Rex Brynen is Professor at Political Science at McGill University, where he specialises in Middle East politics, complex peace and humanitarian operations, and serious gaming. He is senior editor of PAXsims ( www.paxsims.org ) and designer/coedesigner of several published games, including AFTERSHOCK, the Matrix Game Construction Kit, Outbreak READY! and We Are Coming, Nineveh.
The NIWC Pacific Wargaming Lab is made up of US DoD Civilian Navy scientists and engineers, based in San Diego, California and Pearl City, Hawaii.
Since 2005, Jake has worked at NIWC Pacific as a US Navy civilian engineer, specializing in military planning, human factors, usability, and wargaming. He co-founded the NIWC Pacific Wargaming Lab consisting of US DoD Civilian Navy computer scientists and engineers based in San Diego, California and Pearl City, Hawaii. His research interests include experimental wargaming, as well as user interface and wargame design.
The Digital Course of Action Analysis Tool (DIGICAT) is the digital representation of Tim Barrick's popular military Operational Wargame System (OWS), under development by the NIWC Pacific Wargaming Lab. David and Jake will introduce OWS, discuss some of the advantages of a digitized OWS over its analog counterpart, conduct a live demonstration of its game mechanics, and propose potential future development paths and opportunities.
audio of Q&A session.
Coercion, in a security studies context, refers to 'the use of threats to influence somebody's conduct'. In 2023, LTCOL Jimmy Groves and Owen Cooper developed a learning game for students taking the new ANU postgraduate course 'Coercion and National Security'. Our aim was for students to experience and explore coercion theory by developing, applying and responding to coercive strategies and tactics in competition with other student teams. This presentation examines the game's design brief, conceptual and practical challenges, evolution, the pilot game, planned revisions for 2024 and some lessons learned.
Owen Cooper and LTCOL Jimmy Groves are part of the National Security College Futures Hub at the Australian National University, where they help government departments and officials make better decisions through facilitated scenario planning, simulations, training programs, advice and research. Jimmy is a Royal Australian Artillery officer, on secondment to the Futures Hub. He has deployed operationally in a number of combat, peace-keeping and disaster relief roles at the tactical level and has extensive experience in partnered operations and training in the Pacific region. His favourite game is Settlers of Catan. Owen is a former defence intelligence analyst and occasional musician. He enjoys playing Ticket to Ride and Pandemic with his two sons.
Wargaming has long been recognised for its potential to enhance decision-making skills, yet adoption remains limited outside military and strategic contexts. This presentation aims to elucidate the critical importance of wargaming as a tool for honing strategic thinking and decision-making in diverse organisational settings. We explore the challenges and misconceptions that inhibit wider adoption and offer practical recommendations for designers to create wargames that are not only instructive but also engaging. By dissecting the barriers to entry and suggesting actionable solutions, this talk provides a roadmap for integrating wargaming into mainstream organisational training and development.
Dan is The Director of The Long Game Project, improving organisational decision-making through tabletop exercises. Dan is also a Medical Doctor and an academic with a PhD from Monash University's faculty of public health. His areas of expertise include Decision Making, Behavior Change, Tabletop Game Design, Behavioral Economics, Pandemic Prevention, Forecasting and Philanthropy. Alongside game design, Dan has been an academic consultant across public and private sectors, a medical educator, an amateur forecaster and a high-performance athlete.
Exercises are useful training, validation and discovery tools for any security program but are also becoming formal business requirements. Legal and governance frameworks such as CPS234, SOCI and the Australian ISM call for regular testing of incident response systems. As a result security leaders find themselves adding exercises to their calendar and wondering how to effectively conduct exercise campaigns while showing positive return on investment.
In this presentation I will share my experiences building teams to develop and deliver regular exercises for sponsors security programs. You will hear about lessons learned in gaining employer buy-in, meeting sponsor expectations, design pressures and developing capacity and capability in delivery teams. I'll also share how I've drawn on methods from SABSA security architecture, AIIMS and disaster response research to solve problems.
This presentation is an invitation to other practitioners of exercises, wargames and serious games to share their own lessons learned while developing their craft. The lessons shared in this session will be familiar to many attendees, though hopefully the context and responses should have some novelty.
Kirk is a security advisor with a focus on building resilience through disaster and incident response exercises. He develops and manages incident response programs using the lens of serious games, constructivism and an emergency services and military background. He is a VICSES volunteer, Deputy Chair for the The SABSA Institute (TSI) in APAC and a committee member for the International Game Developers Association Melbourne chapter (IGDAM). He takes joy in enabling teams to gracefully handle the unexpected and hosting games nights with friends.
John Curry is an UK academic who plays serious games about strange things, in strange places, with strange people. He has published over 100 books on wargaming through the History of Wargaming Project. www.wargaming.co His last book was published a few weeks ago Advanced Matrix Games for Professional Wargaming: Innovations in Wargaming . His next book is on Axis and Allied tactical wargaming during World War II . He currently supervises 5 PhD students in wargaming.
https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/our-people/john-curry/
Chally Troop Leader is a multiplayer subjective game of modern MBT platoon leadership and operation, based on the old Avalon Hill game Patton's Best and the newer American Tank Ace from Compass Games. This presentation covers the development of the game from initial conception to its current physical form, why various design choices were made, what insights were gained from its development and playtesting, together with plans for the next iterations.
Nick Riggs is a part-time PhD student at Bath Spa University in the UK, studying small unit tactical wargaming, supervised by Dr. John Curry. Formerly a technical writer, Nick has recently joined QinetiQ Training and Simulation Ltd as an operational analyst. As a hobby gamer and publisher, he has produced several roleplaying games and supplements. He is currently training to achieve his private pilot's licence.
Clausewitz's understanding of chance is far different from how it is often portrayed or understood, and as one of the fundamental pillars of his trinity it is vital his ideas are fully understood in context. This has important implications for wargaming and teaching.
Nicholas Murray is the wargame designer and instructor for the Strategic Thinkers Program. He has designed and run hundreds of war and decision games. He is the author of four books as well as a number of articles. Nick is currently working on a new translations Clausewitz's writings, including On War. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal for Military History. He advises the OSD with policy regarding military education and wargaming, and he has received numerous awards including the OSD's highest medal: the Exceptional Public Service Award.
Tim Barrick COL, USMC (R) Armor Officer Lead Designer of OWS Wargame Director Marine Corps University (MCU)
Matt Jones COL, USMC (R) Infantry Officer Lead Designer GOWS Professor of Practice at the Marine Corps War College (MCWAR)
Curt Hudson Jr COL, US Cavalry (R) Co-Lead Designer GWOS Principal Wargame and Mission Systems Engineer
Global OWS is an extension of the OWS system from Marine Corps University's Design Team.
The game covers the entire globe. The time scale is two weeks. The map scale is 200 nautical miles per hex. Land forces are Divisions and Brigades. Air Units are wings. Naval units are Task Forces arrayed around Carrier Strike Groups, Surface Action Groups and Amphibious Task Groups. Subs are abstractly represented as levels of presence sustained by multiple boats. The game has rules for space, cyber, electro-magnetic spectrum operations, engineers, infrastructure damage and repair, action cards, initiative chits, information operations, Special Operating Forces, sustainment, replacements, regeneration and Research and Development options. The game is scalable to different time scales based on the purpose of the game.
The game has been in use for about 3 years at MCWAR. It is still in development as the design team looks at various command and control mechanics, sustainment, unit and map scale and streamlining combat mechanics, especially missile strikes.
Most military members have little to no knowledge about operations on a nuclear battlefield. This presentation will examine multiple educational wargames run by the DTRA nuclear wargaming team at the Service, Combatant Command, and NATO levels to educate DoD leaders and their staffs about how to continue to fight after an adversary nuclear attack.
LTC Jim Gifford is currently the Chief of the Nuclear Wargaming Team at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). LTC Gifford is a Functional Area 52, Nuclear and Counter-WMD Officer, in the US Army with over 22 years of service. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, has a master's degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from North Carolina State University.
Games are expressions of models, and so a game's underlying model should have a deep impact on what the game achieves.
Boho interactive creates games about communities, embedded in landscapes, dealing with changes and disasters. We use a participatory co-modelling framework to build the models that drive our games. This framework tries to include as many voices as possible, and aims to build a consensus model, used as a tool for imagining pathways to a better future.
Does the modelling framework bleed out into the games we make? In what ways are these games useful? Could any of these insights be useful in your own practice?
David Shaw is a key creative with Boho Interactive. Boho makes games exploring concepts from systems science, complexity theory, resilience thinking, game theory and network theory.
We work with scientists and research institutions including Australia's CSIRO, University College London, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Earth Observatory Singapore.
The WhatIF Lab is a research hub at The University of Queensland which uses the skills of science fiction writers to structure foresight workshops. Writing is patterned and structured, genre writing in particular, yet the precise nature of this structuring is very different than games. Crucially, as Ian Bogost argues, games are a way to teach procedural literacy: that games teach us to think in and through systems, and hence make us aware of how those systems work.
In this presentation we reflect on the spectrum of recreational behaviors defined by the French sociologist Roger Caillois in terms of their structuring. Paidia, he argues, is 'active, tumultuous, exuberant, and spontaneous', while ludus involves 'calculation, contrivance, and subordination to rules' (x). The former is what we might casually term play, with its associations of improvisational, rambunctious childrens' diversions. The latter is what we might ordinarily term games or sport. For Caillois, paidia inevitably evolves into ludus as players add rules and clarifications. Crucially, we explore how we learn about systems by introducing rules.
Prompt-based narrative games such as 'The Quiet Year' and 'For the Queen' sit between somewhere in the middle of Caillois's spectrum, relying on simple mechanics to generate complicated, adaptable and engaging narratives. We argue that elements of this style of game can be useful for foresight practioners in that they provide enough structure to direct a group's imaginings or simulations while including enough openness to handle what Jenny Andersson calls the 'unpredictable uncertainties' of the future. Our presentation will take as a case study a futures-oriented narrative game we designed called Moonshot, which uses prompts and relatively simple mechanics to help university researchers simulate the challenges of a collaborative project in a one-year, three-year or five-year timeframe.
Andrew Somerville is an Infantry Officer in the Australian Army with a long and broad service history. He has attended the Army Simulation Operations Course and the Joint Experimentation and Wargaming Course and has completed the MORS Designing Tactical Wargames Course. Andrew has been wargaming since High School, he is a game designer and a strong advocate for the use of wargaming as a learning tool in professional military education. Andrew is currently the SO2 Wargaming and Simulation in the Headquarters of Land Simulation and Wargaming, a subunit of the Australian Army Battle Lab and he is leading the reinvigoration of wargaming in the Australian Army.
Ian is a Senior Lecturer at York St John University where has taught History, American Studies and War Studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1994.
Ian is a member of the York Historical Warfare Analysis Group and co-author of a recent book Quantifying Counterfactual Military History.