Faculty Blog

Good event design (game, seminar or workshop) looks at all those pieces-parts somehow related to the issue at hand. For a complex problem, this could become a dizzying array of factors. Turning to the objective, we can exclude those factors beyond the scale and scope of the event. Of the ones remaining, we ask, “So what?  Why is that particular factor, in light of the objective, important? How are the factors connected?” Factors that do not have significant implications for or weak linkages to the objective are further eliminated or notionalized. Finally we ask of the remaining factors, “Which factors do we want participants to discuss or make decisions about?” and “Which contribute to the participants' decisions, but are outside of what we want them to directly deal with?”

This approach weaves a web of interconnected elements which can be explicitly shown to be relevant to the issue and objective. Like dew drops clinging to a spider web, the outermost part of the web holds those notionalized or abstracted factors which often become "givens" or background information. In the next inward portion of the web cling those elements which will influence or be influenced by our participants’ actions; this is the realm of the white cell or moderator, injects, models and sims, assessment, "higher authority", etc. At the center of the web are the participants and all those elements at the core of the activity. These elements will have the highest level of detail, but be fewer in number than those factors in the rest of the web. 

The web works for a variety of reasons; along with being able to show the connection to the objective, it keeps all the factors in a delicate balance. The factors of the greatest importance resident in the smallest central portion of web, while those of lesser importance are located out in the broader areas of the web’s periphery. Like the spider, our participants are able then to concentrate on the convergence of elements at the center of our investigation, vice crawling over the entire web wasting precious time jumping from factor to factor.  

Once constructed, the web is stable. If new factors are to now be added to the web, they must be carefully analyzed to see if and where they connect. If sufficient connections cannot be found, the new factor should be allowed to fall away. Forcing any factor into the web without sufficient understanding of it role risks tangling the entire structure and leaving the chances of a successful game, seminar or workshop in tatters. The smart spider scurries away at this point!

An article on the front of the Providence Journal  http://www.projo.com/news/content/38_studios_visit_07-15-10_U7J6AC7_v30.1914af9.html reports that former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company 38 Studios is considering a move to RI. Currently based in Maynard, MA, the company employs “a team of artists, engineers, technicians, musicians and storytellers” who are working on the company’s soon to be released massive multi-player online game, or MMOG, code named Copernicus. The creative team includes fantasy author R.A. Salvatore, comic book and toy creator Todd McFarlane, best known for Spawn, and game designer Ken Rolston.

Says Salvatore of Copernicus, “This is a world that’s believable, it’s gorgeous, it makes sense. It’s full of beauty and danger and adventure.”

This gaming world is a fantasy world, which the team at 38 Studios must create from scratch. For 38 Studio’s game to be a financial success, they must create a gaming world which is so compelling that subscribers are willing to “pay to play.” This is the ultimate constructive design process – the blank canvas. For anything to be in this world, it must be added to the game.

Professional war games, on the other hand, are often designed from the deconstructive (or distillation/abstraction) process. Given that we already have a ‘real’ world with environment, orders of battle, culture, societies, etc., we are often faced with the challenge of what to remove in order to accommodate limitations of time, space and resources while still meeting our educational or research based gaming objectives.

The need to construct a compelling world, therefore, can be overlooked in the professional game design process. Yet it is no less important to the success of the professional game. While players may not pay a subscription fee, for many war game participants it still costs in terms of travel budgets and perhaps more importantly time away from primary duties. 

I once had a game sponsor say that he didn’t particularly care about engaging the players, because “they come and play because they’re told to.” True in the case of military officers, but the quality of play will be greatly diminished if the players’ level of engagement simply consists of showing up, and are more worried about moving up their flight home than what is going on in the game.

In the end, our professional games are no more or less ‘real’ than fantasy games – a game is a game. I know of fantasy gamers who were more genuinely distraught over the death of a single online character than players of “serious” war games were over the loss of hundreds of soldiers and civilians. In the latter case a certain level of engagement was clearly missing. 

Your players are the heart of your game. No players, no heart, no game. Creating an engaging world for those players, both the real physical environment they inhabit during the game, and the artificial environment in which they play, is crucial to getting the results you’re hoping for.   

I once had a commodore who was fond of saying, “life is a test, and you can fail.” It is not much of a leap to modify that to “Life is a game, and you can lose.” Or play poorly.

In games, particularly those involving strategic game theory, there are players who have options. Those options have varying payoffs. Payoffs can either be positive (rewards) or negative (penalty). Based on those payoffs, players will make choices based on what appears to be in their best interest. But the payoff I ultimately receive is a function of both my choice and the choice my opponent makes. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a well known example. 

A colleague of mine asked where I found my working definition for one, one-and-a-half and two-sided games that appears in some of my game design lecture material. As far as I know, there is no "official' lexicon for war gaming, so I made it up. In truth, it is not so much a definition of WHAT two-sided gaming is, but rather WHEN you should use two-sided vs. one or one-and-a-half sides in your game design. Perhaps the best way to think about sides in a war game is to take it from the players' perspective, i.e. "Who am I playing against and what is their objective?" and "What is the role of Control?"

If the challenges facing the player team (e.g. the Blue Team) are primarily created by a moderator, facilitator, faculty group or control team whose only purpose in the game is to poke, probe or otherwise stimulate Blue to think about and respond to a problem, often in a pre-scripted manner - in other words, have no gaming winning objective of their own - then it's a one sided game. If the adversary is a separate team from the control group, but under Control's close supervision in order to maintain game pace, direction and overall objective, then you have what we call a one-and-a-half sided game, the half being some aspects of a Red Team. Red in this case is essentially working for Control to assist in achieving the game's larger objective, which is often educational in nature. In this case Red is sometimes referred to as Pink (part White or control cell, part Red cell). In both these cases, Control or a notional Red is performing more of a Devil's Advocate or Anti-Blue role than a Pro-Red role for the purposes of challenging Blue.

If on the other hand, Red gets to play in a dynamic manner to achieve their own victory conditions, then you have a two-sided game (or multi-sided game). From either side's perspective, they are battling against another set of players on equal footing. Neither side has any undue or disproportionate interaction with Control. From an outside observer perspective, the sides are indistinguishable in terms of their purpose - that is, to win the game. Control acts more as an umpire to ensure the game is played according to the rules, and the score is the score.

You know you're probably NOT in a two-sided game:
- If injects are used or the game is MSEL driven.
- If the Red Team is being steered directly by Control.
- Phrases like "keeping Red in their box" are used.
- If Control, in acting as higher authority for both sides, is far more constraining and manipulative of Red than Blue.
- If Red winning runs counter to the game's objective.
- If there is no interest in whether or not Red can or does win.

Two-sided games are more psychologically demanding. Take for instance a computer based game that can be played solitaire (against the computer) or networked with another human opponent, which I have at home. When my son plays against the computer, the game "feels" one or maybe one-and-a-half sided. While he doesn't like to lose to the computer, contrast that against when he plays against his brother on the other computer. The game now is definitely two-sided and the emotional commitment to the outcome is quite a bit higher! As McCarty Little put it, "Now the great secret of its [war game's] power lies in the existence of the enemy, a live, vigorous enemy in the next room waiting feverishly to take advantage of any of our mistakes, ever ready to puncture any visionary scheme, to haul us down to earth." And if that applies to both sides, you have yourself a powerful two-sided game.

A recent story on NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125588087) casually mixes gaming, simulation and computer programming, as if they were all one in the same. Typical is this quote from a student studying “gaming,” “As soon as I got into computing, I just fell in love with it. I really love the logic behind it. I love the sort of building-something-out-of-nothing sense that you get from it.” Notice he said “computing,” and not “gaming.” Even if that’s what he meant, the two are clearly the same to him.

According to the NPR story, students at Georgia Tech are learning how to design games by studying previous game systems. Game like Go (2,500 years old), Mahjong (2,000 years old) or Chess (1,500 years)? How about those Johnny-come-lately games like Monopoly (100 years)? Nope. The grand-daddy game to be studied…Atari (for those too young to remember, that would be Pong, 1972).

To be fair, Pong was a phenomenon in its day. But why? To understand that, hopefully these degree programs include elements fundamental to game design – any game, not just computer games  – why people play games, the nature of competition vs. cooperation, the concept of flow, the psychology of decision-making under stress, reward and penalty, etc.   That part apparently isn’t nearly as exciting as virtual reality, augmented environments and iPhone apps. But without those fundamentals, what you get is a computer game programmer, not necessarily a game designer.   There’s a reason those previously mentioned games have survived for hundreds or thousands of years, whereas the drawer under the family gaming console is littered with forgotten game cartridges from last year.          

My issue with this story can be summed up by changing the title to this post to “War Gaming and Models & Simulation – It’s All the Same Thing, Right?” In other words, the tendency to see technology as the ends rather than a means to an end. Not that gaming is the ends, either. Gaming, using a board and tokens, playing cards, computer, ball and bat, or just our imaginations can be a powerful learning and discovery tool. At the Naval War College, gaming is used to examine a wide range of pol-mil problems: deterrence, cyber-threats, irregular warfare, conventional conflict, counter-proliferation, future maritime strategy…all with technology no more complex than desktop computers running Microsoft Office.

By focusing on the latest technology, we tend to overlook the most powerful gaming system that’s been around for millions of years – the human mind.