Wargaming and Serious Games
A lotta feelings about this video, understandably. I’ve been working in edu/simulation games for about a decade. Here are some of my jumbled thoughts:
Serious games
It’s wild that he name-dropped “serious games” without really getting into that the field is alive and well. Games for Change was founded in 2004 and has been having regular showcases and talks since. The first International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA) conference was in 1970. “Do these serious games do anything” is a question we’ve been grappling with for decades, and doing pre/post tests is a pretty well-established procedure.
Israel & war games
Re: Israel’s war games, we got a glimpse of their stance on them in 2007 when an Israeli general played Peacemaker (an early breakout serious game, putting the player in the position of navigating the Palestine/Israel conflict as a head of state) on live TV. From Kotaku:
After being confronted with a suicide bomb in the opening sequence of the game, he responded with a series of hawkish moves, including an Apache helicopter airstrike and a ground operation to destroy the militants’ infrastructure. Not long after, a pop-up informed him that his actions as the Israeli PM initiated the Third Intifada, or Palestinian uprising. He lost the game. “Is this game realistic?” probed the reporter. “There is nothing to learn from this game about reality,” replied the major general with confidence, “as I took all the right actions.”
Chilling. The lesson here supports the fundamental problem that he talks about: if the people funding/playing the game disagree with its lessons, the game will be discarded. In this context, these games will only ever function to support the status quo of imperialism. There is no escape.
Business schools
When I attended the 2022 ISAGA conference, one of the talks there went into how games have helped accelerate economic disparity and recessions by way of the practice of business schools commonly running “stock market war games”. Students are given some starting money and are graded by how much they’re able to multiply that simulated cash over the course of the game. We accuse Wall Street of playing our economy like it’s a game and they literally practice doing that. This teaches them to chase short-term gains and ignore externalities like climate impact.
That is to say: it’s not just some new games being run by the Dept of Defense that are fucking up our world. They’ve been here for a long time and have contributed to people you know getting laid off.
Outcomes
When making a serious game, you have to know your aim to get anything done. I see a few categories of outcomes.
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High fidelity training: This is the only thing VR is good for, and it’s likely the best-in-class for this. Crane operators. Flight simulators. Warehouse organization. Health procedures. These games simulate a highly specific and usually technical aspect of a job and give players practice doing that thing. This requires that the field is already thoroughly explored; you can’t simulate what you don’t know.
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Turtles, termites, and traffic jams: Small simulations with simplified dynamics that are designed to uncover emergent behaviors. You can get traffic jams and flocking with entities following simple rules; no need to simulate the specifics of the vehicle engines. Anything novel learned typically happens in the building of these models rather than the playing; the developer tweaks something, sees what happens, makes more tweaks, and ends up with a dynamic presentation they can display to others to show what they learned. (Explorable Explanations)[https://explorabl.es/] are in this category but are usually focused more on teaching than making novel discoveries.
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~feelings~ with a pinch of topic: This is the category that simulation games usually end up in by accident, but many great commercial games are here too like Pandemic. If you dump a whole bunch of world-rules on the table and file off their edges to turn them into game mechanics, you’ve almost certainly defanged their applicability to predict real-world outcomes & left out a bunch of side effects. What’s left is pushing around little blocks and feeling like you’re engaging with the subject matter but actually mostly making relationships in your emotional landscape. If a designer doesn’t realize this is what they’re doing, what those relationships are is mostly up to chance.
Interestingly, the example he gives about shipyard security falls into #2 because its value is more of a brainstorming session about approaches than creating a game that’s meant to be played.
Hearing that wargames treat “nukes launched” as an “everybody loses” scenario is the best news I heard in that whole video. It means that the games that are #3 are correctly teaching people what their relationship to that outcome should be. I was horrified to hear that there’s a group pushing for incorporating nukes as a regular option in games because I have extreme doubts that their simulations of such would have any validity and it erodes this correct stance that the previous designers have been taking.