A Horse of Peas

Job opening at the CASL

2010-12-25T19:12:00.000-08:00

Christmas brought the Center for Applied Strategic Learning a job posting for a Research Analyst. Closing date is on January 5th. CASL is the gaming center at National Defense University, serving a variety of audiences with strategic policy games. If you read this blog and find any of this stuff interesting, maybe this is the job for you!

UPDATE: The deadline for this job posting has been extended until January 19th.

Alex Pang and the future

2010-07-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

I met Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a self-described "historian and futurist of science," at a recent conference. He has some interesting ideas about the potential use of gaming in communicating scenarios (of the type generated by scenario planning processes) to decision-makers. And I owe him an email.

His blog, The End of Cyberspace, would likely be of interest to readers of this blog. Most posts are collections of links, but what links they are! Of particular note, these two posts deal mostly with tabletop exercises for disaster preparedness and emergency management, but they also extend to decision-making research, including some intriguing National Science Foundation grant awards. One of the links I'm looking forward to exploring in more depth is the FEMA online independent study course on emergency preparedness exercise design, which includes a section on their vision of tabletops.

Of course, another blog anyone who reads this should also be reading is PaxSims, and not just because Rex Brynen compared my return to blogging with the camp exploits of my childhood hero, though that has helped make him one of my favorite people.

More semi-relevance

2010-07-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

To follow up on something I mentioned a while ago here, the New York City school with a curriculum built around games is open for business.

I've been meaning to mention this for a while, mostly so I could post this summary of one of their 6th grade social studies units, "Spartan Private Investigators":

Aligned to the 6th grade-overarching theme of “Beginnings,” this mission asks students to travel back in time to the birth of the world’s first democracy in Ancient Greece and study the time period when Sparta is faced with making a policy decision about how to deal with the actions of Athens. They will explore cultural differences between Sparta and Athens and consider the role that geography plays in the development of societies and their relationships to each other. They will also consider specific historical events affecting city-states in Ancient Greece prior to 432. B.C. as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of three resolution strategies (war, diplomacy, or neutrality). Throughout the Mission, students are working to create and deliver a policy brief to the political leadership of Sparta (the Council of Elders) stating which resolution strategy is best, using evidence to support their ideas. In order to help them construct their argument students are immersed in different digital simulations to explore possible ramifications of different resolutions. The final presentation (in front of the Council of Elders) requires them to collaborate with other students, to gather evidence from multiple sources, and consider several points of view.

Pretty cool. Though when I think of a Spartan policy brief, this is what comes to mind first.

Perception and misperception in gaming

2010-07-09T20:33:00.001-07:00

Jon Alterman has written a short and thought-provoking piece for a CSIS newsletter about his experience on the U.S. team in a recent multi-cell policy game. Worth reading in full, but here's an excerpt:

The U.S. team swiftly leapt into a series of actions intended to direct the actions of its allies and blunt the efforts of its foes. In the second move, things got worse, and the U.S. side tried even harder to marshal its forces, artfully deploying its military and diplomatic assets. By the third move, the situation continued to worsen in many respects, but the U.S. team saw light at the end of the tunnel. We had a plan, and our allies were looking to us for leadership. Equally importantly, they were all acting precisely as we had hoped, abandoning the troublesome sorts of freelancing that had marked their earlier moves. We thought we had played the game well.

When we all gathered after the final move, however, it was clear how much we had misjudged the situation. Opponents talked about how easily U.S. moves were blunted or ignored. Allies were beside themselves that the United States had missed numerous opportunities to consult with them and raised tensions needlessly. But most importantly, they charged that the U.S. team had fundamentally misjudged the motivations of their actions. The U.S. team had congratulated itself on its ability to integrate all of the instruments of national power—in contrast to allies that could either convene summits or issue statements or host American military forces, but rarely more than one of those and almost certainly not in a sustained, purposive and coordinated way. Yet allies explained that perceptions of their own national interests drove their decisions, and that U.S. actions rarely shaped those decisions. It is true, the U.S. team had moved military aircraft and issued statements to and fro, but the other players did not find it very impressive. They had their own calculus. In their telling, it was as if the U.S. team was trying to take credit for the sun rising in the East. If anything, they said, the U.S. team’s actions had made it harder for them to comply with U.S. wishes.

There's a lot here. First, this is the sort of discussion that is missing in many public depictions of gaming events. Alterman was constrained by the event sponsor's desire to keep details of the scenario private, but the generalized insight he describes is probably of at least as much value to him and the other participants as any specifics of the game outcome.

My sense is that games are a largely unexploited avenue to bring participants to a better understanding of their own perceptions and misperceptions. In Alterman's example, the stark contrast between the U.S. team's sense of agency and the view of other actors will likely stick with him to a greater extent than hearing someone lecture about the pitfalls of psychological decision-making biases. Thomas Schelling viewed the RAND crisis games of the 50's and 60's as a tool uniquely suited to examining perceptual factors (discussed briefly here), but I'm not aware of much work since then on the subject, nor have I seen much application of social psychology to gaming, with a couple of exceptions that I should blog about sometime.

The role of the debrief session is key in all of this, as it was for Alterman's experience. Unfortunately, it's much easier to say how important debriefing is than it is to concisely define what it is about a debrief that makes it effective. How would you set up a game and the subsequent debrief to address perception and decision-making biases directly? Multiple cells, for starters, would be a key factor, as Schelling would have said, with closed information conditions. The debrief would have to be substantial enough to give each cell the opportunity to understand what was going on in each of the other cells, and the debriefer would need to be focused on drawing out the differing perceptions of the participants. Beyond that, I'm really not sure.

CNA - Wargaming Strategic Linkage and Conversations with Wargamers

2009-10-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Two recent papers from the Center for Naval Analyses are great examples of the benefits of robust professional dialogue in the gaming field.

Wargaming Strategic Linkage was the result of a project conducted for the Naval War College, looking for ways to structure wargames to include more than one level of war (strategic, operational, tactical). While this was undertaken in support of the revived Global War Game, most of the ideas involved would apply equally well to gaming outside of a military context. Traditionally, the divisions between the levels of war have been more clearly specified than those between the policy and implementation levels of other issues. However, there has been a blurring of the lines between strategic, operational, and tactical concerns, an ambiguity that Wargaming Strategic Linkage has to deal with.

As noteworthy as the results of the project is the process by which it was undertaken. As a part of their research, Peter Perla and Michael Markowitz consulted a number of other wargaming experts (including CASL's Erik Kjonnerod). Even better, they decided to release their notes on these discussions as a separate paper, Conversations with Wargamers. These detailed interviews provide a great deal of insight into the gaming process, not all of which was directly relevant to the problem Perla and Markowitz had set out to address. Together, these two papers are a testament to how much different gaming practitioners have to teach one another, especially when guided by a targeted research question and researchers who are themselves experts.

Gaming's contribution to the new maritime strategy

2009-09-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

The Navy released its new maritime strategy in October 2007, and gaming played a critical role in the development process. Writing in the Spring 2008 issue of the Naval War College Review, Robert Rubel explained how (the article begins on page 69 of the magazine, page 75 of the .pdf file).

Here are some key paragraphs:

From the outset, this project would not simply derive from existing strategic guidance, such as the National Security Strategy or the National Defense Strategy. This may seem somehow subversive to those who are used to military planning processes in which guidance from higher headquarters is regarded as holy writ. However, consider our situation—the project was undertaken at the end of the Bush administration and our requirement was to look ahead twenty years. We could not responsibly make the assumption that current U.S. security strategy would remain in place, and there was no adequate way to predict the direction of the next administration’s policies. Our solution was to postulate four different potential strategy vectors of a future administration, which resulted in having four U.S. teams in a strategic war game we conducted. The first team represented a “Primacy” strategy, in which the United States would attempt to maintain its near-hegemonic status in the world. The second team adopted a “Selective Engagement” posture, in which the United States would focus its efforts on averting conflict among major powers. The third team played a “Cooperative Security” strategy, in which the nation committed itself to seeking security through multilateralism and international institutions. The fourth team represented an “Offshore Balancing” strategy, in which the United States retracted certain security guarantees and caused major powers to balance each other.

. . . .

The Strategic Foundations Game took about six weeks to play and involved the four U.S. teams, one for each potential policy future, and five “strategic entities,” countries and nonstate groups selected for detailed play. Teams were directed to develop grand strategies for the next twenty years that would maximize their security, aspirations, and interests. Non-U.S. teams were not required to demonstrate hostility to the United States unless that made sense in terms of their grand strategies. This represented a departure from normal gaming, in which worst-case scenarios are the rule. In the open adjudication sessions in which each team proclaimed its strategy, a compelling central thread emerged. Each state had an intrinsic interest in the effective functioning of the global system of trade, even such “rogue” actors as Iran and North Korea. Only al-Qa‘ida and associated groups had endemic hostility to the system. This insight produced the “big idea” that the protection of the existing global system of trade and security (as opposed to the process of globalization) provided both the context for the new strategy and the intellectual glue that tied together all regions of the world. Thus the notion of system security and defense figures prominently in the maritime strategy document, both “up front,” in its introduction, and in the description of the maritime strategic concept. This could not have been more important—even, in its way, more revolutionary. It provided a basis for not only a maritime strategy but a national grand strategy not aimed against a particular country or threat but positive, without being aggressive. The strategic concept upon which the maritime strategy is based—defense of the global system of commerce and security—offers the opportunity for future administrations to adopt a clearly articulated grand strategic defensive posture,with all the political advantages that brings. As a defensive strategy, it makes global maritime cooperation much easier to attain.

Storming the CASL

2009-09-11T18:27:00.000-07:00

In August I started a new job at the Center for Applied Strategic Learning (CASL) at National Defense University. Until recently, CASL was known as the National Strategic Gaming Center, which I've mentioned before. This is, quite simply, my dream job.

I hope to get back to blogging more regularly, now that I've made the move to DC and have settled in to some degree. The first few posts will just try to get through a backlog of material I've been meaning to blog about for a while. Watch this space.

Perla: Design, Development and Play of Navy Wargames

2009-04-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

Peter Perla, wargamer extraordinaire, wrote this paper for CNA in 1985 as a broad overview of wargame design and development. I meant to write this up shortly after discussing several other CNA papers in the past, but it took me a while to get to it. That's a shame, because this is a great introduction to wargame design. Much of the content remains relevant today, nearly 25 years later. While the focus is on Navy wargames, the principles expressed pertain to a much wider variety of games. Perla went on to write The Art of Wargaming, which is one of the premier works on the subject, covering both the history and practice of wargaming. I highly recommend the book, but this CNA paper is free and will do in a pinch: Design, Development, and Play of Navy Wargames

Gaming economic warfare

2009-04-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Wiggins at Opposed Systems Design posted a link to a Politico story on an attempt to game economic great power conflict at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory. This is a fascinating concept, and I hope it's something that gets developed further.

“This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” said Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”

Several participants said the event had been in the planning stages well before the stock market crash of September, but the real-world market calamity was on the minds of many in the room. “It loomed large over what everybody was doing,” said Bracken.

Bracken is precisely the person you would want at this sort of event. I've mentioned Bracken before here. It's not clear if he had any role in the design of the game, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. Details are (as usual in this sort of story) sketchy but intriguing.

The event was unclassified but has not been made public before. It is regarded as so sensitive that several people who participated declined to discuss the details with POLITICO. Said Steven Halliwell, managing director of a hedge fund called River Capital Management, “I’m not prepared to talk about this. I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you.”

Officials at UBS also declined to comment.

Participants described the event as a series of simulated global calamities, including the collapse of North Korea, Russian manipulation of natural gas prices, and increasing tension between China and Taiwan. “They wanted to see who makes loans to help out, what does each team do to get the other countries involved, and who decides to simply let the North Koreans collapse,” said a participant.

There were five teams: The United States, Russia, China, East Asia and “all others.” They were overseen by a “White Cell” group that functioned as referees, who decided the impact of the moves made by each team as they struggled for economic dominance.

At the end of the two days, the Chinese team emerged as the victors of the overall game – largely because the Russian and American teams had made so many moves against each other that they damaged their own standing to the benefit of the Chinese.

Bracken says he left the event with two important insights – first, that the United States needs an integrated approach to managing financial and what the Pentagon calls “kinetic” – or shooting – wars. For example he says, the U.S. Navy is involved in blockading Iran, and the U.S. is also conducting economic war against Iran in the form of sanctions. But he argues there isn’t enough coordination between the two efforts.

And second, Bracken says, the event left him questioning one prevailing assumption about economic warfare, that the Chinese would never dump dollars on the global market to attack the US economy because it would harm their own holdings at the same time. Bracken said the Chinese have a middle option between dumping and holding US dollars – they could sell dollars in increments, ratcheting up economic uncertainty in the United States without wiping out their own savings. “There’s a graduated spectrum of options here,” Bracken said.

It is rare to find such a perfect example of the right way to frame the benefits derived from a game in a press report. The result that 'China won' is next to meaningless, but Bracken's comments have some real value.

On an only tenuously related note, here is a clip from Bloggingheads.tv that touches on Nassim Taleb's ideas about uncertainty, previously discussed here and here, as applied to the financial crisis:

This isn't directly relevant to gaming, but it does reinforce Bracken's point about the economic game not being about predicting the future, but rather about identifying issues to think about. Gaming in general is a very poor predictive tool, all the more so when applied to something as ridiculously complex as the global economy.

Disclosure: I work for Bloggingheads.tv on an irregular basis.

Reacting to the Past at Barnard College

2009-03-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

(via PaxSims) Barnard College runs an interesting program called "Reacting to the Past," a set of classroom roleplaying exercises based on historical situations:

“Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

All of the games are set in the past, and thus might be regarded as history, but each game also explores multiple additional disciplines. Part of the intellectual appeal of RTTP is that it transcends disciplinary structures. In addition to games in the published series, the consortium seeks to expand the curriculum by supporting faculty workshops and collaboration on new game designs that explore a variety of historical moments in the humanities and sciences.

Neat stuff. There are some upcoming faculty conferences in different regions for those interested in using or contributing to the program (Paxsims has more about that). What struck me after watching the sample video at the RTTP site was that it was difficult to see what the structure of the exercises really was. Is this a roleplaying debating society, or are there some underlying game elements that aren't shown? Based on the accompanying web pages, it seems that there are some other aspects to the game that I just wasn't able to pick up on. This reminds me of some of the games designed by Megagame Makers (discussed in another post a while back), and I wonder if some of them (particularly the Washington Naval Conference one) could be transferred to this RTTP framework without much trouble. Perhaps that wouldn't be sweeping enough in scope for the RTTP program. I also wonder if the good folks at ChoMUN and MUNUC are aware of this... and vice versa....

More on risk, uncertainty, and Nassim Taleb

2009-03-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

To follow up on my previous post on Nassim Taleb and his work, there is a critical distinction that is often overlooked between risk and uncertainty.* Risk is quantifiable. Whether or not it has been properly measured, it refers to something that is measurable. Uncertainty is not quantifiable. Risk can be "bought down" or hedged in ways that uncertainty cannot. A standard example of risk is the sort of game you find at a casino, like roulette, where the odds are clearly known. The state of affairs that will result from a war (the outcome or outcomes), on the other hand, is uncertain, relying on too many variables, complex interactions, and unknown unknowns to be meaningfully quantified. The outcomes of risks have known probability distributions. Not so with uncertainties. Here's an example of these concepts in action, in the context of baseball.

This conceptualization of risk and uncertainty is sometimes mapped onto the "known unknown" vs. "unknown unknown" divide, with known unknowns characterized as risks and unknown unknowns as uncertainties. But the distinction between known unknowns and unknown unknowns is based on the knowledge of the observer, while the distinction between risk and uncertainty is in some respect a difference in "knowability." There are plenty of "known uncertainties" in the "known unknown" category, where we are perfectly capable of identifying something we don't know which nonetheless has a probability distribution we do not or cannot know.

Part of Taleb's argument with regards to the financial crisis could be framed in these terms. Financial managers thought they had transformed some types of uncertainty into risk that could be reliably estimated through new statistical techniques. But they were operating with assumptions about the underlying probability distribution of events that were unwarranted, meaning that all they had managed to do was conceal significant uncertainties (unquantifiable indeterminacies) that ultimately came back to bite them. (See this Wired Magazine article for a fascinating description of how this came about.) The more generalized form of this argument is that we tend to operate as though we are facing risks, rather than uncertainties, in part as a result of our psychological biases. (Taleb discussed a variant of this a bit in the podcast I referred to in the earlier post.)

This may all seem rather esoteric, but in a world where there is a fresh appreciation for the limits of statistical knowledge there needs to be a way to act under uncertainty. The elemental caution reflected in Taleb's advice on operating in what he would call the "fourth quadrant" and what I would call conditions dominated by uncertainty is as reasonable a response as any to decision-making in this type of environment. When faced with less-structured problems, dominated by uncertainties and unknown unknowns, highly structured analytic tools are frequently neither appropriate nor helpful. Gaming can be one of the least-structured analytic approaches, which limits its outputs but allows it to constructively address issues characterized by deep uncertainty.

* These definitions do not conform to popular usage of either term, but they are generally used in this way in policy analysis and represent a helpful way to characterize different types of indeterminacy. Risk in this case is not limited to costs or negative events, but instead applies to probabilistic outcomes both positive and negative.

The uncertain world of Nassim Taleb

2009-03-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

A trader for 20 years, Nassim Taleb became fascinated by decision research as a result of watching his colleagues and the financial industry in general. Two books (so far) have resulted from this fascination: The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. I haven't had the chance to read either just yet, but I recently found this podcast of an interview with Taleb, in which he covers some of the same ground he goes over in his books. He is not an eloquent speaker and is occasionally hard to follow, but I enjoyed this conversation greatly. Russ Roberts struck me as a skilled interviewer, though I'm not sure how accessible some parts of the discussion will be to those without some economics-related background (give it a listen anyway... it's thought-provoking and worthwhile).

Taleb's work is an example of the recent trend of books about decision-making research which are aimed at a (relatively) broad audience. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is the best example of this phenomenon I can think of offhand. In addition to demonstrating a heightened sensitivity to the role played by psychological decision-making biases, Taleb is particularly concerned with the use of statistics and related tools for decision-making purposes for which they are ill-suited, in his opinion. He has a point. About 55 minutes into the podcast, he and Roberts talk a bit about Taleb's distinction between what he calls "ludic" and "non-ludic" (also referred to as "ecologic") environments. Ludic decision-making environments are those where the "rules" are known, with no ambiguity, such as in a standard board game. Non-ludic environments are those where the rules are unknown and/or don't apply. Instead of a lack of ambiguity, non-ludic environments are characterized by "real world uncertainty." One of Taleb's basic concerns is that people seem to approach many non-ludic situations as thought they were operating in a ludic environment, using decision-making tools (such as certain applications of statistics, but also including innate psychological decision-making biases and heuristics) with a ludic basis and which do not necessarily provide the right kind of decision support for a non-ludic environment. Another way of saying this might be that people too often ignore the existence of unknown unknowns, to their peril.

This article by Taleb (found via Mapping Strategy, which has some intriguing thoughts on the subject as well) enumerates more of his ideas, focusing on his case against the misuse of statistics rather than the decision-making biases he spends most of the podcast talking about. It's interesting stuff. Our limited ability to plan for and consider the future based solely on backwards-looking models suggests that other methods are necessary. Mapping Strategy sees this as an endorsement of alternative tools like scenario planning, and I see a role for gaming to play in trying to understand our messy, non-ludic, ecologic world.

Red Team Journal and hypergame analysis

2009-03-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

The current incarnation of Red Team Journal looks like a very promising site and I hope they start to post more often. They don't deal directly with gaming, but many of the concepts they discuss with respect to red teaming and alternate analysis are directly applicable to the study of gaming.

As an example, hypergame analysis (an extension of game theory developed by Peter Bennett) is a way of thinking about conflicts where the two sides perceive themselves as playing different games (in the game theoretic sense*). The perceived rules, outcomes, and decisions may vary significantly between the participants. Some actors may correctly perceive (completely or incompletely) that their opponents perceive the conflict very differently, while others may (incorrectly) believe that both sides share the same basic framework. Fourth generation warfare is marked by this kind of split perspective, in contrast to more traditional forms of warfare where both sides largely shared the same basic assumptions and perception of the conflict. Representing that kind of split perspective in a game (not in the game theoretic sense) is a challenge, as discussed previously here. Hypergame analysis might provide some insight into how to structure this kind of exercise, and I hope that RTJ returns to the subject at some point.

* Once again, the terminological issue of gaming vs. game theory rears its ugly head.

Some semi-relevant links

2009-03-13T20:58:00.000-07:00

A few links that are slightly off topic for this blog, but only slightly....

A school with a game-based curriculum is opening in NYC next fall. It's currently looking for teachers and students:
Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of "systems." Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.
The U.S. Institute for Peace is developing what it calls the Open Simulation Platform (OSP), which would be an open source online simulation development tool, hopefully streamlining and simplifying the process of simulation generation and execution to allow more trainers and educators to make use of this type of tool: (via Wiggins)
The problem describing the OSP is that it is different things to different audiences. To students it is an online world. (Albeit right now it is a very simple text and static image based world.) To instructors/facilitators it is an online library to select a simulation and tools to run a simulation. To simulation authors it is a guide (someday we hope a wizened guide) to help one construct meaningful training simulations. And finally, to a community we hope that it becomes an improved marketplace of ideas: a place where people can really debate their beliefs in more meaningful ways. When proving one’s point about something comes down to creating a realistic and sophisticated simulation that demonstrates that point, we will have arrived on that level.
The Economist recently ran a story about Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). These events generally blend online and real-world elements, usually involing both puzzles and narrative. Their (commercial) origins were as alternative advertising for films and the like, but they are being applied to a variety of other purposes. As is often the case with The Economist, it's a pretty good introduction to the subject:
It was back in 2001 that the first commercial ARG, “The Beast”, a promotional campaign for Steven Spielberg’s film “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”, began blurring the line between reality and fiction. Instead of formally announcing the start of a game, ARGs merely leave clues for potential players to follow: a subtle image on a poster, perhaps, or a cryptic message on a website. Fans must piece together the narrative—that’s the “alternate reality”—on their own. ARGs are characterised by their reliance on technology and teamwork, and are often shrouded in mystery until they end, weeks or even months later. Only then is the full story (and the product being promoted) revealed.

Having started off as marketing tools for films and video games—as with “The Beast”, or “I Love Bees”, an ARG created to promote “Halo 2”, a video-game, in 2004—ARGs are now entering the mainstream. Consider “The Lost Ring”, commissioned by McDonald’s for the 2008 Olympics. Designed by Jane McGonigal, an ARG pioneer who used to work at 42 Entertainment, the game brought together players across six continents to uncover a story of amnesiac athletes and to recreate a supposedly lost (but actually fictional) ancient Olympic sport. “Most people’s experience of the Olympics is vicarious,” says Ms McGonigal. “I wanted to give people a more social and active way to experience them.” This ARG, linked to a global sporting event, sponsored by a multinational company and run in seven languages, shows how far ARGs have come.

Pirates, yellowcake, and the press at Patterson

2009-03-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

Rob Farley has a post up about the recent crisis game at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. He links to the in-game press reports about the action, which give a pretty good idea of how things worked (posts are listed in blog-style reverse chronological order, so start at the bottom of the page). What's most interesting to me about this setup is that they brought in journalism students to play the world media and produce their press reports within the game, interviewing the participants as things moved along. It's an interesting concept. The media are frequently represented in this sort of exercise, but in the examples I've seen (particularly Simulex at the Fletcher School, which I will have to describe in more detail sometime), the "media" is a tool of the control team, used for distributing information (and disinformation) about developments in the scenario to the participants, rarely if ever producing reporting ON the participants. Bringing in journalism students to do so seems like a great way to kill two birds with one stone. The other participants get a taste of operating in a global media environment, while the journalists have an international crisis staged for them to practice reporting on. And as a bonus, it resulted in an easily readable account of the weekend. This is not something that would work for every crisis game, perhaps not even many of them, but it's a nice feature for this one.

Pre-mortems and the Day After Game

2009-03-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

The "pre-mortem" is a technique proposed by Gary Klein and promoted by Daniel Kahneman to legitimize dissent and identify previously unconsidered risks in projects or plans. Kahneman is a psychologist who is essentially the father of behavioral economics, and who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for developing prospect theory with Amos Tversky, so when he gets interested in a decision-making tool it's a good sign that there is some real value to it. In an interview, Kahneman described it like this:

'I learnt a great idea from a friend of mine, Gary Klein. He recommends what he calls a 'pre-mortem'. It's a very clever idea. You get a group of people who have made a plan, it's not completely final, but they have a broad plan. And then you bring them together for a special session, 45 minutes is usually enough. You tell them, take a sheet of paper and now imagine the following: a year has passed, we have implemented the plan and it is a disaster.
'Now, write down on that sheet of paper what happened. Why did the plan turn out a disaster?
'It's a brilliant idea. Because you have a group of people who are now encouraged to think of difficulties and problems with the plan. And that solves the problem of legitimising dissent very elegantly, and it's easy to implement.

Simple and elegant. So much so that there isn't much written about it online. How much more is there to say? Kahneman himself discusses the pre-mortem in this video interview (the whole discussion is worthwhile, but the pre-mortem section starts with about 12:38 remaining). As one commenter paraphrased part of Kahneman's argument:

In organizations where the members are competitive, you expect people to think quite hard about the flaws in the idea and what could go wrong. In a room of twenty people you might expect three or four new ideas that can be used to readjust and improve the proposed plan of action.

The whole concept of the pre-mortem reminds me of a type of game that RAND developed called the Day After Game. This is a much more structured exercise than a pre-mortem, but a pre-mortem seems limited to considering specific plans that are already well-developed, while the Day After Game can be applied to more general problems or issues. The Day After Game is divided into three periods. In the first period, participants are confronted with an unfolding crisis and asked for their response. In the second, the "day after" (hence the name of the technique) the crisis hits is explored, with the consequences mapped out and the effectiveness (or more likely ineffectiveness) of the measures proposed in the first period considered. But it's the third phase that really separates the Day After Game from other crisis exercises, because then participants are asked to step back to before the crisis event and consider what could have been done between the present day and the hypothetical future date of the crisis in the first period to improve the likelihood of mounting an effective response. By considering the severity of the day after, it becomes a mechanism for focusing attention on the "day before." In this respect, the Day After Game is a means of generating "prospective hindsight" in a similar fashion as the pre-mortem exercise.

This methodology was originally developed as a means of surveying the Washington policy community by running a series of games with many repetitions, in an attempt to identify the major schools of thought about policy alternatives that would likely dominate discussion in Washington in the near term. Over time it seems to have evolved into something more focused on generating "prospective hindsight." The RAND report on the first use of this technique (examining nuclear proliferation) is available for free in .pdf format in three volumes. One other Day After Game report (on cybersecurity) is publicly available as well. There is a good description of the methodology followed in each report. RAND has apparently used the technique in a number of other contexts, as well.

I'm a little surprised that this type of game hasn't made many inroads (to my knowledge) into academic or classroom settings. It's a simple enough concept. There isn't any strategic interaction, since Day After Games are run with all the participants responding as a group to the scenario, but that's part of what makes it easier to execute.

Eliot Cohen on punditry (and the implications for gaming)

2009-03-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

I missed this when it was published, but Eliot Cohen had a great op ed in the Wall Street Journal in January, shortly after stepping down as senior adviser to SecState Rice. It doesn't directly touch on gaming, but it provides some very useful suggestions for pundits and policy commentators on the outside of government looking in:

Most commentators have a radically imperfect view of what's going on. Those on the inside, including at the very top, know more, though less than one might think. Government resembles nothing so much as the party game of telephone, in which stories relayed at second, third or fourth hand become increasingly garbled as they crisscross other stories of a similar kind ("That may be what the Russian national security adviser said to the undersecretary for political affairs on Wednesday, but it's not how the Turkish foreign minister described the Syrian view to our ambassador to NATO on Thursday.") Add to this the effects of secrecy induced by security concerns, as well as by the natural desire to play one's cards close to one's vest, and the result is a well-nigh impenetrable murk of policy making.
But it's even murkier on the outside. "Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves," Henry Kissinger once remarked. Or as the White House correspondent of one major national newspaper once confided to me, "We really don't have a clue what's going on in there."

What, then, is a pundit to do? The best commentary has an impact, less because it offers new ideas (most ideas have been considered, however incompletely, on the inside) than because it clarifies problems or solutions that the insiders have only vaguely or incompletely considered. A tight, well-written, and carefully reasoned examination of a policy problem will bring into focus an issue that the officials have not had the time, or often the literary skill, to capture precisely. That kind of analysis is very much worth reading.

Invariably, a pundit will prescribe solutions. In doing so, he should follow the advice of the late Raymond Aron, the wisest French policy intellectual of modern times: Never criticize a policy unless you can convincingly depict a better course of action. Aron, like many of the greatest commentators on policy, had virtually no experience in government, but great empathy for those in a position to decide. Empathy -- the capacity for imagining what it is like to be the other -- is an essential quality for the thoughtful pundit. Policy makers, of course, prefer sympathy, which is soothing, unnecessary and often harmful.

There's more in the full op ed. It's not hard to see how this could relate to gaming. In a sense, the question of how games can have a policy impact is implicated in this line of thinking. If a game "clarifies problems or solutions that the insiders have only vaguely or incompletely considered" or provides the opportunity for outside commentators to develop the empathy with decision-makers that Cohen describes, that could be a valuable contribution. It is extremely rare for high-level decision-makers to participate in games; the time just isn't available. Cases like the Sigma II game in 1964 are few and far between. Therefore, the utility of games from a policy perspective is at best indirect. Cohen's piece provides some food for thought on maximizing the usefulness of games to current policymakers.

(Found this piece thanks to Wiggins at Opposed Systems Design)

Update: Rex Brynen has more thoughts on this, including an excellent example from his own experience (and some very kind words) at PaxSims. See also the comment by Wiggins.

Game theory courses (and some learning by doing... in Starcraft)

2009-03-05T20:28:00.000-08:00

Game theory doesn't have anything directly to do with the political/military gaming this blog is about, but it's a useful tool in conceptualizing strategic interaction, which can come in very handy. Academic Earth has posted video of the lectures from two different elementary game theory courses, one from Yale, the other from Berkeley. The Berkeley course only has one lecture posted so far, but the Yale course appears to be complete. However, the Berkeley course offers something unique: it is the first class to be taught from the perspective of the video game Starcraft. The strategic interaction within the game forms the basis for the course's explanations of the basics of game theory, and familiarity with the game is highly recommended for students taking the class. I'm not sufficiently familiar with Starcraft to fully appreciate this, but it's a fascinating concept. The class website is here, with more information. It's enough to make me consider trying to hunt down a copy of the game.

For a more complete explanation of the difference between gaming and game theory and an example of how game theory and gaming together can complement each other as analytic tools, see the section of this post describing an article by Paul Bracken that utilizes both.

Sigma I-64 and Sigma II-64: gaming Vietnam

2009-03-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

In 1964 the JCS hosted two particularly interesting wargames, Sigma I-64 and Sigma II-64. The Sigma wargames were designed to consider the issues surrounding the escalation of U.S. commitment in Vietnam. H.R. McMaster's article in the current issue of World Affairs mentions these games in the context of what they revealed about the weakness of "Graduated Pressure," a strategy of carefully calibrated use of force meant to efficiently change the behavior of the adversary:

The failure of Graduated Pressure was foretold even before it was implemented. In 1964, two eerily prophetic Pentagon war games exposed fatal flaws in the strategy. In those war games, Southeast Asia experts played the role of the North Vietnamese government. In response to limited bombing designed to signal American resolve, those experts decided to infiltrate large numbers of North Vietnamese Army soldiers into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. This, in turn, impelled the commitment of American troops to the South. The war games concluded that the combination of enemy sanctuaries in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the enemy’s ability to sustain itself on meager provisions, its strategy of emphasizing political and military actions to avoid strength and attack weakness, and limitations on the application of American military power, would mire the United States in a protracted conflict with little hope for success. The game ended after five years of fighting with five hundred thousand troops committed in South Vietnam. Bundy, however, found the conclusion to be “too harsh.” Rather than force a reexamination of strategy, the results of the SIGMA I and SIGMA II war games appear, in retrospect, as a roadmap that civilian and military leaders followed along the path to failure in Vietnam.

McMaster goes on to note that "The SIGMA war games had no effect on American policy or strategy in Vietnam." Why is that? On the surface, the games were extremely well positioned to have a major impact. Certainly, there was a need for sober reexamination of the underlying assumptions of U.S. strategy. Harold Ford cited a CIA officer’s comment on Sigma I-64:

“Widespread at the war games were facile assumptions that attacks against the North would weaken DRV capability to support the war in South Vietnam, and that such attacks would cause the DRV leadership to call off the VC. Both assumptions are highly dubious, given the nature of the VC war.”

Gaming with a broad cross-section of participants can serve to identify and challenge the assumptions they bring with them, and in this case there were participants in the Sigma games that did not share the predominant view of the conflict. Sigma I-64 was played by “working level CIA, State, and military officers.” Sigma II-64 also involved high-level policy officials, including National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, DCI John McCone, General Curtis LeMay, General Earle Wheeler, and A/S Defense John McNaughton, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, Deputy CNO Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr., A/S State William Bundy, and CIA deputy director for intelligence Ray Cline. This is an exceptionally high-level group to find participating in a wargame, but it does not appear that the Sigma wargames of 1964 had any direct impact on policy, despite their dire warnings about the potential consequences of U.S. actions and despite the participation of numerous military and civilian national security leaders. Without a willingness to be persuaded on the part of decision-makers, the games could not make a policy impact. While the results of Sigma I and II were uncannily prescient, the failure of participants to take the results seriously is not the most significant issue; policy-makers are right to be skeptical of a game's predictive value. But by failing to move policy-makers to reexamine their assumptions from a fresh perspective, the Sigma games represent a colossal missed opportunity.

(Thomas Allen's 1987 book, War Games, has a chapter on the Sigma games (pp. 193-208). See also Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968, pages 57, 58, and 67.)

Moral dilemmas , gaming, and the Kobayashi Maru

2009-02-24T13:52:00.000-08:00

Rex Brynen at PaxSims has an interesting post up wondering whether it would be helpful to provide training to peacekeepers in the form of Kobayashi Maru-like scenarios (scenarios for which there is no "good" answer, no way to win, and no way to avoid a severe negative outcome), as a way of preparing them for the wrenching moral choices they might encounter in the course of their work:

Science fiction fans will immediately recognize this as a reference to a Starfleet training simulation featured in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In the Kobyashi Maru scenario, trainees were faced with impossible choices in an unwinnable situation: did they answer a distress call from a damaged frieghter, only to find their ship destroyed? Or did they ignore the call, only to see the freighter destroyed? It was meant to be a test of character, and an evaluation of how would-be officers confronted such dilemmas.

Now, readers who haven’t the slightest interest in Star Trek needn’t worry that this blog post will slip into excessive Trekkism. Rather, it occurs to me that there may be some value in designing peacebuilding/humanitarian assistance operations in which participants are confronted with situations that truly have no good answers. I mean this, moreover, not simply in that they face resource shortages and hence opportunity costs associated with actions (something that the Carena simulation does very well), but rather that no matter what they do, they are forced to confront gut-wrenching moral choices.
Does one—for example—pull humanitarian workers out of a dangerous area, knowing locals will die? Or does one keep them there, knowing that no matter what security precautions are taken there is a significant risk of staff being killed?
Do you authorize an airstrike against a high-value insurgent leader, knowing that there is a near-certainty of significant civilian casualties?
Do you pay “taxes” to a local militia to enable access to a needy population—knowing that the doing so strengthens their capacity to engage in such predatory activities?
Do peacekeepers fight in to protect civilians from massacre, even if they believe they lack the capability to win and might thereby be slaughtered as well? (Yes, I’m thinking here of Srebrenica, although it could equally be applied to some of the choices that MONUC has made in DR Congo.)
…and so forth. The point would be not so much which particular choice was made, but how it was made—providing an opportunity for participants to reflect on the the moral and practical calculus involved.

This got me back to thinking about the potential role of gaming in preparing participants for difficult moral challenges by means of acclimating them to decision-making in that sort of environment (something I looked at a bit in my thesis). In their 1977 book, Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment, Irving Janis and Leon Mann described a similar phenomenon they called "outcome psychodrama," which would involve a sort of "emotional inoculation" for decision-makers ahead of time to better prepare them for the emotional states they might experience under a decision-making situation. They believed that gaming might be a particularly appropriate tool for outcome psychodrama "[f]or group discussions whose consequences are highly dependent upon the reactions and countermoves of other people." In contrast to the way most games are run, Janis and Mann suggested running the similar scenarios multiple times with the same participants, examining likely, favorable, and worst case results for each of the available alternatives.

As an example of the danger in ignoring the emotional factors in decision-making, consider Bernard Brodie’s description of the U.S. decision to defend South Korea in 1950 after having announced that it outside the U.S. defensive perimeter in the region just months earlier:

“President Truman and his Secretary of State had endorsed the well-known and obviously rational opposition of the military to becoming involved on mainland Asia. When the crisis came, all, including the military, immediately reversed their position. Apparently few had asked themselves: How will we feel, and how will we in consequence respond, if there is a flagrant attack upon this state and this government that we have ourselves set up and all but recently withdrawn from on the now disproved assumption that they were no longer in danger? Will we really stand by and let them go down?” (Bernard Brodie, War and Politics, 60-61)

Brodie suggested that this was the result of "the tendency of people in office to use formulae rather than imaginative rumination to in projecting their own behavior into the future." "Imaginative rumination" is something that free-form gaming can offer the opportunity to pursue. This goes further than the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario, but seems like it could have significant value. I am not aware of games having been built for this purpose, but John Hanley discussed a number of participants from the Global War Game who reported having experienced powerful emotions surounding the sorts of "gut-wrenching moral choices" Rex proposes. In the Global War Game, these often revolved around the use of nuclear weapons. Hanley mentioned some participants reporting that "[e]ven simulated momentous decisions cost them some sleep."

New gaming blog, new article on NDU's gaming center

2009-02-10T20:21:00.001-08:00

Rex Brynen and Gary Milante recently started PaxSims, a great new blog, "devoted to the development and implementation of peace and conflict simulations for education and training purposes." It's well worth checking out, and they are posting frequently.

Their most recent post is on a new article in Joint Forces Quarterly on the National Strategic Gaming Center at NDU. There's some great stuff about a new initiative by the NSGC to get the various gaming shops to engage more with each other and with the broader policy community with regards to gaming methodology. I wrote about a previous JFQ article on the NSGC here.

Nuclear War: Iran vs. Israel

2008-08-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

This report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies is not strictly speaking a game report, but rather "the material used in a scenario analysis and interactive game that looks at some of the consequences of a future nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, and the possible impact of its expansion to cover targets in Syria, Egypt, and the Gulf." Unfortunately, I can't find any details on the "interactive game," but the background materials are comprehensive and fascinating (if you're into nuclear weapons). The results from their analysis are presented as a quote from the movie Wargames: the only way to win is not to play. If anyone knows where I could find details about the "interactive game" they conducted, I would love to learn more about it.

Wargaming Fourth-Generation Warfare

2008-07-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

I am slowly making my way through the papers available at the website of the Center for Naval Analyses (previously mentioned here). Wargaming Fourth-Generation Warfare is another excellent resource from their archives. Though it deals with more operational concerns than most of the games I focus on here, the concepts that it lays out to address the issue of fourth-generation warfare are applicable to any structure of game.

The paper includes a fairly full description of the development of the idea of fourth-generation warfare as a way of distinguishing the way armed conflict occurs in the modern world from previous kinds of war (e.g., Napoleonic, WW1, WW2). This is the sort of thing that one hears a lot about in security studies, but perhaps not as much elsewhere. Regardless, at its core, fourth-generation warfare is a way to think about the way changes in technology and the phenomenon of globalization, among other factors, have fundamentally altered the environment in which conflict takes place. In a broad sense, this shift is relevant to disciplines far removed from security studies, which makes this paper useful outside of the military or political-military context.

Some of the hallmarks of fourth-generation warfare are the increased importance of non-state actors (clans, terrorist organizations, corporations, criminal organizations, etc.), a related loss of the nation-state's presumed monopoly on violence, and a diminution of traditional distinctions between combatant and non-combatant. The paper describes these shifts in terms of increased asymmetries of worldview, purpose, actions, and means between the relevant world actors, which is not how I have previously conceptualized fourth-generation warfare, but which sets up a useful framework for considering how to model the phenomenon in a game.

The authors address the basic question of gaming fourth-generation warfare: how do you build a game that integrates vastly different worldviews on the part of the opposing sides? The goals of the various relevant actors might be so diverse that their very perceptions of the "battlefield" might be incompatible. Designing a game in which the setup, goals, and options available to each actor allow (and encourage) the expression of each actor's distinct worldview is a huge challenge. As the authors suggest, it basically means designing multiple games, each from the perspective of one of the actors, and finding a way to accommodate or merge them together.

This is a fascinating paper. Presumably there has been more research along these lines at CNA and the Naval War College, since fourth-generation warfare appears to be here to stay, and with it the thorny problems of designing games with it in mind.

Virtual environment for distributed seminar-style wargames

2008-07-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

Wired's defense blog, the Danger Room, has an interesting post about the Army wanting a virtual reality space for conducting distributed seminar-style wargames (where participants are not in the same geographic location) to complement its collection of training video games:

What's missing, according to Major Kyle Burley, a staffer at the Army War College, is a game that simulates decision-making at strategic levels -– something to help make better generals. He calls it "a first-person thinker."

Today Burley uses a moderated, text-based game that simulates top command during an imaginary Second Korean War. Essentially, the game is just a series of chat rooms where colonels hash out potential command decisions, and a moderator decides whether they’re good decisions or not. What Burley wants is an "immersive" game with a live 3D environment and avatars for the players. "Ideally, we would have a virtual, online, Web-access roleplaying environment which allows students to be an avatar [that] probably looks much like the student, and they're given a skin like in Second Life that is equivalent to their position, and they go into different moderated rooms and talk to fellow roleplayers that are in that scenario."

It's unclear from the post whether the actual conduct and structure of the game would change much, but if this makes strategic-level gaming more accessible or the necessary suspension of disbelief easier to achieve, that could be a big step forward for this sort of distributed game.

Center for Naval Analyses

2008-07-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

Peter Perla, author of The Art of Wargaming, works for the Center for Naval Analyses, which has a number of his papers available online, along with others related to wargaming. A few of particular interest are:

An Introduction to Wargaming and Its Uses and Wargames, Exercises, and Analysis
Two short papers from the mid 1980's, these provide a good basic introduction to the terminology and the concepts that the military (particularly the Naval War College) applies to wargaming. Most notably, in both cases, wargames are presented in the context of other types of analysis. These papers also demonstrate the way that strategic-level political-military games (of the type this blog spends the most time considering) are viewed as one segment of the broader wargame genre. I found that seeing this sketched out helped me better understand the approach that some military and defense sources take when discussing these pol-mil games.

Wargame-Creation Skills and the Wargame Construction Kit
This paper and accompanying kit are not a complete course in wargame design, but they do lay out some of how the Naval War College approached creating such a course. Some of the material was deleted when the report was declassified, so the kit is no longer a complete wargame in and of itself, but I found a lot of useful ideas in both the report and the kit.

Game-Based Experimentation for Research in Command and Control and Shared Situational Awareness and Gaming and Shared Situation Awareness
These papers describe two series of experiments conducted using a simple computer game (called SCUDHUNT) to measure the degree to which players developed a common mental model of their operational environment. The focus of the game is tactical/operational rather than strategic, but the approach represents a new and fascinating way to study fundamental questions of perception, decision-making, leadership, and other issues, all of which have great relevance when considering human action at any level. In addition to the practical military consequences of understanding shared situational awareness, it seems to me that a better understanding of how these shared mental models are formed (or not formed) would help game designers address the fact that different participants in a game (particularly a large one) will have very different experiences, which could lead to vastly different conclusions being drawn. I don't know if anything has come of the authors' proposal for a game-based laboratory to apply this sort of technique, but I hope something will.

Cyber Storm II

2008-03-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

My previous post on 2006's Cyber Storm exercise was apparently more timely than I realized. Cyber Storm II is on its way:

During the second week of March, nine states, four foreign governments, 18 federal agencies and 40 private companies will participate in Cyber Storm II — a weeklong simulation designed to better prepare the players for cyberattacks. DHS, FBI and the Defense Department are among the federal agencies that will participate.

...

A source familiar with the planning of the exercise said that this year’s simulation exercises could include elements of organized crime, terrorism or a hacking attempt driven by political goals.

“We are looking at a more sophisticated scenario this time around,” he said. “It’s going to be quite an event.”

Hopefully there will be more information available about the exercise sometime soon. Presumably they will caution participants before the exercise about not mounting attacks on the computers running the simulation, to avoid a repeat of last time.

Cyber Storm

2008-02-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

In September 2006, the Department of Homeland Security ran an exercise named Cyber Storm to consider the U.S. response to a significant cyber attack. A wide variety of public and private sector agencies and entities were involved, leading to a better understanding of how the patchwork of responses by these groups could be better coordinated in the event of such an attack. The game report is available here.

Apparently, the game referees had to stop (overzealous?) participants from trying to hack the system the exercise was being run on:

In the middle of the war game, someone quietly attacked the very computers used to conduct the exercise. Perplexed organizers traced the incident to overzealous players and sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" reminding them not to probe or attack the game computers.
"Any time you get a group of (information technology) experts together, there's always a desire, 'Let's show them what we can do,'" said George Foresman, a former senior Homeland Security official who oversaw Cyber Storm. "Whether its intent was embarrassment or a prank, we had to temper the enthusiasm of the players."

The comments on this page have an interesting discussion of this incident, with some back and forth about whether this type of action should be allowable in the context of a game/exercise. A wargame called Millennium Challenge 2002 is referenced early in the discussion. Millennium Challenge '02 was a large-scale wargame conducted in 2002, pitting the U.S. against an unnamed Middle Eastern military. It achieved an unusual degree of notoriety for a wargame because the commander of the "Red" forces used several unconventional tactics to exploit weaknesses, which resulted in massive damage to the "Blue" fleet as it entered the Persian Gulf. The exercise was halted, and the Blue losses were "re-floated," causing some to cry foul. The Red commander himself said that the game was "fixed." The game has been in the news again lately after Iranian speedboats approaching U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf recalled the tactics used in the game to devastate the Blue fleet (though the success of the tactic in the wargame was apparently predicated on a massive number of speedboats, cruise missiles, and other attack vectors making a simultaneous assault to overwhelm the capacities of the warships to track them and respond).

This comment (in the aforementioned discussion of the Cyber Storm exercise) in particular seems to get right at the issue:

My point is just that a particular wargame has a purpose. It's usually not run to find out who's the best or cleverest solider/commander/unit/force, even if that's what some of the participants want it to be. If the real purpose is damaged by people trying to figure out how to change the intended parameters of the game in order to "win", then players shouldn't be doing that.

In particular, I'd say that you shouldn't be trying to exploit the limits of the simulation. Hypothetically, suppose that you're supposed to be learning (among other things) how to deal with poor communications, so your radios have been jiggered to make them unreliable, or else the enemy can listen in, or something. I have no idea whether that's a plausible wargame, but just suppose.

Now, suppose you decide to adapt to your comms problems by using couriers. Fair enough, you'd think, but if the people designing the game didn't think of that, then their wargame might well not account for snipers either. Then all you've achieved, other than "winning", is to show that couriers are great if your opponent can't do anything about them.

That doesn't prepare you for a real war - obviously modern forces do have snipers, and your couriers would have a great deal more difficulty operating in a warzone than they did in the simulation. You've made the scenario be about couriers and snipers, when it was designed to be about something else (strategies that are robust against broken communications, maybe).

I agree that couriers should be considered in future planning, but if the consideration is, "they wouldn't last five minutes out there", then there's not much point allowing them in the simulation.
Of course for the Millennium Wargame, one accusation was that the envisaged scenario was a sweeping Blue victory no matter what Red did, with no intention to discover anything about real war. But such a "politically motivated" ruling, if that's what it was, doesn't detract from the fact that in general, wargames might have a reasonable purpose, and might need to use "unrealistic" restrictions to achieve that purpose.

I had initially intended for this post to go further into the whys and wherefores of things like "refloating" in the midst of a wargame, but so much has been written about Millennium Challenge 2002 over the years that I haven't finished going through it, much less finished thinking about the issues it presents. There have been a few blog posts this year that have been especially good at identifying the underlying issues. Yet another thing I'll have to come back to in a future post....

Terminological issues in a related field

2008-02-24T19:54:00.000-08:00

As I have noted before here and here, political-military gaming of the type I try to talk about in this blog suffers from serious terminological issues. Meaningful keywords for searches can be hard to come by, and the different vocabularies used by various groups mean that it can be tough to find the right way to describe a particular exercise or discuss a specific aspect of gaming. This post on the Learning Circuits Blog has a nice discussion of the similar problem faced by the "serious games" field.

UPDATE: This topic was the subject of the keynote address to the recent Serious Games Summit:

As a specific concept, serious games have been drifting around the design sphere since at least the turn of the millennium. Yet for all the hype, and all of the yearly GDC conferences on the subject, the theory has had some trouble gaining traction as more than an academic or industrial curiosity.

According to Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill and Peter Smith of the University of Central Florida, some of the problem in the serious games movement is a general haziness as to exactly what serious games are, and are for.

Sawyer and Smith observe that the traditional view of serious games is vague exactly because of its specificity. “Often when we see people talk about serious games, we see them talking about them in a sort of narrow way,” Peter Smith mused.

Yet, at the same time, “Everyone has their own name for what serious games should be called. When they’re using these terms, they’re still talking about serious games… It’s not that these words are wrong. It’s just, they’re trying to categorize things. And there’s nothing categorical about any of these names.”

See also here, which has a link to the slides Sawyer and Smith presented (here). None of this directly addresses political-military gaming, free-form gaming, or any non-computer-based gaming at all, but the questions and problems raised are relevant.

The Pentagon, global warming, and the problem with reporting on gaming and scenario-based planning

2008-02-23T10:29:00.000-08:00

A leaked report from the Pentagon on the subject of global warming has caused a stir recently. The article in the Guardian/Observer is headlined:

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us
· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Pretty scary sounding stuff. And coming from the Pentagon? That seems to give it even more credibility. But this incident is a pretty good example of a real problem that can affect gaming and other scenario-based forms of strategic planning. From the text of the article:

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.
An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

I haven't read the report itself. It does not appear to be available beyond the snippets contained in press coverage. But several points about the above quote should stand out, and have been completely lost in the coverage. First, Peter Schwartz is best known for his work on scenario-based planning, as I mentioned here when discussing his book, The Art of the Long View. I don't know anything about Doug Randall, but I believe the Global Business Network where he works was started by Schwartz after he left Royal Dutch/Shell. That, and the language in the next paragraph about the "imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change" suggest that the report itself was written as a form of scenario-based planning document, probably along similar lines to the sort of thing found in Schwartz's book.

If that is the case, the press is getting the story very wrong. A scenario, in this process, is a tool for considering possible futures and open planners' eyes to potential shifts away from their main-line analysis, not for predicting specific events. By considering multiple plausible scenarios, the planning organization can work to be prepared for any one of them, and can get a better understanding of how certain actions that seem desirable in one scenario might prove problematic in another. These scenarios are researched and detailed, but are not scientific documents or predictions, and it is wrong to present them as such. They are, in the words of the book's introduction, "designed (one hopes) to bring forward surprises and unexpected leaps of understanding." They are also generally presented in groups, so that the planning organization can look across different plausible futures.

So, what does that mean for this report? It sounds like the events picked up on by the Guardian/Observer were part of one particular scenario within a broader document. Certainly, the point of the report might have been that there needs to be some serious consideration given to the potential for disasters like the ones in the scenario, but that's a far cry from saying that these specific things will happen. Things like them could happen, and it behooves any huge organization engaged in long-term planning (such as the Pentagon) to consider what the actions they take today would look like in a variety of futures, including one in which climate change effects dramatic shifts on world security concerns. That seems like a reasonable statement. But that's not the story the press told in this case.

This highlights a concern that could arise in the context of gaming out possible futures, or in other efforts to use scenario-based planning. It can be important to consider the extreme case, and looking for radical discontinuities and unexpected shifts is difficult work, so a process involving scenario-based planning could produce plenty of dire-sounding projections that might be reported as forecasts rather than what they really are: parts of a larger project of strategic planning. This lack of context is a problem, because it might inhibit the use of these helpful planning tools for fear of leaks or bad press. It's important for the Pentagon and the rest of the national security community to be open to multiple possibilities about the future, and this is an effort that should be encouraged. This is not to say that I think there's a simple fix here; it's natural for the press to jump on things that seem controversial or explosive, but it might be just that kind of controversial scenario that is necessary to promote a better understanding of the deep uncertainty that surrounds the future. This seems like a genuine problem for this kind of planning effort.

The Global War Game at the Naval War College

2008-02-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

From 1979-2001, the Naval War College sponsored an annual exercise they called the Global War Game. I've already mentioned John Hanley's excellent summaries of the 1979-1990 games in his dissertation, but there are some other, more easily accessible descriptions of these games as well. Bud Hay and Bob Gile put together a review of the first five years of the game, and Gile returned to the subject later to write up the second five years. Both summaries were published in the Newport Papers series at the Naval War College, but only the second appears to be available online, here. The second of these provides more information about the way the games were structured, and includes a brief summary section on the first five years, so I would recommend starting with that one anyway. Both of these papers are available at some university libraries.

Beyond these summaries of the early games, few articles or other accounts have been published dealing with the Global War Games, particularly the later games. One of the few I have seen so far is Kenneth Watman's article on Global 2000. Watman was the head of war gaming at the Naval War College.

This post from an arms control blog last year is an indication that potentially useful insights might still be available from these games, which is why it is fascinating to me that no one has written a systematic review of the later years. The review of the second five years, mentioned above, was published in 2004, which suggested a new interest in studying the games, but nothing more has been forthcoming.

Thesis: Decision-Making and Gaming

2008-02-16T17:18:00.001-08:00

Here is my Fletcher thesis, looking at how decision-making theories from political science and psychology can be used to better understand free-form games. I can't help but think of this as a work in progress, which is why it has taken me a while to get comfortable with the idea of posting it in its present form. The bibliography (which I may revise and post separately) might be the most useful part of the paper for people interested in this sort of thing.

The Application of Decision-Making Theories to Free-Form Gaming

Comments and questions are very welcome.

(Google Documents seems to have done something strange to the footnotes. Anyone who is interested can email me or leave a comment and I'll send a file in .pdf or .doc format directly.)

The Power of Positive Feedback

2007-11-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note of thanks for two folks who have mentioned recently that they have found this blog useful. I have some more posts in the works, and hope to be posting regularly again very soon. The feedback has really been a strong motivation to get back in the habit, and I sincerely appreciate it. It's nice to know someone is finding value in this. Keep checking back.

Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III - A Wargame Scenario

2007-11-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to like this book.

An ex-Air Force wargamer, the editor-and-chief of Aviation Week, and a published author of techno-thrillers teamed up to produce Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III - A Wargame Scenario. Their goal was to publicize the threat of space attack in an unusual format, drawing from actual wargame scenarios that have been played out over the years by the Air Force. By publishing this book as a novel, I imagine they were hoping to reach a broader audience.

Unfortunately, the choice of format more or less dooms the book from the outset. They seem to have had a laundry list of points to make, and arranged the story, such as it is, to cover the list, nothing more. Admittedly, I am not the normal target audience for techno-thrillers. I haven't read one in years, though I did enjoy the first five or six Tom Clancy books back in the day. Even given that characterization is not the strong suit of the techno-thriller, in Space Wars the characters are such ridiculous stereotypes that it's hard to see them as anything but mouthpieces for the points the authors want to make.

Perhaps this material would have been better suited for a movie of some sort. Dirty War was an HBO/BBC production about a dirty bomb attack in London that quite successfully presented a number of very real issues in the context of a gripping story. For the most part, the policy issues are integrated into the broader story quite well. I was at a screening at the Kennedy School of Government, with Graham Allison and Richard Clarke (and possibly Rand Beers?) in attendance, and when asked after the movie what they thought of the portrayal of the issues involved, the consensus seemed to be that it was pretty much on target. No one would make that comment after reading Space Wars. Space Wars would have been a lot harder to film than Dirty War, but maybe decent acting could have stood in for characterization, and maybe the film medium would have made it easier for the creators to show their main points rather than have their characters deliver them in stilted dialog ("show, don't tell" is a cliche, but a useful one) . A movie format would also have forced them to edit out whatever didn't fit in a fairly compact script.

There is a lot of information packed into the book, but it could have been expressed in a nonfiction book in a more engaging manner. The potential events the authors describe are scary, but they should have resisted the urge to pile them all into a single storyline that becomes progressively more strained as the book goes on. It was difficult to finish.

The most frustrating aspect for me was the treatment of wargaming. The authors clearly have a great deal of respect for the practice of wargaming. So much so that they set up a wargaming group within the story that produces most of the important insights and decisions that take place. The lead wargamer character even convinces his superiors to integrate the battle staff of USAF Space Command into the wargame he is running, to use the game as a real-time decision support tool. It looks like a case is being made to use wargames in this fashion in reality, but there is so little information in the book about what actually goes on in the game (besides having characters pop up every so often with another idea or insight gained from the exercise) that it is impossible to see how this vision of wargame-centric planning would work. Somehow it's related to Taoism, apparently, but what that means is never explained. Without more explanation of just how the wargame is supposed to be operating, and given the book's highly unrealistic account of higher-level decision-makers essentially abdicating their responsibilities to independently consider choices by accepting virtually every recommendation that comes out of the game, it's hard to see what the value of this depiction is from the standpoint of advancing the stature of gaming as a tool.

Regardless, I'm sure I would enjoy sitting down and talking with the authors about these issues and about the role of wargaming in particular. Maybe they have ideas that could be extremely valid and useful. You just wouldn't know it from this book. Read this article instead for a brief summary of one of the wargames they apparently drew from.

WaPo article on gaming a withdrawal from Iraq

2007-07-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post ran a piece this week describing several recent games on potential courses that U.S. disengagement from Iraq could take.

The piece illustrates one of the problems about reporting on gaming exercises. Games are not terribly good at predicting outcomes, but the natural question that occurs to a journalist writing about an exercise is: what did it "show?" Lincoln Bloomfield made a wonderful statement on prediction in gaming which I can't lay my hand on at the moment, to the effect that what is often forgotten when discussing games as predictors of events is that the defining predictions have already taken place in the writing of the scenarios involved. Without seeing more information from the games, like the initial scenarios and the final game reports, it's hard to know just what the comments in the article about the lessons of the games are based on. Wargamers are generally pretty careful when it comes to ascribing a predictive basis to their exercises, so it seems likely that the reporters are responsible for giving that impression.

Bibliographies

2007-05-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

I've been busily working on my thesis since my last post, but I hope to get back to posting regularly.

Here are a few online bibliographies that have been useful during my research:

The Air Force War College maintains an extensive wargaming bibliography, broken down by subject. This link is to the main page, but the politico-military gaming page and the scenario page are particularly relevant. The bibliography was compiled in 1999, so there is nothing more recent listed.

The Army War College Library put together a wargaming bibliography in 1994, which is available in pdf or html format. As far as I can tell, it remains the most current listing of Army War College Library material related to wargaming, at least that is accessible by internet.

Sharon Ghamari compiled a bibliography covering the use of wargames in the 1950's and 60's for a book on Herman Kahn. The articles that appear on this list that are not on the others mentioned above seem to be primarily of historical interest, but I haven't made my way through them all by any means.

I haven't had the chance to track down everything on all of these lists, but much of what I've already profiled here appears somewhere in these bibliographies. Good stuff. With search engines and online library catalogs the value of a good bibliography has been somewhat obscured. But for a subject like political-military gaming, with its terminological and definitional ambiguities, it can be difficult to come up with the appropriate search terms to find the most useful articles and books without being overwhelmed by irrelevant material. That, at least, has been my experience. A bibliography, even an old one, provides some names and terms and titles that can help narrow searches. That has been my experience, at least. If anyone reading this knows of any other useful bibliographies, please let me know.

Hanley: On Wargaming

2007-03-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

John Hanley's 1991 poli sci dissertation at Yale (On Wargaming: A Critique of Strategic Operational Gaming) is one of the best single sources I have found.

Unfortunately, this dissertation is not available online. It might be difficult to get a hold of via interlibrary loan, as well. I had to order it from the University of Michigan's dissertation express site, and have it printed from microfilm and shipped to me. But for me it was worth it, and I highly recommend this dissertation to anyone serious about studying pol-mil gaming.

Particularly helpful are Hanley's chapters analyzing the Naval War College's Global War Game from its debut in 1979 through 1990. I'll write some more about the Global War Game soon. Hanley provides a lot of information about how the games were organized and structured, what the critiques at the time were, and how the objectives of the games changed over time. This is in contrast to most publicly available game reports, which often focus on substantive results rather than the methods employed during the game. This can be a major frustration for those of us who would like to learn more about the way these tools are employed. There is much, much more to this dissertation, which will hopefully show up from time to time as I go forward with this blog.

The only journal article to cite Hanley's dissertation, as far as I can tell, was Robert Rubel's piece I discussed here. To date, it appears that no one has cited the Rubel article in a journal. In part, both Hanley's dissertation and Rubel's article aimed at starting a certain type of conversation about epistemology and methodology within the gaming community. That doesn't seem to have happened yet, at least not in magazines and journals. Why is that? I have some thoughts, but I'll save them for another time.

Orbis Forum on Political and Military Gaming

2007-03-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

In 1984, the journal Orbis published a series of articles on the state of political-military gaming. The exchange is unfortunately not available for free online, but it appeared in the winter 1984 issue, which is probably widely available at university libraries. As a group, these articles are an excellent source of reflections on gaming by some prominent practitioners and theorists.

This is a long post, and it covers four separate articles. If I had known it would take me so long to get around to finishing it, I would have split it up. Lesson learned.

Lincoln Bloomfield was a pioneer in political-military gaming, particularly in his work organizing research-oriented political exercises (referred to as POLEXes) for senior-level decisionmakers at MIT in the late 1950's and throughout the 1960's. All of the POLEX research results are apparently unclassified, but I can't find any reference to them on the web. In his Orbis contribution, Bloomfield discusses the history, practice, and realism of political gaming, based on his own experience. His explanation of how free-form gaming requires experienced participants in order to generate useful policy results is particularly well laid out:

No satisfactory model yet exists of the national security decisionmaking system of the United States (or any other country), nor of the larger system of interactions and perceptions that connects them. Thus one either specifies a crude, oversimplified model or relies on the complex model inside the heads of experienced professionals. How successfully a simulation emulates reality depends on the extent of the players' knowledge of the structures, routines, and probable responses of decisionmakers. Great pedagogic, but little policy value results from putting inexperienced individuals in the shoes of decisionmakers.

Even today the national security decisionmaking process is not sufficiently understood as to negate the value of free-form gaming. I would suggest that it never will be. (More on this in a future post.) There has been some debate over issues related to the last part of Bloomfield's remark above, and in the 50's and 60's several researchers (Guetzkow and Hermann are the two I can think of offhand) used inexperienced participants in games to study various aspects of crisis behavior, then tried to generalize conclusions based on a number of runs of the same game. Whether or not those efforts are considered to have produced valid results, exercises designed as experiments in that way bore little resemblance to the high-level games Bloomfield is basing his conclusion on. It is reasonable to agree that given Bloomfield's type of political game, he is correct in asserting that inexperienced participants who do not have carefully calibrated internal models of the world situation would not produce particularly meaningful policy-oriented results.

Among the points Bloomfield makes that have a special relevance to the epistemology of gaming is this:

Games do not predict future events or policy outcomes and can be misleading for specific contingency planning purposes. But they can indicate in detail how a future situation might develop and, even more important, why. A little-noticed fact is that in such games he controlling prediction has already been made: the situation the players face is not of their making, but rather is decided by the game designer. Both MIT and government games relied on scenarios prepared by experts asked to depict a specified future situation in a way that would be accepted by other experts as plausible. A prediction was thereby made that partially determined the game results. Thus, such POLEXes have been biased by game designers, whether for experimental, bureaucratic, or merely frivolous reasons.

These remarks remind me of some of H.A. DeWeerd's concerns about the contextual basis for scenarios, previously discussed here.

Although Bloomfield argues that "In a properly designed POLEX, a knowledgeable non-national can often approximate the policy options likely to be considered by another country's decisionmakers," he also notes that:

Given our national tendency to ascribe Western "rational" mindsets to others, crossing cultural barriers to investigate probable foreign reactions is a valuable and neglected use of gaming. A comparable value derives from putting military officers in the shoes of civilians and vice versa. (A survey of several hundred officials who participated in MIT games reported "role-exchange" as the most useful aspect of the games.)

I suppose that the idea here is that worthwhile results can be generated by non-nationals playing a country's decisionmakers, but only if there is an attempt to understand the cultural context in which those decisionmakers would operate. That may be an element, in Bloomfield's thinking, of proper POLEX design.

Paul Bracken (professor of both political science and management at Yale) contributed an article titled "Deterrence, Gaming, and Game Theory." Among other things, this article includes a short discussion of the distinction between gaming and game theory. This is an issue, because there is a tendency to lump the two together, which is part of the problem with gaming terminology. While Bracken's distinction relies on a rather specific definition of "gaming," it illustrates the difference between the two very well:

Gaming and game theory are sometimes confused with each other, because of their similar names. Gaming refers to an exercise in which opposing teams of human players are confronted with a situation or problem and work out responses to the problem and to the moves of the opposing team. The use of human players to simulate specific political or military decisionmakers is the key to gaming. Such role playing gives the game its richness while distinguishing it from a mathematical model or computer simulation. However, models and simulations often are included in political-military games as supporting tools to facilitate human decisionmaking. When there is extensive use of such models and simulations in a role-playing game, or when computerized communication and control systems are included, the entire exercise is sometimes referred to as a "man-machine simulation."

Game theory is a body of primarily mathematical theory concerning decisionmaking. Although often applied to real problems, game theory needs no justification of practicality. It offers a useful vocabulary for making subtle distinctions and precise definitions about phenomena that arise in gaming and decisionmaking.

Despite this important distinction, Bracken highlights the ways in which gaming and game theory can support each other as analytic tools. Both are tools dealing with the study of strategic interaction, and it is no accident that game theorists like Thomas Schelling and Martin Shubik (and presumably Bracken himself) were drawn to the study of gaming.

When many interacting moves are extended over time, the details of information processing, communication, decentralization, and sequencing are of the highest importance in carrying out a strategy. Gaming, especially with a large number of participants on each side, can make this process transparent. This is less likely when strategic analysis is compacted into verbal stories that rely on a handful of words like "counterforce" and "countervalue."

Specifically, Bracken recommends large-scale games that can encompass the complexity of interactions within the nuclear command and control structure: "The play of a large political-military exercise points to the importance of process, informational patterns, and institutional structure." These are precisely the points he felt needed most examination within the deterrence context. Today's context is greatly different from the nuclear confrontation of 1984, but the utility of large scale games for examining organizational/institutional factors would seem to remain. Bracken was skeptical of pol-mil crisis games that only included a few participants for their lack of emphasis on institutions, at least if they resulted in overly complicated or intricate plans for nuclear warfighting that did not take communication and organizational issues into account.

Garry Brewer (another professor of political science as well as management at Yale) contributed an article titled "Child of Neglect: Crisis Gaming for Politics and War." As might be expected from the title, this is a defense of the crisis game as an analytic tool, and a call for its increased use after a decade of very limited application.

These games never prove anything in a narrow scientific sense. They help to portray the complexities of international conflict; their role-playing aspects provide insights into the special problems of command and control; and they are important educational experiences, providinng participants an opportunity to become aware of facts associated with possible conflicts. Discovery is emphasized and highly valued. Positions, expectations, perceptions, facts, and procedures typically are challenged and improved as the game proceeds. Controllers and referees, who are often experts in particular areas, may question a decision or prevent individuals from making certain moves, but their actions are also open to challenge and debate. Thus, imagination and innovation play central roles in the drama of the manual game. The game also allows players to challenge the initiating scenario, including its explicit and implicit assumptions.

In discussing the original pol-mil crisis games of the 50's and 60's, Bracken notes that:

Political-military games directly addressed a number of important questions:
1) What political options could be imagined in light of the military situations portrayed, and what likely consequences would each have? How, in other words, is force related to political ends?
2) Could political inventiveness be fostered by having those actually responsible assume their roles in a controlled, gamed environment? Would the quality of political ideas stimulated be as good or better than those garnered by more conventional means?
3) Could the game identify particularly important, but poorly understood, topics and questions for further study and resolution? What discoveries flow from this type of analysis that might not from other forms and methods?
4) Could the game sensitize responsible officials to make potential decisions more realistic, especially with respect to likely political and policy consequences?

The flexibility and transparency of the scenario and its relevant assumptions in the crisis gaming technique is particularly important to Bracken:

It is not widely appreciated, but all computer-bassed models and games have embedded scenarios and associated assumptions. The technical problem, however, is that changing scenarios or assumptions means changing many complex instructions contained in the model's embedded codes - something no model builder relishes, especially considering the probable headaches he has already suffered in getting the device to run.

Finally, Bracken makes a necessary point about maintaining a broader view of analysis, incorporating whatever techniques best suit the material, while remaining open to alternative approaches:

A fundamental purpose of manual gaming is to encourage creative, innovative thinking about problems that defy treatment with more conventional analytic approaches and methods. This basic goal has not been achieved to the extent that it could and should be. Furthermore, political-military crisis games are best perceived as key elements in a generalized problem solving process. At present, the analytic community shows an unfortunate tendency to believe that a specific model or analysis will provide answers to a given problem. This is unfortunate for several reasons. The most essential: any given analysis or model can represent only one version and vision of reality. More is needed, and the inherent strength of the manual game in this respect calls it to our attention.

Lloyd Hoffman, Jr. worked at the War Gaming and Simulation Center at NDU, which I assume was replaced by the National Strategic Gaming Center (discussed previously here) at some point, but I haven't looked into the history. Suffice to say, there is no entity with that name at present. His contribution was titled "Defense War Gaming," and it provides a survey of what sort of gaming activity was going on in the Defense Department in 1984. While this is of great historical interest, I won't quote him at length here on that subject. Hoffman covers a wider scope of war gaming than the other authors in the series, delving into field exercises, tactical models, and other such areas.

Lempert and Schwabe - Transition to Sustainable Waste Management

2007-03-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

Another RAND monograph, but this one deals with an application of gaming techniques to a domestic public policy question (available in pdf form here). The goal was to investigate what factors might turn out to be important in the shift from a product packaging industry that primarily used "virgin" materials and generated large amounts of solid waste to a system based on recycling of packaging material. Participants from government and industry were assigned roles within the context of a model, and were asked to make decisions on investment or regulation related to packaging. Based on these decisions, the model then worked out the market clearing prices and quantities for each type of product or service, established profits and losses for the simulated activities, and presented the results to the participants for another round of regulation and investment.

This paper provides a detailed look at the way a model can provide the structure for a game, as well as showing the value added that gaming out a model can produce.

DeWeerd: Political-Military Scenarios

2007-03-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

Another RAND monograph on scenario design by H.A. DeWeerd, but this one is available for free online (through the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)'s Scientific and Technical Information Network (STINET)) , unlike the one discussed previously here. Written in 1967, this one is a very basic primer on scenario construction, discussing some of the details a designer needs to consider. The Peter DeLeon piece I described here is still my favorite single scenario design article, but this is a useful look at the process.

Two key concepts in this piece are credibility and relevance, and DeWeerd describes the tension that can arise between them when a game is intended to shed light on a specific research question. At times, it may be necessary to favor relevance to research objectives over scenario credibility, though DeWeerd recommends that in any such circumstances the designers make clear to participants what sacrifices in terms of credibility have been made.

CIA "red team" exercise on Iraq

2007-03-09T13:44:00.001-08:00

Here's an article about a (relatively) recent Red Team exercise conducted by the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) at the CIA. Red Teaming is when analysts/experts/whoever gather in a structured way to consider weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their own side that could be exploited by current or potential enemies. In this case, the exercise was meant to shed light on what the reactions of Al Qaeda and other terrorist actors would be to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. If there was a "Blue Team" at all, it was probably directly managed by the control cell, since the focus of the exercise was on considering "Red" actions. I'll write more about Red Teaming in the future, but this is an interesting application of the technique.

DeWeerd: A Contextual Approach to Scenario Construction - and - Schwartz: The Art of the Long View

2007-03-05T17:34:00.000-08:00

A bit more on scenario design.

H.A. DeWeerd wrote A Contextual Approach to Scenario Construction while he was working at RAND, for submission to the journal Simulation and Gaming. It was printed in the December 1974 issue (Vol. 5, No. 4), but it does not appear to be available for free online, either from RAND or the journal itself. It's only 10 pages of text, so it's not worth buying, but DeWeerd is an expert in scenario development (and is cited as such by his student, Peter DeLeon, in the piece I wrote about here).

DeWeerd's main point is that the way scenarios for games, research, or thought experiments are frequently designed back-to-front, with the desired problem or crisis as a starting point, working backwards to fill in contextual details to make the scenario as plausible as possible. DeWeerd contends that a better way to develop scenarios would be to construct the context first, based on current trends, and then look for the most likely scenarios that could take place in the posited context.

This approach is not too far removed from that described by Peter Schwartz in The Art of the Long View. Schwartz developed his techniques for scenario-based planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, and later started Global Business Network. His basic idea is that by developing alternate scenarios of future developments, the possible consequences of present day decisions can be evaluated under a range of conditions. When Schwartz refers to a scenario, he is essentially describing what DeWeerd would call a context.

While Schwartz's method works for considering present day decisions, DeWeerd's proposal for contextual-based scenario design is somewhat more problematic. As he notes, most scenario design is done with a specific problem in mind. As applied to gaming, this is almost always the case. The sponsor of a game has something they want to explore, and they describe it to whatever group organizes the event. Unless the context development takes place on the sponsor's side, before the problem for the scenario is selected, there is very little opportunity for the gaming group to follow DeWeerd's advice. Instead, the retroactive assembly of contextual details to bolster the credibility of the scenario is the only option. Is there another way? Perhaps if the gaming process were integrated well into a broader strategic planning process.

More on the Harvard Symposium on Preemptive Action

2007-03-02T20:53:00.000-08:00

I attended the symposium at Harvard Law School I mentioned in the previous post. The panels were great, with high-powered speakers and interesting discussions. However, I was disappointed in the scenarios presented. My guess is that they were written by as legal hypotheticals by law school students, who perhaps then ran them past Richard Clarke to see if they were vaguely realistic. The scenarios were short and handed out to the audience, so I'm going to reprint most of both of them here, to illustrate.

Scenario 1: A high-profile Al Qaeda leader begins operations in Yemen in mid-2006. He is very generous and has been paying local militias to defend and work for him, so the local government is aware that he is there. In general, due largely to bin Laden's fiscal generosity, the local government has been supportive of him. The Yemeni national government, on the other hand, has no idea that he is in the country.

In January, based on reliable human intelligence, the United States uncovers this information. however, it appears as if the Yemeni government does not have a lot of control over the region in which he is located. The United States would like to intervene militarily to capture the Al Qaeda leader, but believes that if it tells the Yemeni government about the intervention, the local government will find out and tip him off so that he can escape. Moreover, the United States is not entirely sure that Yemen would be willing to cooperate and permit military action.

This scenario was followed by a brief comment about the 2002 Predator drone Hellfire missile attack on a car in Yemen carrying six Al Qaeda members (including one of the leaders of the group responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000), which was undertaken with the approval of the Yemeni government.

Although this was labeled scenario #1, the panel started its discussion with the scenario listed below instead:

Scenario 2: On February 27, 2007, seven Americans (tourists, businessmen, etc.?) were taken hostage on the border between Colombia and Ecuador by an unknown terrorist/rebel group. Last night, on March 1, the responsible group broadcast online a beheading of one of the hostages and threatened that more beheadings would follow if the United States did not agree to stop funding coca eradication programs in the region. The group provided no other relevant information and its demands are thus far relatively vague.

Although both Ecuador and Colombia have expressed public outrage at the hostage situation and have demanded the release of the hostages, neither government is willing to take action. Ecuador is hesitant to move in because they say the group is actually in Colombia, and Colombia refuses to move in because they think the group is technically in Ecuador. In reality, neither country has total control over the jungle region. Additionally, each is probably incapable of safely rescuing the American hostages. For a variety of reasons, both countries object to allowing American troops to intervene. In each country, the domestic political situation weighs heavily against permitting American intervention. Moreover, both countries claim that allowing American troops to rescue the hostages would constitute a violation of their sovereignty.

There is no evidence that either government is actively supporting the terrorist/rebel group nor is there any evidence that either government has extensive knowledge of the group. The United States has reliable intelligence about the location of the hostages and thinks that a military intervention to rescue them would be successful.

The last paragraph of the scenario talks about the "variety of interesting questions related to preemptive action and international law" that the hypothetical situation raises. In fact, there appeared to be very few interesting questions raised for the panelists by this scenario. They basically agreed that international law did not prohibit the U.S. from using military force without the consent of the two countries (though for different reasons, the discussion of which was interesting), and the precedent of the Entebbe Raid was discussed at length.

Beyond that, the panelists all stressed that this sort of decision would not be made by international legal experts, but by policymakers concerned with much more than just what international law did or did not allow. That was a valuable point, and the panel emphasized it during their discussions of both of the scenarios. That makes sense, since the chair of the panel, Antonia Chayes, teaches a well-regarded class at the Fletcher School on just that subject (one which I wish I had found time to take during my time there).

Several panelists suggested that there would be tremendous public pressure on the administration to "do something" in the Colombia/Ecuador scenario after the kidnapping and the beheading video. What the scenario did not mention is that there are a number of American citizens currently held hostage in Colombia already. Three contractors working under the Department of Defense were taken captive by the FARC in 2003 after their plane crashed. A Colombian colleague and another American citizen were shot, execution style, and their bodies were left at the crash site. While it didn't pack quite the punch of an internet-broadcast beheading of a tourist, in the event there was little public outcry. In the last two years, about 18 American citizens have been kidnapped in Colombia, mostly by terrorist groups. While the beheading would be a new wrinkle, and might generate more attention, the idea that there would be a massive public outcry in the wake of the scenario just doesn't seem likely.

Another issue that the panel rightly addressed was the offhand way the scenario assures that "the United States has reliable intelligence about the location of the hostages and thinks that a military intervention to rescue them would be successful." The panel in general urged skepticism about any claims of this sort, given how difficult it is to make a meaningful and accurate assessment of intelligence data, and given the challenges posed by mounting an operation deep in the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest that the scenario suggests is the location of the hostages is an incredibly impenetrable area. The canopy foliage in the rainforest can be so thick that GPS will not function through it. Locating anything or anyone from the air is ridiculously difficult, and getting from the air to the ground through the dense foliage presents its own challenges. The scenario tried to wish away such concerns in the interest of focusing on the legal issues involved, but it did so in such a ham-handed way that the panel was obliged to comment on their skepticism of any such confidence. And what no one mentioned but I found very odd about the scenario was that if the U.S. had sufficient intelligence data to know where the hostages were, presumably they could generate map coordinates for the location sufficient to prove to Colombia or Ecuador on which side of the border the terrorists were holed up.

It is true that both in the case of Colombia and the case of Yemen, there are areas within the country that are not under the control of the central government. In Colombia, history and geography are the main reasons why, with a combination of a state that has historically never truly controlled its borders or territory and nearly impassible terrain that makes it extremely difficult for any central authority to assert itself in large portions of the country. I know much less about the situation in Yemen, but my understanding is that there are areas over which, for reasons largely related to tribal dynamics, the central government exerts authority in name only. It was in such an area where the Predator drone attack in 2002 took place.

A term that comes up occasionally in gaming literature is the tendency of participants to "fight the scenario" at times. This is usually held up as something to be avoided, both through careful scenario construction (with an eye towards credibility) and through explicit requests to the participants themselves to refrain from such activity and simply try to play the game as written. This is one of the reasons a debriefing session is so important after a game: participants who had objections to certain aspects of the scenario can raise them at the debrief, where they will still be considered by the group. In a short session like this panel discussion, however, it was precisely the right time to fight this sort of scenario, which the participants did to some extent. It was still a high-quality discussion, thanks to the panelists, but it could have gotten off to a better start with a better set of scenarios.

Harvard Symposium: Legal Perspectives on Preemptive Action

2007-03-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

Here's an event that I'm planning to attend tomorrow afternoon at Harvard Law School. The key paragraph from my perspective:

We are working with Richard Clarke to create two unique hypothetical situations for the second panel of the day. Using the same format as the first panel, this panel will address preemptive strikes against non-state actors without the approval of the sovereign nation in which the non-state actors are located. Although the scenarios have not been finalized, they will have to do with a counterterrorism strike against an unwilling sovereign and will be as realistic as possible. An information sheet outlining the scenarios will be circulated before the panel.

It will be interesting to see how they structure the scenarios. Two professors from the Fletcher School will be on the panel, Antonia Chayes and Michael Glennon, both of whom are fascinating speakers. I realize the odds are slim that anyone will read this in time here and decide to attend, but what the heck.

DeLeon: Scenario Designs, an Overview

2007-02-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

More from RAND. There has been surprisingly little written about scenario design, and the best piece I have found so far is Peter deLeon's Scenario Designs, an Overview. It's not even 20 pages, and it was written in 1973, but it covers a lot of important ground. And it's available for free online in .pdf format.

Some points I found particularly relevant:

"Although the political/military game can portray a nation's response as the result of the interplay between a number of actors... it cannot hope to capture the full richness of the bureaucratic models that have been increasingly coming to the fore... [he specifically mentions Graham Allison's Models II and III, the Organizational Behavior and Governmental Politics models from Essence of Decision, which I hope to discuss in more detail in a future post].... However, it can help isolate the decision process from extraneous bureaucratic noise."

DeLeon also describes two ways the control team can involve the participants in the action of the scenario. The first, which he calls the "scenario goad," utilizes the scenario to place the teams in a decision setting where they are in effect forced to act. This forecloses options the teams might have had earlier in a crisis, and posits the building crisis as a part of the scenario itself. The second, which he calls the "control goad," turns decision making over to the teams in the earlier stages of a crisis, allowing them more freedom of action. However, if a team proves to be too "reticent or cautious" this requires the control team to "structure and manipulate the game environment in order to provide... incentives" for the team to act in such a way as to advance the game situation. I suppose the literary analogy here is that the "scenario goad" is starting the participants' game experience in media res, while the "control goad" is more of an ab ovo beginning. DeLeon sees the "scenario goad" as a more useful tool for less skilled or less knowledgeable participants (he mentions university students), while more skilled/knowledgeable participants (professionals) might "bring enough prior knowledge to the game that they can promote their own actions and, with the prompting of control, intensify the crisis."

One possibility DeLeon mentions is providing "a menu of options or actions that a team might choose to exercise while playing the game. The explicitness of these 'handles' is largely dependent upon the sophistication of the players. However... the scenarist must be careful not to bias his scenario unconsciously so as to make some options more attractive than the others. Also, such a menu might possibly limit a team's capability and incentive to devise new and novel options. That is, the scenario should present a situation that permits - indeed, encourages - the exploration of a wide variety of levers, old and new."

For a short paper, there's a lot here.

Jones: On Free-Form Gaming

2007-02-26T16:06:00.000-08:00

Another RAND note, this time from 1985. William Jones wrote On Free-Form Gaming based on his decades of experience working on gaming at RAND.

This is a 55 page document, but it is so dense with practical insights into gaming procedures that it is almost impossible to summarize adequately. Anyone looking for a better understanding of gaming techniques is well advised to find a copy somehow. It is not available for free online at this time, but it is available through interlibrary loan for those with access. The price at RAND is steep for 55 pages ($20.70), but quite possibly worth it.

Jones focused mainly on two-team games, like the classic crisis games (mentioned previously here and here, but his suggestions and insights pertain to any team structure, and he discussed several alternative structures in the course of the note. One interesting detail is that his vision of free-form gaming involved set move periods, requiring each team to produce a comprehensive set of instructions by the end of the move period. There was no opportunity to take action on the part of the teams (besides making specific requests for information to the control team) during the move period, meaning that "game time" effectively did not advance during the teams' deliberations. After the move period, the control team would assess what the timeframe and situation would be at the start of the next move period. That required them to assemble all of the teams' move papers, decide what the results of the requested actions would be, decide on when to advance the game time until (based on their view of the next interesting point for study), and produce new scenario papers for the next move period.

In contrast, using computer systems (like the ICONS project's web-based software, but more on this another time), exercises today can more easily allow teams the option for action during moves, implicitly or explicitly advancing "game time" during the move period. That probably creates a very different atmosphere within the teams. It also opens the door to diplomatic interaction between teams, something very difficult to manage if move orders are only processed at the end of each move period.

This is an excellent paper. Rather than try to go into further detail now, I'll refer to it when discussing things in the future, since there is something related to almost every aspect of pol/mil gaming.

UPDATE: Alert reader persis notes in the comments that this paper is now available for free download at RAND. Go get it!

Groupthink and gaming

2007-02-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

Irving Janis' classic book Groupthink deals with the distortions that can enter a group decision making process when members of the group edit their participation in deliberations out of concern (conscious or subconscious) for preserving the cohesion of the group. His hypotheses have relevance to gaming in three ways: identifying potential pitfalls for gaming exercises meant to produce usable policy insights, suggesting methods of utilizing gaming to avoid some of the problems of groupthink within a decision making process, and presenting challenges in group dynamics that can profitably be studied using gaming techniques.

Janis posited three "antecedent conditions" for the emergence of groupthink in a given decision making context:

1. The decision makers constitute a cohesive group
2. Structural faults of the organization (such as insulation of the decision making group from outside information/experts)
3. A provocative situational context (such as high stress from external threats combined with lack of hope of finding a better solution than the leader's, or low self-esteem on the part of group members as a result of recent failures)

Janis grouped the resultant symptoms of groupthink into three broad categories: overestimation of the group, closed-mindedness, and pressures towards uniformity.

These symptoms can lead to defective decision making characterized by premature consensus without appropriate consideration of all relevant alternatives, objectives, and risks. Defective decision making will presumably lead to lowered probability of success.

There has been so much consideration of the groupthink phenomenon in the past 20 years that a 2002 book even suggested that some organizations have gone too far with their concern about groupthink, to the point of making substantive agreement difficult or impossible, deadlocking the decision making process, or at least not providing optimal results. (Paul Kower, Groupthink or Deadlock) I haven't read this yet, but it sounds like an argument for moderation in the pursuit of a groupthink-free decision making process. That sounds like something Janis would approve of, as he mentions the risks of not considering the costs of measures designed to reduce groupthink.

I will return to the topic of groupthink soon, but as for using gaming techniques to study the phenomenon of groupthink, by its very nature groupthink requires small group decision-making exercises not too far removed from the policy gaming exercises I'm trying to blog about. While the focus of study, the relationship between game controller and participant, and the subject matter of the exercises are all different, in each type of game there is an interest in both the decision making process and the results of that process. Psychological research through gaming requires an attempt to turn the exercises into controlled experiments, which is generally not possible in policy gaming.

Wikipedia on Groupthink.

Wargame blog

2007-02-23T16:12:00.000-08:00

(For future reference, comments, suggestions, links, etc., are always welcome.)

Matt Kirschenbaum runs "Zone of Influence," a blog about board-and-counter wargames. While that's a little removed from my own interest in political/military gaming, some of the same issues are relevant in terms of game design. Here are a couple of his posts dealing with two famous recreational wargamers, H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson. I haven't read either of H.G. Wells' books on the subject (Little Wars and Floor Games), but the article about Stevenson he links to is wonderful.

Desert Crossing

2007-02-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

In 1999, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni commissioned Booz Allen Hamilton (a government contractor with a large gaming shop) to produce a wargame (titled Desert Crossing) to examine the issues that would surround US intervention in Iraq. The after-action report and some related documents were declassified late last year, and much of it is available through GWU's National Security Archive website. Prior to declassification, Gen. Zinni mentioned the game in several public contexts, and Tom Ricks included a brief description of the game in his book Fiasco.

There were a number of mentions of Desert Crossing in the press when the documents became publicly available, as well as some attention from the blogosphere. Many of these comments were directed specifically at the number of troops the game participants assumed would be necessary to occupy Iraq, in contrast to the number that were actually used four years later. But the game is much more interesting than a simple question of troop numbers, and the troop number issue is a bit of a red herring compared to the broad insights that emerged from the game. The game was run to identify problem areas for future consideration, which it did. Despite the fact that the scenario was largely directed at internal Iraqi events that might require/precipitate an American intervention (rather than dealing with the sort of invasion action actually undertaken by the US), the interagency group of participants produced a list of challenges the US would face that looks fairly prescient, given current events. Unfortunately, the exercise itself never made much of an impact. In 2003, when the then-retired Gen. Zinni called CENTCOM to recommend that they look at Desert Crossing again, they didn't know what he was talking about.

The point is not that the game predicted anything. Games don't predict very well, and generally should not be used for that purpose. What Desert Crossing did was bring together the right group of people in the right setting with the right procedural setup to allow them to thoroughly examine the right questions. But Desert Crossing is also an example of the difficulty of assimilating the results of such a game into an organizational context.

Parson: What Can you Learn from a Game?

2007-02-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

Edward Parson contributed a chapter to a 1996 book (Wise Choices: Decisions, Games and Negotiations, edited by Richard Zeckhauser, Ralph Keeney, and James Sebenius, unfortunately not available online) [UPDATE: The chapter is available on Parson's website] on what sort of useful knowledge a game can produce. In his chapter he assesses the value of using simulation gaming (his term) for four different purposes: experimentation, instructing decision makers, promoting creativity and insights, and knowledge integration.

He found the technique to be unsuitable for most experimental purposes, primarily since simulation games cannot be easily replicated in controlled ways. This may be less true with simple simulations that highlight broadly applicable questions, such as basic negotiation simulations, but it is almost impossible to control for everything or repeat often in the case of a complex simulation game covering a specific, novel problem area.

As far as instructing decision makers is concerned, Parson has doubts as to whether simulation games can help much, though he acknowledges that he is concerned not with the informational value of bringing the right group of experts together (for which a simulation can provide a useful venue), but rather in actually using a simulation game to teach the details of a complex problem to decision makers themselves:

Seeking to use simulation gaming to instruct decision makers in the essential character of a complex policy problem is a much more problematic enterprise. This mode of instruction presumes that the simulation structure embodies insights into the essence of the problem that are true, important, relatively enduring, and not dominated in practical settings by other factors that the participants understand better than the analysts, and consequently that decision makers should understand them and would act differently if they did.

That's a great paragraph, and it identifies several real concerns about using simulation games in this manner. Those concerns are not necessarily impossible to overcome, though. Simulation games could be valuable just for encouraging a decision maker to focus on a problem or threat that he or she might otherwise not have paid as much attention to. That might be an example of a positive aspect to the simulation heuristic, as discussed previously. Of course, that assumes that the assessment of the given threat or problem is accurate.

Promoting creativity and insights is where Parson sees most of the value in simulation games that have been conducted to date. There is, in addition to the "get the right experts in the same room" factor as mentioned above, a well-structured simulation game can help participants think creatively about a problem and generate fresh insights. Some key points Parson mentions about this use of simulation:

Granting participants the standing to critique the relevance of simulation insights, and consequently the simulation design that conditioned them, implies an equality of standing between the simulation participants and designers that is not present in the experimental or the instructional model. Participants are not just experimental subjects or recipients of instruction; nor is the simulation reduced to a mere pretext for bringing them together.
....
[A] sober, critical postsimulation debriefing is an essential component of the learning effect of the simulation. It is here that the significance and legitimacy of the problem posed is explored, potential implications and consequences of decisions taken and plausible alternatives not taken are explored, and the practical applicability and generalizability of strategies and insights from the simulation is tested against the participants' knowledge and experience.

Use of simulations for the integration of knowledge is not a common practice, but it is one Parson feels has great promise. Creating an "integrated assessment" of a complex problem is a challenge under any circumstances. Simulation games could play a role where it is necessary to combine the technical or scientific details of a problem with the political, social, and economic aspects to arrive at a view of the whole. It's an interesting idea, but as he notes, few games have been conducted with this as a primary purpose. This chapter is 10 years old, however, so I will have to see if anything has changed in this regard.

Parson is an interesting perspective to read on simulation gaming, since he primarily works on environmental and negotiation issues. Though my own focus tends toward security issues, it is always refreshing to see someone using the same sorts of techniques in a field far beyond the traditional political-military focus of gaming.

The Simulation Heuristic

2007-02-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

I finished another RAND monograph recently (Implications of Modern Decision Science for Military Decision-Support Systems), which is too long and too dense and too useful to sum up in a single post. It's available for free online, but I wound up buying a copy from Amazon after realizing how relevant it was for me (Amazon was cheaper than buying it through RAND this time).

The first section deals with the history and development of decision science. It's a great, concise summary of the psychological aspects of decision-making theory, including a description of the split between what the authors refer to as the Heuristics and Biases Paradigm and the Naturalistic School of decision science. More on this in the future, but something that struck me was the description of what some call the simulation heuristic, and which the monograph refers to as "imaginability" (as a subset of memory biases) or the "availability heuristic". The basic idea is that people see things as more likely if they can visualize them more easily. That echoes Robert Levine's criticism (referred to here) that a game could lead participants to believe that the events depicted were probable, as opposed to merely plausible. In the simulation heuristic formulation, it is the very act of making it easier to imagine an event that increases the perception of its probability.

In a sense, that might not be a bad thing, in that one of the benefits to simulation and gaming can be to make a given circumstance seem more real, for the purposes of spurring people to action, or taking a threat seriously, or provoking more thoughtful analysis. But Levine's point stands to a certain extent; what about the other, unsimulated, ungamed possibilities that are accorded less priority because the simulated case is assigned a higher probability than is warranted? The simplest answer I can see right now is that rather than doing less gaming, perhaps the simulation heuristic should in fact lead to doing more gaming, as a tool of exploratory analysis, with an eye towards keeping in mind the vast multitudes of possible futures (more on this sometime soon, I hope). Another answer might just be that gaming is not necessarily by itself a good indicator of the likelihood of a given set of events. That seems like a no-brainer, but perhaps it's difficult to keep that in mind when presented with a realistic game. How do the pros deal with this issue?

Why "A Horse of Peas?"

2007-02-11T12:56:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has wondered enough about where the name of this blog came from has probably already found this site through Google:

Dear Word Detective: My roommate from Ohio insists on saying "It's a horse of peas" meaning "It's the same thing, one way or another." After hearing him use this random saying over and over, I finally called him on it and asked him if he didn't mean it was "a horse apiece"? He is adamant about his pea horse (I imagine a green horse consisting entirely of English peas) and won't hear any different. Please enlighten us with your expertise. -- Allison Paige, via the internet.

"Horse of peas"? I'm going to put this one at the very top of a file I keep labeled "Conclusive evidence that Ohio is actually a lost colony of Martians."

In any case, you are correct and your roommate is a victim of a "mondegreen," or a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric. The term "mondegreen" was invented in 1954 by the writer Sylvia Wright, who as a child had heard the Scottish ballad ''The Bonny Earl of Murray" and had believed that one stanza went "Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands, Oh where hae you been?, They hae slay the Earl of Murray, And Lady Mondegreen." It turned out, as Wright later learned, that the line actually ran "They hae slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green." Oops, no Lady Mondegreen, but Wright did have a good name for the phenomenon.

"A horse apiece" means, as you supposed, "more or less equal" or "six of one, half dozen of the other." Field researchers for The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) first heard "a horse apiece" in 1980, but the phrase is undoubtedly much older. A similar phrase, "horse and horse," dates back to at least 1846.

According to DARE, the logic of "a horse apiece" may come from an old dice game called "horse" in which two players who have each lost a turn are said to be "a horse apiece." Or it may just be a variant of "horse and horse," describing two horses racing neck-and-neck down a racetrack.

I say "a horse apiece" quite frequently. I picked it up from my parents, but my wife has never heard anyone use the expression outside of my family. One day, she searched for more information about the phrase, and came up with the article quoted above. She thought "a horse of peas" was hilarious, and so did I. She even designed a T-shirt for me (available at her CafePress store here) as a Christmas gift. So now I not only have a ready-made blog logo, I've already got merchandise available! Not bad for 10 posts into a new venture.

Schwabe: An Introduction to Analytic Gaming

2007-02-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

William Schwabe wrote an entry on gaming for the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science in 1994 that was also released as a RAND paper. Unfortunately, the entry/paper is not available online at this time. It's only 2 or 3 pages in the encyclopedia, and the RAND paper is only 7 pages long (double spaced), but it does a good job of laying out the basics of gaming as a policy research tool. It's a bit short to quote at length, but here are several points:

Few methods have been so inadequately named, prompting ridicule from skeptics and attempts by adherents to call it something more serious sounding or descriptive, such as "operational gaming," "simulation gaming," "free-form gaming," and, in defense analysis, "war gaming" and "political-military gaming."
....

Unlike many other techniques of analysis, gaming is not a solution method. The output of a game is not a forecast, solution, or rigorous validation. The output of a good game is increased understanding.
....

Gaming has often not been as well integrated into studies using other methodologies as might be warranted. Gaming is but one form of analysis to inform policy, managerial, or operational decisions.

In addition, Schwabe quotes Clark Abt's 1970 book, Serious Games, in his definition of a game in his first paragraph. It's a book I'll have to pick up at some point (and apparently it was just reprinted in paperback in 2002), but for now:

Clark Abt (1970) defines a game as "an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context."

Note the importance of multiple decision centers, just as Schelling noted (as mentioned previously here). Schwabe quoted some of the same portions of Schelling's section in Crisis Games 27 Years Later that I did in his description of what games can produce that other research methods cannot.

For a very basic look at gaming as a research tool, this is a remarkably successful 7 pages. I have the RAND report, not the encyclopedia entry, but I believe they are about the same. It wouldn't be worth the $18 RAND is charging for the paper, though, and it shows the importance of checking the page count before purchasing thinktank reports online. I got mine through interlibrary loan, and I expect that the encyclopedia is widely available at university libraries.

More on Crisis Games

2007-02-07T16:44:00.000-08:00

To continue the thoughts in the previous post, Crisis Games 27 Years Later contains a number of criticisms of the gaming form by Robert Levine, to which Thomas Schelling and William Jones respond.

Some of Levine's concerns:

Gaming could lend a sense that a plausible scenario is in fact probable. This could take place by virtue of the chosen, simulated scenario becoming more "real" in the minds of the participants than all of the other, unexplored possibilities. (More on cognitive biases like this one in another post soon, once I finish the paper I'm reading now)

A combination of "ersatz history" (in the form of scenarios that depart greatly from present day events) and "ersatz people" (since game players do not share the same characteristics as the individuals they are simulating) introduce biases to the gaming process that compromise its utility in generating worthwhile hypotheses.

The results of games may be used as evidence, even when they have no evidentiary value. Specifically: "If a game result appears in language which can be read as a confirmed policy conclusion, there is a substantial chance that it will be so read."

For a more recent view of some similar issues, Robert Rubel's "The Epistemology of War Gaming" (mentioned in this previous post) talks about a broader category of games, and also has steps in mind to try and address some of these methodological challenges, rather than simply advocating that gaming be abandoned as a research tool.

Rather than enumerate Schelling and Jones' replies to these and other arguments point by point, here are a few examples of their ideas (the paper is well worth reading in its entirety):

Schelling defines games as necessarily involving "at least two separate decision centers... neither of which is privy to the other's planning and arguing, neither of which has complete access to the other's intelligence or background information, neither of which has any direct way of knowing everything that the other is deciding on." This definition excludes many of the exercises we would categorize as games, and includes many that do not appear to be games at all, but this is because Schelling is focused on the strategic interaction between the two (or more) decision centers:

"What this mode of organization can do that can not otherwise be done is to generate the phenomena of understanding and misunderstanding, perception and misperception, bargaining, demonstrations, dares and challenges, accommodation, coercion and intimidation, conveyance of intent, and uncertainty about what each other has already done or decided on. There are some things that just cannot be done by a single person or by a team that works together."

"One is to judge how 'obvious' something is. An analogy is the 'hidden face' in the picture. If I draw a face with a hidden picture, there is no way for me to tell how hard it is to see the face except to show the picture to somebody. I can't not see the picture because I put it there, and the hidden face has the quality that once you've seen it it is awfully hard to recapture your innocence and not see it."

Jones responds to the charge of "ersatz history" thus (keep in mind that he was writing in 1964):

"[P]erfectly plausible, useful, and not improbable game scenarios of a situation three or four years in the future can be had by simply initiating a game using today's newspapers -- interjecting only tomorrow's equipment. Arab-Israeli controversy has existed for some time and it seems probable that it will be in existence in 1970. Turkey and Greece have not seen eye-to-eye on the Cyprus situation for a considerable period and, unfortunately, this controversy is likely to persist.... Notice here that I am not saying that games, played from scenarios which are extrapolations of today's problems, are perfect for determining tomorrow's force posture and weapons characteristics. I am saying that I can think of worse procedures (re-fighting the last war, for example) and I know of no other way in which I have even such a limited amount of confidence."

There is a good deal more in this paper than I can tackle in a blog post, but many of the ideas and concerns expressed resonate today, which is why RAND reprinted it in 1991, 27 years after it was written.

Crisis Games and RAND

2007-02-07T07:18:00.000-08:00

In 1964, Robert Levine, Thomas Schelling, and William Jones circulated a series of drafts through the RAND Corporation internal mail system, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of crisis gaming. In 1991, feeling that the issues laid out remained relevant, Levine republished the entire exchange as a RAND paper: Crisis Games 27 Years Later: Plus C'est Deja Vu. RAND has released this paper (along with some others from their 50 years of research and policy memoranda) for free in pdf form. It's well worth reading in its entirety. Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005, and his defense of crisis gaming as a technique is fascinating.

RAND did a lot of pioneering work in crisis gaming, which seems to have come on the scene during the Cold War as a way of examining the issues surrounding crises between the US and the USSR (I will confirm this at some point in the future, but the earliest references I have seen so far to crisis gaming date to the 1950's). The study of crisis was a priority, given the risks of nuclear war that attended a misstep. The various Berlin crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the surprise attack that began the Korean War were all influential in shaping the view that crisis management was an important skill to develop. Cold War crises had some very appealing features when it comes to gaming: there were two main adversaries whose interactions (due to their superpower status) were much more important than the roles of any other states (whose actions could be devised by the control team), the stakes in any given confrontation were high and the time frames often short (due to the presence of large nuclear arsenals), which ensured that the highest level decision makers would be involved, superseding normal policymaking structures, and the novelty of the nuclear standoff, with unprecedented destructive power involved, which gave a sense to policy theorists that all bets were off and that this type of crisis event needed to be studied outside the context of previous conventional military confrontations. This last point was also a major argument made by the newly ascendant civilian policy analysts in favor of rethinking conflict in ways opposed by the military establishment.

Gaming and Public Health

2007-02-04T15:46:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post has an article today about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exercise simulating a flu pandemic. The contractor that designed and executed the scenario was MPRI (Military Professionals Resources Inc.), is largely staffed by former military, and the leader of the design team used to work on wargames at the Pentagon. This is an example of the recent increase in attention being paid to the public health applications of gaming techniques. Booz Allen Hamilton, another large contractor in the simulation/wargaming business, has moved into public health simulations in a big way as well: (from the Booz Allen response to a survey from Vault.com)

Over the past several years, Booz Allen has transferred its strategic simulation (also called "wargaming") capabilities from the government sector to the public health arena. The firm has conducted a variety of games to help various constituencies understand the implications of different health crises, including HIV/AIDS and a potential influenza pandemic.
The global HIV/AIDs epidemic is at the intersection of public health, political policy, and corporate interests, confronting all of humanity with the greatest challenge of our time. In October 2003, Booz Allen brought together experts from all over the firm to focus on this complex issue, hosting a groundbreaking HIV/AIDS strategic simulation event in India. Working with the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS and the Confederation of Indian Industry, Booz Allen led more than 200 government, business, and nonprofit leaders in a three-day simulation that underscored the need for new public/private partnerships, many of which were born during the simulation itself.
Eighteen months later, Booz Allen and the Global Business Coalition partnered again to host the Joint Summit on Business and AIDS in China. Rates of infection are still relatively low in China, and both the Chinese government and the business community have demonstrated significant leadership since coming together to address the issues at the summit.
In July 2005 and January 2006, Booz Allen brought its health-focused strategic simulation expertise to two senior audiences: at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival in Colorado, where attendees dealt with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India and developed approaches to building stronger public/private partnerships; and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where attendees were confronted with an influenza pandemic and had to address the challenges for delivering essential services during a widespread outbreak.

For more on some of these events, see also: Booz Allen's "HIV/AIDS Epidemic Strategic Simulation" in India and "The Global AIDS Crisis " run at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival in 2005 (page has a link to a brief after-action summary as well)

One interesting feature of public health gaming is the lack of a real "enemy." The strategic interaction that is the focus of most wargames is not present, although the spread of the disease in the CDC example above would presumably depend in some way on the steps taken by the government to deal with it. In this sense, they share a lot of common ground with the incident response drills run by the Department of Homeland Security, relating to the aftermath of terrorist attacks or natural disasters. In any such exercise (especially in the case of trying to prepare for bioterrorism), public health would be a critical component.

Why aren't there more hobbyists doing this?

2007-02-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

Besides the Megagames of the previous post, and the National Security Decision Making Game (a U.S. group that runs large-scale international simulations at gaming conventions) I'm not aware of anyone else doing this sort of thing for recreation. That's excluding, of course, model U.N. groups in high school and college, some of which (such as the University of Chicago's MUNUC and ChoMUN) make a point of producing high-quality, innovative simulations. But why so little interest in this sort of thing after college? Here are a few thoughts:

Preparation time: Putting together something like a Megagame or a scenario for a NSDMG takes a long time. There are no published supplements, and everything is pretty much done from scratch. College students might be able to spend this kind of time, but it takes a devoted hobbyist to do so out in the "real world." There's also the question of preparation for the individual participants; there are frequently background papers or rules to read beforehand (though not for NSDMG).

Lack of expertise: This is the sort of thing one learns by doing. While there are a lot of model U.N. survivors out there, perhaps not many of them really feel comfortable designing an event of their own.

Playing time: NSDMG and Megagames are usually about 8 hours long. Many model U.N. conferences run for four days. That might be more than many people can schedule.

Location, location, location: Just finding a space large enough and with the proper setup to hold one of these events is tricky. NSDMG uses gaming conventions, which are usually held in convention centers or large hotel conference areas, while Megagames apparently use a variety of venues, ranging from schools to boats and more. High schools and colleges can often use classrooms and auditoriums. But for a general recreational interest, without a connection to a college or the budget to rent conference space, finding a site would be challenging.

Lack of familiarity: People aren't used to this sort of thing. And hanging around with a hundred strangers immersing themselves in a political simulation doesn't necessarily sound appealing. Megagame Makers have the advantage of having built up a cadre of loyal fans, and NSDMG benefits from staging events at gaming conventions with a high number of wargamers in attendance, who are a more receptive audience than the general public.

I'll revisit this issue again. A lot of these issues seem to be manageable, so long as a small group is willing to put in a fair amount of time taking care of the substantive and logistic issues. At the very least, it doesn't seem impossible to develop some kind of constituency for this sort of thing.

"Megagames"

2007-02-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

Megagame Makers is a UK-based group that creates and runs very large scale wargames for entertainment purposes, usually based on military conflict represented on boards or maps, but sometimes dealing with negotiation simulation. See the description of their Washington Conference simulation (which they will be running again in November 2007) for an example of a negotiation simulation not too far removed from the seminar-style games I'm trying to focus on here at A Horse of Peas. Their downloads page also offers the basic handbook for their Congress of Vienna game, another interesting negotiation simulation. This group has been around for a while, and looks well worth checking out for anyone in the SE England area.

What Can We Learn From War Gaming?

2007-01-31T19:56:00.000-08:00

"The Epistemology of War Gaming" - This article from the Spring 2006 Naval War College Review addresses the question of how one can assess the knowledge gained from a war game. Can you extract valid knowledge that will be of use in future, while avoiding drawing unsupported conclusions? This is a fascinating piece, and it ends with a call for a "guild" of war gamers to professionalize the discipline. The author, Robert Rubel, was head of the War Gaming Department at the Naval War College when he wrote this, but has moved up to the position of Dean of Naval Warfare Studies.

I can't find much else on the internet referencing this article, or anything that provides any indication of whether this has prompted the debate that Rubel wanted to start. It's a worthwhile discussion. As I have noted previously, "war gaming" encompasses much more than the seminar-style games I am focused on, but most of the points made here are very relevant to games at the strategic level.

NSGC in JFQ

2007-01-30T17:46:00.000-08:00

Here's a Joint Forces Quarterly article from 2005 about the National Strategic Gaming Center, one of the premier gaming shops. The NSGC is part of National Defense University, located at Ft. McNair in Washington, DC. This is a pretty good summary of the types of games that most interest me: strategic-level policy-oriented foreign affairs simulations conducted in person (not computer moderated or "distributed simulations").

Gaming and Simulation

2007-01-26T15:34:00.000-08:00

Welcome to A Horse of Peas. I hope to use this space to explore and examine the use of gaming and simulation in studying international relations. Specifically, my interest is in the seminar-style, political/military games of the kind organized by various entities within the U.S. Government, as well as some government contractors. Part of the problem in looking for information on this type of exercise is that different groups use different terminology. "Wargaming," "strategic simulation," "crisis gaming," "policy-level gaming" and "operational gaming" are all examples, with the problem being that the terms are often either vague or overly broad. For example, wargaming covers a wide range of activities, many far removed from the kind of exercise I am primarily concerned with. Hopefully, I can use this space to refine my description and my understanding of this interesting analytical tool.

On a personal level, maintaining this blog will require me to overcome my tendency to avoid sharing my ideas until they are fully developed. This could be a rocky process. An explanation of the title of this blog will eventually appear, but it has nothing to do with gaming, simulation, or the topics discussed here in general.