Terminological issues in a related field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.