknowledges that games and simulations are not a “silver bullet” (p.32) and it is possible to identify unintended insights. Throughout the book I think there is a considered view that games and simulations are reflective activities, they require the teacher, student, observers and any teaching evaluators to reflect on how the game was designed, run, played, adjudicated and evaluated. I would argue that games reveal to teachers the gaps in their knowledge and show the ability of the decision-making and the adeptness of thinking, in a way that other forms of teaching do not. As a result, like all learning tools and opportunities they need to be well run and selected to match the intended learning outcome (p.89). This binding of the simulation within the course or module is also effectives demonstrated in other chapters. For example, chapter eight by Gentry (pp.135-6; and 138) clearly maps how the simulation activity combines with other homework to enable the students to achieve the intended outcomes.
In considering how to build-in simulations into teaching chapters of the book fairly consider constraints and offer practical and pragmatic methods to manage these challenges. For example, in chapter three, Donohue and Forcese discuss “liberating 40 hours of teaching time” (p.52) and utilising the tools available more effectively. This requires teachers to identify what learning is passive and can be done away from the tutor and what learning is active and needs or is enhanced by tutor-student and student-student interaction. This in itself is demanding and requires more time from teachers, not only in terms of preparation of the simulation materials, but also the jiggling of other course contents to fit.
In other sections of the book (for example by Chamberlain in chapter 7) authors also highlights the physical constraints and potential barriers to running simulations for students of chemistry. The chapter then clearly expresses the requirements for running a simulation for these students (p.117). Again, as in other chapters this exploration of the challenges is then matched with an articulation of potential solutions including some free resources (p.118).
The chapters also consider and highlight how simulations and their assessment can augment and add-value to different programmes. For example, in the chapter on social work the author identifies a limitation in how students are observed in practice and how simulations can contribute to the assessment process, enabling a more holistic approach to evaluating the student’s performance. A central message throughout the book is to provide an awareness of challenges in building simulations into teaching and learning spaces and programmes but matching this with practical and pragmatic solutions to overcome any problems. From this approach, the reader is therefore prepared, and well equipped, to start to incorporate these ideas into their own work.
The book should not be read as being solely a ‘how to guide’, nor a piece of advocacy to convert teachers and lecturers to add-in simulations wholesale to their course. The authors do highlight the strengths and problems of simulations, but they also tackle head-on some of the potential problems of whether the performance in a simulation affects the practice that follows (chapter 14 by Picketts and MacLeod, in particular p.238). The findings of the research indicate that in the simulation the students acted in a ritualised way but when applying the same methods in practice they flexibly adapted to the situation (p.240).
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone considering how to add simulations to their learning environment, but I think it is always very useful for people who have used simulations for years as there are nuggets of gold within each chapter that may enable a different way to reflect on your own practice. The book has certainly given me some new approaches and ideas.
Or, how screwing up as Control can teach you moral lessons.
[Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this game for free in exchange for a review.]
We Come In Peace is a free-form RPG about first contact between two alien species with no prior knowledge of each other’s existance, language, or culture. To enforce that understanding barrier, the game is played without face-to-face communication between the teams. Control acts as a go-between relaying non-verbal messages, redacting anything with too much shared understanding between humans (numerals, icons, facial expressions, and gestures like thumbs up).
In person it’s played with the two teams in separate rooms, passing notes. We played over zoom, using a separate breakout room for each team, Control hopping between the two, and a shared slide deck so the teams could go full-Arrival with their attempts at communication.
The game is an allegory for a hidden scenario that only Control is aware of (until the debrief at the end), cloaked in enjoyable sci-fi buffoonery to keep the players and teams from bringing too much cultural hindsight and understanding to the table.
That means it’s Control’s job to take everything the players say, translate it into the hidden scenario to determine the outcome, and then back into the sci-fi allegory to communicate the effect to the players. Which is hard.
This is a game I learnt to play by screwing up as Control and seeing all my mistakes—and what would have made for better gameplay—in hindsight.
How did we do?
My intrepid space explorers did not start a global thermo-nuclear war, in fact the two sides ended having established a tentative trade agreement and cultural exchange…though one side thought they’d sent a hostage into orbit for four days and the other side planned to abandon their scientist planet-side indefinitely, effectively kidnapping the local…I think it’s safe to say we stored up a bunch of slower-time cultural collision consequences that would have ended badly for one side.
Team A: this roughly translates as “Wow! We pick up the gift you’re holding and rush around pointing ecstatically at parts of our shuttle. We give you SCIENCE in exchange.” Team B understood: “The ship is made with dirt? Huh. And what is this blue stuff you’re handing us? We’re smiling like we have any idea what it’s for…” Also it is cannon that this alien species is made of kapock, fleece, wire, and googley eyes.
The teams did pretty well at establishing peaceful intentions, starting out sending mathematical sequences and sharing their words for basic chemical elements. We had a brief exchange of charades “we’re going to land our shuttle craft now, on that spot there…” before an historic meeting of both peoples and exchange of gifts. The subsequent trade negotiations almost caused an Incident when the message, “we’re sending two shuttles to harvest resources now, on these spots here and here…” was briefly misinterpreted as “they want us to leave our planet?!!” but cool heads prevailed.
It was interesting to watch the thought-process behind the communications with one team, and then hop across to the other team with the image and see their thought-process trying to unravel the message. The planetary civilisation were keen not to lose their new friends too quickly, so sent a message asking them to stay at least four days. The explorers got the days and the four, but didn’t know what to make of the rest so planned to do a midnight-flit on the third day to be sure of avoiding any unfortunate consequences of over-staying their welcome. That was the biggest misunderstanding we had.
Peace in our time, then?
Secretly we were all a little disappointed we hadn’t at least come to the brink of war.
My first thought was is this what happens when you put women in charge? Instead of establishing dominance, both sides tried extremely hard to understand the other side and understand how they might come across to the other side—gasp, leaders doing the emotional labour for a change…
My second thought was wow, this game is hard to be Control at. I was prepared for thinking on my feet, trying to relate the player actions to the hidden scenario. In doing that, I failed to communicate to both teams the sense of fear and isolation about their situation that should have been motivating a lot of their actions. The stakes of our game were we’ll make friends? when it should have been you face death and/or cultural extinction. The scenario is set up to pivot to that fear if one side opens fire (spoilers: the teams are wildly asymmetric) but neither side came close to aggression, and I really struggled to know if or when I should let on you can basically do what you want with impunity here. In hindsight I should have—but it’s also not that simple.
I don’t think it’s too spoilery to say the allegory is about racism—literally every alien encounter in science fiction is about how we treat people who are different to us.
But the game wouldn’t work with me just saying “haha you guys have all the power here,” because white supremacy and colonialism (and misogynism, and homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc) is fear-based: a fear that the oppressed group would do all the same bad things if the tables were reversed—that slaves would enslave the slave-owners if they were granted freedom instead of just, you know, living free. That women would treat men like chattle and unpaid household/caregiving labour if the patriarchy were dismantled, instead of just, you know, being equals. Supremacy feels precarious.
I didn’t want to dictate how the teams felt about each other. I thought that would be me influencing the game too much. I was trying to let the players decide how to react emotionally—and that was a huge mistake. I failed to communicate xenophobia to the teams: I was too focused on presenting the information neutrally within the allegory—what the equipment translated to—and I failed to account for the system and assumptions present in the hidden scenario that my players simply didn’t bring to the table because of politeness, decent-human-being-ness, Derby House Principles, or the game being majority-women and women being socialised to perform the emotional labour of any encounter.
In effect I ran a game of I don’t see colour.
By not manipulating the teams, our invented worlds didn’t include the seeds of racism to spontaneously generate cultural misunderstanding: both sides were too open to the other side being actual human beings like them, not less-than.
Racism doesn’t happen in a vacuum: people are indoctrinated into assumptions they don’t even perceive as racist. I don’t see colour only works in a world lacking existing injustice.
The default of the current system is the reproduction of racial inequality. To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs for white people to be really nice and carry on – to smile at people of color, to go to lunch with them on occasion. To be clear, being nice is generally a better policy than being mean. But niceness does not bring racism to the table and will not keep it on the table when so many of us who are white want it off. Niceness does not break with white solidarity and white silence. In fact, naming racism is often seen as not nice, triggering white fragility.
We can begin by acknowledging ourselves as racial beings with a particular and limited perspective on race. We can attempt to understand the racial realities of people of color through authentic interaction rather than through the media or through unequal relationships. We can insist that racism be discussed in our workplaces and a professed commitment to racial equity be demonstrated by actual outcomes. We can get involved in organizations working for racial justice. These efforts require that we continually challenge our own socialization and investments in racism and put what we profess to value into the actual practice of our lives.
This takes courage, and niceness without strategic and intentional anti-racist action is not courageous.
I had a conversation at work with a guy who was adamant that he treated everyone equally, and therefore was not discriminating against anyone. In fact he was quite insistant that actively making space for women and minorities in any opportunity was wrong and unfair and though he didn’t say the words, underpinning his argument was the assumption that making room for women and minorities would mean better-qualified men missing out. Underpinning his argument was the assumption that women and minorities could not possibly be as qualified as the men currently taking up all the space.
“Treating everyone equally”—not seeing colour, not seeing gender (or gender identity), not seeing sexuality, not seeing disability—is to deny the lived experience of being black, a woman, LGBT, or disabled: their culture, their value, and the real and tangible obstacles they have faced to get here. The reality is the women and minorities who make it to the wargaming table are very often more qualified and more able than the straight-white-non-disabled-men, because it’s been so much harder for them to get there.
Lt Syed Ahsan, number one at the Bombay Tactical Unit: went on to lead Pakistan’s navy. Captain Roberts? He did some odd-jobs for Norway, collected a few gongs for his war work, but he never rose above the rank of Captain nor did he serve in government.
So what can I do about that, as a white person, and someone who supports the Derby House Principles?
People whose careers center on examining and repairing racial inequality tend to say that being willing to see color, and talking about what it means, is one part of how white people can turn their black friendships into something that broadens their horizons on race.
We Come In Peace is a good game. It works well over zoom. We had a real mix of experienced professional to never-wargamed-before players and everybody got into it. The puzzle of how do we even communicate that intention was enjoyable to watch.
The explorer team have some great dynamics going on: it was relatively easy to establish this team’s mentality based on the breifing and sci-fi touchstones. The team breifing’s humour provided excellent direction for the players’ motivation without it feeling heavy-handed.
The planetary civilisation felt less developed in their breifing. I took this to be a reflection of them being somewhat at-the-mercy of the situation, but the fact that they didn’t clearly have a goal to pursue beyond reacting to the demands of the other side made for less interesting game play, or relied on the team to spontaneously come up with a goal in response to the arrival of this alien speicies. I suspect this is why we had a relatively peaceful exchange: our planetary team spontaneously chose the goal of mutual cultural exchange, ie of co-operation. In reality—and in keeping with the hidden scenario—they needed an overriding desire to preserve a clearly-defined way of life to create friction. Even something as simple as the aliens have shown up on a national holiday and we’re busy would have set that train in motion.
The Control guide instructions on the hidden scenario were a little vague: read up on the real-life situation on Wikipedia, and here’s a glossary for translation into sci-fi which is focused on the physical—what sending a shuttle-craft or using sensors really means in the hidden scenario. If the players invoked combat the cultural collision would be obvious. Beyond that it was lacking guidance on how to be the cultural misunderstanding. My best suggestion for how to play Control in this game is to think of yourself as the rogue unit in Arrival delivering the explosives.
This is a game I’ve learnt to play by doing it wrong the first time, and realising that my job as Control is to manipulate the hell out of both sides, to out-right lie to them about the other side’s actions and perceived intentions—because ultimately this is a game about the clash of two different cultures, and when both teams are actually made of humans with the same culture, that clash and wild misunderstanding is not created by pictionary alone; both sides are operating from the same concept of what good intentions look like.
I thought my job was to be a neutral party and see if they do or don’t start a war by accident. I see now my job is to do my best to cause friction at every turn and see if both sides can tell cultural collision (my manipulation) apart from hostile intent.
We Come In Peace is available for download from Stone Paper Scissors.
You can read the Derby House Principles on diversity and inclusion in professional wargaming here.
PAXsims 