Connections, Day 3, Working Group Session

1330 - 1630 Working Groups: Building a Wargame Profession, Co-chairs: Mike Garrambone & Erik Kjonnerod
Speakers: Mr. Mike Garrambone, Professional Society Concepts; Mr. Bret Givens, Professional Societies; Dr. Yuna H. Wong, Social Sciences of Societies; Col John Lister, Professional Gaming at Quantico; Ms. Renee Carlucci, MORS COP*--Wargaming; Ms. Elizabeth Bartels, Inculcating the New Wargamer

Starting with Michael Garrambone:
Practical analytical uses for games:
- gaining insights
- Sources of questions
- practice decisionmaking
- organize technical facts
- explore feasibility and implications of plans, concepts, or new technologies
- communicating ideas in vivid & memorable ways

Professional society: a org whose members share a professional status with the same occupation
Professional: a person whose occupation requires extensive education and skill, high degree of specialized training and competence
Professional Orgs: help to organize the group

What does a professional society or organization look like and how would it be organized?

Switch to Bret Givens to talk about types of certifications or other assessments of knowledge.
ANSI standards for professional certifying organizations.

We're starting to devolve into a bit of a discussion about what are wargames, what are games, what's in and what's out, and how do you draw the lines.

more after the jump


Dr Yuna Wong with a great quip. Explaining that MORS hasn't decided what "operations research" actually is and that the PoliSci folks finally decided that "political science" is "what political scientists do" she noted that we could spend a few days arguing about "what is a wargame" and not agree on a definition, or we could skip the argument, not agree, and get on with life.
She's mainly talking about communities of practice that share a common body of knowledge and interest.
Can you piggy-back off of an existing structure?
Need to establish what the core practices are, and inherently what to keep out.
Can you join a gaming community of practice if you're primarily a player, or must you design one?

4 categories of wargaming practice:
- Customer of wargaming
- Designer of wargames
- Player of wargames
- Analyst of wargames

Next up is COL John Lister, USMC, dpty director of wargaming at MCWL
MCWL is there to experiment and wargame possibilities to support future operations.
Quick explanation of MWCL's wargaming requirements and activities.

MCWL definition of wargaming: a wargame is an artificial vehicle that allows a human intellect to consider a real problem.
Much of their work is on the tabletop, and not driven using M&S processes.

Uses of wargaming at MCWL:
- assess and refine concepts & doctrine
- inform doctrine development
- develop concepts of employmnet
(others I couldn't type fast enough)

-- next speaker's not here, but Garrambone is handling her slides --
Talking about communities of practice still, and building it off of the MORS folks again.


Ellie's up next and will be talking about bringing in the newbies.
Plans to talk about Game Designer, from Yuna's categories above.
She's got a typology of games on-screen that is good, but misses some key points, in part because she's missed the point of the "game" - it's gotta have a winner/loser or it's *not* a game, it's a toy.
Current system of developing game designers is very master-apprentice driven and very informal.

By: Brant