Wargaming Small Wars (merged thread)

[Rex Brynen]

If you've got the computer to point to and say "you fired 20 shots and 11 hit" the unit doesn't argue as much as they would if there was a 'DM' saying the same thing.

This is undoubtedly a problem--the belief among participants that outcomes were being decided by moderator biases and not by their own actions.

In my experience, most of this can be resolved by a combination of effective moderating (which requires some skill and experience, hence the difficulty of using a RPG format as a generally-disseminated training tool) and good post-simulation debriefing. It is often the case that what participants attribute at first to moderator bias is actually due to their own lack of information ("You didn't realize the police chief was the brother of the school principal? That's why the police were unenthusiastic about guarding the school after the principal had been fired and replaced with an outsider.")

I also wouldn't underestimate similar problems in electronic simulations ("I would have killed that BMP if my mouse hadn't stuck/if the physics modeling was more accurate/if I had been able to hear it like I could in real life").

All this discussion has me wanting to work on one...

[120mm]

This is undoubtedly a problem--the belief among participants that outcomes were being decided by moderator biases and not by their own actions.

In my experience, most of this can be resolved by a combination of effective moderating (which requires some skill and experience, hence the difficulty of using a RPG format as a generally-disseminated training tool) and good post-simulation debriefing. It is often the case that what participants attribute at first to moderator bias is actually due to their own lack of information ("You didn't realize the police chief was the brother of the school principal? That's why the police were unenthusiastic about guarding the school after the principal had been fired and replaced with an outsider.")

I also wouldn't underestimate similar problems in electronic simulations ("I would have killed that BMP if my mouse hadn't stuck/if the physics modeling was more accurate/if I had been able to hear it like I could in real life").

All this discussion has me wanting to work on one...

Excellent points. As a recon guy in a former life, I used to be greatly frustrated by the lack of ability to be properly "modelled" in any of the computer games.

I was restricted to, at first, maneuvering my Troops as a single icon, and then some computer wank did me the "favor" of "allowing" me, to obviously great inconvenience to himself and the replication, to maneuver Platoon icons.

And then my Division commander chewed butt for the CAV not seeing anything, and getting killed right away....

I think with any kind of simulation, it's more about testing systems and staffs than achieving some kind of net result at the end, anyway, just because all of the variables at play.

[AmericanPride]

I do not think a COIN simulator is viable at the tactical level because a COIN simulation is inherently political. Many have already mentioned the obvious problems in modelling the complex relationships in a COIN environment. A fully simulated tactical COIN simulator would be simplistic at best, which is a problem with nearly all games which attempt to model any kind of political environment. I think this kind of simulation would be best utilitzed as a staff tool at battalion or higher. Using the model I suggested earlier, the S3 and S2 could take their traditional roles (Blue Force and OpFor, respectively), the S5 as the most influential civilian demographic in the AO, the S9 (if available) as any agencies in the AO, and the S4 possibly as other friendly forces in the AO (if any). Since there's likely to be multiple OpFor and civilian groups, people can be pulled from the S2 and S5 sections (or the other remaining sections) as necessary. All the while, the S6 can make sure the simulator is functioning properly since there'd be little need for any kind of moderator. The system wouldn't require anything more than someone knowledgeable in a common programming language (PHP, C++, etc) and access to the internet.

Further Note: All of this could be made available through a master site (even AKO), where the staffs can enter and play their respective scenarios, using a basic options menu common to any game to design the desired scenario. My inspirations for this idea were this game and this one. The first one uses PHP to model the classic Diplomacy board game (no moderator necessary) and hosts hundreds of simultaneous games; the second models the whole of the Star Wars universe; of course, that kind of scale is not necessary for COIN purposes. Both of these are free to the users.

[davidbfpo]

I have merged seven threads today, which all refer to wargaming and small wars. A couple of threads refer to major wars: South China Sea and Iraq - so have been left alone.

[Rex Brynen]

One of my undergraduate students, Alex Langer, is currently designing a wargame of the Syrian civil war as a class project--you'll find a link to the instalments in his "designer diary" below. I'm sure he would welcome comments, although he is only likely to see them if they are made on the original blog posts at PAXsims: http://paxsims.wordpress.com/tag/gam...ian-civil-war/

[Rex Brynen]

One of the issues that has been casually discussed at recent professional conferences (MORS, Connections, etc.) is the small number of women within the ranks of professional national security gamers. PAXsims therefore put together a virtual panel discussion on the topic, featuring women who work in the field. You’ll find the results here:

http://paxsims.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/women-and-professional-wargaming/

[AdamG]

1000 Days of Syria is a hypertext-based historical fiction game centered on the first 1000 days of the Syrian Civil War. Created in 2014 by Mitch Swenson, it is considered to be one of the first examples of an electronic literature newsgame.[1][2][3][4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Days_of_Syria
http://1000daysofsyria.com/