CNA - Wargaming Strategic Linkage and Conversations with Wargamers

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.

Perla: Design, Development and Play of Navy Wargames

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

Wargaming Fourth-Generation Warfare

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.

Center for Naval Analyses

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.