After The Apex – The Dilemma Game

PAXsims has previously reported the development of a matrix game entitled After The Apex by Ben Taylor and Ben Williams. The game allows players to explore the challenges faced by the fictional country of Bretonia as it seeks to chart a course to toward the new normal once the first wave of COVID-19 infections had passed.

The developers have now been working with Anja van der Hulst of TNO to build a dilemma game based upon the same scenario. The dilemma game is implemented in software and allows the solo player to make a series of policy decisions based upon dilemmas faced but the Bretonian government. A range of advisors will offer perspectives on the issue and provide different rationales for accepting, or not, the proposed policy. The player is left with the decisions as to what to do.

The dilemma game plays much more quickly than the matrix game and so allows some of the same issues to be explored in a shorter time, but without the rich interpersonal interaction. This may be a better design choice for some applications. Those attending next week’s Connections professional wargaming conference will have two opportunities to play the dilemma game and to meet with the developers. A fuller write up will follow on PAXSims after the conference.

Connections 2020 reminder

Connections US/Global 2020 update

In response to the global pandemic, this year’s Connections US interdisciplinary wargaming conference will be held on 10-14 August 2020 as a 100% virtual/online conference and as a truly Global Connections, with hours convenient for participants from the west coast of the US and Canada through the UK and Europe.   

Content will include a keynote by, former deputy secretary of defense Mr. Robert Work, seminars, speaker panels, and working groups on subjects from wargaming pandemics, AI in wargaming, wargaming and innovation, wargaming and education and more.  Online wargame demos, play-throughs and labs will also be available. 

To learn more go to https://connections-wargaming.com/.

New date and location for Connections US 2020 Wargaming Conference

Due to new Naval wide (which includes the USMC) base access regulations following shootings at Navy bases USMC Quantico has had to disinvite Connections US 2020. Connections US 2020 will now be hosted by CNA in Arlington, VA, August 11-14, 2020. Note the one week shift to the right. For more details go to the Connections website at https://connections-wargaming.com/

Serious Games Forum 2020 (Paris)

The next Serious Games Forum—the French version of the Connections wargaming conferences—will take place on January 27 at the École Militaire in Paris. Over two hundred participants attended last year.

Further information and registration details can be found at the link above. For details of the previous conference in December 2018, see this PAXsims report by Juliette Le Ménahèze.

Connections US Wargaming Conference 2019 Proceedings

 

The Proceedings of the 2019 Connections US Wargaming Conference is now available thanks to Mark Leno, Wargame Analyst, Department of Strategic Wargaming at the US Army War College.

The Future of Wargaming working group report

PAXsims is pleased to provide more of the impressive work done at the Connections 2019 (US) professional wargaming conference. Many thanks to Ed McGrady for passing this on for wider distribution.

Also, if you haven’t yet, please take a minute to complete our PAXsims reader survey.

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At Connections 2019 we held a working group (WG2) to explore the future of wargaming.  We approached the problem several different ways.  First, several members of the working group contributed fictional stories describing what gaming might look like in the future.  Second, we had baselining briefs on future technologies, including virtual and alternate reality technologies and artificial intelligence.  Finally, we did a scenario planning exercise with the working group attendees at the conference.  This process resulted in a wide-range of different ways to think about, and predict, the future of gaming.

The working group was co-chaired by Mike Ottenberg and Ed McGrady, with stories contributed by Sebastian J. Bae, Michael Bond, Col. Matt Caffrey (Ret.), Dr. Stephen Downes-Martin, Dr. ED McGrady, and Dr. Jeremy Sepinsky.

• Stories of Future Gaming (Connections 2019 WG2)
• The Future of Wargaming (Connections 2019 WG2)

Ed McGrady 

Wargaming the Far Future working group report

PAXsims is pleased to present the report of the “Wargaming the Far Future” working group, ably assembled by Stephen Downes-Martin. This 276 page (!) document contains the papers written by the working group, their discussions while they wrote and refined those papers from November 2018 to June 2019, and the discussions at the workshop held during the Connections US Wargaming Conference in August 2019.

Our most potent power projection and warfighting capabilities, developed in response to current and near future threats, are technologically advanced, hugely expensive, and have half- century service lives. The first of these characteristics gives us a temporary and possibly short lived warfighting edge. The second grants our political leaders short lived economic and political advantages. The last characteristic locks us into high expenses in maintenance and upgrades for many years in order to justify the initial sunk costs as though they were investments. This combination forces us onto a high-inertia security trajectory that is transparent to our more agile adversaries, providing them with credible information about that trajectory while giving them time to adapt with cheaper counter forces, technologies and strategies.

We must therefore wargame out to service life, the “far future”, to ensure our current and future weapons systems and concepts of operations are well designed for both the near term and the far future. However a 50 year forecasting horizon is beyond the credibility limit for wargaming. The Working Group and the Workshop explored and documented ways that wargaming can deal with this horizon.

Papers and comments are contributed by Stephen Aguilar-Milan, Sebastian J. Bae, Deon Canyon and Jonathan Cham, Thomas Choinski, John Hanley, William Lademan, Graham Longley-Brown and Jeremy Smith, Brian McCue, Ed McGrady, Robert Mosher, Kristan Wheaton, and of course, Stephen himself.

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Please take a minute to complete our PAXsims reader survey.

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Registration open: CONNECTIONS NORTH 2020

Registration is now open for the CONNECTIONS NORTH professional wargaming/conflict simulation/serious gaming conference, to be held at McGill University in Montréal on Saturday, 15 February 2020.

For details of past conferences, see these reports.

Further details and conference registration via Eventbrite.

CONNECTIONS NORTH is proud to be part of the globalist conspiracy anarcho-syndicalist commune international network of Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conferences.

 

Connections US 2019 reminder

This is a reminder that the Connections US 2019 professional wargaming conference will be held at the US Army Heritage and Education Center (Carlisle, PA) on 13-16 August.

To see what to expect, see our PAXsims report on last year’s conference.

Registration open for Connections US 2019

A message from Tim Wilkie (National Defense University):

This year’s Connections conference will be hosted by the Army War College and held at the Army Heritage and Education Center (AHEC) in Carlisle, PA, August 13-16.   Since 1993, Connections has brought together practitioners from all aspects of the wargaming field to learn from each other, share best practices, and grow the discipline.  We seek to “advance and preserve the art, science, and application of wargaming,” and we do so through a variety of events at each year’s conference, including speaker panels, workshops, working groups, game demonstrations and playtests, and more.  We welcome every background: military and civilian, educators and analysts, government and commercial hobbyist press, U.S. and international.  Our participants use gaming for research, analysis, education, and to inform policy, and there is much that we can learn from one another.

On behalf of my conference co-chair and the founder of the Connections conference, Matt Caffrey, I am pleased to announce that registration for Connections 2019 is now open.  You can reach the registration form from the conference website.

The website also contains additional information about the conference, including the draft agenda, directions, hotel information, and more.

Connections 2019 wargaming conference — Call for presentations

Connections 2019 will be hosted by the U.S. Army War College at the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, PA, 13-16 August 2019.

Connections is an interdisciplinary wargaming conference that has been held annually since 1993, with the mission of advancing and preserving the art, science, and application of wargaming.  Connections participants come from all elements of the wargaming discipline, and include those in the military, government, academic, private sector, and commercial hobbyist fields.  By providing a forum for practitioners to share insights and best practices, Connections works to improve gaming as a tool for research, analysis, education, and policy.

Presentations on any aspect of professional wargaming are welcome.  The 2019 conference theme is Futures of Wargaming, and with that in mind, presentations on wargaming future events, advances in wargaming techniques, wargaming to train future leaders, and related topics are especially encouraged.

Please submit your proposal via the Google Form at this link (which contains additional information).

It is by no means necessary to have attended a previous Connections conference to participate as a speaker.  More information about past Connections events and current updates on the status of planning for Connections 2019 can be found at the conference website: https://connections-wargaming.com/

Feel free to pass this along to those who you think might be interested, including posting this in appropriate places online.  For additional information or any questions or concerns, please contact Tim Wilkie (National Defense University).

In-stride adjudication (Connections 2018 working group report)

Stephen Downes-Martin has pulled together a 187 page (!) report on in-stride adjudication from the papers and discussion presented at the Connections US 2018 conference. You can download it here.

How can we avoid risky and dishonesty shifts in seminar wargames?

Stephen Downes-Martin has written up the discussion from another Connections game lab session, this time on “How can we avoid risky and dishonesty shifts in seminar wargames?” with contributions from Stephen Downes-Martin, Korene Phillips, Ken Shogren,
Sorrel Stetson, Rosemary Tropeano:

The group identified three research questions and identified and discusses nine ways that the risky and (dis)honest shifts could be baselined, measured, controlled or mitigated.

Two Behavior Shifts During Small Group Discussions

The (Dis)honesty Shift

Research indicates “that there is a stronger inclination to behave immorally in groups than individually,” resulting in group decisions that are less honest than the individuals would tolerate on their own. “Dishonest” in the context of the research means the group decisions break or skirt the ethical rules of the organization and societal norms, involve cheating and lying. Furthermore, the group discussions tend to shift the individuals’ post-discussion norms of honest behavior towards dishonest. First the discussion tends to challenge the honesty norm, then inattention to one’s own moral standards (during the actual discussion) and categorization malleability (the range in which dishonesty can occur without triggering self-assessment and self-examination) create the effect that “people can cheat, but their behaviors, which they would usually consider dishonest do not bear negatively on their self-concept (they are not forced to update their self-concept)”. The research indicates that it is the small group communication that causes the shift towards dishonesty that enables group members to coordinate on dishonest actions and change their beliefs about honest behavior”. The group members “establish a new norm regarding (dis)honest behavior”. Appeals to ethics standards seem to be effective in the short term [Mazar et al] but there is little evidence for long term effectiveness.

The Risky Shift

Research into risky or cautious shifts during group discussion looks at whether and when a group decision shifts to be riskier or more cautious than the decision that the individuals would have made on their own. One element driving the shift appears to be who bears the consequences of the decision – the group members, people the group members know (colleagues, friends, family), or people the group members do not know. There is evidence that individuals tend to be myopically risk averse when making decisions for themselves. Research indicates however that “risk preferences are attenuated when making decisions for other people: risk-averse participants take more risk for others whereas risk seeking participants take less.” Whether the group shows a risky shift or a cautious shift depends on the culture from which the group is drawn and the size of the shift seems to depend on the degree of empathy the group feels for those who will bear the consequences and risks of the decision.

Research into leadership shows that “responsibility aversion” is driven by a desire for more “certainty about what constitutes the best choice when others’ welfare is affected”, that individuals “who are less responsibility averse have higher questionnaire-based and real-life leadership scores” and do not seek more certainty when making decisions that are risky for others than they seek when making decisions that are risky for themselves alone. However, this research says nothing about the starting risk-seeking or risk-avoiding preference of the decision making leader.

See the full paper (link above) for further discussion, including the footnotes (which have been removed from the excerpt above).

How can we credibly wargame cyber at an unclassified level?

The frighteningly-efficient Stephen Downes-Martin has been kind enough to pass on a game lab report from the recent Connections US 2018 wargaming conference on “How can we credibly wargame cyber at an unclassified level?”  (pdf) with contributions from Michael Bond, Stephen Downes-Martin, Andreas Haggman, Clayton Hutto, Michael Markowitz, Douglas Samuelson, and Joseph Saur:

A small minority of cyber experts with wargaming and research experience have security clearances. If cyber operations are researched and gamed only at high levels of classification, then we limit our use of the intellectual capital of the United States and Allies and put at risk our ability to gain edge over our adversaries. We must find ways to wargame cyber[1]at the unclassified level while dealing with information security dangers to best use the skills within academia, business and the gaming community. During the Connections US Wargaming Conference 2018 a small group of interested people gathered for about an hour to discuss the question:

“How can we credibly wargame cyber at an unclassified level?”

The group concluded that it is possible to wargame cyber credibly and usefully at the unclassified level and proposed eight methods for doing so. The group also suggested it is first necessary to demonstrate and socialize this idea by gaming the trade-offs between the classification level and the value gained from wargaming cyber.

[1]“Wargaming cyber” and “gaming cyber” are loose terms which group deliberately left as such to encourage divergent thinking and to avoid becoming too specific.