And I'm afraid that's what you might see if you went to an all-computer simulation of COIN...depending of course on how dependent you were on the AI. If you used it like a MUD, for example, I could see the utility. The problems begin as soon as you rely on the simulation to provide the majority of the "actors" and even take on the role of factions.Originally Posted by Rex Brynen
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
Actually, David Earnest (Old Dominion U) had a really interesting article on MMO- type multiplayer approaches to COIN simulation in the Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulations last year.
My own classroom simulation is designed around this idea of a large number of participant interactions. It works well--especially the sense of intersecting agendas and the imperfect information flows that it generates--but it's human moderated, and pretty much takes up 90% of my week when I run it. USIP is designing software to support that type of simulation (the Open Simulation Platform), into which you would then "slot" your scenario and setting. This is all text and basic chat, though--no WoW style maps and immersive VR environment (or, for that matter, Night Elf Mohawk grenades).
They mostly come at night. Mostly.
- university webpage: McGill University
- conflict simulations webpage: PaxSims
Our local brew is reasonably labor-intensive too, but I consider it worthwhile in that our cadets get experience with something other than automated planning processes (or simulated automated planning processes). I guess I've always viewed the computer sims as tools that can be used toward an end rather than an end in and of themselves.
Does USIP have a downloadable version of this up yet? Last time I looked they were still testing.
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
We did an exercise for our Defense Strategic Studies course we did an exercise that incorporated a lot of roleplaying. We used the event capability in Follow Me to trigger the roleplaying. Prior to the exercise we created the areas and triggers for each event. As the cadets conducted their operations events would "pop" based on a trigger, in most cases the trigger was a blue unit entering a specific area. Follow Me has the capability to show jpg, text, audio, or video events.
For this exercise we opted for simple jpg files. Whenever the event fired a graphic would show describing the event, the cadet would decide whethere or not they needed to take action. If they did then they would move to the designated roleplay area.
On the host machine we are able to monitor the events as they were triggered. Whenever one was triggered we would let the roleplayer know so he/she could get into character. If the cadet moved to the roleplayer area the roleplayer would do their thing.
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