Comments Off on Using digital outbreak simulations in academic settings
Posted by Rex Brynen on 01/05/2024
The Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health (CHH) is holding a virtual information session on how digital infectious disease outbreak simulations can be used in academic settings.
Virtual Outbreak READY! Information Session for Academic Institutions
Outbreak READY!and Outbreak READY 2!: Thisland in Crisis are innovative digital outbreak simulations aimed at improving the capacity of practitioners to prepare for and respond to large-scale infectious disease outbreaks in humanitarian settings. Created as part of the READY Initiative, a global consortium led by Save the Children, the Outbreak READY! simulations bring the complex nature of outbreak response in humanitarian settings to life and provide a novel way for learners to test their skills and knowledge in a “safe,” virtual environment.
While the simulations were initially created for NGOs, an increasing number of academic institutions have successfully used the simulations in their classrooms. Since the first simulation launched in 2021, institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, McGill University, the University of Geneva, the Prasanna School of Public Health, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have used one or both simulations to advance their students’ learning.
To support the increasing number of universities reaching out about how they may incorporate the simulations into their classrooms, we are hosting a virtual information session on Wednesday, May 15th, 09:00-10:00 ET. This session will provide an overview of the simulations and feature professors who have used the simulations in their classrooms.
Please register using the link below. We also invite you to share this invitation with colleagues who may be interested in attending.
How do economic factors shape the dynamics of violent crises? To launch and sustain their fighting, conflict actors rely on financial resources and access to physical supplies; economic motives may themselves also be an important driver of violence. There is no lack of academic research describing these dynamics, nor of practice-oriented frameworks for grasping how they play out in a given conflict context. Yet there remains a very large step between better contextual understandings and being able to anticipate the concrete consequences of an external intervention.
This is a significant challenge for policymakers as they consider intervening in the political economy of a crisis setting. They have a range of interventions at their disposal, from sanctions regimes to fostering peace-positive investments. But the complexity of conflicts means it is crucial to think through the possible impacts – and unintended consequences – of any potential intervention. This project explored how simulation games can serve as a valuable tool for conducting forward-looking analysis in such contexts. It positioned simulation games at the intersection of political economy analysis and serious games methodologies.
The project’s final publication offers a practical toolbox for developing simulation games tailored to analyzing political economy interventions in stabilization settings, including a step-by-step process and a menu of potential design choices. While these apply to a broad range of settings and themes, the discussion also draws on the project team’s experiences in designing a game on conflict dynamics in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The report is an extremely useful contribution to the literature on confict simulation. You will find both a summary of their work and a link to the full (49pp) report at the link above.
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…
Comments Off on Barzashka: AI, wargaming, and ethical oversight
Posted by Rex Brynen on 08/01/2024
At the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ivanka Barzashka notes the many potential contributions of artificial intelligence to wargaming—but also the ethical dangers:
AI’s integration into wargames can subtly influence leadership decisions on war and peace—and possibly lead to existential risks. The current landscape of human-centric wargaming, combined with AI algorithms, faces a notable “black box” challenge, where the reasoning behind certain outcomes remains unclear. This obscurity, alongside potential biases in AI training data and wargame design, highlights the urgent need for ethical governance and accountability in this evolving domain. Exploring these issues can shed light on the imperative for responsible oversight in the merging of AI with wargaming, a fusion that could decide future conflicts.
She raises some important points, consistent with the thoughtful arguments she has made before about academic standards and research ethics in analytical wargaming.
In my view, however, the issue of how one does ethical review—and, indeed, if one should do an ethical review—is perhaps even more complex and fraught.
University-based research involving human subjects almost universally requires ethics approval by an Institutional Review Board (US), Research Ethics Board (Canada), Research Ethics Committee (UK), or similar. However (having served for many years as chair of a REB) such review is almost entirely focused on the protection of human subjects. Except in unusual circumstances, it does not protect anyone from research that might be distorted or put to use for unethical purposes. Indeed, there’s generally no accepted standard for what this might entail. I’ve certainly self-censored research findings because I thought they could be misused. Some of my colleagues, however, might consider such self-censorship a violation of a broader academic commitment to knowledge. After all, aren’t I thereby applying an ethical (and possibly political) filter to my work?
Ethics reviews in universities also provide, at best, minimal protection from research designs that might be “unethical” in that they are intended to produce desired results, and they certainly provide zero protection against misinterpreting data. The academic enterprise assumes that the safeguards here are embodied in peer review processes before publication—but peer review itself is neither perfect nor free from its own biases
Also, very little government policy development is subject to research ethics restrictions or formal oversight. Indeed, it is often specifically excluded from national-level research ethics rules, in part because they would be impossible to apply. How would you apply the rules for academic research to meetings with stakeholders, decision-informing conversations with colleagues, etc? The issue of ethics in intelligence collection are even murkier, yet this usually has even greater effects on national security decision-making than any wargame ever does.
This is not to say that we cannot identify potential dangers and pitfalls, as a way of guarding against them. However, implementing formal oversight (on a case-by-case basis) might be challenging indeed.
Despite the attention devoted to these outcomes, the games did not reveal anything novel or surprising about China or weaknesses in the U.S. military arsenal. But they did reveal something about policymaking and influence-peddling in the United States, where advocates of various foreign and domestic policies have come to see war games as a useful tool in advancing their agendas.
War games go beyond predicting futures; they are interactive and evocative experiences for players and compelling stories for domestic and foreign audiences. They can be used (knowingly and unknowingly) to influence choices about budgets, weapons, foreign policies, and, ultimately, international power. By designing and framing a war game carefully, planners can create an outcome of their choosing. Accordingly, a war game often reveals more about the interests and intentions of the players than it does about the outcome of the game itself.
In the case of the Taiwan games that are so popular in Washington right now, their value is not in informing defense leaders that a war between the United States and China would be difficult to win. U.S. officials don’t need war games to tell them that. The games are more useful to officials—and to outside observers—for what they reveal about the factions and players in American politics pushing the country to start preparing for war with China.
She argues:
The history of war games shows how game designers and conveners can influence outcomes through their choice of players, rules, and scenarios. This is why, even though war games are ostensibly designed to help people understand how a war might play out, the results of this “inner” game can reveal only so much. Instead, it is the outer game—who convened the game, who is playing it, how the game is played and distributed, and ultimately why it is played—that offers real insight.
Finally, she notes, there is always a danger of “getting played”
War games are not crystal balls, but they are powerful tools of influence. Domestically, war games can rally constituencies in Congress, the armed services, opposing political parties, or the public. Internationally, games can signal a country’s intentions and help bolster the credibility of steps it has taken to deter conflict. War games reveal what states care about, what domestic political actors want, and how states believe wars will occur and play out. The immersive quality of such games and the way they bring people together for a shared experience make them uniquely effective forms of persuasion. As Bloomfield, the political scientist and statesman, wrote of the games run by MIT during the Cold War, reentering the real world after a game was “like coming out of a deep sleep after a particularly vivid dream. It takes time for the carryover of emotional content from the game to reality to wear off.”
The richness of that experience is what makes war games so engaging and what helps them illuminate otherwise unpredictable situations. But they can be biased toward a specific conclusion and in this way become dangerous tools of propaganda to make a case for war. Done wrong, they can also turn the horrific reality of war into an abstraction, which could make a conflict seem less deadly. That is the effect that the sociologist Irving Horowitz had in mind in 1963 when he criticized Cold War–era thinkers such as Kahn, Schelling, Wohlstetter and Henry Kissinger as inhabitants of “a world of nightmarish intellectual ‘play.’”
On the other hand, as Gallagher has pointed out, war games can also demonstrate the cost and seriousness of war, leading states to carefully build deterrence and defensive capabilities. Games about why wars start, not just who wins, can reveal patterns of inadvertent escalation and suggest mechanisms or strategies that opposing countries can take to avoid war in the first place. Furthermore, games can play an important diplomatic role in building trust between both allies and adversaries.
It would be harder for organizers to manipulate war games if the press and the public better understood them. That means asking the right questions about the games’ outcomes, including how the players arrived at those outcomes. Who is paying for and convening the game? What are their motivations for running the game? Who is playing the game? What assumptions and rules are embedded in the game? Are details of the game being leaked, publicized, or disseminated in a way that could benefit the sponsors? Asking and answering such questions does not nullify the utility of a game’s findings; instead, it provides necessary context for interpreting them.
The true value of war-gaming is its ability to immerse policymakers in a scenario that might be otherwise unthinkable and in which they might learn something about themselves. This is why war games do not predict the future but can shape it. Today’s war games do not foresee a future war between the United States and China. But the fact that they are being played at all should be viewed as a warning about where things are headed.
She is arguing, in a way, for a sort of political science, sociology, and social psychology of wargames that emphasizes embedded in a broader context of politics, ideas, and public discourse. This may be an challenging view for some to accept if they like to see wargaming as a purely technocratic process of question-raising and problem-solving.
However, I find it a very valuable way to think about the process —which is why I need to hurriedly revise my Conflict Simulation course syllabus for next term to include her piece!
It appears we live in a Golden Age of Wargaming in the Marine Corps.
However, educational wargaming has yet to “take off” the way one would expect with strong institutional backing, financial investment, and outside support.[9] In Quantico, the hub of the Marine Corps’ wargaming efforts, relatively few active-duty Marines participate in MCU’s Fight Club tournaments or Breakfast Club meetings. Most who do appear to be veteran gamers and proponents, with recent converts and curious souls making up the minority.
Turning to the fleet, few units, particularly combat arms units, appear to use educational wargames routinely. This lack of activity seems odd because, again, thousands of combat arms officers and SNCOs have been exposed to wargames at Quantico since 2020, when schools like CSC began running them in earnest.[15]
Based on these observations of what is happening in the fleet and Quantico, we should be concerned with the direction and future viability of educational wargaming. In the following sections, I detail five concerns and pose recommendations where I have them. But I certainly do not have all the answers. The wargaming community must collectively grapple with the challenges described here to help wargaming spread and, more importantly, “stick” throughout the Marine Corps.
His five concerns are:
Few combat arms units wargame routinely.
Wargaming has an image problem
Wargames focus disproportionately on field-grade officers.
Wargames have eclipsed all other decision games.
Marines and the Marine Corps do not prioritize decision-making excellence.
After a length, detailed, and well-documented discussion of each of these he concludes that it is “timefor tough love, tough conversations, and action.”
To return to one of the infantry officers quoted in the first concern.
“Maybe wargaming never had a chance. Maybe it is a fad. Swing music was “in” for about six months in the late 1990s. Ska in the early 1990s. There are always dedicated fans, but wargames will never be pop music. Just some fringe genre that gets cool for a minute and recedes into the shadows.[93]“
I hope he is wrong. But hope is no strategy. The situation requires action. The wargaming community must examine ourselves, our approaches, and practices. We must temper our zeal for wargaming with tough love and critical self-reflection. How tragic it would be if, despite our best intentions, we contributed to educational wargaming receding once more “into the shadows.”
At the same time, individual Marines and the larger Marine Corps must take decision-making training more seriously. Marines must practice decision-making independently, and the Marine Corps must find ways to facilitate that effort, increase opportunities for decision-making in its schools, courses, and units, and reward decision-making excellence.
While we cannot say with certainty that educational wargaming “works,” the available evidence, arguments, and anecdotes point in that direction.[94] We do know wargaming is important and worthwhile.[95] It offers a cost-effective way to develop the decision-making, critical thinking, and other cognitive skills needed to thrive in modern combat.[96]
I call on fellow wargamers and non-wargamers, Marines and other service members, and those in PME and civilian academia to join the conversation. How do we imbue and sustain wargaming in communities like the combat arms? How do we overcome bias against wargaming? Most importantly, how do we make wargaming an indispensable part of Marine Corps culture, as accepted, expected, and practiced as physical training, going to the rifle range, and celebrating the Marine Corps Birthday?
It’s an outstanding piece, and one with applicability well beyond the USMC.
The following item was written for PAXsims by Steven Sowards, a retired academic librarian, with a graduate degree in history and a longstanding interest in games and simulations.
Before climate change, November marked the end of the wildfire season, but it’s no longer likely that any time of the year is fire-free. Planning to manage wildfires is increasingly important, with too many tragic stories in the media. Training materials include a variety of table top and sand table exercises.
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group brings together multiple US agencies to work on wildfire issues, including the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Defense, and others. Available on the NWCG website is a link to the Tactical Decision Games (TDGs), with links for resources.
“The Library” has hot links to a dozen archived short scenarios in PDF, related to wildfires (an example: “Direct vs. Indirect Attack/Johnson Fire: Players should decide on direct or indirect attack strategy”).
“The Library” links to a guide for scenario design, a 2-page crib sheet called “TDG Development Guide with tips about audience, objectives, resources, facilitator briefings, “Murphy’s Law” suggestions, facilitator notes, and after action reports.
Also posted: “High Tech vs. Low Tech Training” … a 2011 paper by Larry Sutton about simulation training theory and a comparison of high and low tech models. The 10-page PDF discusses general issues in simulation design, in a fire-fighting context. An excerpt:
…computer-based wildland fire simulations … promise to add exciting new dimensions to wildland fire training. However, there are disadvantages associated with this type of training tool. First, it requires several computers with high-end video cards installed. Second, it requires someone with Information Technology skills to run it. Third, it requires some level of effort to integrate this technology into existing training courses. Fourth, software development is very expensive. Sand table exercises, on the other hand, require only an 8′ x 4′ box of sand with some toy figures of people and fire engines, material that looks like vegetation and smoke (e.g., cotton), and chalk to mark fire perimeters and roads. Sand tables can be used in remote locations. The only limitation to sand table exercises is the trainer’s imagination; an infinite number of scenarios can be created to stimulate learning. Individuals can be placed in situations where they have to make decisions and communicate them to subordinates.
Other agencies, big and small, also post table top exercise suggestions and reports: for example the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council has a webpage describing some brief scenarios used for training.
The Wildfire Threat Tabletop Exercise: Situation Manual is a 26-page Word document from CISA—the Cyberstructure & Infrastructure Security Agency (part of US the Department of Homeland Security). The manual / template supports an exercise about communications challenges in a wildland-urban fire situation. This is one of many CISA tabletop exercise templates: others include “Supply Chain Severe Flooding” and “Chemical Sector Unmanned Aerial System Threat” scenarios. Each text has a schedule and guided questions for players, observers, facilitators, moderators and evaluators to work in “an open, no-fault environment wherein capabilities, plans, systems, and processes will be evaluated.”
Of course, there are new sand table options based on digital technology. SimTable can be programmed with recent fire data. Stop Disasters! is a browser-based educational game by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction that includes a wildfire scenario. At the low-tech end of the game production spectrum, Smokejumpers: Wildland Fire Fighting is a solitaire hex-and-counter boardgame available from Microgame Design Group in Edmonton, Alberta.
I’ve got a confession. I am a member of a secret organization that has been promoting a genuine conspiracy theory, about conspiracy theories, called the metaconspiracy. Under the cover of darkness this last Monday, I was hanging posters promoting our conspiracy theory along with hundreds of other acolytes around the world. I’m merely a messenger, of course, the true masters behind the conspiracy (I sold my soul to them for a deck of critical thinking cards) are the brains behind the schoolofthought.org.
The idea behind metaconspiracy.org is to create a fictional conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories to intrigue people enough to “take the conspiracy theory test” – an online experience. It is a fun little test, you should take it and pass it along (thus, I continue to promote the conspiracy). Is it, though, a “gamification” as the designers claim it to be?
The problem (I’ve been told…) with critical thinking and skepticism is that you can’t really turn them off. So when I read that the school of thought had “gamified” their test – I started thinking, but, did they, though?
We’ve been (properly in my view) skeptical of “gamification” on PAXsims before. When people ask for something to be “gamified” that is usually shorthand for “this is boring, make it fun, like a game, so people will learn it”. The thing they are trying to tap is the thing that gets us coming back to very good games – they are fun models of the world imbued with riddles, puzzles, problems with complex solutions, places where we can experiment and social spaces. Essential to all of these features is making choices that matter. Experiences have some of those features – we talk about them afterwards to process them – but when we’re on the rails experiencing what has been laid out for us – we are never making strategic choices. That is what differentiates the two.
Take the test yourself. In my opinion, the conspiracy theory test is a fun experience, but not a game – apart from the choice of scenario at the beginning and then surveys (which we’d want people to answer honestly) there are no strategic choices. I wouldn’t say it has been gamified. There is a “score” but it is a simple little algorithm that can be “gamed” (in the way that stats are gamed, though interesting use of the word) by simple setting your initial plausibility as low as possible and then increasing it throughout the experience. Comparing scores is sometimes interesting, but, as we know, scores often don’t really mean anything, even in real life, let alone games.
I’ve realized this is also the problem with recent “games” like Pokemon Go or Monster Hunter Now (MHN) that I wanted to like. They are AR experiences that accompany real life experiences of a nice walk / hike, but they have no strategic action / choice – you ALWAYS capture everything you can in Pokemon Go and kill the monster in MHN – the result for MHN is basically playing a butcher of really pretty to look at monsters that you remove from the world and your normal walk turns into a bloody abbatoir. The only strategic choice I have is now I don’t play it so the pretty critters can live.
So, I posit that the difference between experience and game is strategic choice. Are there other features? Are you building experiences or games?
Ben Moores is a senior advisor at the UK Ministry of Defence, a (very sharp) defence analyst, and both a hobby and professional wargamer. On the social-media-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter, he offers some thoughts on the limits of wargaming which should be essential reading.
After 4 years of working at the top of Defence & on the Ukraine war I’ve had some thoughts on how wargaming captures and simulates conflict decision making. I use wargaming in a very wide sense of the word so that it includes strategy games with conflict elements.
The following article is authored by Lieutenant James Court, United States Navy, who is currently serving as an instructor at the Academy for Defense Intelligence. He has served in the US Navy for 8 years both at sea and ashore and has deployed to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Fleet areas of responsibility. His game research and design has largely focused on educational games about great power competition, operational and tactical levels of war, and information operations. He graduated from the George Washington University with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Securities Studies from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Navy, Department of Defense or the US Government.
Introduction
Wargames have a long history of helping the warfighter simulate battle and conceptualize ideas. They serve to foster creative thinking, problem solving, and to teach players how operations work. While war colleges have traditionally been the hubs for wargaming in the military, the practice is virtually non-existent in the surface fleet.
Training for junior officers in the surface warfare community is already in crisis – two collisions in the Indo-Pacific region in 2017 publicly exposed training shortfalls that had long been open secrets in the surface warfare community.[1] Surface warfare training is left to the Commanding Officers (COs) of ships, who must balance junior officer training along with other administrative and operational tasks. When surface warfare officers study for their qualification boards, they are often counseled to simply focus on topics that the CO cares about. As a result, there is significant variance in how officers are trained and qualified.[2]
Wargames are a solution to this problem – they are small, inexpensive and can be tailored to work in a shipboard environment and around a shipboard schedule. They can be standardized across the fleet and can be used to educate officers and prepare them for their boards – better yet, they can be used on boards for practical demonstrations. Wargames can even be used by crews to game out scenarios before conducting unfamiliar operations. Peter Perla, the father modern wargaming, has even noted the benefits of a computer-based wargame being played on several terminals where junior officers pit destroyers against each other, while a more senior officer follows from another terminal and offers advice. Wargames can serve as efficient tools for training, morale, and creative problem-solving – all of which the surface fleet needs.
How Wargames Benefit Wardrooms
Educational wargames can directly benefit wardrooms in three ways: train surface warfare officers on maritime warfare, foster creative decision-making, demonstrate understanding of key concepts and build morale – all at a very low cost in terms of time and money.
When newly commissioned surface warfare officers arrive at their first commands, they are required to undergo a training program that culminates with their full qualification as surface warfare officers. As part of this qualification, officers must study maritime warfare, which consists of understanding capabilities, limitations, and TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) for US and adversary forces. Officers are expected to understand this information for future application against an adversary.
Wargaming can help junior officers memorize basics such as weapons and detection ranges, radio and RADAR frequencies, missile salvo and magazine sizes, as well as how to apply tactics and doctrine at sea. Playing games can build neural pathways and muscle memory to not only practice application of this knowledge, but also to create memorable experiences of both positive and negative application theory through wargame immersion. If the wargame is appropriately scaled and appropriately represents technical characteristics of platforms, players can absorb real, non-abstracted information that they would normally have to memorize.[3] This includes adversary information – even an unclassified wargame, built on open-source information, can help junior officers grasp adversary technical capabilities.
Wargames also encourage something that rote studying does not – creative decision-making. Creative decision-making is more than just choosing between options correctly – it is about recognizing mission needs and making decisions that best meet that mission, even if those decisions are unusual or out of the box. Creative decision-making is a crucial skill to all officers, given that the most crucial decision-making occurs while under stress and with limited resources.[4] A wargame can introduce junior officers to unfamiliar situations and force them to improvise.[5] These unfamiliar situations can include combat damage, inoperable systems, or unreliable communications – all of which are difficult to simulate in practice.
Moreover, wargames provide a valuable platform for junior officers during their qualification boards. In these boards, officers are expected to answer scenario-based questions, often crudely drawn out on a whiteboard. Wargames can both enhance and standardize these scenario-based sections. By employing a formal ruleset that is founded on actual military capabilities and well-designed scenarios, wargames enable officers to practically demonstrate their acumen and showcase creative decision-making skills.
Finally, wargames can serve as morale-building tools that COs can employ as fun and team-building outlets. They can foster competition in a positive and enjoyable environment while still reinforcing learning objectives.
How to Incorporate Wargames at Sea
While the benefits of wargaming on ships are evident, implementing wargames on ships is not without challenges. To effectively integrate wargames into professional military education at sea, they must be well-scoped to meet the training requirements of a wardroom.
A tactical-level wargame would be most appropriate, with gameplay revolving around a single surface platform. The design features of the game must reinforce what junior officers learn in their first three tours, such as how missiles and air defense work, how to hunt submarines while balancing air operations, and how to avoid mines while engaging surface threats, to name a few.[6] It would also have to be easy to adopt and with minimal abstractions of key maritime warfare concepts.[7]
Modularity would also be key, so that the game could introduce players to other ship classes, different environments, different adversaries, and so on. This would allow junior officers to place themselves on other warships and employ their capabilities, thus developing a broader understanding of maritime warfare. Modularity would also help players craft scenarios based on the time and resources they have – enabling a quick game between officers after chow, amongst a group of officers as part of a qualification board, or to prepare the entire wardroom for a major event.
While Peter Perla may hope for computer terminals serving as wargaming stations in wardrooms, the real scarcity of computer systems on ships makes this impractical. To ensure accessibility and ease of gameplay, wardroom wargames should be low-cost, employing physical maps, tokens, and cards that can be stored in compact boxes, allowing officers to play in various settings, both at sea and in-port.
How to Change the Culture
Introducing wargames into the Navy’s training culture requires overcoming resistance and skepticism. To ensure adoption and acceptance of wargames, three approaches can be employed: introducing officers to the game at schoolhouses, standardizing the game across the fleet, and deliberately integrating the game into the qualification process and in preparation for major operations.
Perhaps the defining hurdle to overcome is the perception that wargames are unnecessary or frivolous. Some argue that they are a waste of time and provide little educational value.[8] Ultimately, this perception often comes from the discomfort with suspending disbelief and learning game rules. To address this, the same wargame that wardrooms play at sea should be introduced in the schoolhouses that train surface warfare officers at all stages of their careers.
The Navy’s schoolhouses, such as the Basic Division Officer’s Course, Advanced Division Officer’s Course, Department Head Course, and Command Qualification Course, offer ample time for officers to be exposed to wargaming. This way, officers can learn the rules of the game without feeling like they are being distracted from more important administrative or operational tasks. They can absorb rules and gameplay in an educational environment, where they are more prone to suspending disbelief and trying something new. Furthermore, by experiencing the educational benefits firsthand more senior officers will understand how to leverage wargaming for the training and development of junior officers.
By standardizing the wargame across the fleet, using identical rulesets regardless of platform or location, officers can retain their understanding of the wargame from tour to tour, which helps overcome variations in training standards across the surface fleet. Incorporating the game into the qualification process further reinforces its importance and encourages widespread adoption.
In preparation of significant operations, such as navigating through a strait or executing freedom of navigation operations, using the wargame to play through these situations can provide officers with valuable visualization and insights. It allows them to anticipate unexpected situations and understand the roles of each team member. Officers can apply their understanding of maritime warfare and even develop TTPs. Even routine events, like a strait transit, can benefit from wargaming by introducing highly unlikely scenarios and allowing new officers to test roles they wouldn’t normally play.
Conclusion
Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis noted in the summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy that “PME [professional military education] has stagnated, focused more on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of lethality and ingenuity.”[9] By incorporating wargaming into officer training, surface warfare boards, and pre-operations planning, wardrooms can start comprehensively training according to universal standards. Investing in the training of junior officers through wargaming, even with simple materials like cardboard game pieces, maps, and dice, will better prepare them to face the challenges of the high seas.
Earlier this week on the social-media-formerly-known-as-Twitter I extolled the professional value of gaming, in response to a piece by James Marriott in The Times.
The first, an article by Ian Strebel and Matt McKenzie at War on the Rocks, argues that Dungeons & Dragonshelps to develop narrative and story-telling skills that are essential to briefing intelligence material.
Wargaming has seen a resurgence in professional military education, something we wholeheartedly support; games make learning fun, effective, and memorable. But integrating games into this education isn’t enough. The armed services only send a military intelligence professional to formal training a few times over a long military career. Comparatively, tabletop role-playing games can provide regular practice for the skills needed in exercises, wargaming, and the real world. After all, as James Sterrett, chief of the Simulation Education Division at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, said, “Experience is a great teacher and well-designed games can deliver experiences that are tailored to drive home learning.”
If you are interested in integrating tabletop role-playing games into training for military intelligence professionals, it will likely prove challenging to convince commanders that subordinates should spend work hours “playing a game.” However, if games are structured like training, commanders could perhaps be brought around. First and most important: create a training plan. There would need to be learning objectives, measures of performance and effectiveness, lesson plans, and a schedule. Have the required materials ready; convert them from the standard Dungeons & Dragons style (filigree and stylized dragons in the margins) into something that looks like a Department of Defense form. Don’t plan an epic, multi-year campaign. Instead, take and edit short adventures that can be completed in around two hours.
Next, present the plan and justification to the chain of command. Be ready to answer a lot of questions. Be ready to be told “no.” Emphasize professional development — this is always a viable reason in the military. Wargaming is already built into the upper echelons of military learning; tabletop role-playing games are simply more advanced, if smaller, wargames.
In the face of extreme skepticism, ask for this to be a pilot program: As a possible measure of effectiveness, offer to have a subordinate give an intelligence brief to the unit both before and after the tabletop role-playing game training cycle with surveys to see what the audience remembers. Lieutenant von Reisswitz also faced initial skepticism about integrating wargames into military training, when a general was reported to have said, “You mean we are to play for an hour on a map!” And now, due to the history of Prussian military success, wargames, both large and small, are an accepted part of military culture. Tabletop role-playing games may eventually be as well.
As the U.S. military moves from counter-insurgency toward great power competition, military intelligence professionals must be ready to deal with complex and dynamic adversaries acting in an increasingly complex and dynamic world. Now is the time for experimentation to learn new skill sets and find new ways to fulfill the intelligence professional’s mandate. Dungeons and Dragons is a powerful tool to do just that.
D&D also gets a shout-out (at 09:20) in a longer War Room podcast on simulating diplomatic disaster. In that piece, podcast editor Ron Granieri discusses with Giovanni Corrado, Ian Hopper and Kent Park a strategy simulation exercise they have developed as part of the Carlisle Scholars Program at the US Army War College.
President Langata calmly explained that the traditional donors were no longer necessary—this is the dawn of a new age of prosperity and self-reliance for Carana—and then she promptly rolled a 9: success! Even with the modifiers imposed for the complexity of the proposed action, the dice predicted success—and I marvelled at the smiles and shouts of celebration around the table. Four hours ago when we started, few of these people knew each other well and no one knew Carana… and who would have predicted they would care this much in this amount of time?
How did we get here, you ask? Now that my friend Laura and I don’t work for the World Bank anymore, we recently dusted off Carana and updated it with our friend Marc for use in an experience we’ve designed that introduces the concepts of adaptive leadership to people working in fragile and conflict-affected developing countries – we’re calling it Carana: Adapt!
Gary and Laura SimMastering (standing) for a recent delivery for the UN at NYU-Silver
Where the old Carana had a (rather clunky but fun) post-conflict needs assessment exercise designed to teach the basics of security and development mandates and sequencing in a complex developing country, the new Carana is lean and light, built on a super-simple matrix game, with some pretty sweet tokens and chips representing power and influence and a nice simple map and board to draw players in. The whole design gives us the ability to quickly switch between scenes we keep ‘in our back pocket’ and choose scenes that offer the greatest simulation of real-world drama based on player actions … all unfolding over a six-scene story arc we deliver in a day. And while players engaged pretty enthusiastically in the ‘old’ Carana, this one creates much more energy, and the pause between each scene lets players assess and adapt how they’ll pursue their goals.
What I found most interesting about the success we’ve enjoyed so far with Carana: Adapt! is how easily it serves as a holding environment. In adaptive leadership, a holding environment is the “cohesive properties of a relationship or social system that serve to keep people engaged with one another in spite of the divisive forces generated by adaptive work”. That is a little technical for me, I think of a holding environments as the artificial constructs that people create to explain why they are willing to stick through some occasionally painful work. The foundations for a holding environment can be as simple as norms or rules – “golf has 18 holes”, as practical as timelines – “the meeting ends when lunch comes at 1” or as profound as values – “a family sticks together through thick and thin” or, as my grandparents used to say “never go to sleep angry” (creating some late night holding environments). There was something intuitive that I think Laura and I sensed when we started designing Carana: Adapt from our 14 previous deliveries of Carana – when people get in a game, they care. So we set out to figure out how to design a game immersive enough that people would care enough to do hard adaptive work.
I think this is an important point. Here on PAXsims, we have a lot of reflection on the value of games and simulations for experiential learning and for analysis, admittedly with limitations. But, I think, as gamers, we often take for granted the immersive quality of games – they make people care.
And it isn’t just that they care – they invest. They get a light introduction to a fictional country and information about their roles (we encourage players to inhabit their roles inspired by their professional experience, without deep roleplaying or regression to cliché). What we see is that even with a fairly low threshold built for scoring or victory like ours has, suddenly people care about chips, about die rolls, about problem-solving in the fictional country … and they’re willing to invest their energy and time. Most interestingly, they’re not just invested in ’winning’, but they zero in on pursuing better outcomes, taking risks and applying what they are learning from the introduction to adaptive leadership that is embedded into the experience.
In formulating the concept of the holding environment, Heifetz and others are telling us how difficult the work of adaptive leadership can be – if the holding environment isn’t strong enough to maintain the “pressure cooker” people will abandon the work. Somehow a game contributes to that resilience – perhaps the tokens remind people that it is not real, perhaps the play of inhabiting a role gives them more space to take chances, or maybe the catharsis of a die roll for victory (or loss!) gives them the release they need to accommodate that stress – whatever the case, games don’t just make people care, games keep people engaged.
This engagement is an important and often overlooked element of gaming. We’re using it to wring every ounce of energy and attention out of our participants and at every Carana:Adapt! delivery we’ve done so far people stand around and talk for an hour after. Our next challenge is to begin to build a network of Carana: Adapt! veterans who support each other in trying out some of those risky interventions in real life. Let us know if you want to visit Carana.
Comments from Laura Bailey and Marc Manashil are gratefully acknowledged.
The following article is by Akar Bharadvaj, who is a research associate in the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division with the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, where he specializes in wargames and structured analytic techniques. He presented on this topic at Connections 2022. In his spare time, Akar designs commercial board games, including “Tyranny of Blood,” the first-place winner of the 2021 Zenobia Award for historical board games.
Ebbs and flows in military interest and support for the practice of professional wargaming have generated significant barriers to maintaining a broad, multi-generational workforce capable of supporting the U.S. military’s wargaming needs. Various articles[1] and volumes[2] have described the challenge professional wargaming faces in building the next generation of wargamers who are needed to ensure continuity in the field. The task, while difficult, also presents an opportunity to be intentional when filling the gaps in the discipline.
The author therefore suggests approaching such a transformation by not only considering its challenges, but also its opportunities. In order to understand the implications of bringing new perspectives into the wargaming field, the author reviews salient portions of the current literature on diversity, specifically its benefits for and challenges to institutional thinking. A case study of hobby historical board games is a vehicle for exploring how another industry faced generational challenges and overcame them. Finally, the author discusses lessons that the literature review and case study suggest for professional wargaming, and posits possible future sources of wargamers.
Challenges and Opportunities
The challenges inherent to building wargaming’s next generation are well-documented. Wargaming has never come with a clear career path—it is an “accidental career” for most people.[3] The generation that cut its teeth playing complex hobby wargames from Avalon Hill a few decades ago continues to dominate professional wargaming, which complicates passing the baton to a generation of younger wargamers that is increasingly diverse in terms of demographics (immutable personal characteristics), functions (professional and academic background), and values.[4] Wargaming remains an elite, guild-like community, reflecting its origins in Prussian nobility.[5] Further constraining the breadth of perspectives and thought in wargaming is the fact that the U.S. national security world’s hiring and security practices select for specific backgrounds and lifestyles; most “creatives” instead choose private sector jobs that allow for a broader choice of lifestyles.
While this challenge is an abiding and significant one, recent changes in the cultural, commercial, and professional aspects of wargaming offer several opportunities to overcome it with new generations of wargamers.
Wargaming is becoming more popular. Government programs like the Wargaming Incentive Fund, and public outreach from think tanks, such as the Center for a New American Security[6] and Center for Strategic and International Studies[7] are fueling this expansion.
Commercial wargaming is undergoing a renaissance, developing a hobby that can feed into professional wargaming through innovation and increased personal interest. As board game designer Harold Buchanan points out in Conflicts of Interest magazine,[8] commercial wargames are more plentiful, with more topics and mechanics, than ever before. Newer innovations in hobby wargaming arrive from a broader range of sources, such as eurogames and role-playing games. This borrowing enables more dynamic games, typically with less complicated rulesets and a more appealing user experience. The hobby has also become more academically rigorous: some upcoming board games have been peer reviewed by academic institutions such as Central Michigan University’s Center for Learning Through Games and Simulations.[9]
Younger generations are accustomed to gaming as an educational tool. The 1980s and 1990s saw a boom in “edutainment,” which precipitated the rise of “gamification” in educational services such as the language-learning app Duolingo. Journalist Cassie McClure has gone so far as to refer to a cohort of Millennials (typically born between 1981 and 1996) as the “Oregon Trail generation,”[10] named for the educational computer game most of us in this cohort played (and some even learned from). Using games for education has only grown in popularity since then, with Generation Z increasingly using laptops and tablets in the classroom.
Technology has spurred new types of remote online wargaming that use platforms such as Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia to connect players from around the world.
Such ready-made opportunities suggest natural paths and benefits for cultivating new wargamers.
Diversity and Creativity
Cultivating the next generation of wargamers engenders the opportunity to improve the field and help avoid the historically endemic “accidental career” problem mentioned earlier. But, if we want to be intentional, where should we look for gamers, and how varied should these sources be? Reviewing current literature on diversity and creativity can help us better understand the benefits of intentionally recruiting wargamers into the field.
This literature review comes with a few caveats. First, it focuses on the practical benefits of diversity, rather than sociopolitical or ethical aspects. Second, diversity is a far more complex and multidimensional issue than this short literature review can tackle; functional and demographic diversity offer different benefits and challenges, and intersect to lead to more complex dynamics. Third, as an overview of diversity’s positive and negative effects as they apply to wargaming professionals, this article does not describe all of the research around diversity.
The social science research into diversity and creativity follows two different research paradigms that together strongly describe the presence of diversity as a double-edged sword: it creates opportunities to include broader and more innovative perspectives, but also raises the management costs of effectively integrating those perspectives.[11] The information/decisionmaking paradigm focuses on diversity’s strength of fostering broad, more innovative perspectives, and expanding the pool of ideas.[12] The social categorization paradigm considers the risks of diversity, indicating that people tend to work best with those who are similar to them, and that differences increase the risk of social conflict.[13] Thus, maximizing diversity’s benefit requires striking the right balance while working to mediate the negative outcomes.
According to the information/decisionmaking paradigm, diversity offers numerous benefits related to creativity. Divergent viewpoints stimulate teams to challenge biases, augmenting the value of structured analytic techniques.[14] Even open conflict can help groups by challenging assumptions, as long as the conflict is respectful and not personal. Diversity reduces groupthink and premature closure; a single divergent viewpoint can make a group’s decision-making process more rigorous, even when that dissenting view is objectively incorrect.[15] Diverse groups tend to perform better at creative, complex tasks, such as divergent thinking, but worse at more straightforward tasks, such as convergent thinking.[16] For wargames that involve red-teaming or otherwise understanding another actor, diversity can enhance empathy and cultural understanding while reducing mirror-imaging.[17] Diversity alone, however, is insufficient to generate these benefits if it is not sought and welcome (an attitude sometimes termed inclusivity), and if it is without an openness to challenging biases.
Diversity’s benefits also come with challenges. The social categorization paradigm points out that diversity risks creating fault lines, which “divide a group’s members on the basis of one or more attributes.”[18] Fault lines do not negatively affect team performance when they lie dormant (i.e., the team acknowledges them, but does not perceive them as a division), but numerous internal and external processes can activate them. If activated, fault lines become more salient than the overarching team identity; the divisive pressures can lead to coalition-forming, in-group conflict, and decreased work satisfaction.[19]These fault lines manifest differently across the different types of diversity: demographic (immutable personal characteristics), functional (job roles and expertise), and values (moral value systems).[20]Activated fault lines can lead demographic and functional diversity to slightly undermine team cohesion and performance when a team is just forming; the same circumstance in the context of values diversity has an even larger negative effect.[21]
Thankfully, these challenges can be mitigated. Good leadership and friendship-building can bridge such fault lines and reduce animosity.[22] Professional wargamers avoid the worst problems because they typically enjoy values cohesion (given a shared interest in supporting a common mission). Moreover, with good leadership and growing team interdependence, the early problems with demographic and functional diversity can be alleviated, but lost time might damage a team in other ways. Leaders can reduce or eliminate fault lines by encouraging teams to work closely together to achieve superordinate goals.
The challenges of diversity do not outweigh its benefits, but diversity needs to be carefully and intentionally managed to maximize its utility. Leaders should not throw together a disparate group and hope for the best—they should prepare to carefully support team-wide or industry-wide diversity and integration. Conversely, team leaders should not avoid forming diverse teams just because they have the potential for difficulty. Regarding the generational diversity salient to this article, leaders should be aware that generational differences can lead to harmful power differentials or to healthy mentorship relations. Different generations communicate differently; teams of players in a wargame might require more flexible or modular communications structures, and might respond differently to facilitation styles or wordy rulesets.[23]
The Case Study of Hobby Wargaming
Complementing the previous section’s theoretical framework, this section analyzes a practical case study with similar challenges to professional wargaming: historical hobby board gaming, commonly (but often simplistically) referred to as hobby wargaming. The hobby wargaming industry, a sub-set of the broader board game industry, has obvious similarities: similar processes for distilling geopolitical dynamics, a similar need for creativity and design thinking, and, most importantly for this article, similar generational challenges. Both types of games faced a similar decline, and are now experiencing a resurgence. Though this case study—comparing a commercial entertainment genre to an analytical, practical discipline—is flawed, it still usefully suggests lessons for how to grow a field with intention.
Hobby wargaming has existed as a commercial, mass-market publishing industry since Charles S. Roberts founded Avalon Hill in 1952, but it faced a crisis in the 1980s and 1990s: games became overly complicated and struggled to find an audience with a newer generation of gamers who preferred Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and Settlers of Catan.Two of the largest publishers, SPI and Avalon Hill, closed shop amid internal business problems and a stagnating market. Hobby wargaming dried up for years, to the point where Millennials grew up thinking of wargames as digital (or video) games like Starcraft or Command and Conquer, rather than analog games like Advanced Squad Leader.
These times gave way to a renaissance in historical gaming, primarily because the market reacted quickly and intentionally. When rulesets became too complicated to appeal to most players, publishers made games with broader appeal such as Axis and Allies. Wargames became less war and more game, portraying conflict in domains such as politics, economics, technology, and diplomacy. Increased cross-pollination with other genres of games have furthered this renaissance; games like Twilight Struggle and Memoir ’44 broke through to mainstream gamers. More recently, wargame publishers have expanded thematically, cultivating a more diverse set of historical themes, perspectives, and designers, and fostering a new sense of dynamism to the genre.
Despite the quick pivot and this recent growth, the genre faces some challenges born of the lost time. Game choice has made the hobby more welcoming; however, the industry has published games by new designers on unexplored topics, and invited them into the industry as equals to more established designers. Reflecting the social categorization literature on diversity, these changes have prompted some pushback, mainly from a small group of older gamers who possibly feel disoriented by change or feel that their experience is being devalued. Some established gamers have dismissed new game concepts, ideas, and topics, including “wargames” that do not meet their definition of “war.” They have labelled games with simpler or more focused mechanics as inferior to more complex fare, even if they appropriately handle the topic so that a broader audience can appreciate them. This elitism can turn off new gamers from going deeper into the hobby. Lastly, these changes (and the responses to them) have prompted some cliquishness among different kinds of gamers, which limits open communication, mentorship, and the flow of ideas to new generations of gamers. Unsurprisingly, each of these problems is also rampant in the professional wargaming world.
Lessons for Professional Wargaming
The literature about diversity and the case study about hobby historical board games point to useful lessons for professional wargaming.
Interdisciplinary needs require interdisciplinary approaches. Wargaming is a vast field with a plethora of necessary inputs, so good wargamers need to come from a lot of different sources. The graphic below is meant to spark thought and start a conversation, not to end one. What other domains might produce the next great wargamers?
The lack of a clear professional path to wargaming can be an opportunity. Having too regimented a training program as an industry could limit creativity and innovation; drawing from a broader set of career paths reveals opportunities for growth. Wargamers can learn from all genres of gaming, not just classic hex-and-counter wargames. We can also reach out to fields such as design, social sciences, and communications.
Lean into generational differences rather than fight them. Younger cohorts may enter the wargaming world in different ways than did previous generations, but we should welcome them and the perspectives they bring. The lesson from hobby gaming is that professional wargamers can benefit from being open-minded about points of entry, which would enrich the creativity and variety of approaches. Dismissing comparisons to popular games like Dungeons and Dragons, or arguing over whether a game is technically a wargame is off-putting and limiting. As professional wargaming increasingly takes on new, broader topics—diplomacy, climate change, logistics—it can learn from a greater range of sources. Even something as simple as using a term other than wargaming could frame the field so as to bring in folks who are interested in using gaming to explore problems, but who are not interested in war.
Invest more into mentorship and friendly competition. We can still do better at creating an environment that is more inviting to newcomers. Generally, professional wargaming has done less outreach than hobby gaming, but has succeeded with programs such as the Women’s Wargaming Network and the Georgetown University Wargaming Society. Tapping more groups can increase experimentation, for example with groups such as the Department of Defense’s “Fight Club.”[24] Beyond the defense world, reaching out at gaming conventions and more universities would also help. Wargamers could explore beyond our niches to find people with skills needed for wargaming who might not even know what wargaming is. Who in the Department of Defense would have reached out to social workers for wargaming advice before Chris Engle invented matrix games?
Finally, and most importantly, diversity amplifies creativity and innovation, but it does not come cheap.Diversity requires work, good leadership, and time to support inclusion and to mitigate inherent challenges to team cohesion. Good leaders from older cohorts acknowledge their knowledge and experience in their work, but they should also embrace differences and ensure all perspectives are heard and free to express themselves, particularly when approaching new problems. Thankfully, wargaming in the defense world comes with a degree of shared mission and values, so the hardest part of a diverse team is mostly addressed. Time and team interdependence mediate some of these challenges, but teams need to be patient and cultivate cohesion.
Building this diverse new generation of wargamers intentionally, and learning from other fields and research, our field can not only envision new heights of creativity, analytical rigor, open experimentation, and real-world results, but set out to explore them. The future of wargaming is an exciting one.
[12] D. van Knippenberg, C.K. De Dreu, and A.C. Homan, “Work Group Diversity and Group Performance: An Integrative Model and Research Agenda,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, no. 6 (2004): 1008–22. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.6.1008
[13] van Knippenberg, et al., “Work Group Diversity and Group Performance.”
[14] van Knippenberg, et al., “Work Group Diversity and Group Performance.”
[16] C.A. Bowers, J.A. Pharmer, and E. Salas, “When member homogeneity is needed in work teams: A meta-analysis,” Small Group Research, 31, no. 3 (2009): 305–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/104649640003100303
[19] K.A. Jehn, and K. Bezrukova, “The faultline activation process and the effects of activated faultlines on coalition formation, conflict, and group outcomes,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 112, no. 1 (2010): 24–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.11.008
[21] A.E. Randel, “Identity salience: A moderator of the relationship between group gender composition and work group conflict,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 23, no. 6 (2002): 749–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.163
[22] H. Ren, B. Gray, and D.A. Harrison, “Triggering faultline effects in teams: The importance of bridging friendship ties and breaching animosity ties,” Organization Science 26, no. 2 (2015): 390–404. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2014.0944
The following post has been cleared for release by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.
AI (DALL-E2) interpretation of my return to Dstl Portsdown West.
In early May I was fortunate to spend four days at the Defence Wargaming Centre of the UK Defence Science Technology Laboratory (Dstl), at Portsdown West near Portsmouth. I had been on similar visits before (in 2016, 2017, and 2018) but this had been followed by a hiatus due to COVID and other factors. It was good to be back, and I’m very grateful to everyone at Dstl who organized and supported the visit.
On the Tuesday and Wednesday I offered a series of lectures on “Mishaps and Minefields in Professional Wargaming,” which examined common mistakes we make and why we make them. These were primarily intended for newer analysts, although several more experienced wargamers participated and contributed to our wide-ranging discussion.
Mishaps and Minefields I: So You Think You Need a Wargame?
Mishaps and Minefields II: Game Development
Mishaps and Minefields III: Participants and Resources
Mishaps and Minefields IV: Game Control, Adjudication, and Facilitation
Mishaps and Minefields V: Data Collection and Analysis
Mishaps and Minefields: Mea Culpa
The final session involved me recounting decisions I now regret and mistakes I’ve made personally while designing and running serious games. Critical reflection is important, after all!
The slides for all of these sessions are below. Like the image at the top of this report, most of the artwork for the slides was generated by AI (and some of it is quite amusing).
The Thursday and Friday of my visit involved more informal discussions of key topics, such as adjudication and end-to-end analysis. There were also playtest sessions of two games being developed as part of Dstl’s EAD (Explore, Anticipate, and Develop) Project. The first was a full-featured modular grand strategic game system that can be adapted to a variety of questions and scenarios.
The second was a much simpler “strategic game in a box” (Contested) to introduce the possibilities of strategic gaming (in much the same way that the Dstl-sponsored Matrix Game Construction Kit was designed to help jump-start matrix gaming in organizations). Both are very promising, and the latter in particular benefits from a very intutive game system that presents few barrier to adoption and play.
On a related note, in 2021 Dstl published a lengthy (165 page) paper on How Can Dstl Expand Our National Security Gaming Toolset To Generate More Meaningful And Reliable Insights? (DSTL/PUB131779 1.4) which provides some really thoughtful discussion of the methodological challenges in strategic gaming. Dstl has now cleared this report for public release, so I’ve just shared it as a separate post on PAXsims.
We also had a session on the design of We Are Coming, Nineveh!, followed by three simultaneous games. The latter went very well, with everyone quickly learning the game system. Daesh seemed to have the best of it in all three wargames, perhaps because the ISF was overly cautiously a little slow to find and fix the enemy—who, after all, were playing for time before they inevitably lost control of West Mosul. I was pleased to learn that the game is to be used in the Defence Academy of the UK to teach about modern urban warfare
Friday afternoon involved a lengthy (but highly enjoyable) drive up to Liverpool, where the Western Approaches HQ Museum hosted Dstl, Royal Navy, and other personnel for a convoy wargame based on the work of the famed Western Approaches Tactical Unit during World War Two. Kit Barry, who organized the event, has already written about the game preparations and the outcome. As captain of fictional Type-VII U-boat U2, I was quite pleased with my result: three merchantmen sunk, followed by a stealthy exit (despite one corvette doggedly trying to find me with ASDIC).
Overall, I had a terrific time—it was both professionally rewarding and very fun. There has been quite a few changes since my earlier visits: the establishment of the DWC, more facilities, and a very substantial growth in the number of Dstl analysts now supporting defence wargaming acriss the UK Ministry of Defence. The United States, of course, remains the preeminent wargaming “superpower” in NATO. Indeed, the budget for the new US Marine wargaming center alone likely exceeds the wargaming resources of most other NATO members combined. However, the UK has clearly consolidated its position as a leader in the field, as evidenced not only by Dstl’s expanding activities but also by the 2017 publication by the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre of the Defence Wargaming Handbook as well as the forthcoming Wargaming Influence Handbook. It has developed this capacity, moreover, from a position of greater resource scarcity relative to the US. In that sense I think it is sometimes better attuned to the challenges faced by small and medium-sized NATO militaries. It is also geographically closer to most of them, and the annual Connections UK wargaming conference always has strong representation from other European countries.
I hope that Dstl and others across the UK Ministry of Defence will continue to leverage these strengths to play a leading role in mentoring, supporting, and partnering with wargaming initiatives by allies and partners. They have a a great deal to contribute.
It should also be added that Dstl has been an early and avid supporter of the Derby House Principles on diversity and inclusion in professional wargaming. The effects of this can be increasingly seen in their team of analysts, how they approach their work, and the powerful synergies that arise from harnessing multiple experiences and perspectives. Here too, others have much to learn from their example.
The following report has been cleared for release by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory .
In May 2021, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory published a lengthy (165pp) report entitled How Can Dstl Expand Our National Security Gaming Toolset To Generate More Meaningful And Reliable Insights? This addresses a broad range of related issues, including the experiential value of games, identifying genuine insights (as opposed to artifacts of the game design), and post-game analysis.
Section 1 – Introduction
Section 2 – How Is An ‘Analytical Game’ Defined?
Section 3 – How Can We Develop Creating Knowledge Games That Are More Analytical?
Section 4 – How Can We Conduct More Analytical Games Within TheConstraints Of Engaging Very Senior Players?
Section 5 – How Can We Encourage More Representative Red Cell ResponsesTo Blue Cell Actions?
Section 6 – Proof of Concept Escalation Dynamics Game and Concept of Analysis
Section 7 – Conclusions and Recommendations
Section 8 – Closing Summary
This report has now been approved for general public release, and can be found in its entirety below (DSTL/PUB131779 1.4).
PAXsims 