The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming ConferenceHey, I'm out of here early today, so you're only getting part of today's stuff. It's my birthday, deal with it.
Today we've got Tim Wilkie on the podium, starting out by thanking the CASL team that's hosted the conference, and they all deserve a huge thanks for their hard work as the hosts.
Navigating the Archipelago of Excellence
Lots of folks doing great wargaming work in lots of places, but not talking together particularly well.
How do we engage with each other?
What are the incentives to engage with each other?
Efforts to Engage Wargaming:
-- Strategic Gaming Roundtable (quarterly series) - in person roundtables and discussions; some are streamed but not recorded. (these are the ones that I tend to live-blog when I can make it)
-- Lectures on Strategic Gaming (educational opportunity for game designers) - learn about how wargaming works for novices and journeymen entering the field of professional wargaming
-- CASL Wargaming Bibliography. And of course, we've got our own here at GrogNews, too (look up top at the tabs below the header)
-- MORS. Yeah, whoop-freakin-ee, MORS. (the problem with MORS is that unless you're connected to the US military and have a security clearance you can't get in the door, so throw out all the academics, foreigners, hobbyists, etc)
-- Online Resources: PaxSims, Wargaming Connection, Play the Past, GrogNews, Dr Sabin's Yahoo groups (pretty sure we've got all these linked on the left sidebar)
and a big thanks to Tim for pimping GrogNews to the assembled masses
What are the incentives for keeping people engaged?
-- Part of our problem in sharing our work, and publishing/publicizing is that we don't own a lot of our own work, and we're things doing for other people. They may be classified, or just touchy subjects.
-- Not everything we do has a clear outcome and tangible benefits that can be defined for our hierarchies to justify our continued engagement in this community.
-- "Lost in Translation" - no clear definition of wargaming. Dr Yuna Wong: "Wargaming is what wargamers do."
Outreach - Engagement - Collaboration
Three similar facets of working together.
Need to do a lot more within the wargaming community.
Other venues for engagement:
Origins War College
IITSEC
GameTech
By: Brant
For other venues of engagement, I would add academic conferences (or journals) in fields including game studies, digital humanities, and information studies (as well as more familiar disciplines like strategic studies).
ReplyDeleteMatt - that was Tim's list that he was discussing during the last presentation. I think it's a fine suggestion, but he was the one nominating the options.
ReplyDeleteIt was your birthday? I didn't know. Damn, man, Happy Birthday!
ReplyDeleteThanks - it wasn't a big deal, but I did have to hit the road early b/c of it.
ReplyDelete