MORS 82 Summary – Day 2

I started off the second day of this year’s Military Operations Research Society annual symposium by attending a presentation by Yuna Wong (Marine Corps) on The Search for the Black Herring: MORSS Strategist’s Corner. This wasn’t a gaming presentation per se, but Yuna is certainly well-known in the professional wargame community, and has been particularly active in encouraging the closer integration of social science theory and methods into gaming and strategic analysis. In particular, her talk asked what analytical organizations should do to prepare for future analytical challenges in an era of uncertainty. One of my current research projects looks at the political science of prediction, so I was especially interested to see what she had to say. (For those who might be wondering. a “black herring” occurs when analysts obsessively look for the next “black swans,” only to find “red herrings.”)

Her primary argument was that analytic communities needed to be multidisciplinary, broaden their methodological expertise, and use experts well. Among the challenges to being more multidisciplinary are the existing (US government) human resource system, as well as organizational culture. As an example of the latter she used the professional wargaming community, who tend to have internal measures of legitimacy (for example, many years of being a boardgamer) that have an exclusionary effect on new and different talent. It is also a risk for organizations to depart from existing practices, and the search and start-up costs of becoming more multidisciplinary may be higher than maintaining the status quo.

She also was critical of the tendency of modern operations research to focus on narrow technical problems and answers. Such approaches may be less useful for addresses issues that are better characterized as a “mess” rather than a “problem.” (For the difference between these and the effective use of judgment-based methods, see NATO’s Code of Best Practices for Judgement-Based Operational Analysis.) The real “black swans,” she suggested, were to be found in the swamp of complex and chaotic environments.

Yuna had a number of useful thoughts too on effective use of outside expertise, addressing issues of identification, recruitment, facilitation, as well as practical issues (such as contracting and clearances).

I agreed with pretty much all that she had to say. However (following on from the work of Phil Tetlock and the Good Judgment Project) I asked whether we needed to pay more attention to cognitive styles. It isn’t just a question of finding people with differing areas of expert knowledge, but finding those people who are also not locked into particular paradigms or filter everything through a preexisting worldview.

While not a wargaming panel a great deal of what she had to say was of significant value for analytic gaming. Many wargames, after all, involve need to address messy problems, challenge conventional wisdoms, engage broader expertise in game design and adjudication, and explore uncertain futures.

 

John Hanley Jr. (formerly ODNI) presented on Gaming and Game Theory: Using Game Theory to Advance Gaming. He argued that understanding game theory helped in both wargame design and analysis. Manual games, he suggested, have their limitations: they are not rigorous analysis; they don’t have fully reproducible results; they are dependent on the quality and characteristics of the gamers; they can be personnel-intensive (and hence expensive), can be error-prone; and they aren’t real (and there is a consequent risk of over-learning from them). Many of these limitations can be reduced however, by continuous gaming and a structure for capturing results. He highlighted this by discussing a series of games over the years at the Naval War College, subsequent analysis of which identified clear clusters of moves, responses, outcomes, and equilibrium strategies for Red and Blue. The data, however, was messy (suggesting that moves and adjudication needs to be more clearly delineated and recorded). Capturing manual games in game theoretic form allows for more sophisticated analysis, helping to poulate the strategy space and identification of dominant strategies and equilibria.

 

Daniel Stimpson (George Mason University) talked about Using Operational Patterns to Influence Attacker Decisions on a Transportation Network. The challenge he was addressing was how to anticipate an opponent’s IED attacks on transportation and logistics networks. To date, he suggested, much of the academic (and classified) literature did not adequately address attacker dynamics and the interaction between attacker and defender. Boyd’s OODA loop provided some of the conceptual underpinning for his approach.

He offered a useful discussion of the notion of “randomness,” noting that neither “variety” nor “surprise” was synonymous with randomness, nor was it the same as failure to predict (although prediction is only possible in constrained systems, and totally random systems are inherently unpredictable). Surprise, he noted, derives from a failure to predict—the system itself is not “surprised.” In his model, Blue seemed far more constrained in its tactical choices than Red (whose behaviour seemed to be wholly driven by trial-and-error learning). The presenter noted that there were limits in how complex the model could be, given resource and time constraints.

 

Douglas Samuelson (InfoLogix and Group W), offered a presentation title Anybody Else Wanna Negotiate? Representing Negotiations Realistically in Wargames. He argued that negotiations are generally characterized by non-zero transaction costs and multiple representatives with non-identical interests. Because of this, negotiations often have multiple phases: reaching a deal, then selling a deal to constituents or clients. For a deal to last, it needs to keep producing benefits that outlast the negotiator’s involvement. Negotiations with many parties but clear interests are good candidates for mediation. Problems with shifting interests and unclear identities are more difficult to mediate. (He used the examples of North Korea and Israel-Palestine to illustrate his argument, although I was not convinced of his application of the cases.) He suggested that achieving the best possible deal is not always in a party’s interest, given the importance of promoting trust as a basis for continued interaction. He also addressed coalition-building, as well as conditions under which negotiators may wish to prolong talks, or actors may seek to derail negotiations by attacking the negotiators.

Unfortunately the presentation didn’t link this very well to wargame design or facilitation. For the most part it simply identified aspects of negotiation, and suggested at the end that a wargame ought to include these in some way. Some of the audience probed this point, asking questions about how we might best built the many complex aspects of negotiations into a wargame—the tricks of the trade, as it were, for manipulating players into realistic negotiation behaviours

 

A key aspect of this, of course, is building an effective narrative that players will internalize, and understanding what player narratives indicate about perceptions and behaviours. Fortunately the next presentation was by Yuna Wong (USMC) and Sara Cobb (George Mason University) on Narrative Analysis in Seminar Gaming. Unfortunately the presentation was classified as For Official Use Only and those of us Canadians with yellow badges had to leave. (This is known in MORS wargaming parlance as being “Brian Train-ed.”)

With this, our cunning plan to use US government thinking about narratives and seminar gaming to assist in the rapid Canadian military seizure of Seattle, Fargo, and Albany as envisaged in Defence Scheme #1 was foiled. Curses!

(I should add the Working Group 30 chairs were very apologetic about this, and as Canadians we left very politely.)

 

The day ended with an excellent panel discussion on Practices in Wargaming that featured such wargaming luminaries as Peter Perla (CNA), John Hanley Jr., Jeff Appleget (NPS), Hank Brightman (NWC), and Ellie Bartels (Caerus Associates).

Three main topics were addressed. Far too much was said by both the panel and the audience for me to accurately record here, so instead I’ve briefly summarized some of the major points:

Gaming for DoD Analysis

• Ellie Bartels: We need to pay more attention to game design in order to be able to convince clients of the value of gaming methodologies.
• Jeff Appleget: You really need to pay attention to the human element in wargaming. We’ve been too focused on closed-loop combat models.
• Peter Perla: We need to integrate all the tools in the toolkit. Does DoD have any organizational incentive to listen to games and OR analysis that tells unpleasant truths?
• John Hanley Jr.: DoD should be gaming everything that involves the interaction of two or more players. Games are useful for developing concepts, identifying capability and intel needs, etc. However no game results can stand without independent substantiation.
• Hank Brightman: Our greatest challenges as analysts is we work for senior decision-makers from hard science backgrounds that are most comfortable with quantitative data. We need to look at big problems in whole, and use games to provide insights (but not answers).
• Audience questions, comments, and discussion:
  • Are decision-makers so saturated with analysis that there is only limited capacity for games-based analysis? Can good analysis drive out bad? Who does wargaming best in DoD?
  • Withholding information can help assure that players don’t get lost in the tactical weeds, and instead focus on operational and strategic levels.
  • Almost all of the key insights of wargames are qualitative. However, there was push-back on this, suggested that some quantitative data extraction was also important.

Making a Playable Game

• Ellie Bartels: Players are human beings, and need to be treated as such and feel their contributions are valuable. We need to be parsimonious in our game design.
• Jeff Appleget: I have my students actually design a game for a DoD sponsor. They learn the challenges of deriving clarity from the sponsor. Adequate time for playtesting is important, since there is a design/play/revise iteration that is essential.
• Peter Perla: The closer the game is to familiar functions the easier it is to play. However you need a balance between a simple “talk it through” game, and formalisms that give players an opportunity to discuss how the game models the real world.
• John Hanley Jr: You get people responsible and place them in a similar environment and they really engage with the game.
• Hank Brightman: There are two types of game, experiential and analytical, and they have different requirements. We link the designer and the analyst from the beginning.
• Audience questions, comments, and discussion:
  • It is important not to confuse one type of game with another.
  • We don’t have a common gaming conceptual language.
  • There are lots of folks who design bad games.
    • There is more to truth to analysis. Games are created universes that can encourage insight but aren’t analysis.
  • A game is in the minds of the players, not in the computer or in the table.

The Future of Gaming

• Ellie Bartels: The future of wargaming will depend a lot on who future wargamers and leaders are. Findings tend to be both complex and abstract, and you need analysts and leaders who are comfortable with that. We need to be multidisciplinary–even into the humanities!
• Jeff Appleget: The need for games is higher in an era of higher uncertainty. We need to communicate to senior leaders what games can, and cannot, do.
• Peter Perla: It seems as if gaming is on the rise again—although I’m nervous that it will do its (boom and bust) cycle again. We need to communicate its payoffs and limits. We ought to be able to communicate to future decision-makers with games.
• John Hanley Jr: My expectation is more of the same. My aspiration is that we devote more effort into making sense out of sets of games. We could be using online gaming to explore a larger chunk of the strategy space.
• Hank Brightman: We need to bring in folks from other fields. Future analytical gaming needs to use more analytical triangulation and mixed methods. I think that we’ll have a backlash against the impersonalism of some digital gaming and interfaces.
• Audience questions, comments, and discussion:
  • What is the impact of having commanders who went through wargaming?
  • Distributed gaming on SIPRInet.
  • What is the impact of the current gaming generation?
  • What is the accountability mechanism for learning from game failures, or insights that turned out not to be very insightful?
  • What are gaming worst practices?

MORS 82 summary – Day 1

There’s more to attend at the 82nd annual symposium of the Military Operations Research Society than I can fit into my schedule, but here is a quick summary of the presentations I was able to attend today:

Tim Wilkie (NDU) and I made a presentation on The Decision to Attack: Experiments in Small Group Decision-Making to Study the Leadership of Violent Extremist Groups. This is an exploratory project being developed by Devin Ellis (ICONS Project, UMD), John Sawyer (UMD), John Wilkenfield (UMD), Victor Asal (SUNY Albany), James Walsh (UNC Charlotte) and ourselves that would use a role play simulations to examine the factors shaping decision-making by violent extremist groups. Part of the intent here is to see whether we can replicate, in a simulation/experimental environment, the actual decision-making processes and calculus of known attacks by non-state armed groups. We also hope to develop a role-play test-bed (using ICONSnet) that would allow us to explore how different variables (such as psychological profile, resources, inter-and intra-group competition, set policies, world-view, etc.) might shape the use of violence. At this point we were largely looking for ideas and feedback as we refine the proposal, and certainly found the discussion useful

Ellie Bartels (Caerus Associates) presented on Methods of Social Inquiry for Game Design. She started with a review of how gaming is used in the social sciences, as a pedagogical tool an—less frequently—as an experimental technique. Its use, however, is limited by a perceived lack of rigour. Game theoretical treatments are often too abstract to examine complex issues. Social science may be used as an input into professional gaming of some topics (insurgency, irregular warfare, but unevenly. Also, she noted, there is only limited published work on how social science can inform wargame design.

She argued that games are not really models, because they aren’t fully portable across cases. Rather they are an instantiation of a model, implemented in a very particular context. Decisions in a game may be an input, and output, or both.

She also suggested that games were much more akin to case studies than statistical analysis, because of the unquantifiable nature of decision-making. Because of this, case study research design can help illuminate important aspect of wargame design.

They also parallel formal models, in that they are artificial and can produce emergent behaviours based on formal rules. Most wargames are too complex and multi-sided than most formal modeling. She noted that the more focused the game the stronger the analytical findings will be. There also needs to be some point of comparison. Variables need to be clearly conceptualized, and decisions need to be considered a key variable. Both “most likely” cases and “least likely” cases provide good cases for games. She also highlighted some of the limits of games, including the limits of gaming single cases and problems of selection bias. Games can be useful for theory development, she suggested, but cannot in themselves validate theories.

Jeffrey Appleget (NPS) and Rebecca Dougherty (Lockheed Martin)  delivered a presentation on Assessing the Value of Weather Knowledge within End Use Context, which used a manual wargame to examine not how weather affects military operations, but rather to look at how actors use weather knowledge, and what weather information is important for mission success. In order to avoid any priming bias, participants were not told the wargame was about weather—most, as it turned out, thought it was about the impact of a new weapons system. The game was driven, in many ways, by the degradation of the current array of US military weather satellites, and a fiscal environment in which it will not be possible to continue all weather data collection. In other words, if the US is to lose weather information capacity in coming years, what information and capabilities can most safely be sacrificed?

Finally, I attended a presentation by Katrina Dusek, (NDU) on COIN of the Realm, a counterinsurgency board game designed to illustrate key COIN principles. Two players vie to control territory (physical and conceptual) and to dominate various sectors (such as  security, rule of law/governance, provision of services, and messaging). Players mobilize resources to generate additional capabilities, but in most cases win the game by securing popular support. We all got to give a copy of the game a spin, and I’m pleased to say that in the version I played we insurgents seemed to be on a slow path to victory when play had to come to an end!

Not-quite-live from MORS 82

This week I’m attending the 82nd annual symposium of the Military Operations Research Society. There is much of interest to the professional wargamer or serious conflict simulationist here. In addition to an entire Working Group devoted to wargaming (WG30, ably chaired by Scott Simpkins of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University), there are related working groups on everything from modelling and simulation through to analysis of alternatives; training and education; and social science methods and applications. Indeed, it’s a veritable cornucopia of simulation and analytic milgeekiness.

For many years the MORS symposium was largely NOFORNed—that is, closed to non-US nationals, even those with allied security clearances. That has changed—my rough estimate is that more than two-thirds of the sessions are now open and unclassified this year. Of the classified material, some (although not much) is REL FVEY, meaning the sessions can be attended by allied (UK/Canada/Australia/New Zealand) participants with suitable SECRET clearance (which, as we all know, is hardly any clearance at all)

Among other things I’ll be making a presentation here with Tim Wilkie (NDU) and Devin Ellis (ICONS Project) about a proposed project that a number of us have been working on that will explore decision-making in violent extremist groups through simulation game methodologies.

As the week progresses I’ll try to post periodic summaries of panels and discussions to PAXsims—or, at least, those I’m able to attend (and hotel WiFi permitting)

If you’re a PAXsims reader and attending MORS, drop me an email and perhaps we can grab a coffee!

Simulation miscellany, 28 January 2014

Some recent news on conflict simulations and serious games (and, occasionally, other stuff) that may be of interest.

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They’re as busy as ever at GrogHeads. First, there is still time to vote in the 2014 “Readers’ Choice” awards for the best games of the year. Also, they are always on the lookout for academic and analytical contributions on wargames and related subjects. Go check it out.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education this week features an article by Anastasia Salter on “Alternate Reality Games in the Classroom“:

It can be hard to get a clear picture of ARGs without participating in one directly. Alternate Reality Games typically start with a rabbit hole: a website URL for a fictional company embedded in a movie ad campaign, a strange interruption in a video clip on YouTube, a series of street art images with a Twitter hashtag, or some other method of alerting potential players that a story is starting. From there, players typically follow a trail of clues presented by the game’s puppetmasters. You can find out more about games going on now through the Alternate Reality Gaming Networkand the Unfiction Forums. Brooke Thompson has a great quickstart guideon how to play ARGs that can help you get started. Most of the games are marketing promotions, but they still often include great examples of using mysterious websites, codes, social media, geocaching and flash mob events to play a story. These same techniques can be scaled up or down to a classroom or conference….

h/t Brian Train

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The proceedings for last year’s History of Games conference are now online. There is also a special issue of Game Studies with papers from that conference

h/t TAG

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Kotaku has an interesting discussion by Paolo Pedercini of the forthcoming game Prison Architect:

Is it possible to create a prison management game without trivializing or misrepresenting the issue of mass incarceration? As video games mature and tackle more serious topics, players and developers should be aware of the values embedded in their systems.

Prison Architect is an upcoming game by Introversion Software, a British independent company. Dubbing themselves “the last of the bedroom programmers,” Introversion played a key role in the renaissance of independent game development, producing a string of critically acclaimed titles and paving the way for digital distribution of third-party games on Steam.

Among their previous releases is one of my favorite games ever: Defcon, a spine-chilling, eerily beautiful multiplayer real-time strategy game in which players engage in a Cold-war era nuclear conflict. Each Defcon game culminates in a slow-motion Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. Whoever suffers the least amount of megadeaths is the winner.

Prison Architect is also tackling a dark subject, a subject that deserves special attention and defies any ‘it’s just a game’ kind of dismissal.

As the name suggests, the player is in charge of designing (but also managing) a private penitentiary. The gameplay is reminiscent of sim games from the ’90s, most notably Bullfrog’sTheme Park and Theme Hospital: a mix of construction, zoning, research, resource and staff management….

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Do you have a lot of ill-gotten gains you need to turn into safe, useable cash? The blog Criminal Genius is featuring the “Keno Laundromat,” a weekly money launder challenge/tutorial simulation.

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The deadline to submit abstracts for consideration at the 82^nd Military Operations Research Society Symposium is Thursday, 14 February 2014. Registration is now open.

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The Red Team Journal continues to add to its list of “The Laws of Red Teaming.” Check out the current list.

MORS 82nd Symposium

The Military Operations Research Society will be holding its 82nd annual symposium on 16-19 June 2014 in Alexandria, Virginia. In addition, “virtual” sessions will be held on 4-6 June.

The Virtual sessions will take place via DCO for both unclassified and classified presentations. The in-person 82nd Symposium is structured so that unclassified sessions will take place at the Hilton Mark Center and classified sessions will take place at surrounding classified facilities.

We welcome abstract submissions for both the virtual and in-person Symposium through the MORS Abstract Submission site. You will be able to designate your abstract for the virtual sessions and/or the in person sessions. Please click here to submit an abstract(s). Once in the system you will be asked to login with your MORS login (e-mail) and password or create an account if you do not have one. For questions and assistance please contact Liz Marriott liz.marriot@mors.org 703-933-9071.

Schedule Highlights:

• 4-6 Virtual Sessions
• MON 16 June: CEU Courses and Tutorials
• TUE 17 June: Plenary, Sponsors Panel, Tutorials, Special Sessions, CEU Courses Continued and Evening Social/Mixer
• WED 18 June: Composite/Working Group Presentations, Tutorials and Demonstrations
• THU 29 June: Composite/Working Group Presentations, Tutorials and Demonstrations

Who Can Attend: US Citizens with or without a clearance may attend the full program at the Hilton Mark Center. In addition special arrangements have been made to include cleared participants from Five Eyes (FVEY) countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom) whose clearances have been passed to MORS via their Embassy. The Five Eyes (FVEY) participants will be able to attend the unclassified presentations at the Hilton and some of the classifed sessions. Those with a U.S. Secret Clearance may attend all classified sessions. More information will be posted in the near future with clearance and visit request instructions.

The slight relaxation of the usual NOFORN (US citizen only) rules for the classified sessions is certainly a plus, although much depends on what proportion of these sessions are opened to FVEY participants.

Several of the Working Groups address issues relevant to conflict simulation and serious games, most notably Working Group 30:

WG 30 – Wargaming

Chair: Scott Simpkins, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Co-chairs: Michael Ottenberg, OSD CAPE

Advisors: Kyle Kliewer, Lockheed Martin Corp.

Wargames are used as one means of supporting senior Department of Defense and national security decision makers. Wargaming is also found in training curricula in military school houses, in businesses and in university courses. Most wargames are structured to address specific issues, such as current or future National Security challenges but all wargames provide a low cost evaluation of alternatives. Their outcomes tend to be of the qualitative nature, but still of substantial interest to Defense leadership. There is an intense interest to apply quantitative tools to these games, so that analytical techniques may be applied. Wargames are attractive to decision makers because of the human interaction between those who have a vested interest in the issues at hand. The narratives derived from a game are sometimes more important than the raw data. Relating these narratives to quantitative analysis is a challenge, but may reap immense benefits to the users of wargames.

The emphasis of Working Group (WG) 30 presentations is metric determination, game design, statistical analysis, game verification practices, tools to present information to players and capture data, use of models and simulations to supplement game play, and techniques, methodologies, or processes. Special interests of the working group include considerations of interdisciplinary games, applications of game theory, complexity theory and chaotic behaviors. WG-30 encourages presentations on both completed and work in progress.

Virtual MORS: Train on “Developments in Commercial Insurgency Wargames”

It is the second day of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) 81.1 Virtual Symposium , and Brian Train has just delivered a very useful overview of recent developments in the wargaming of insurgency and counterinsurgency within the commercial/hobby sector.

Ploughing in the COIN Field: Developments in Commercial Insurgency Wargames  

Whatever their medium, wargames produced for a professional military audience are different in their intention, focus and execution from those produced for the civilian market. And yet, professional military gaming, which started 200 years ago as a training aid, did spawn the “commercial” market for civilian hobby gamers in the 1960s. There has always been a certain level of overlap between the two worlds, with examples both of comercial games used by the military, and of civilianized versions of military games repackaged and released onto the open market. The purpose of this presentation is to talk about manual wargames on irregular warfare topics that have appeared on the commercial market, the challenges of designing and playing them (and getting them played), and the possible uses and insights they may hold for the professional wargaming community.

In the presentation, Brian suggested that COIN games had not historically been very popular among hobbyists, because the topic itself was morally ambiguous and unglamorous; variables are difficult to quantify; both the conflicts themselves and the games that address them involve asymmetric situations with unfamiliar  mechanics; and because such wars involve abstracted play of a nebulous conflict with no clear endpoint. HE suggested that hobby gamers can be quite conservative in accepting the new and unusual game mechanics necessary to model irregular warfare.

He also highlighted what he saw as the main elements of a good COIN game design, namely that the game show the relative importance of the various factors shaping outcomes; that it feature asymmetry of means, methods, objectives and information; that there be transparent assumptions and mechanisms (one of the shortcomings of computer games, in Brian’s view); and that it be mutable. He emphasized that such games are not meant to be strongly definitive or predictive, but ideally they should stimulate discussion.

The presentation generated some interesting questions from the audience.

• What is the social science body of knowledge embodied in these games? Wargames encode a framework and body of knowledge about the domain, but if the assumptions are wrong, mistraining may result.  Immersive training is known to especially bad in this regard, as wrong lessons are learned very vividly.
• DoD has struggle to build COIN operations research models. The general conclusion is that the responses and impacts are almost completely depend on the situation. Do you agree? Can wargames help fill the lack of quantitative COIN models?
• The games can engage some reward mechanisms, and so they can train a person towards rewarded behaivors. What are the advantages and dangers in terms of counter insurgency games with red team option?
•  Do agent-based models have a role in conducting analysis or ability to be utilized as part of a COIN game?
• Can you expand a bit on the game design trade-offs between playability versus accuracy in the commercial sector?

You can download Brian’s presentation slides here. Much of the presentation involved analysis of the various games featured on the slides. That analysis isn’t in the slides themselves, however, so we’ll post the recording if and when it becomes available. In the meantime, you can also check out Brian’s useful list of links at http://brtrain.wordpress.com/game-links-and-resources/.

Virtual MORS: Bartels on “Can your game multi-task?”

The Military Operations Research Society (MORS) 81.1 Virtual Symposium started today, with online presentations on a broad range of topics. As I post this, Ellie Bartels (National Defence University) has just finished presenting an especially interesting paper, cowritten with NDU colleague Deirdre Hollingshed, on “Doing More With Less: Can Your Game Multi-task?” (click the link to download the full set of slides).

Ellie started by noting that games can serve several purposes: education, training, discovery, and analysis.

The conventional wisdom in the field has generally been that games should be designed with a single one of these purposes if they are to be most effective.

However, she argued that there may be  value in mixed games that simultaneously undertake different tasks, involving rather different groups of participants. She explored this by recounting the case of “Exercise Scattered Light,” a four-day, four move , dual purpose (education/policy) game that examined policy issues related to security and stabilization in Mali and the larger Sahel region.

Overall, and despite some limited drawbacks, she suggested that the approach had proved quite productive and useful. She also noted that in an era where budgetary austerity limits game participation, enabling a broader range of potential participants might also have a practical value too.

I was struck by the parallels between her mixed game approach and the similar mixed approach that we used for the UNRWA humanitarian policy simulation at the University of Exeter earlier this year. In that case we had a mix of both graduate students and senior subject matter experts. I asked Ellie whether she had found the mixed approach had altered the interpersonal dynamics of the exercise in any way:

 Q: I recently ran a game for senior leadership of a UN humanitarian organization that very much fitted in your mixed game model—in this case, a mix of graduate students and SMEs/policymakers organized in competing teams in a process that had both analytic and educational purposes. We found that the energy of the students really pushed the SMEs to work even harder (in part because they didn’t want to be “beaten” by the juniors). How did you find the psychological dynamics were altered by the mixed game (and participant) approach?

Ellie noted that this effect was likely limited in “Scattered Light” because of the format they had adopted:

A: I think there was a different dynamic here because they had different roles, The students were much more resource constrained (per reality) and in some ways the policy makers ignored student strategy until prompted. I think more exchange between the two groups would have helped but we were aiming for a cooperative rather than competitive dynamic in tone so that may also have impacted performance.

Overall, it was an excellent and well-delivered case study in professional gaming, and I’ll try to link to the recording when it becomes available. The DCO online meeting software also seemed to work well too—I certainly hope MORS continues to offer this option in future.

Military Operations Research Society 81.2 Symposium

After the original version of the 81st MORS symposium had to be postponed because of US budget sequestration, it is now reborn as version 81.2, to be held in Alexandra, Virginia on 17-20 June. As usual, it contains a working group devoted to wargame methods:

WG 30 – Wargaming

…

Wargames are used as one means of supporting senior Department of Defense and national security decision makers. Wargaming is also found in training curricula in military school houses, in businesses, and in university courses. Most wargames are structured to address specific issues, such as current or future National Security challenges. Their outcomes tend to be of the qualitative nature, but still of substantial interest to Defense leadership. There is an intense interest to apply quantitative tools to these games, so that analytical techniques can then be applied. During a MORS Special Meeting in October 2007, issues concerning wargame design, structure, data, information, and metrics, why and how modeling and simulation could be used in support of a wargame, and the integration of wargame results with external quantitative analyses were discussed and debated. During the past symposia, the Working Group examined quantitative outputs from several different game designs, results and techniques.

Wargames are attractive to decision makers because of the human interaction between those who have a vested interest in the issues at hand. The narratives derived from a game are sometimes more important than the raw data. Relating these narratives to quantitative analysis is a challenge, but may reap immense benefits to the users of wargames.

The emphasis of Working Group (WG) 30 presentations is game design and structure, information used in and data collected from different games, tools used to present information to players and to capture data, use of models and simulations to supplement game play, and techniques, methodologies, or processes that enable the use of external quantitative analyses after the game is completed. Factors that may be considered are the type of game, number of players, use of groups, use of a control cell, any technologies examined in the game, data collection techniques, in game analysis methodologies, or any post game analysis methodologies.

WG 30 is interested in ways to improve gaming to include immersion of the players into the game environment, the ability to rapidly adjudicate player actions, and the design of games to adapt to examination of new topics (new threats, environments, technologies) as they occur. This WG encourages the development of ways to provide quantitative analysis of a generally non-quantitative proceeding. The WG solicits innovative ideas that will spawn discourse and invite game designers to include “hooks” for those ideas in their game structure that will in turn provide decision makers with more data to consider post game. WG 30 encourages presentations on both completed work and work in progress.

You too can play “Where’s FORN?” See if you can tell which is the uncleared American and which is the cleared US ally!

There are also working groups on modelling and simulations, computational advances in operations research, and other related topics.

New this year, MORS is permitting security-cleared members of the Five Eyes community (UK-Canada-Australia-New Zealand) to attend the unclassified sessions, although the classified presentations will continue to be NOFORN (“no foreigners”). It is a puzzle to me why non-Americans need clearance and Americans don’t, but at least it is an improvement on previous years.

Further conference information and registration forms can be found at the MORS website.

Sequestration is no game as MORS military operations research conference scrambles for a new location

The Military Operations Research Society is the largest association of military OR researchers in the world,  and its annual conference is a place where the American operations research community (including wargaming and simulation design experts) have been discussing and advancing the discipline since 1957. However, with budget sequestration having led to tight restrictions on military participation in conferences and workshops, MORS is now scrambling to relocate its annual symposium which was to have been held at the United States Military Academy (West Point) in June:

MORS was informed late last week that the Office of the Secretary of the Army has not approved the waiver request for the United States Military Academy (USMA) to host the 81st MORS Symposium, making West Point unavailable this year.

As a result, the 81st MORS Symposium will be moved to the National Capital Region (NCR). The exact location is still being arranged and further details will be provided as soon as they are available. We would like to share our plans for proceeding:

A. Every effort is being made to keep the Symposium on the same planned dates 17-20 June, 2013.

B. The Symposium will be restructured into sessions at the Composite Group level, rather than at the Working Group level, in order to make them more compatible with potential venues in the NCR. Working Group leadership will be coordinating their presentations and discussions with the Composite Group leadership.

C. Every effort is being made to allow presenters to have the opportunity to present in person or remotely via Defense Connect Online (DCO) or similar video teleconference system.

D. If you have submitted an abstract you will receive a MORS questionnaire asking if you can attend the Symposium in the NCR, attend only to present, or present remotely.

E. Everyone who has registered for the Symposium may request a full refund until June 5th, 2013, if you determine you cannot join us at the new location. Please contact Liz Marriott at liz@mors.org or 703-933-9070.

F. Note that if you have made a hotel reservation at West Point you must call the hotel and cancel your reservation. MORS cannot cancel reservations made by individuals even as part of the MORS room blocks.

MORS is fully aware of the uncertain environment and the current restrictions affecting our community. Denial of the waiver request by the Army may affect Army personnel differently than others and we encourage you to check with your command or organization to determine if you can present your work, either in person or remotely. MORS continues to work with the other services to determine the status of their waivers.Moving the Symposium at this late date is a great challenge, but MORS firmly believes it is worth the effort to preserve the opportunity for the OR community to share work, exchange ideas, and keep our community focused on moving forward.

Let us take this opportunity to thank the Symposium Program team headed by Tom Denesia, all of the Working Group Chairs, Co-Chairs and advisers, the other session Chairs, and the USMA site coordination team for the many volunteer hours spent preparing for this Symposium. Your dedication and support to MORS is greatly appreciated.

There will be more details in the near future, please look for updates and check the MORS website,www.mors.org, for the latest information on the 81st Symposium.

Very Respectfully,

Mike Garrambone

MORS President

Susan Reardon

MORS CEO

As previously noted at PAXsims, sequestration has also led to the postponement of a planned MORS special meeting on professional gaming, and has also affected efforts to organize the 2013 Connections interdisciplinary wargaming conference.

Military Operations Research Society 81st annual symposium

The 81st annual symposium of the Military Operations Research Society will be held at the United States Military Academy on 17-20 June 2013. Because of US defense budget uncertainty (including growing restrictions on conference participation by DoD personnel), the deadline for submitting an abstract has been extended.

Abstract Submission Deadline extended to Friday, 15 February. Understandably, there have been many requests to extend the deadline to submit abstracts for consideration at the 81st MORS Symposium, 17-20 June 2013, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY. And we are listening.

We would also like to note that although there are questions about the Department of Defense’s budget, submitting an abstract(s) for consideration does not obligate you to attend.

Please visit the 81st MORS Symposium website for all information currently available regarding this leading event. For over 45 years, the annual MORS Symposium has been the premier opportunity for the national security community to exchange information, examine research and discuss critical national security topics. The MORS Symposium gathers over a thousand analysts from military, government, industry and academic ranks to share best practices. We welcome you to share your experience and knowledge by submitting an abstract for presentation at the 81st MORS Symposium.

When you present at the MORS Symposium, the value of your work multiplies and you are recognized by your colleagues for your important contributions to the profession and to national security.

Announcement and Call for Presentations (ACP) – To download the ACP, please click here.

Abstracts – To submit an abstract please click here. Please note: You will need to login using your MORS website user ID (your e-mail address) and password (or if it is your first-time create a new profile) to submit an Abstract. Once you are on the site please follow the instructions provided. Be sure to complete as many of the fields as possible, and include your email address. This will ensure that you receive a confirmation of your submission.

This is one of the premier professional wargaming events, with working groups on both wargaming and modelling and simulation, as well as computation advances in OR, decision analysis, training and education and a range of other related areas

…or so we’ve heard: the meeting is NOFORNed and thus only open to US Citizens with an active Secret clearance. <insert snide comments from NATO allies here>

As previously noted on PAXsims, MORS will also be convening a professional wargaming workshop at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on 26-28 March 2013. This will be open to all.

MORS professional wargaming workshop (26-28 March 2013)

The Military Operations Research Society will be holding a workshop on professional wargaming on 26-28 March 2013 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland:

This special meeting focuses on professional gaming  as an analytic practice and will produce initial content for a Professional Gaming Practitioner’s Handbook. The meeting will bring together members of the community of practice to consider best practices, taxonomy, existing applications and appropriate analytic methodologies in an effort to codify the fundamentals of game design and analysis. The meeting is designed for information exchange and participant exposure to professional practice; there is no intention to conduct a game or for attendees to participate in game play.

Military and business leaders throughout history have practiced gaming with storied successes in planning and education so much so that the Department of Defense offers professional education in and develops war games. Gaming is popular and nearly everyone has played complex and informative games as well as participated in the seemingly ubiquitous military ‘war game.’ The term itself is used to describe a very wide range of activities and has come to mean nothing specific. Gaming comes in many levels of fidelity and scope; there is a big difference between a tactical board game and a strategic computer assisted game. Game designers who change organizations find that previously successful techniques and approaches do not align with differing organizational perspectives.

The principles of war gaming have changed little over time while methods and tools have continued to develop. Historically, games were kept small in scope, ‘moving pieces’ were limited and adjudication was performed manually. Modern technologies provide infinite fidelity storing millions of individual data and allowing players to select the ‘level of play’ while software aggregation provides a meta-data operational picture commensurate with that level of play. Efficiencies in data collection, processing and visualization that significantly improve capability. Concerns of old that ‘games are too abstract’ are based somewhat on limits to player cognitive capability but mainly due to limited identification and tracking of second/third order details. This, however, can lead the game designer to include many extraneous metrics, overwhelming players and generating confounded results.

Gaming is an analytic methodology that seeks to provide, for example, empirical support for hypothesis testing or virtual exposure to complex interactions, but struggles with acceptance possibly due to non-repeatability, lack of rigid methodology and the qualitative nature of data. There is a need within the gaming community to establish baseline practices for design of professional games as well as quality data collection procedures and assessment techniques. Designers should have a quality threshold against which professional games can be measured to ensure minimal standards are met. Junior analysts should have a reference of terminology, design processes, assessment tools and best practices.

The workshop will be based on the discussions and output of several working groups, plus a synthesis group:

• WG 1: Gaming Ontology and Taxonomy
• WG 2: Objective Development
• WG 3: Game Design & Development
• WG 4: Data Collection and Analysis Methods and Tools
• WG 5: Adjudication Procedures
• WG 6: Aligning Games with Larger Studies and Methods
• WG 7: Professional Game Execution
• WG 8: Quick-Turn Design or Rapid Development

Registration fees for the event are $575/$675 for government/non-government MORS members, and $650/$750 for government/non-government MORS members (this being the peculiar defence and security world where “non-government” is assumed to be richer defence contractors, not poorer academics, NGOs, and commercial/hobbyist designers). Further details are at the link above.

79th MORS Symposium wargame AAR

The 79th annual symposium of the Military Operations Research Society, held at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey in June, featured the first-ever analytical wargame held during a MORS annual meeting—in this case a modified version of James Dunnigan’s simple WWII game Drive on Metz.

There’s an article on the game in the September 2011 issue of the MORS bulletin Phalanx. Those involved in advising, facilitating, conducting, or participating in the exercise apparently included some of the luminaries of professional wargaming in the US, including (in addition to Dunnigan) Peter Perla, and a number of friends of PAXsims.

Interesting as it is, I must admit the piece left me rather wondering what had been achieved, especially in a setting where a great many people must already be familiar with much more complex military wargames and staff exercises, even if they aren’t familiar with hobby/commercial military boardgames. Part of the reason may be that while an objective of the exercise was to “[learn] how to prepare, field, execute, and derive meaningful analytical information from military wargaming as a unique analytical tool” there’s not a lot of information on this within the article itself. Since Drive on Metz was deliberately designed as a very simple, introductory wargame to begin with (it was included as an example in Dunnigan’s Complete Wargames Handbook, and features less than 20 playing piece and a single combat resolution chart), I wonder how many new players from military or operations research backgrounds might have been disappointed with the (deliberate) lack of sophistication. Of course, the game was modified and adjudicated in the MORS setting, so perhaps this added additional layers of complexity. The adjudication, monitoring and instrumentation of wargaming can be an art and science in itself, but again the article doesn’t give much sense of how the demonstration highlighted this.

Of course, I might well be missing a big part of the picture here—I wasn’t able to attend the MORS annual symposium, since it is limited to US citizens. If you were there and have some details or insight to contribute as to how the experiment went, feel free to contribute it in the comments section below!

Live from Nairobi, it’s… simulations miscellany!

We’ve been a bit lax on posts the past few days because both PAXsims editors are currently in Kenya. One of them is doing loads of work as part of the team delivering the World Bank’s core operations course on fragility and conflict (including the Carana simulation). The other one is watching everyone else do loads of work while in the comfortable role of observer.

Selfless global humanitarians that we both are, we also found time to save most of the world from the scourge of global Pandemic, aided by Tusker beer (pic right). Note that if you live in North America and aren’t genetically immune to the “blue virus,” you might want to consider selling up and moving.

Despite that, we do have a few bits of simulation-related news:

1. Online registration is now open for the Connections 2011 wargaming conference, to be held on 1-4 August  at the National Defense University in Washington DC. You’ll also find the provisional conference agenda online too. Both Gary and I should be there. (If folks with a .gov or .mil address are having trouble with the first link, try this one instead.)

2. MMOWGLI is now undergoing a prelaunch playtest of Turn 2, when participants are asked to develop action plans to combat Somali piracy. I’m not sure whether time and a dodgy internet connection will allow me to participate, but if so I’ll try to bring you another report. Given that I’m actually 500km from the Somali border at the moment, any action plan I do develop really ought to get bonus “thumbs up,” don’t you think?

3. The Military Operations Research Society is currently holding 79th MORS Symposium (June 20-23rd) at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. There will certainly be lost of interesting wargaming and simulation stuff discussed there, but you have to be a US national with a SECRET clearance to attend. Hypothetical Canadians with a TS/SCI are right out, of course, either because Washington still secretly harbours ambitions to implement War Plan Red, and/or because they know that Brian Train and Brian McFarlane were asked to update our very own Defence Scheme No. 1.