PRESENTATION TO RAND GAMING CENTRE, 24 FEBRUARY 2016

Good morning

My name is Brian Train.

I have been designing board wargames for the last 25 years, and I have about 40 –

odd published designs to my credit… some of them very odd.

Today I’ve been asked to talk about the question: how can civilian wargames – that

is, their structure, subject matter and mechanics - contribute to the development of

professional wargames?

I’m going to talk:

about the benefits of wargaming generally and how civilian wargames have

contributed to them;

about the limitations of civilian wargames from the imaginary standpoint I

have of a professional wargame designer; and finally

about the characteristics of innovative games and game players, and the

potential contributions that civilian wargames can make in pursuit of

developing these characteristics

I’d like to start by explicitly limiting my remarks as much as possible to board or

manual wargames, which is where my direct experience lies.

I’m going to use the term “civilian” wargames in preference to the term

“commercial”.

Yes, the goal of a lot of game designers is to get their work produced and

distributed by a publishing company.

And the main customer demographic of those companies is, yes, other civilians.

But this doesn’t acknowledge the home truth about this very small, very nichey

hobby: no one makes their daily bread by designing wargames for the hobby

market.

They do not do it for the money, they do it for the attention and to satisfy the same

basic creative urge that drives other people to write Sailor Moon fanfiction, stitch

quilts or build temples out of Coke bottles in their back yard.

The proof of this is the large amount of cheap and free or nearly-free stuff out

there, self-published via Desktop Publishing or simply given away as Print and

Play projects.

I also want to use the term “civilian” to set it apart from “professional”. Normally

the opposite of the word “professional” is “amateur”, and it might seem to fit here

in view of the non-commercial aspect.

But the word also carries a connotation of “uninformed dilettante”, and that doesn’t

fit: there are many examples of game designers who have spent considerable time

in the military, or were analysts, and turned to designing games themselves.

It also does not respect the prodigious amount of historical research game

designers often do in creating a game, to go by the extensive designer’s notes and

bibliographies found at the ends of many rulebooks.

[slide of Tactics map and counters]

But I suppose it was a gifted amateur who did start the hobby of civilian

wargaming.

His name was Charles Roberts, and in 1952 he started selling copies of a wargame

he had designed called Tactics by mail order from his garage, doing business as the

Avalon Game Company.

This game featured a squared mapboard divided into the two generic countries Red

and Blue, with square die-cut counters that represented military formations – it

mimicked the look of the battle maps and map exercises he had seen in his

personal reading, and participated in as a reserve infantry officer.

By the time his initial print run of 2,000 copies ran out, he had changed the name

of his business to Avalon Hill Game Company and produced a revised version

called Tactics II, along with the games Gettysburg and U-Boat.

Several years before this RAND had contacted Roberts to ask him about the

Combat Results Table used in Tactics and other of the Avalon Hill classics, since it

incorporated a break-point at 3-1 odds – an interesting example of parallel

development, since gamers at RAND had been using a very similar table. Roberts

said later that they must have been disappointed to learn that he had worked his out

in about fifteen minutes, when presumably they had spent a lot more time and done

a lot more math to arrive at the same result.

[slide of LIFE magazine photo]

Then in 1958 Roberts happened to see this picture in LIFE magazine, showing

RAND analysts playing a game on a hex map.

He knew a good thing when he saw it, so by 1961 he had re-released Gettysburg,

and added Chancellorsville, Civil War, D-Day and Nieuchess – all with hex maps.

So civilian wargaming was off to a sputtery start, spawning thousands of

derivatives based on this interesting collision between RAND and the civilian

world, featuring two incidents of synchronicity and minor intellectual theft (though

I’ve thought if anyone holds a patent on the hexagon, it’s honeybees).

That was over 50 years ago, and for almost half that time – 23 years – now retired

US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Matt Caffrey has been running the annual

Connections conference, a formal attempt to bridge gaps and communicate best

practices in wargaming between the civilian, military and academic worlds. I’m

sure many of you have attended at least one of these – show of hands?

[Perhaps need to break off here and explain what Connections conference is: now

in its 22nd year of bringing the two worlds together; many people here have

attended one or more in the past and that’s probably how I met you; now has

franchise conferences in the UK, Australia and the Netherlands. This year it will

be at the Air War College in Montgomery Alabama, and I’ll be putting up a link to

the conference site at the end of my slides.]

Benefits of Wargaming

In 2000 Matt Caffrey wrote an article “History of Wargames: Towards a History-

based Doctrine for Wargaming”, where he described three benefits of wargaming –

and while he was describing professional wargames, there are examples of where

civilian games and game designers were able to contribute:

[slide]

Personal development

This is the widest category and the one where games have perhaps added the most

value, on an individual level.

Games developed by civilians have also yielded some benefits for reinforcing

individual training, such as the “Marine DOOM” modification of that civilian

game in 1996, and even earlier the tactical board game Firefight developed by SPI

in 1975.

More generally, there’s a very adequate body or research on how playing games of

any kind sharpens a person’s attention and retention spans, unites styles of thinking

(linear and nonlinear) and helps reasoning and decision making under artificial

time pressures.

Society is most familiar with abstract games being used this way – Chess or Go

used to be part of a gentleman’s education, and these two examples are wargames

stripped down to their essentials.

Civilian wargames are vehicles for indulging a person’s personal interest in history

– that is studying military campaigns and exploring historical alternatives, which

seem to be the two prime drives getting people into the hobby.

I think some people here must have seen notice of Marine LCOL Gregory Thiele’s

article in the January 2016 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, entitled “Marines

Ought To Play More Games!” in order to stimulate individual Marines’ interest

and knowledge of strategy and the principles of war generally.

The examples he listed were all computer games, but I’ll forgive him that…

because before this was Project Warrior, an Air Force effort that ran from 1982 to

1987 and which was designed to introduce civilian wargames to Air Force

members, in the hope that this would promote greater awareness and knowledge

among them.

They also continue to be used as an active learning tool in both civilian and

military educational settings - I would reference Philip Sabin and his book

Simulating War, where he discusses his graduate students at Kings College London

learning about warfare by both playing these games and designing their own.

German Air Force LCol Uwe Heilmann, working at the NATO Joint Air Power

Competence Centre

uses civilian games as tools for leadership development and for students to analyze

command decisions (Command and Conquer Ancients, IIRC, and some aviation

games such as Luftwaffe).

Force development

This refers to development of new tactics, SOPs, force structures and decision

assistance on weapons procurement.

There are numerous examples of how civilian game designers have assisted in this:

a civilian tactical computer game called TacOps was used in the “Team

Trackless” volunteer unclassified project led by James Dunnigan in 1998-

2000 to get volunteer testers to try out doctrine and tactics for the LAV-25

equipped brigades that were then being experimented with; other editable

computer games such as Steel Panthers 2 and Operational Art of War have

been used to test these concepts, or to model recent campaigns.

The naval miniatures wargame rule set HARPOON has been used since the

1980s, in both digital and analog versions.

More recently, the manual designs Rapid Campaign Assessment Tool and a

game called Mech Battalion have been developed for the British Army with

input from British civilians with backgrounds as both serving officers and as

miniatures and board games designers and developers. The latest issue of

Simulation and Gaming magazine has an article on how commercial

computer game technology was introduced for training, education and

decision support within the British Army, which seems to be getting into

games-based training in a big way.

Strategy development

There are many examples of wargames at the operational and strategic level that

deal with particular campaigns, but for the most part they tend to be oversimplified

because of the customer’s lack of interest in the very necessary logistical and

administrative issues that are foremost in a real campaign planner’s mind, and so

of very limited use professionally.

A well-known exception is the use of the game Gulf Strike, an ambitious and

complex game designed by Mark Herman and whose second edition was published

by Victory Games in 1988, only two years before its hypothetical assumptions

were made reality.

Still, it’s certainly true that by studying game models of past historical campaigns

in an area, one can come to at least a basic understanding of current problems

there.

Ambrose Bierce is supposed to have said that “war was God’s way of teaching

Americans geography”, but with wargames we can perhaps save some time and

effort there.

Personally, I was very happy to hear secondhand that LCOL Ivor Gardiner,

Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion of the British Army’s Royal Irish

Regiment said that he had found A Distant Plain to be some of the most valuable

orientation material he examined before his unit deployed to Helmand Province, in

helping his staff to gain and develop insights into that complex situation.

LCOL Gardiner also has an article in the current issue of British Army Review

where he discusses his use of Advanced Squad Leader as a tool for training the

junior officers in his battalion in making combat estimates, planning operations

and comparing Courses of Action… which brings us back to personal

development.

Limitations

[slide – lines added succesively]

So these are some of the benefits that wargaming provides, and I’ve presented

examples of commercial games assisting in the above, but there are definite

limitations on what these games have to offer the professional world.

The most obvious one is the expectation that a civilian wargame must be “fun”.

Since sitting down to play one of these games is a volitional activity vying for

attention with a lot of other potential diversions, it has to address issues of balance

and competition between the players, and provide excitement for them in this way.

But if any historical battle could be said to be objectively balanced, you can be

assured that the combatants did not want it to be that way.

Warfare is never fair war.

Personally I have not let this bother me too much in the course of developing many

of my designs; my impression is that the people who would subject themselves to

some examples of my work are looking for insight first and fun or a balanced

contest second.

Fine with me.

Another obvious limitation is lack of detail, or too much of the wrong kind of

detail.

Civilian games do a great deal of violence to historical settings and context, the

reality of the time, by abstracting processes and bending outcomes in the service of

balance and equitable victory conditions.

That process of violence easily goes either way, in abstracting events and processes

so much that the game becomes trivial or fanciful… the important points are never

made.

Or instead the designer mistakes needless detail and verisimilitude for realism and

the game mires itself in a swamp of trivial processes that do not add up to a

coherent lesson… the important points might be made, but get lost.

A third limitation is “classification”.

Civilian games on contemporary topics rely on open sources for their information

on the capabilities of vehicles, weapons systems, infrastructure and so forth.

Thanks to the Internet, there is a far greater volume of information available now,

but it may be no more reliable than before, as it is just as susceptible to

confirmation-by-repetition, exaggeration and plain misdirection (example,

researching Israeli Defence Force OOB for Next War in Lebanon game and could

not find consistent information on unit composition or locales – apparently this is

deliberate IDF policy).

Consequently there may be a fair amount of work involved in updating or

correcting a game’s assumptions about its component parts and mechanisms,

should it be picked up for professional use – work the civilian designer cannot

contribute to or advise on, since he has no security classification, little or no

experience of the requirements of a professional game.

The designer may not even know that his game is being used in this way.

Personally, my introduction to MORS and its activities came in late 2007 when I

was informed that Algeria, my game on the French-Algerian war was being used

by not one but two teams in OSD-PA&E (now called CAPE) for two different

purposes

– one to contribute to a model of the Iraqi insurgency, and one to furnish the

framework for a computer-assisted counterinsurgency game called Algernon,

and asked would I like to come to a workshop on Irregular Warfare to see what

they’d done?

A fourth limitation, one not often pointed out, is that when you do sit down to play

them, many of these games are just dull, simple-minded crap.

They are poorly tested and developed

they have unclear purposes and objectives

usually planning and analysis have no role in play of the game, and no

incentive to do any

their rules may not make military sense or encourage “gamer mode”

behaviour

they regularly produce ahistorical results for obscured reasons – and worst of

all, sometimes they cannot even reproduce the actual event they were

designed to model.

This verges on a list of faults found in professional wargames too, as Ellie Bartels

summarized in her January 26, 2016 post at the War on the Rocks blog.

So how do we shove the crap aside, how can the civilian world help the

professional world to produce valuable, innovative wargames?

[slide with Ellie’s points]

Bartels’ eight points for attention are the following, and I offer some comments on

civilian wargames in relation to them:

Not all problems can be helpfully analyzed with a wargame.

Wargames should have a specific and relevant purpose and objectives.

Wargame design should be shaped to meet purpose and objectives.

Blue losing is a sign of a fair game and a terrific learning opportunity.

Wargame design isn’t over when the game starts.

Those who learn the most from wargames are those who participate in them.

Transparency in wargame results is critical to justify faith in findings.

Wargames are most valuable when they are linked to a “cycle of research”.

(don’t read these, just put up the slide)

I can’t argue with any of these, certainly.

There are so many methods open to someone analyzing a problem, and I would

never argue that wargames are any kind of panacea, still less a civilian wargame.

As has been repeated many times, wargames themselves are not experiments, so

even when their use is appropriate for a problem they have to be used as

supplements of other forms of research.

Specific solutions for specific problems.

As for Blue losing, the expectation is that Blue has to lose sometimes in civilian

wargames – and as I said, the victory conditions can get a bit odd in order to ensure

something like a balanced game, that is to say an entertaining match for the

players.

Even so, these games still have much to offer both players, in analyzing their

respective results – how they could have done better, or worse.

Civilian wargames, especially the manual ones, are very amenable to having their

mechanisms altered, edited and changed on the fly.

Because of the relative simplicity and transparency of their mechanisms, it’s often

easy to link causes and effects after just a few plays, and direct the tendency of the

game’s results – this is of course open to abuse, but the abuse will be so flagrant

and obvious it will spur discussion itself.

Ellie’s post got a response from Dr. Stephen Downes-Martin, who supplied a link

to his paper “Wargaming as a Catalyst for Innovation”. This paper was delivered at

the Connections 2015 conference.

Good paper, you should read it – its subtitle is “Stress, Paranoia and Cheating: the

Three Furies of Innovative Wargaming”.

And the part of it I want to point out is where he describes the characteristics of an

innovative wargame; he says,

[slide with quote]

“we are looking for the characteristics of a game that, in a person, would

correspond to INTELLIGENCE, COMPULSIVITY and PARANOIA, and for

methods to design such characteristics into wargames.”

That’s the money quote, right there.

Dr. Downes-Martin went on to identify a set of institutional and cultural forces

within the cultures engaged in professional wargaming that created obstacles to

innovation, and which needed to be engaged and neutralized.

But, I want to react to his interesting descriptions, and identify aspects and offer

examples of civilian wargames that dangle possibilities along these three

characteristics, and hopefully increase the chances of innovation coming from

games – and gamers – exposed to them.

So the modified question ought to be, “How can civilian wargames contribute to

the development of innovative professional games, or at the very least

development of innovative professional gamers?”

[slide]

Intelligence refers to the qualities of creativity in seeking solutions, and open-

minded in applying them. An intelligent game player is one willing to explore

different methods to resolve in-game problems, even cheat, but always in the

service of testing boundaries.

An intelligent game will permit this activity, within reasonable bounds determined

by the objectives of the game.

“WHAT IF…?”

Civilian games with relatively sparse rules and open styles of play can contribute

to this characteristic.

An example I would offer here is matrix games, which have been used since the

1980s in the civilian world but are only now seeming to get some attention in the

military and professional worlds.

And matrix games are an only slightly more formalized form of role-playing

game, a genre which relies on guidelines only for play, and leans heavily on the

individual creativity and open-mindedness of the facilitator and players.

[slide]

Compulsivity means driven in the search for information and answers.

Compulsive game players will be immersed in the game’s narrative (and not in

fiddly multiple in-game processes) to seek complete knowledge from which they

can construct creative solutions.

A compulsive game will require intelligent and creative acts from players to

extract its hidden knowledge, and to act on the knowledge gained.

“WHAT ELSE…?”

Games with hidden or asymmetric information can expose players to the acute

sensations, occasional agony even, of decision making.

Double-blind games (like Command and Conquer Ancients, which I mentioned

before as being used by LCol Heilmann to train his young officers).

Games that rely on bluffing, lying and deduction like Coup, Werewolf and even

Poker can give players insight into uncertainty of information, and stoke their

compulsive need for information, and their paranoid need to both deal with the

unexpected and guard what information they have from the enemy.

[slide]

Paranoia means fear of the unknown, or that things that are unknown will damage

you somehow.

A paranoid player is one who is interested in the game’s discoveries, the

implications arising from changes in the game, how they relate to the game’s

original objectives and focus, and (from a professional’s perspective) what further

questions need to be asked.

A paranoid game will compel the players to seek the extent of the known

unknowns (God you must all be sick of hearing that term) and rationalize their

likely impact on the larger problem, as the game moves constantly through new

states.

“WHAT NOW…?”

Games with an asymmetric structure - where players have radically different force

structures, where turns have variable lengths and incorporate varying numbers of

actions and combinations of moves, where consequences of moves aren’t linear or

discrete, where the initiative is passing back and forth among multiple players with

varying means, methods and objectives – are games that move from state to state

extremely quickly, each change of state setting up a new range of possibilities and

questions.

Concrete examples of these include the newish series of card-assisted games from

GMT called the COIN system, and one of the most popular card-driven wargames

in recent years, Twilight Struggle.

Stepping back and to the side a bit, there are also good examples of asymmetric

abstract games that offer some deep experiences along these lines: Hnefatafl,

variations on Chess, my own Guerrilla Checkers.

[slide - narrative]

So, in our short time together I’ve talked about the personal, organizational and

strategic development benefits and contributions possible through use of civilian

wargames

Despite their limitations, I think civilian games offer a degree of honesty,

transparency and willingness to experiment with structure, mechanics and player

roles that can and should be exploited by those who want to create innovative

professional wargames, or to encourage the development of players and play styles

that exhibit the potential for innovation.

And finally, I think part of the answer lives in considering the origin of the power

of wargames, which is the same as games themselves of all kinds – the simple

power of NARRATIVE.

A (war)game is a shared and constructed narrative, more involving than listening

to a story because the players are not spectators, they collectively build the

narrative as they go making decisions and responses to decisions, in the context of

a set of boundaries and controls (the general rules the players agree to follow) and

their thinking and acting under the double suspension of disbelief – what Peter

Perla calls l’entre deux in this paper “Why Wargaming Works”.

Civilian games are closer to this appeal to gamer psychology (more broadly,

human psychology) because they are more overtly like the high-engagement RPGs

that Perla argues for later in the same paper.

Matt Kirschenbaum calls the unfolding of the play of a civilian board wargame the

construction of a “vast procedural narrative” –

vast because the number of permutations and decisions in even a small

wargame is much, much larger than those in a game of chess,

procedural because the decisions are both driven and limited by an elaborate

but quite transparent set of rules, and

a narrative of the play of the game – optimistically called an “after action

report” by players - can read like a very plausible and even entertaining

piece of history (depending on the skill of the writer).

I think that’s a nice way to describe it.

And what’s the moral or philosophical purpose of a narrative, what happens after

the story ends?

INSIGHTS, and lessons the players can take away with them.

[slide – game in the TOC]

Let’s finish with a look at the picture that was used to illustrate Ellie Bartels’ blog

post.

I was discussing the post with my friend Neal Durando and we focused on the man

on the right.

He is wearing his fleece in the Operations Centre, because he always feels cold in

the Operations Centre where they run these games.

He’s full of bad coffee, and probably thinking about his next PCS – really, does he

look engaged?

How do we get him to clench and unclench his hands, poke at the screen, and even

take off that fleece as he starts to sweat?

What stories will he be able to tell when this game is over – what insights do you

think he gained?

Will he feel able to sound off in some productive way in the hot wash?

We engage him in building that shared narrative.

No, we don’t entertain him, we pull him into the quest for a creative solution by

prompting his existing qualities of intelligence, curiosity, and yes mild paranoia to

come out over the course of the game.

And if we have been able to do that by preparing his mind by the use of civilian

wargames, or appropriation of their techniques in the game he’s playing, then the

time and effort will have been well used.

Thank you.

[slide with links and my contact information, WP blog etc.]