Comments Off on Build Britain’s defence on £750bn (simulator)
Posted by Rex Brynen on 29/05/2026
Shashank Joshi—the outgoing defence editor and incoming Washington bureau chief for The Economist—has constructed a UK defence expenditure simulator, in which YOU the PLAYER, CHOOSE YOUR OWN defence investment plan ADVENTURE.
Give it a try here. The comments the simulation makes your proposal—including who in the services, Whitehall or the Cabinet hates your investment plan and leaks criticism to the press—are worth the price (£0) of playing.
Comments Off on But can it run Doom ?
Posted by Kit Barry on 12/08/2025
A while ago, I got excited about Ace of Aces, a two-player First World War dogfight in a pair of books, and the extremely cool math that makes it possible. I’ve been thinking about this game a lot.
What else can it do?
The thing about Ace of Aces is that it works because you always have your opponent in sight—that’s how the paper computer is able to keep track of the state of the game. Which means you need a page of the book for every combination of your aircraft’s position and orientation vs the other aircraft’s position and orientation…and if you wanted to make a game where you can’t always see the other player, you still need separate pages for each of the combinations of positions and orientations. A bunch of the pages will have identical images, but you can’t skimp and combine them into a single page because the distinct page numbers are necessary to keep track of the state of the game; they encode the conditional logic of the game.
…but then along came Joe Dever!
He took the Ace of Aces formula and ran with it, changing the program from one where the game only cares about the relative positions of two aircraft and no fixed positions, into one with a fixed geography. Instead of the paper computer keeping track of the state of the game, in Dever’s game each book keeps track of that player’s absolute position only…with a little player-computed conditional mechanic.
In this game, you don’t know where the opposition is, you’re searching for them in a dungeon. Which means you spend the majority of the game moving through an “empty” dungeon; the default state of the game is that there’s nobody here. Your page number does not encode the position of the other player, just your position in the dungeon.
You don’t turn to the page the other player gave you in this game. Instead, when you choose a destination where you may acquire sight of the opposition—ie when you round a corner, or turn around—the destination page number has a little conditional table built in:
Instead of turning to the default page number, if your opposition has announced a page number listed in the box below it (all the positions where you would need to see them in the picture), you are directed to an alternative page number which encodes both player’s absolute position and orientation in the dungeon—but, if your opposition’s destination isn’t one that would be in sight of you, you just use that default position of the empty dungeon. (More here, someone uploaded a scan of the books.)
It’s a neat little mechanic that works well because of the design of the dungeon: the lines of sight are limited to short, narrow corridors, so there aren’t too many conditions to test, and the dungeon itself is compact so you’re not endlessly searching for the other player.
There’s a great explanation of the books here:
And of course the internet’s first question in the comments is: but can it run Doom?
How would we define Doom though? Because, of course, you can make a choose your own adventure that has the art but plays the same each time through…would that be running Doom, or would that be an eccentrically-formatted Doom fanfic?
First: ok but we’re going to do Wolfenstein 3D because it was actually the first of the genre, it looks better than Doom, and who doesn’t need to punch Nazis right now?
So what’s the definition of something is running Wolfenstein?
it’s first person
you can navigate the map by moving and turning
the map is a flat level, there’s no up/down looking or moving (Doom had variations in level)
the map is not procedurally-generated
there are NPCs and a boss fight
NPCs have fixed spawn-points, and spawn at the start, not during play
NPCs can patrol, moving on a fixed (but sometimes complex) path until they sight the player. When the player is seen, the NPC chases the player until one of them is dead
you and the NPCs have hit points (ie it’s not just click-to-kill)
there are different weapons, unlocked by picking them up
the art is the actual Wolfenstein sprite sheets
it’s player vs computer, not player (hero) vs player (nazis)
Some of these are pretty simple. Dever’s book has the first four points covered, and a weapon load out. The hard part is taking the other human out and replacing them with NPCs who have state machine behaviour—a state which must be, somehow, encoded in the page numbers of this book. But, it won’t be “running DoomWolfenstein” if there isn’t:
a state machine, which means a minimum of two states and a transition in at least one direction
some uncertainty (to the player) about the location of NPCs
once an attack has begun, either the player or NPC must die
I think we can use the last point to achieve the second point without the compromise being considered cheating: we can say that combat happens without movement—once you see an enemy, one of you has to die before moving from this location. That means our state machine does not need to include following you around the map. (While this is totally possible, it would require a lot of pages, so I’ll save that for the Wolfenstein II upgrade.)
This means we can achieve uncertainty of location by a not 100% chance of an enemy being in its spawn location—the mechanism would be that we spawn NPCs during game play, the observed truth for the player would be not materially-different to experiencing NPCs who spawned at the start of the game but are moving. I admit this one is a bit of a cheat, since clearly we are spawning NPCs during play, but a book that can procedurally generate enemies is definitely a computer ! I’m also thinking back to classic Amiga games like Escape from Colditz where the nazis did spawn during game play.
In order to maintain the illusion that the NPCs are moving not magically appearing, we don’t want them to wink into existence in a previously-seen-empty corridor. So the spawn check should only happen when you turn a corner and—JUMPSCARE—find yourself face-to-face with a nazi. That also gives us fixed spawn points, rather than everywhere.
One important part of the combat system is the ability to ambush an NPC, getting a jump on them from behind, and how that ties into the chase state. Dever’s books have a hide mechanic, which is neat. We’ll need to spawn enemies sometimes with their back turned—and then exit from that page to the enemy now facing you and shooting back. That’s two states (back to us, facing us) and at least one transition (back to us —> facing us) and one of us has to die to end the facing us (chase) state. (Thank god for NPCs despawning on death so we don’t have to keep drawing the bodies, lols)
So really all that’s left to work out is how the spawning mechanism works. Obviously there will be some number of destination pages with or without an NPC…the player will need to turn to one of these pages. If the page numbers are predictable, the player will seek to avoid choosing destinations they know contain an enemy. Even if we randomize the page numbers so there’s no discernible pattern in the value, players can map the book, or remember which numbers contain enemies—effectively, we are creating a mechanism for speed-running the level with no (or all, lols) NPCs…So let’s dice for it.
What we need to do is use page numbers like the BASIC command GOSUB which directed you to a block of code out in the 1000s, which did some things—spawn something, maybe facing away from you, definitely (transitioning to) facing you—then returned you to the line number with the GOSUB command on it. But…how can a book remember where the GOSUB returns to ? With sneaky math, that’s how!
The destination page numbers for the spawn locations are all the baseline “nothing spawned” value. The player rolls to see if there was a spawn and adds that to the page number given which GOSUBs them to a page with the combat sequence, whose exit destination is either game over (you died!) or the baseline “nothing spawned” value (NPC is dead and despawned) for this location. The baseline map enables all the navigation (just like Dever’s book) and combat is a pocket universe at each location, instead of requiring a branch with the entire game in for each spawn outcome.
All we have to do is be organized about our page numbers!
0s are the default map
1s are the enemy facing you, which only exit to game over or 0s
2s are the enemy back to you, which only exit to game over or 1s
Or something like this. I went for 9 possible options, to allow for a weapon load out (drawn on the screen, not Dever’s player-keeps-track method) and variation in NPC sprites. But 9 doesn’t go into one dice well, Kit! Ah, yes, but since the weapon choice changes what needs to be drawn on the screen, “changing weapon” is actually changing the dice you use to roll for spawning, and the numbers on each dice point to only the destinations for this weapon. (And since we’re rolling to see if an NPC spawned, we should use the same dice to resolve combat against them…so the weapon with better stats points to larger page numbers.) I love it when a plan comes together 🤓
I made the HP tracker for the player out of a dice and the HUD artwork.
And here’s the game in action ! Apologies for the pretty terrible AV setup. I burned the captions in because the audio is not terribly clear.
Comments Off on Electrickery and Serious Games
Posted by Kit Barry on 17/11/2024
I teach a couple of programming courses in Sheridan’s Game Design degree, and I’ve been looking at some interesting toys called Phidgets. These are neat little boxes that allow you to connect sensors and control electronics directly in C#/Unity and Processing (Java), the two languages I teach.
When I say connect and control, I mean the rather effortless: you connect the box(es) by USB and ta-da you have the data, zero electronics skillz required. No breadboards, no soldering, no fiddling with resistors, no having to understand how to turn voltage into 1s and 0s or events.
Phidgets make a number of devices for sensing and driving motors, which have all kinds of alternative controller potential for digital games. For Serious Games and wargames, the one that seems most interesting is the RFID read/write Phidget…that is, the RFID box next to your office door that lets you open doors, but USB’d to your computer, which lets you:
detect and read low-frequency RFID tags
write ~24 characters to a writeable tag (depending on the protocol)
send 5V into something when a valid tag is detected (…opening doors, for example)
show red/green lights when a valid tag is detected (handy as “tag has been read” feedback)
Tags come in credit card, button, keyfob and 30-18mm disc sizes.
But what kind of serious games can you make with a door-opener?
With about five lines of code, you can trigger an event in your game when a tag is detected…which you can use to make anything happen, really.
The data isn’t stored on the tag, the tag’s unique ID is used to decide what to do in the program, the same way a button press, or keyboard input, is used.
This opens up all sorts of possibilities for physical/digital interactions. You could make Her Story, but instead of interrogating a database, now you have to physically find the clues.
You could make a working Pokédex like a total nerd for Halloween, so that your students can catch ‘em all IRL…or catch some, at least! I’ve been reliably informed that these four knock-off Qokémon plushies are not, in fact, all. (Pixel art and animations by parter-in-crime Prof Rocco.)
What else could you do with them?
Well…really nothing that you couldn’t already do with mouse/keyboard/controller input. The point is just the ability to encode specific functions to a tag ID to make the input more intuitive or immersive or tactile:
playing a card onto the reader literally causes the thing to happen. This lowers the barriers to entry for players who don’t have to learn to drive the software running the game to play complex roles in the game.
the tag can be embedded in something. Just like RFID tags are used to check in and out library books, in-game items can be used to track, invoke, or unlock game content without breaking player immersion, without players even being aware. Or by making physical aspects of the game (visiting specific places, or finding specific items) relevant. There is something magical for players when a physical thing seems to break the 4th wall and drive the computer.
These are all things that the control team can manage, but tags make more players, or more content, manageable, or reduce the management load to cue up preset branches of the plot.
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…
If you missed the global launch of the READY 2 simulation on infectious disease preparedness and response in humanitarian settings, here is the webinar video.
The actual simulation (which is browser-based and free to play) and supporting materials (fact sheet, solo play guide, and facilitated play guide) can be found here on the READY website.
Whereas the initial READY1 game (2022) put the player in the role of an NGO team leader managing a multisectoral portfolio, in Outbreak READY 2: Thisland in Crisis the player assumes the role of a health programme manager. The primary target audience of the simulation is NGO and international organization personnel working on health issues in the context of a humanitarian crisis. However, it also has value for those working more broadly in humanitarian and disaster response, public health, and international development, as well as those who are “humanitarian adjacent” (such as personnel who might support or be deployed on HADR missions) or university students studying in these fields.
The READY Initiative is a partnership of Save the Children and the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, together with UK-Med, the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, and others. It is supported by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance.
The GAP Project aims to develop “new training curricula for enhancing the preparedness and skills of personnel for conflict prevention and peace keeping missions especially in high risk countries contributes to more efficient and effective conflict prevention and peace keeping missions.” As part of this, it has developed a prototype peacekeeping game, playable via MacOS, iOS, or Windows
The GAP game and learning material available for use at no cost until May 2022.
Games for Change has announced the finalists for the G4C 2021 Awards. Don’t click the image above to see them, however—instead, you will find descriptions and links to the games at the G4C awards page .
Several of these will be of particular interest to PAxsims readers because they deal with issues of conflict and peacebuilding. These include:
Through the Darkest of Times (Steam)
Berlin 1933. “Adolf Hitler is chancellor!” We all know the consequences this message bore. Unspeakable horrors and suffering would sweep across the world. Few would stand and fight the monstrosity that was the German Reich. Will you? Lead an underground resistance group Through the Darkest of Times.
Suzerain (Steam)
As President Rayne, lead Sordland into ruin or repair during your first term in this text-based role-playing game. Navigate a political drama driven by conversations with your cabinet members and other significant figures. Beware or embrace corruption; shirk or uphold ideals. How will you lead?
Harmony Square (browser)
Harmony Square is a game about fake news. The game’s setting is the idyllic Harmony Square, a small neighborhood mildly obsessed with democracy. You, the player, are hired as Chief Disinformation Officer. Over the course of 4 short levels, your job is to disturb the square’s peace and quiet by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residents against each other.
Radio General (Steam)
Radio General is a unique strategy game where you interact with your units over the radio using speech recognition. Test your mettle and relive famous battles as a WW2 general.
The following piece was contributed to PAXsims by Dr. Jeremy Sepinsky, Lead Wargame Designer at CNA. The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the official policy or position of any agency, organization, employer or company.
Professional wargaming is a critical tool in support of the safety and security of our nation. The technique is used regularly and often to help senior leaders align priorities, test courses of action, educate civilians and warfighters, and refine decision making. Regardless of the side you fall on the recentdebates, we all agree that wargaming is important to the nation, that it needs to be done, and that it needs to be done well. Most serious gaming is done in-person and there is evidence of substantial value in this approach. Title 10 games routinely gather hundreds of participants for a week-long event. The CDC would still consider this unwise. While the defense industrial base is typically exempt from restrictions on gathering, many organizations are simply practicing good stewardship and postponing or cancelling wargames and supporting events. Social distancing efforts also make it hard to engage even in informal face-to-face gaming on a much smaller scale. So what do wargamers and their players do when governments restrict travel and even public gatherings due to the spread of the novel coronavirus, while they wait until normal operations can resume? Other authors have discussed how COVID-19 is impacting military training and exercises, as well as some of the solutions in place to bridge the gap. Here, I’d like to discuss some of the commercial games and wargames that can offer all of us – wargamers, warfighters, and analysts – some professional development while we physically distance ourselves. And perhaps some online games can bridge the physical gap and allow some productive socialization.
Of course, there is no substitute for professional wargames. The commercial games discussed here won’t give you the detailed, immersive, and educational experience that a professional wargame would have. These are, after all, designed for enjoyment, not training or analysis. However, these games can help develop operational and strategic thinking skills, contribute to professional military education by supplementing rigorous study, training, and practice, and help generate ideas to use in designing professional games.
With that in mind, I reached out to many of my professional wargaming colleagues and asked for their suggestions on wargames and board games that can be played either solo or virtually (online or by email). Since planning real military operations from home is typically frownedupon, we focus on commercial wargames that have professional development value for war planners and tacticians.
Electronic Gaming
While playing wargames electronically loses some of the tactile and social parts of the game, playing wargames remotely is certainly notnew. Several game engines exist (both free and paid) to help facilitate that play. Many of the games referenced below might be available on these platforms.
VASSAL is a free, open-source application (for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux) that distant (or socially distant) players can use to play digital versions of board wargames against each other, either in real time over the internet or asynchronously by recording moves and exchanging them via email. There are downloadable VASSAL modules for more than a thousand published wargames and other strategy games available, including virtually all of the game releases of very recent years from many of the leading commercial wargame publishers such as MMP and GMT (but at least one of the players must own a copy of the physical game). VASSAL replicates the visual and intellectual experience of playing the boardgames, and even in normal times is a useful way to overcome not only an absence of face-to-face opponents but also the time-and-space challenges of setting up and playing games that are very large or very long. Playing VASSAL games by email can be particularly appealing for studious players who enjoy being able to wrestle with difficult tactical or strategic choices at length without trying the patience of an opponent across the table. (Karl P. Mueller, Political Scientist, RAND Corporation)
Tabletop Simulator (Berserk Games, 2015) – This does exactly what it advertises. Available on gaming platforms like Steam, Tabletop Simulator (TTS) gives you the tools you need to recreate a multi-player physical game in a virtual environment. Standard game components such as playing cards, dice, chips, and other tokens are readily available to include into your game. You can also upload your own graphics to create custom pieces, boards, and maps. The Lua programming language can be used to create scripts to support game mechanics but is by no means necessary. The built in physics engine lets you treat your game components like physical pieces so you do not have to create scripts to replicate game rules. The best part of the physics engine though, is that it lets you flip the table when you rage quit. A large variety of boardgames are already programed and available in the game. The focus of this platform (and similarly Board Game Arena) is typically on commercial board games as opposed to wargame, but these can still have substantial value for strategists. (Mr. Hyong Lee, Senior Policy Analyst, Center for Applied Strategic Learning, National Defense University)
Steam is an online digital game distribution platform, hosting thousands of online games of various genres. Unsurprisingly, wargames are a popular category, which includes titles like the Total War series, Command: Modern Operations, Armor Brigade, and Flashpoint Campaigns. Due to advanced computing, digital wargames can incorporate a wide-range of factors such as weather, terrain, and morale, while maintaining accessible gameplay. Furthermore, by leveraging robust AI programs, digital wargames present increasingly robust and rich challenges, even in solo play. Some staunch traditionalists may disparage digital wargames as graphically appealing, yet substantively lacking. This may be true for some, but it is an unfair characterization for the entire genre. Admittedly, commercial wargames are no substitute for serious, well-researched wargames. However, when used correctly and under the right circumstances, commercial digital wargames can provide utility. For instance, Ben Jensen, a professor at the Marine Corps University, has demonstrated the value of Flashpoint Campaigns in educational wargaming. Likewise, Command: Professional Edition can be found in professional military courses on planning, operations, and wargaming. The appeal of these digital wargames lies in their distributed capability, customizable scenarios, and ease of access. (Sebastian J. Bae, Defense Analyst, RAND Corporation)
Rule the Waves 2 (Naval Warfare Simulations, 2019) – At the other end of the computer gaming spectrum from Command: Modern operations (CMO), in a host of ways, is Rule the Waves 2. It covers the timeframes between 1900 and 1950, so ends where CMO starts and uses an interface and graphics style more out of Microsoft Access than a Maritime Operations Center. But the good news is, if you are a professional Naval analyst, you will probably feel right at home! While it allows you to fight tactical battles from throughout the period, it puts you in the role of not just the Admiral in command of a fleet in a MahanianDecisive Battle, but also that of Fleet Architect. Make technology investment decisions, set engagement doctrine, then test them in Fleet Exercises. Your Government may make demands to build certain ship classes, despite their obsolescence, and events can cause tensions between nations to rise and fall. If you do go to war, you will face the old adage “you fight with the fleet you have, not the one you want”, stretched thin by requirements to deploy forces to areas across the globe. It has a fair learning curve, and is graphically austere, but with some suspension of disbelief it is a terrific sandbox for would be naval technology innovators! (Paul Vebber (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-vebber-a16b6936)
Manual Gaming
A Distant Plain, 3rd Printing (GMT Games, 2018) – Designed by two prominent and prolific wargame designers, Volko Ruhnke and Brian Train, A Distant Plain is a card-driven game (CDG) counter-insurgency (COIN) wargame. Players must navigate the dangerous and shifting power structures of modern-day Afghanistan. Building on the game engine from Andean Abyss, players must leverage unique capabilities and stratagems to pursue their individual goals. Reflective of the wider COIN series, players must make difficult choices with limited resources in a dynamic strategic environment. Normally accommodating four players, A Distant Plain also provides a solitaire mode where a procedural artificial intelligence, in the form of logic flowcharts, simulates the non-player factions. To those new to the COIN series, the game may seem daunting to learn and master. However, A Distant Plain and the rest of the COIN series provides a vibrant and rich gaming experience, reflected by its widespread commercial following. It is also important to note that GMT Games offers several wargames with solitaire modes, such as Pericles: The Peloponnesian Wars and Empire of the Sun, 3rd Printing. Furthermore, Labyrinth: The War on Terror, a CDG about global Islamic jihad, has an early access version available on Steam. (Sebastian J. Bae, Defense Analyst, RAND Corporation)
Agricola (Z-man Games, Inc, 2007) – Not every professional development game needs to be about war. Agricola is a worker placement and resource management Eurogame. The rules are fairly simple, but the strategy is complex. Players are working a medieval family farm, balancing the need to crops, livestock, and other resources. The game has a set number of turns, and, to be competitive, players need to begin optimizing their strategy from the very start. As the game progresses, players are forced to choose between a lot of bad options (including the ability to make other player’s options even worse). This is best for people looking to practice long-term strategic thinking as well as how to balance in-the-moment decisions that may derail their plan. It can be played solo as well as online. (Jeremy Sepinsky, Lead Wargame Designer, CNA Corporation)
Algeria: The War of Independence 1954-1962 (Fiery Dragon Productions, 2006) – This is a grand operational – strategic game of the insurgency-counter insurgency war prosecuted by France against the National Liberation Front (FLN) forces in its colony of Algeria. Highly abstracted, it focuses on most of the military, economic, intelligence, and information aspects found in this type of conflict. While the hearts and minds of the Algerian population play a role, of more importance is the sustainment of French popular support as the FLN attempts to manipulate the French willingness to prosecute the war. The mechanics are sufficiently detailed to permit the examination of several different strategic approaches to both insurgency and counter-insurgency (see Bard O’Neill ‘Insurgency and Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse’). Algeria is available as a VASSALmodule for remote play. (Mike Ottenberg, Military Operations Research Society Wargame Community of Practice)
Close Action (Clash of Arms Games, Mark Campbell, designer, 1997) – Close Action is a game of tactical naval combat in the Age of Sail (1740-1815). Each ship in a battle is represented by an individual counter (or ship model if you prefer) and a hex grid is used to regulate movement and combat between ships. Rules cover ship sailing performance, gunnery combat, boarding actions, and the influence of skill and morale upon combat outcomes. Each player commands one or more ships and secretly plots their moves before each game turn, which represents 200 seconds of real time. Moves are revealed simultaneously, ships are moved, and then the players direct them where to fire. The hex grid and the plotted moves make Close Action an ideal game to play by email—players simply send in their moves before each game turn, to a referee or to each other, then resolve moves and direct and conduct gunfire according to the rules. Ship moves can be tracked and presented to players with photo images or using purpose-designed software (like VASSAL). Play by email allows players from literally anywhere to play in a game. Where Close Action really shines, however, is in its command, control, and communication rules, which simulate the signaling limitations of ships from its era. The rules limit communication between players on a side to messages of a few words each game turn. Players must write messages before a turn and then deliver them only at the end of the turn, thus causing their information to decay and potentially creating confusion in the minds of their recipients. If a game is played with one player per ship, which is facilitated by email play, players can experience the confusion (and frustration!) that occurred in historical battles. In this respect, Close Action can be a valuable tool—even while we’re sheltering in place—for teaching players about the impact of command, control, and communication limitations on tactical combat. (Sean Barnett, Senior Engineer, RAND Corporation)
Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear! (Academy Games, 2012, 2nd Edition) – Conflict of Heroes is a historical WWII Eastern European Theater wargame taking place at the squad level. Its scenarios start out very simple and gradually add complexity to include vehicles, hidden movement, and artillery. The player must make use of limited command resources to coordinate the movements and actions of the ground units. While initially designed for two players, single player experiences abound. As a means of learning basic rules, combat tactics, and game mechanics, a single player can develop and try out strategies on their own for many of the game’s missions. More importantly, the 2nd Edition is supplemented by a Solo Expansion as well as a random Firefight Generator which allows continual single player experiences against an AI adversary. The games AI system is based on core principles of agent based modelling and provides a good tactical challenge. A more recent 3rd edition reimplements and simplifies the ruleset, but is thus not directly compatible with the solo expansions. (Johnathan Proctor, Analyst, Joint Staff)
Dunn-Kempf (John Curry, lulu.com, 2008) – Dunn-Kempf is a professional miniatures wargame that was used to train and educate US Army military officers from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s. Each alternating turn represents 30 seconds of combat. Players maneuver single vehicles or stands of infantry representing fire teams on a terrain table where one inch equals 50 meters. Direct fires, indirect fires, and other systems such as mines are adjudicated using pre-determined combat results tables using dice to represent the random effects of combat. All elements of the game system are based in the weapons, tactics, techniques, and procedures used during that era. Although there is no computer assisted version of this game, a play by e-mail MAPEX using PowerPoint and standard military tactical symbols is readily available for our current environment. (Mike Ottenberg, Military Operations Research Society Wargame Community of Practice)
Enduring Freedom: US Operations in Afghanistan (Ambush Alley Games, 2011) – Published as Issue #30 of Modern War (July-August 2017) this is a solitaire wargame of the invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Components include a sheet of 176 cardboard counters, a 22” x 34” map sheet and a 16-page rulebook. The player controls Coalition forces including brigades, battalions, FOBs, and air strikes (US, NATO, and the Northern Alliance). The game system controls opposing Islamist units and leaders (Al Qaeda, Taliban, and Pakistani volunteers). The map is divided into regions that contain desert or mountain terrain, major cities, “Strongholds,” “Jihadi Centers” and airbases. The game objective is for the Coalition to destroy Al Qaeda and establish a stable Afghan government. The game covers October 2001 (initial US invasion) to March 2002 (conclusion of Operation Anaconda). The complex sequence of play is organized according to doctrinal staff functions: J-1 (Mobilization and Refit), J-2 (Information operations and intelligence), J-3 (Operations), J-4 (Sustainment), and J-5 (Civil-Military). This is a good example of solitaire wargame design for a contemporary joint Operational-level conflict at a fairly abstract level. (Michael Markowitz, Senior Research Specialist, CNA)
Foreign Legion Paratrooper (Decision Game, 2020) – This solitaire wargame is published as Issue #46 of Modern War (March – April 2020). Components include a sheet of 176 cardboard counters, a 22” x 34” map sheet and a 16-page rulebook. The player faces randomly generated crisis contemporary and near-future interventions in Africa and the Middle East, deploying platoon-sized ground and air units from a strategic display to mission maps (variously scaled at 500 meters to 5 km per hex) in desert, jungle, urban, mountain or oilfield terrain. A turn represents anything from 12 hours to a week. A series of missions can be linked into an extended campaign game. Possible missions include hostage rescue, counter terrorist operations, capture of high-value targets, and WMD interdiction, against randomly generated opposing forces. The game system emphasizes planning and logistics, (factors often neglected in hobby wargames) using expenditure of “operations points” for various game functions. The game provides useful insight into the combat capabilities and limitations of modern French forces. (Michael Markowitz, Senior Research Specialist, CNA)
Hornet Leader: Carrier Air Operations (Dan Verssen Games (DVG), 2010) – The entire library of DVG single player wargames provides isolated tabletop tacticians and strategists alike with a series of options spanning history. Hornet Leader focuses on modern carrier air combat spanning from the first Gulf War in 1992 to modern day Syria. Players commit to an air campaign at both the squadron and flight tactical levels. At the squadron level, players must select and manage a roster of aircrew and assets across multiple missions while selecting and prosecuting targets. Since no plan survives contact, each mission includes random events that can change the adversary order of battle, impact available tactics and resources, or (rarely) provide an advantage to the player. The ruleset is simple enough for beginners, but different campaign settings and associated resource limitations will provide difficult decision challenges for experts as well. Additional titles that focus on Army and Air Force aviation include Thunderbolt Apache Leader and Phantom Leader respectively, which use similar setups and rulesets. (Johnathan Proctor, Analyst, Joint Staff)
Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game (Fantasy Flight Games, 2017) – Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) combines the decision-making in the face of uncertainty inherent in card games with a wargame set in a magical version of the Sengoku Period of Japanese history. Players build and pilot decks from one of seven clans, each with a different theme. Some clans seek to quickly overrun opponents and break provinces militarily while others focus on controlling the political arena and slowly wearing down the honor of the opponent. Most games take roughly an hour to play. During gameplay, players must balance their resources across multiple phases; these decisions include playing more characters or playing specific actions. As in many card games, some of the information is revealed on the board to all players while other information is secretly held in each player’s hand. This game can be played online and is recommend for players who enjoy games with partial information and tradeoffs that effect future turns. (Justin Peachey, Research Scientist, CNA Corporation)
Napoleon, the Waterloo Campaign (4th edition Columbia Games, 2013) – This is a relatively uncomplicated wargame but one that employs wooden blocks rather than cardboard counters to represent the military units involved in the campaign. This physical system design easily introduces uncertainty and deception into play because the opposing players cannot see the real identity of opposing units until they engage in combat. Furthermore, the blocks allow easy implementation of a step-reduction system, allowing units to become attrited in combat while preventing the opponent from knowing which units have been damaged the most. The third major element of the game system is the use of point-to-point movement. Forces move between locations connected by roads and the capacity of the roads constrains how many units you can move from one town to another during a turn. This game is one of a handful of truly revolutionary designs, created in 1972 and spawning and entirely new genre of block games. It has much to teach professional wargamers. The mechanisms and components of the game are the most obvious innovations but there is far more to learn here. Perhaps most important lesson is the fundamental change in player perspective that the reduced information creates. Although not a complete “fog of war,” it is at least misty out there. But the game is also an object lesson in revolutionary innovation. It took the old paradigm of cardboard counters openly displayed on a hex grid and completely changed the model. The block-game model is of great interest, even today, for those trying to find a balance between the perceived (though often overstated) unreality of open, Igo-Hugo (i.e., “I go, then you go”) game systems and the perceived (though often questionable) realism of “double-blind” and simultaneous games. Not to mention the fundamental synthetic experience it creates by challenging players to devise a winning strategic approach and translate it into an effective operational plan. Napoleon can be played easily in person with or without a referee to create even more fog of war, or by using email- or text-based play using a referee to manage things. Unfortunately, there appear to be no dedicated resources for automated online play. (Peter Perla, Principal Research Scientist, CNA Corporation)
Pandemic (Z-man Games, Inc, 2008) – Pandemic is a family-friendly cooperative game where players together try to cure four different diseases while simultaneously controlling outbreaks around the world. It can serve as a very basic introduction to cooperative game mechanics and the types of conversations (and arguments) that a cooperative game may generate. While the topic is particularly timely in the age of COVID-19, the decisions have little bearing on how countries and international actors would deal with a real-life pandemic. Rigid rule-based games such as this have explicit connections between player actions and game effects, whereas serious games often serve as a mechanism to prompt real-world actors to figure out who needs to coordinate and when. That said, it is fun to play, and can certainly be considered part of your research into pandemic gaming. Pandemic may be also be played solo or on the iPhone/iPad. (Yuna Huh Wong, Policy Research, RAND Corporation)
Single Player Games – The ranks of purely or primarily solitaire board wargames that merit the attention of serious students of military affairs have grown remarkably in the past 15 years—John H. Butterfield alone has produced more than half a dozen during that time. Among the least conventional recent solitaire wargames, Brien J. Miller’s Silent War is an innovative and attractively-rendered simulation of the Allied submarine campaign against Japan. It captures WWII’s evolving and attritional nature in a level of detail that some players find highly immersive and others tedious, as the solo Allied player tries to sink millions of tons of shipping tracked in thousand-ton increments. (The sequel, Steel Wolves, does the same for the even larger WWII U-boat war against Britain.) The Fields of Firegames, by game designer and career U.S. Marine officer Ben Hull, simulate infantry combat at the company level from 1944 to Vietnam. Fields of Fire uses a unique card-based system that illuminates things about small-unit combat that no other tactical boardgame has done, and has made some players fall out of love with better-known games that treat the topic more cinematically. Both series reward spending substantial time exploring them—one takes a long time to play and the other has rules that are challenging to master—so they might be just right for a period of prolonged social isolation. (Karl P. Mueller, Political Scientist, RAND Corporation)
Space Alert (Czech Games Edition, 2008) – Decision-making under conditions of time constraint and uncertainty, while fostering teamwork, quick communication, and mental agility have become stock phrases associated with professional wargaming. Investment in professional wargaming centers that can put large groups through their paces in realistic scenarios developing these skills are in great demand and offer our warfighters crucial opportunities to hone those skills. But if you are a small group, sequestered from such facilities, or not lucky enough to get invites at all, fear not! You can get a taste of what those events are like in microcosm with this little gem of a game. Using Sci Fi tropes similar to computer games like Starship Artemis, players form a team in the roles of starship crewmen. They must face challenges from attacking aliens to defend the ship, and inevitably, repair it when damaged. The hook that draws you into the game is a set of 10 min audio files. These can be played on a CD or downloaded for your phone – the scripts are available to be read aloud if you need to save your tech for the real-world calamity! Between these encounters, you “jump to hyperspace” and can reset some aspects of the game to prepare for the next time you drop out into a new situation. It takes a few playings to get the mechanics down, but when players get in the flow of the game, its easy to picture yourself in a much higher stakes situation than a board game on your conference or dining room table. (Paul Vebber (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-vebber-a16b6936)
Star Wars Rebellion (Fantasy Flight Games, 2016) – Rebellion is an epic game of hide-and-seek set in the Star Wars universe while fully incorporating the DIME (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic). Diplomatic: Both Rebels and Imperials must convince unaligned systems to join their cause. Informational: The Rebels have a hidden base, which the Empire is trying to find. Military: Like most games with Star Wars, there is an emphasis on the war: the game includes both land- and ship-based combat. Economic: To continue fighting (i.e., building more units, possibly replacing lost ones) both sides have to increase their production capabilities weighed against their ability to produce those units in a useful, timely fashion. Additionally, the Empire has its own set on monstrous projects (e.g., the Death Star) which it must separately balance. All of this is within a move-economy determined by the number of leaders each side has (and how effectively the player uses them). Rebellion pits two players (or two teams) against in each other in asymmetric play ranging from the Strategic to Tactical, while fully incorporating DIME. (Nolan Noble, Research Data Scientist, CNA Corporation)
The Waterloo Campaign, 1815(C3i Magazine, 2019) – This is a recent edition to the canon (or is that cannon?) of Waterloo games. While its mechanisms are relatively uncomplicated, so too are those of chess. Indeed, in many ways the game plays in a very chesslike way. As with chess, this is a two-sided, open-information contest in which the players alternate moving one of their small number of pieces—around 20 for each side—until one or both players choose to stop. One of the unique aspects of play is that pieces are not limited to a single movement or attack each half-day game turn, but rather can be pushed as far as the player may wish until coming into close contact with the enemy. It is a system based on the same design-production team’s earlier Gettysburg game. The biggest differences from that earlier game have to do with implementing the different realities of Napoleonic warfare when compared to the U.S. Civil War. Primary among these are the operational and battlefield roles of cavalry and the effects of elite units such as Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, as well as the Emperor’s penchant for massing a Grand Battery of Artillery to pound his opponent’s line. Unlike the Columbia version of the campaign, the players of The Waterloo Campaign, 1815 can see all the opposing forces on a standard hexagon map but maneuvering those forces is tricky because units must slow down as they approach the enemy and become fixed in place if they intend to attack them. It is a different view of strategy and an unusual form of game play. Its new ideas—and new implementation of old ideas—offer the professional wargamer both new tools and fresh inspiration. The small number of playing pieces belies the depth of game play. Although a short playing time of 60 to 90 minutes is claimed by the designer, my experience is that careful players, using chess-like care, can extend the duration to twice that. As of this writing there appear to be no electronic versions of the game available. However, the small number of pieces and alternating action make it an easy game to play using email or text chat. (Peter Perla, Principal Research Scientist, CNA Corporation)
Twilight Imperium (Fantasy Flight Games, 2017) – Twilight Imperium is a complex wargame. The rules are very involved and a game can take 8 or more hours with the maximum number of players. Each player controls one of seventeen different unique factions. While all factions use the same set of units, each faction may use them differently. The game board varies each playthrough as players build the galaxy they are conquering during the first phase of play. During the main portion of the game, all factions compete to achieve ten victory points. The first player to do so wins the game. Gameplay often involves tradeoffs between attacking other players to gain more territory, building more units to attack and defend territory already owned, and taking actions to gain victory points. This game is recommended for people who want to experience the role of setting and implementing a grand strategy and altering said strategy in the event of contact with an enemy. It can be played online, but not solo. (Justin Peachey, Research Scientist, CNA Corporation)
When comparing alternative courses of action, modern military decision makers often must consider both the military effectiveness and the ethical consequences of the available alternatives. The basis, design, calibration, and performance of a principles-based computational model of ethical considerations in military decision making are reported in this article. The relative ethical violation (REV) model comparatively evaluates alternative military actions based upon the degree to which they violate contextually relevant ethical principles. It is based on a set of specific ethical principles deemed by philosophers and ethicists to be relevant to military courses of action. A survey of expert and non-expert human decision makers regarding the relative ethical violation of alternative actions for a set of specially designed calibration scenarios was conducted to collect data that was used to calibrate the REV model. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey showed that people, even experts, disagreed greatly amongst themselves regarding the scenarios’ ethical considerations. Despite this disagreement, two significant results emerged. First, after calibration the REV model performed very well in terms of replicating the ethical assessments of human experts for the calibration scenarios. The REV model outperformed an earlier model that was based on tangible consequences rather than ethical principles, that earlier model performed comparably to human experts, the experts outperformed human non-experts, and the non-experts outperformed random selection of actions. All of these performance comparisons were measured quantitatively and confirmed with suitable statistical tests. Second, although humans tended to value some principles over others, none of the ethical principles involved—even the principle of not harming civilians—completely overshadowed all of the other principles.
Whether it be bombs going off at the Boston Marathon finish line or a D.C. sniper on the loose, the country’s top decision-makers are tasked with keeping the U.S. safe from any and all national security threats. Now, law students are being prepped to deal with hot seat situations, too. At least that was the goal of a two-day simulation at the Georgetown University Law Center last weekend that asked students to use law, politics and public opinion to mitigate a threat.
A total of 80 law students from nearly a dozen law schools participated the National Security Crisis Law Invitational, a simulation developed by Laura Donohue, director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, eight years ago.
“There is a lot about how we teach in law school that doesn’t work for students who are jumping into national security law,” Donohue said in an interview with The National Law Journal. “We teach the law as it is written, not how it is applied. Law is one of many competing considerations during a national security crisis. How do you talk with policymakers? How do you bring the law into the conversation?”
Donohue said that she created the simulation as a way to help students understand how best to apply the law during real world, high-pressure crises. It’s in these stressful times that your gut reaction has to be the right one. Your actions have consequences.
Leading up to the National Security Crisis Law Invitational, students spend several months hitting the books on national security law, as their performances on Georgetown’s campus are accessed by highly regarded national security experts, including James Baker, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and Rosemary Hart, special counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.
This is only the second year that law students from outside of Georgetown have been invited to take part in the simulation. Students at this year’s invitational came from American University Washington College of Law; Cornell Law School; George Washington University Law School; Indiana University Maurer School of Law–Bloomington; New York University School of Law; Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law; Stanford Law School; Syracuse University College of Law; University of Virginia School of Law; and The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School.
Teams acted as departments within the National Security Council and were paired with mentors with a background working within the agency students were assigned.
Watch the Skies! and John Hunter’s Peace Game have inspired high school teacher Shaun Macmillan and his students to develop their own political science game, Alliance: World Wide Crisis. Follow the link to find out more.
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Phli Sabin (King’s College London) was featured as designer of the month on BoardGameGeek in March:
Mr. Sabin has been a wargamer for over 40 years, and became Professor of Strategic Studies at King’s College London’s War Studies Department. Over the past 20 years, he has published several board games on ancient warfare through the Society of Ancients. In 2007, his book Lost Battles was published, reconstructing three dozen different ancient battles using a common rules system. A deluxe board game edition was published by Fifth Column Games in 2011. In 2012, his book Simulating War was published, containing eight different simple wargames which he has used in his military history classes. One of these (Hell’s Gate) was published in a deluxe edition by Victory Point Games in 2013, and VPG has just published a second game from the book (Angels One Five).
Besides using wargames to help his BA students to understand conflict dynamics, since 2003 Mr. Sabin has been teaching a very innovative MA option module in which students design their own simple board games of past conflicts of their choice. Many of these are available for free download (Google ‘Sabin consim’). He also writes regularly for Battles magazine, and works closely with defense wargamers in the UK and overseas.
For discussion of his design philosophy and views on conflict simulation, see the thread here.
Navit Keren grew up in Israel. She’s lived through the signing of historic peace treaties, and horrific terrorist attacks. Just as important though, she’s witness to the dramatic deterioration of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The biggest problem she sees, is a lack of empathy. Those living on the other side of the divide are not people, but enemies. “Others” to be feared and hated. Her effort to bridge the gap between the two sides is a pretty novel one: a location-based game. Welcome to the West Bank is merely a working title, but it gets right to the heart of the game. Israeli citizens, primarily teenagers, would play as Palestinian teenagers living in the West Bank. Basically she’s asking people to walk a mile in someone else’s virtual shoes.
Right now, there is no prototype, only screen mockups and ideas about game mechanics. The most important part is creating a “sincere and appealing narrative” that will help someone understand the experience of being on the other side of this seemingly intractable conflict. A lot of that means lifting directly from the personal stories of Palestinian youth. As you move through the world you’re offered information about the city you’re virtually visiting, landmarks and historical figures. But eventually you’ll be presented with a choice. Like this passage ripped straight from one Palestinian teen’s personal experience:
You are interrogated because of a suspicion of teaching boys in your village how to build Molotov Cocktails, which you deny. During the interrogation you are kept in a room that stinks of feces and rotten food. You are hit with a chair and threatened with a knife. You are also told that if you did not admit to the charges against you that you would be “taken to an electric chair to help you.”
You’ve already been held for 30 days, and your options are falsely confess and be released, or deny the charges and be held for 10 more days. And your choice will impact future events. If you admit guilt you’ll be placed under house arrest, be unable to attend school and therefore won’t graduate.
The game, however, is only in the concept stage—there’s no actual playable prototype yet.
h/t Anya Slavinsky
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By contrast, Gaza Man is available for download (Android) or online play. In the game the player assumes the role of a Palestinian fighter defending Gaza against an Israeli invasion. Not surprisingly, that’s made it popular in Gaza, and controversial within Israel.
The game itself is pretty standard arcade-type shooting game. It only involves combat between opposing military forces, and no attacks on civilians or any other form of terrorism. Other than a red kaffiyeh worn by “Gaza man,” it also avoids strong political symbols or ethno-religious stereotypes. The game’s introduction shows the hero initially coming to the defence of a Gazan family being harassed by Israeli troops.
For information on other digital games that examine the Arab-Israeli conflict, see these PAXsims reports:
The next issue of Yaah! magazine by Flying Pig Games will feature two abstract Brian Train games, both on the general theme of insurgency:
In UPRISING, the State knows where the rebel units are, but not what they are– violent radicals, passive sympathizers, or simply shadows? The Rebels must misdirect the State to buy themselves the time to build a loose-knit network born of popular unrest into a force capable of declaring open revolution– but will they overthrow the current regime, or be crushed?
In ARMY OF SHADOWS, both players have their own map and set of counters– but only the Insurgent Player knows for sure where his units are located. It’s a tense and desperate race as the State tries to find and destroy the insurgency before the army of shadows can seize the capitol.
The folks at Red Team Journal remind you the “Mind the Gap“—that is, the gap between your model and assumptions, and the real thing.
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GMT Games will soon be publishing Labyrinth II: The Awakening, 2010 – ?, an expansion set by Trevor Bender that updates Volko Ruhnke’s very successful Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ? game to the post-Arab Spring era. For more on the expansion and the issues it addresses, see Trevor’s comments on the GMT blog. For the original game, see our PAXsims review here.
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What’s a GrogCast? It’s the new podcast by our friends at the wargaming site GrogHeads!
RPS: What do you want people to get out of playing This War Of Mine?
Pawel Miechowski: We want to raise awareness about how civilians suffer when war is breaking out. We want to show the other side. We’re partnering with War Child so we’re going to raise money for [kids in war]. From the perspective of being creators we use a parallel to movies because it works well in this case. Sometimes you’re in the mood to watch an action movie or a comedy. Sometimes you watch drama – The Pianist or Saving Private Ryan with that brutal opening. We decided we see games as ready to speak about important things. We’re not pioneers – we already have amazing games which do that really well – Gone Home, Papers Please….
See the full interview at the link above.
(h/t James Sterrett)
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Positech Games have announced the release of Democracy 3: Clones & Drones, an expansion for their political strategy game Democracy 3. It adds a range of new policies to consider (from the use of armed drones to human cloning to driverless cars) and events (shortages of “rare earths”, anti-technoloy rebellions, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and many more).
…unusual strategies — and the gall to enact them — are desperately needed as we increasingly face complicated conflicts that seem to have no way out. Police and citizens distrust one another in places like Ferguson, Missouri. Bullies taunt kids from rich neighborhoods to poor. Old ways of fetishizing power, such as nationalism, and winner-takes-all need to be replaced with new models in which complicated people in global, complex societies can not only get along but prosper. It’s not impossible. We need resilient communities that not only survive, but thrive.
And as law scholar Yochai Benkler noted in his bookThe Penguin and the Leviathan: Triumph of Cooperation Over Self-Interest (2011), systems built wholly on self-interest end up as disasters. Parts of society that serve everyone — from public parks to Wikipedia — last longer and make people happier.
It’s time to recast the molds. Let’s find new ways to model unusual forms of cooperation. Games like Pandemic or Pox: Save the People, two board games where teams of people fight against spreading viruses, are a first step. Let’s tell stories that replace the “bad guy” with the challenges we face together.
We must reinvent rusty old conflict models, or we will never escape the vicious cycle of war countering war. Violence isn’t the answer to seemingly intractable problems. And yet, we’re only as brilliant as the tools we’ve learned to use.
I have certainly used games as a way of exploring challenging issues and helping to players to jointly identify possible solutions to deep-rooted conflicts (see, for example, here, here, and here). However, I think we also have to be careful that we don’t oversell what games can do.
The zombie genre is quickly becoming a feature of International Relations (IR) classrooms and pedagogical toolkits as scholars enthusiastically embrace the undead as a vehicle for teaching the discipline. This article offers a cautionary note on a generally positive move to embrace the use of zombieism in IR. It shows how an uncritical use of a zombie apocalypse as a vehicle for teaching IR can reinforce existing divisions in the field, essentialise country positions, crowd out heterodox approaches, reinforce gender stereotypes and dehumanise people. To guard against these problems, the article shows how Zombie IR can be better used to think critically and normatively about world politics.
(h/t Lisa Lynch)
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York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design is seeking a tenure-track junior researcher in the area of games, gaming and gamification:
This position seeks a strong junior researcher whose creative practice and theoretical interests span games, gaming, and organized play as cultural phenomena, as a platform for art-making, and who explores gaming as it manifests in a wide range of contemporary practices. Possible areas of interest include the following: art games, serious games, experimental game mechanics, alternate reality games, game related art or installation, interactive narrative, critical game studies, world making, visualization, alt-games, notgames and gamification. The candidate will be a practicing artist and creative coder, with strong theoretical framework, who has expertise with a variety of tools found in professional game development and whose technology-based art practice incorporates interdisciplinary approaches to art and science. The candidate will have capacity to teach practicum courses in Digital Media and Design.
You’ll find additional details here. The deadline for applications is 5 December 2014.
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Worcester Polytechnic Institute is advertising a tenure-track faculty position in serious games. You’ll find details here. Applications should be received by 15 December 2014.
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Earlier this year, George Phillies (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) posted a series of videos on wargame design to YouTube, based on a class he taught on the subject. You’ll find the first of them below, and links to the others here.
Countless games have thrown players into heated warzones, whether as a soldier holding a gun ready to fire or an almighty commander who oversees the entire battlefield, moving units around.
What’s less examined in games is what’s happening off the battlefield and the consequences of violence. Recently, however, we see more developers who are examining war’s impact on civilians. We’ve made a list of games that we’re looking forward to and a list of thought-provoking titles to play right now.
Some of those mentioned in the short piece have been discussed before at PAXsims, including PeaceMaker and This War of Mine.
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The current conflict in Gaza spurred the development of several games on the theme. According to Time:
In Bomb Gaza, a game about doing precisely what its peremptory title commands, you play as the Israeli Air Force, tapping a touchscreen to pour red-nosed bombs into a 2D multi-level landscape filled with cartoonish people wearing white robes and clutching children — meant to signify civilians — as well as others draped in black, clutching rifles, touting greenish headbands and grinning maniacally. The goal is to hit those black-garbed militants — presumably members of Palestinian militant group Hamas — while avoiding the white-clad civilians.
At some point in the past 24 hours, Google removed Bomb Gaza from its Android Play store (the game was released on July 29). It’s not clear why. Google’s only officially saying what companies like it so often say when handed political hot potatoes: that it doesn’t comment on specific apps, but that it removes ones from its store that violate its policies….
It’s unclear which of Google’s policies Bomb Gaza might have infringed, but in Google’s Developer Program Policies document, it notes under a subsection titled Violence and Bullying that “Depictions of gratuitous violence are not allowed,” and that “Apps should not contain materials that threaten, harass or bully other users.” Under another titled Hate Speech, Google writes “We don’t allow content advocating against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity.”
Bomb Gaza isn’t the only Gaza-centric game Google’s removed: another, dubbed Gaza Assault: Code Red is about dropping bombs on Palestinians using Israeli drones. Its designers describe the game as “[bringing] you to the forefront of the middle-east conflict, in correlation to ongoing real world events.” It was also just yanked, as was another titled Whack the Hamas, in which players have to target Hamas members as they pop out of tunnels.
Politically-themed games about touchy current issues have been around for years, from depictions of deadly international situations like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to others modeled on flashpoints like school shootings. In late 2008, a game called Raid Gaza!appeared around the time Israel was carrying out “Operation Cast Lead,” a conflict that left 13 Israelis and some 1,400 Palestinians dead. In that title, you’re tasked with killing as many Palestinians as you can in three minutes, and actually afforded bonuses for hitting civilian targets, all while listening to a version of the Carpenter’s saccharine “Close to You.”
In the past, quick browser or app games have developed for the purpose of sitar or political commentary—as is immediately evident if you play Raid Gaza!. In this case, however, it seems to have simply been a case of game developers cashing in on the widespread destruction in Gaza to create a quick “how many Hamas militants can you kill” game.
There was also at least one Arabic game that put the player in the role of Hamas. According to the BBC:
The US-based firm has now removed Rocket Pride by Best Arabic Games, in which players attempt to outmaneuver Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system, from its Google Play app store.
It also deleted Iron Dome by Gamytech, which challenged players to “intercept the rockets launched by Hamas”.
Other titles that do not name the “enemy” remain online.
The Connections Australia website has been updated with a general conference program and registration information. The conference will be held on 8-9 December 2014 oat the University of Melbourne.
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Additional details have been announced for the 2014-15 Disaster and Humanitarian Response Program at McGill University (October 2014-April 2015). The program includes a field exercise to be held in May 2015.
2014-2015 Disaster and Humanitarian Response Program
Beginning in October 2014, the Humanitarian Studies Initiative of McGill University will be once more offering its innovative and multi-disciplinary humanitarian training program that advances and improves the quality of humanitarian work and practice to improve the lives of people most affected by war and disaster around the world.
The 2014-2015 Disaster and Humanitarian Response Training Program offers an evidence-based approach on the globally-recognized core humanitarian competencies that are essential for anyone involved in disaster response and/or humanitarian assistance. This course is specifically designed for people with little or no prior experience in emergency settings who wish to undertake a career in the humanitarian sector. Participants will learn about the background and context of humanitarian emergencies, international humanitarian law, doctrines, and operating procedures of in many technical areas. Instructed by a community of humanitarians and Faculty from around the globe, the program also offers participants an occasion to join an exciting network of humanitarians.
In-Classroom training is on a weekly basis from October 2014 till April 2015.
The 3-day field-based disaster simulation exercise will be held in May 2015.
The course will take place in Montreal at the Department of Family Medicine
Interested applicants can apply directly on our webpage or send their enquiries to the Program Manager: Melanie Coutu.
The following post was contributed by Jonathan Keller (James Madison University). For an earlier PAXsims summary of Gustavo Carvalho’s forthcoming article, see here.
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The Pedagogy of Statecraft
I would like to thank Rex Brynen for the opportunity to join this conversation on his excellent blog. A good discussion has been provoked by the forthcoming International Studies Perspectives article by Gustavo Carvalho entitled “Virtual Worlds Can Be Dangerous: Using Ready-Made Computer Simulations for Teaching International Relations.” The article focuses on one class’s (largely negative) experience with the Statecraft simulation at the University of Toronto and generally casts doubt on the effectiveness of Statecraft as a teaching tool.
As the creator of Statecraft, I read this article with great interest. Statecraft is certainly not a perfect simulation, and I am interested in feedback on ways in which it can be improved. I was disappointed to discover, however, that Carvalho had employed Statecraft in at least four ways that were directly counter to the explicit instructions we provide to professors. These instructions are not arbitrary, but are the result of over a decade (now approaching 15 years) of observing the pedagogical impact of different Statecraft design choices in a variety of IR courses. The instructions were designed to maximize Statecraft’s pedagogical effectiveness and to prevent precisely the sorts of negative outcomes this class experienced. Specifically, in the Toronto class that was the subject of the ISP article, (1) students were not incentivized to learn the simulation rules through the online manual quizzes, (2) the all-important grading system (which encourages realistic behavior) appears not to have been used, (3) countries and student roles were not set up properly before Turn 1 began, leading to widespread confusion, and (4) the instructor materials (lecture outlines, assignments, etc.) that are essential for helping students make sense of their Statecraft experience are nowhere mentioned in the article and appear not to have been used.
ISP has decided to include my rebuttal alongside Carvalho’s article in print. This forthcoming article is entitled “Misusing Virtual Worlds Can Be Dangerous: A Response to Carvalho.” This article provides context regarding Statecraft’s design, instructions for use, and pedagogical intent that were missing from the Carvalho piece, so that readers may gain a more complete picture of what Statecraft was intended to do and how it is designed to work.
I encourage PaxSim’s readers to read this rebuttal, which should be available soon on ISP’s “Early View” if it is not already. But here I’d like to highlight briefly three pedagogical lessons that the Toronto experience (and my own 15-year history developing Statecraft) suggest regarding the use of simulations.
First, grading criteria greatly affect students’ behavior and should be carefully calibrated to produce the dynamics the instructor wishes to illustrate. The clearest lesson from the early trials of Statecraft (1999-2002, back when it was a purely “paper and pencil” simulation) was that unless students are given incentives to behave like real world leaders, Statecraft will quickly degenerate into entertaining but unrealistic global warfare, with a heavy emphasis on nuclear weapons. One student described an early version of the simulation as “college kids with nukes.” The current Statecraft grading system is a result of this experience, and it gives tangible incentives for students to pursue the range of goals that have historically motivated real world countries (national prestige/distinctiveness, domestic development, cooperation on transnational issues, and imperial conquest), without telling students which of these goals they must pursue. Since Statecraft assigns students to countries using a foreign policy attitudes survey, there will always be a mix of hardline countries, pacifist regimes, and so on. The “Historians’ Verdict” award was introduced specifically to curb unrealistic resort to nuclear warfare, and when used it virtually eliminates nuclear war in Statecraft. In the last 10 years of using the recommended grading system (described in detail in my forthcoming ISP article), about 40% of my “worlds” have avoided war altogether, and only one nuclear weapon has ever been launched. I encourage instructors to tweak the default grading criteria to achieve the type of “world” they want their students to experience, but they should be cautious about diverging too far from these thoroughly tested criteria. The extraordinary bellicosity of the world described in the Carvalho article, together with the omission of any mention of the grading system, indicates that the recommended grading criteria were not used.
Second, precise verisimilitude with the real world should not necessarily be the primary goal of IR simulations. Yes, some degree of realism is necessary in order to illustrate key concepts and replicate the core dynamics of world politics. But if a given run of Statecraft produces outcomes that diverge from real-world outcomes, this should not be an occasion for despair (as the Carvalho article seems to suggest) but presents a golden opportunity for reflection and critical thinking. If a class finds itself locked in conflict spirals and the UN is impotent, the instructor can ask students what factors are driving the conflict and under what conditions these processes are likely to be replicated in world politics. He or she can ask students whether these outcomes approximate the predictions of realists or liberals, and can encourage them to consider whether their classroom experience with an ineffective UN parallels the limitations of the real UN, or whether the actual UN has more influence than the Statecraft version, and why. This is how Statecraft was designed to be used, as evidenced by the many discussion questions and paper assignments (provided to instructors using Statecraft) that ask students to actively critique the assumptions behind the simulation design and compare their classroom experience with their observations of world politics.
Finally, no matter how well designed a simulation is, student learning will be stunted if the simulation experience occurs in a vacuum. It is still the job of the instructor to make clear the connections between students’ simulation experience and class material. Statecraft is intended to be fully integrated into IR courses through lecture, discussion, exams, and paper assignments. (All of these instructor resources, including 39 pages of lecture outlines on 13 different IR topics, are included with Statecraft). It is therefore not surprising that Carvalho’s students—who, based on his article, were not exposed to lectures or assignments making sense of their Statecraft experience—expressed skepticism about the utility of Statecraft as a teaching tool. As Carvalho notes (p. 13), “Simulations and video games do not replace good textbooks and content material, and they need to be carefully interwoven with lectures if they are to be effective educational tools.” On that point, we are in complete agreement.
Hopefully the upcoming publication of Carvalho’s piece and my response in ISP will continue to generate productive discussion on the pedagogy of IR simulations. I believe that the Toronto class experience in spring 2012, when properly understood, offers constructive lessons about the limitations of simulations as standalone teaching tools and the ways in which Statecraft can most usefully be employed.
Jonathan Keller is Associate Professor of Political Science at James Madison University. He received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 2002. His research and teaching interests include political psychology, foreign policy decision-making, U.S. foreign policy, and research methods. His work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, Political Psychology, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Foreign Policy Analysis.
Gustavo Carvalho, a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, has an interesting article appearing soon in International Studies Perspectives on the use of computer simulations in an international relations classroom—in this case, the online educational game Statecraft. He warns, based on use of the game in an introductory international relations course at U of T, that such games may not necessarily be very effective, and may also be less versatile in the classroom than non-digital “manual” games:
Video games have become a hot topic in education. To their proponents, they enhance the interactive and active aspects of learning. In addition, mass-produced off-the-shelf video games promise a cheaper and more convenient approach to education, being quick and easy to set up, in contrast to the extensive time commitment that goes into designing a simulation from scratch. My paper uses our experience with Statecraft, a commercial off-the-shelf IR computer simulation tailored to the educational market, as a proxy to discuss the educational usefulness of commercial strategy video games in general. Our experience recommends that we be cautious and reflective in the use of ready-made games for teaching. More to the point, it is still not clear which benefits, apart from convenience, commercial computer simulations bring to our classes that cannot also be provided by old-fashioned, low-tech customized simulations, whether designed by instructors or in collaboration with students.
The full text of the article is behind a paywall, but for readers who don’t have access to the journal here are some of the major points he makes, together with some comments of my own:
In view of how much they relied on the lectures, it is of some concern that only slightly over a quarter of the students said that the simulation helped them understand IR theories and concepts much (23.91%) or very much (4.35%), while close to a third (32.07%) ranked their experience only as average. Likewise, although a little more than a quarter of the students said Statecraft improved their engagement with the course readings (29.3%), a quarter felt that the improvement was average (25%), and almost half of them felt that it improved their engagement little (23.37%) or nothing at all (21.74%). Not surprisingly, given the status quo bias of Statecraft, only slightly over a fifth of the students said the simulation changed their previous views on international politics (21.19%). In a more positive tone, however, close to half of the students said Statecraft improved much (32.07%) or very much (13.59%) their engagement with the lecture and tutorials, while less than a fifth (19.02%) recorded an average change in engagement.
Much depends, of course, on how a game is integrated into curriculum, and especially how it is briefed and debriefed. That being said, the numbers aren’t very impressive—even more so when one considers that they are self-reported learning effects, which tend to be a more generous appraisal of game effects than objective learning measures (such as impact on test scores). One also needs to consider opportunity costs. It isn’t enough that a game have learning effects—it also needs to have learning effects that are greater or different from those that would be generated by a similar amount of time devoted to lectures, tutorials, readings, films, or other ways of examining the course material. It is an observation that international relations scholars James Robinson, Lee Anderson, Margaret Hermann and Richard Snyder made almost half a century ago in a seminal research article in the American Political Science Review, but which often gets lost amid contemporary enthusiasm for the gamification of learning. (It should be noted, however, that a 2013 paper by Chad Raymond on Statecraft reports much more positive learning experiences—again suggesting that much may depend on how any give game/simulation is used in the classroom.)
While it is often assumed that games-based learning is more attractive to students, Carvalho has some words of caution based on his classroom experience:
In contrast with the expectations of some scholars (Weir and Baranowski 2011:450), my first takeaway point is that computer-based simulations may in fact be unattractive to students, particularly those that do not feel at ease playing video games…. One student summarized this problem poignantly: “(…) I found that I got lost very quickly. Not being used to computer games I had to take more time to get acquainted with the rules and on top of trying to understand what was going on [at] my screen, I had to connect that with what I was learning.”
He also later notes that, based on the results from his class survey, “commercial video game simulations appeal more to those students who already enjoy playing them outside of the academic environment.”
The author’s second takeaway from the experience relates to the issues of course design and other learning methods raised above:
My second takeaway point is that there is a careful balance to be struck between simulations, particularly video game-based ones, and traditional learning tools, such as lectures and tutorials. Simulations and video games do not replace good textbooks and content material, and they need to be carefully interwoven with lectures if they are to be effective educational tools (Aldrich 2009). Moreover, simulations and video games may also be detrimental to the experience of students who prefer traditional learning methods (Asal 2005:361) or feel uneasy in intense social situations.
His third major point relates to the problem of “realism” versus playability, a constant source of debate among conflict simulation designers:
My third takeaway point is that the trade-off between complexity and playability, important for games in general, is crucial in educational simulations. Game designers may feel tempted to increase the complexity of a game, or the amount of variables and elements that the players need to deal with, in order to make it seem more “realistic” (Sabin 2012:21). This seems to have been the case with Statecraft. Our data suggest that many students had trouble with the number of variables they had to control and with the choices they had to make in every turn of the game.
Gus also discusses the need for an educational game to be easy to play and run:
My fourth takeaway point is that off-the-shelf or commercial computer products may present serious technical challenges to course instructors. In the case of our experience with Statecraft, many software glitches had a direct impact on the performance of the countries, a serious problem for a simulation that relies too much on conflict-based game dynamics. In our case, the bugs and glitches were not serious enough to derail the simulation, but they may have been detrimental to our educational goals in the course, and particularly to the experiences of students that were not gamers to begin with
His fifth major point is a very important one, relating to the way in which any game models the “real world,” and the need to be aware of the potential message this sends to students:
My fifth takeaway point is that, when using commercial video games for teaching purposes, we need to be aware of the concepts and ideas that they either explicitly or implicitly transmit to the players. Game designers may be uncritical when choosing game mechanics or may be more concerned with making the game viable from a commercial point of view. Either way, their choices may not be equally useful in helping the students to better understand political science and IR, and some may actually be counterproductive to the goals of our courses.
In the case of Statecraft, it is difficult to say whether its designers had strong views about IR theories or were attempting to emulate successful games such as those in the Civilization and Age of Empires series.[13] Either way, as a result of their design choices, Statecraft ended up as a tragic caricature of international politics, to the detriment of its pretense realism. Instead of depicting the nuances of international politics, with the real trade-offs behind decision-making and the high costs associated with conflict, the game dynamics behind the simulation pushed the students to behave with the testosterone-infused logic of the stereotypical male gamer, including the “trash talk” and “trolling” that are associated with it. This is supported by the survey, with more than two-thirds of the respondents ranking the level of realism of Statecraft as average and lower, and was highlighted by the nuclear wars that occurred in two of our simulated worlds.
This is a widespread problem. We raised similar concerns a few years ago in a review of the manual, book-and-roleplay IR simulation International Relations in Action: A World Politics Simulation. We also pointed to the problem of exaggerated levels of international conflict in our recent review of the computer gameMasters of the World.
One final point in the article that is worth underscoring is how serious games in the classroom can positively affect inter-student dynamics:
…an interesting, and usually neglected, part of the entertainment factor of group simulations such as Statecraft is their social or community-building aspect (Aldrich 2009; Hofstede et al. 2010:830–832). In private conversations, some of my students noted how the simulation had actually brought them together and helped them connect with other students in their tutorials, a welcome change in our current environment of huge (and increasing) class and tutorial sizes.
This is a point my own students frequently make, with the friendships forged in the simulation often enduring for years after (or, in one notable case, resulting in marriage!)
All-in-all, an excellent piece, and well worth a read.
Some recent material on conflict simulations and serious games that may be of interest to our readers:
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The folks at Reacting to the Past historical role-play project are in the process of transitioning to a new publisher, which may temporarily affect the availability of their published volumes:
As the new academic year approaches, we wanted to reach out to everyone in the RTTP community with important information about the availability of Reacting to the Past Series games for the Fall 2013 semester. The Reacting to the Past Series is currently in transition to a new publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, and is temporarily unavailable for purchase. We are confident that our relationship with W.W. Norton & Co. is going to be a successful one, but we must remain focused on quality and be willing to accommodate to industry-standard timelines. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee that printed versions of the nine (previously published) RTTP game books will be available to purchase by September 1. Therefore, we have implemented a new policy to ensure that instructors will be able to obtain game materials for Fall 2013 courses. All instructors planning to teach a published game should follow this alternative procedure.
As noted at the link above, RTTP will make their simulation materials in the Fall 2013 term via an encrypted PDF version of the student game book(s).
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The preliminary programme for the 7th European Conference on Games Based Learning (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Porto, Portugal, 3-4 October 2013) is now available.
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Eversim—the same people who produce Masters of the World and Rulers of Nations—also produce iScen, a software programme that allows you to create netowrked interactive multimedia training modules. Currently only available for PCs, version 2.0 (in development) will also be available in a Mac version.
A free evaluation version is available from their website. (If anyone with some experience in educational simulation wants to review this for us, drop us a line.)
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These two papers aren’t new, but were only posted to the Social Science Research Network earlier this year:
Zapalska, Alina and Brozik, Dallas, A Model for Developing and Evaluating Games And Simulations in Business and Economic Education (December 19, 2008). Zbornik radova Ekonomskog fakulteta u Rijeci, časopis za ekonomsku teoriju i praksu – Proceedings of Rijeka Faculty of Economics, Journal of Economics and Business, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2008, pp. 345-368. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2268452
Earlier this year the Indian Army’s Wargaming Development Centre (WARDEC) issued a request for proposals for a Counter-Terrorism Operations Planning Tool and Wargaming System. According to the RFP “[t]he aim of the Counter Terrorism Operational Planning Tool and Wargaming System is to aid unit commanders in operational planning and to train sub-unit commanders in planning and execution of various Operations in Counter Terrorism (CT) environment.” Other key features of the system would be:
The package will be based on actual area of Operations in a 1:5,000 scale digitised map with option to switch to 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 scale maps, provided by WARDEC. The software will have the facility of incorporating satellite images and air photographs.
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[T]he package would be fielded at WARDEC and in the actual Area of Operations of an Infantry Brigade/Sector Headquarters.
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The Operational Planning tool is intended to be used both in a standalone and networked mode based on a LAN configuration.
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The training audience are required to be trained in planning and execution of various operations in CT environment based on “painted” situations.
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The level of game play would be from the battalion down to platoon level. However, the Exercise Control (EXCON) of the game would be from a terminal, dedicated for Exercise Director, who will represent the Brigade Headquarters….
(a) BlueForces. The resolution level for Blue Forces would be down to sub section/Operational Team level for input of orders. All activities below a Team level would be depicted and resolved based on sets of Combat Rules embedded in the system. The behaviour and activity pattern of a single soldier would be modelled in the back end and aggregated to that of an Operational Team comprising 6-8 soldiers. The players would, however, play the game based on this lowest entity of an Operational Team.
(b) Terrorists. The resolution level for terrorists would be individual terrorist
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EXCON would be able to set intangible factors like training, leadership, morale, fatigue, fear, support of local population, etc. These factors would have effect on the combat outcome of the forces
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The aspect of civilians would be played as an EXCON function. The aspects to be played from the civilians graphical user interface would be:-
(i) Assisting terrorists.
(ii) Act as informers to security forces/terrorists (OGWs).
(iii) Act as human shield during security forces operations.
(iv) Mass gatherings.
(v) Blockades.
The closing date on the RFP was back in April. However, Colonel Sameer Chauhan (Senior Fellow, Center for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi) is currently undertaking research on simulation-based training requirements in the Indian Army, and passed on the RFP with a request for thoughts and feedback from the broader professional wargaming community. If you have any comments, feel free to leave them here, or email him directly.
PAXsims 