Video Coverage of Connections UK

By: Brant

CONNECTIONS 2013 Conference on Professional Wargaming

CONNECTIONS 2013 Conference on Professional Wargaming
The Connections 2013 conference will be held 22-25 July in Dayton Ohio, near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Connections is the only national event dedicated specifically to professional military wargaming. Organized and chaired since its beginning in 1993 by (now retired) Air Force COL Matt Caffrey, the annual Connections conference has worked to advance the art, science and application of serious wargaming by bringing together all elements of the field (military, commercial and academic) so participants can exchange information on achievements, best practices and needs.
The theme for 2013 is: "Enhancing Wargaming Support to Budget Decisions." Given the current and future uncertainty over US Department of Defense budgets, this is a timely theme indeed.

Another valuable element of Connections is the chance to meet leaders from across the spectrum of wargaming. Past attendees and speakers have included Larry Bond, James F. Dunnigan, Joe Miranda, Al Nofi, Peter Perla, John Prados and many more.
Keynote speakers for this year are:
- COL Chris Froehlich, Chief Strategic Planning Division, Air Force Material Command
- Dr. Peter Perla, author of The Art of Wargaming, Lead, Wargaming, Centre for Naval Analysis
- Dr. Thomas Allen, Deputy Director for Studies and Analysis, Joint Staff

Connections is open to all contributors to the field of professional wargaming: military, government, defense contractor, academic, and recreational. It is an unclassified event. Many of the attendees are recreational wargamers in their spare time, but the emphasis of the conference is on discussion of activity and issues in professional wargaming, from the military, commercial and academic perspectives.

See the conference website and agenda at http://connections-wargaming.com/
Contact Matt Caffrey at matthewbcaffreyjr - at - gmail.com for further information.
Thanks for your interest,
Brian Train

By: Brant

Connections - Day 4, But Just The Beginning

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Hey, 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.

CASL Wargaming Community Engagement Efforts
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

Connections - Day 3

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Day 3 Panels
(these aren't all 1 panel; I glommed a few together and left out one or two I didn't feel I could capture well)

Anchors in Time: Handoffs Between Board Games & History (Jeremy Antley)
Games use narratives drawn from when they were created; gives them “temporal fingerprints” that place them in a place in time
Increasing ‘soft’ factors in hobby/wargames; factors can be highly debatable

Why do historians have antipathy towards games?
- Perceptions of source material
- Counter-factual narratives?
- Lack of ‘established knowledge handoffs’ – historians don’t know/understand the material of wargames
- Willingness to deal with unwritten sources (presenter’s background is studying peasants, who don’t have written sources)

What is “authoritative” information? Before it goes into “history” how is it “validated” in such a manner that keepers of history will accept it?
- More info on models/sources used to design
- What were the designer’s aims and what was he trying to do?

Top-Down Model on board games’ ability to simulate war (Sabin)
- Concentrates on outputs and observed effects
- Players understand mechanics and model
- Relatively easy to modify
- Crusader Kings II vs Twilight Struggle

Design involves abstraction
Board games can generate knowledge through their abstraction; can question how the abstractions were emplaced and models were developed
Videogame abstraction is very ‘black box’
Board games guided by narratives; video games guided by code
Design compresses time, but doesn’t compress thinking with history
Superpowers at War vs 1989: The Dawn of Freedom

Useful sources for tying games to history
- Design notes / lineage of design and mechanics
- Podcasts and background
- Blogs and blog posts w/ comments and interactions
- Forums
- Playtest notes & discussions as model evolves

Because board games use narratives, design has to be validated (or at least tacitly acknowledged) for the model and theme to be accepted (esp for COIN)
Historical texts are passive; games are active
Validation is what’s needed to tie the two together.


Archives and Documentation of Military Simulations
Dr Henry Lowood (Stanford)
The Cabrinety Collection of videogames, about 1350 linear feet of archive material, all as digital/videogames from mid-70s to mid-90s (Magnavox Odyssey to N64, roughly).
Did you know that there was an Atari game for Eastern Front (1941) published back in 1983 for the Atari 400/800? The volume of copies sold was apparently roughly 2/3 of the total sales of Atari 400/800 platforms.
Because the catalog is alphabetical by “author” you get E.T and Eastern Front consecutively.
As they’ve gone through and started cataloging the collection, they haven’t opened a box that didn’t have at least 2-3 wargames in it.
Because all the boxes, packaging, etc are all intact, you can analyze the ways in which the games were presented commercially. For example, Road to Moscow (WWII computer game) looks a lot like a board game in its packaging and presentation. Rules, tables, graphic presentation looks like it was lifted straight out of a board game. Because of the paper-presentation with the games, even if the games never run on a computer again, they still have value for their paper artifacts.
Stanford project “How They Got Game” on the history of videogaming / archiving the games. One of the first tasks they went at was the history of wargaming & simulation and how the commercial press treated coverage of the military sims. (The first cover of WIRED featuring Bruce Sterling’s “War is Virtual Hell”). ...building up through the 73 Easting sim.
HPS Sim’s archives, stored at Stanford where they were the academic partners with HPS for some STTRs and responsible for cartography and archiving (among other things). Among the cartography work, they were digitizing the German general staff maps of the 1940s. Trying to get a complete set of maps on Eastern front, and piece together a complete set (turns out some of them were never printed by the Germans at the time). Some are commercially available from HPS. Archives of HPS games include design notes, reviews of games, online AARs, forums, blogs, etc. Sample included a very dense table created by a user for Squad Battles with weapons stats for Vietnam-era battles.


Data Curation and Conflict Simulation, or What’s Really in Larry Bond’s Basement
Dr Matt Kirschenbaum
What is “data curation”?
The community’s data is expensive and time-consuming to gather; sometimes classified; subject to revision; needed for validation and assessment
Actions needed to maintain digital research data and other digital materials over their entire life-cycle and over time for current & future generations of users. Includes processes of needed for good data creation and management and capacity to add value.
Data has a life-cycle and preservation begins at creation
Preservation alone isn’t enough, but it also needs active and on-going management, and it will have value to future users that you cannot anticipate.
1898, Janes’ Fighting Ships and Janes’ Naval Wargame used the same blocks to print the images in the research book as well as the wargame.
--- extended discussion of, literally, what's in Larry Bond's basement, with regards to his notes, data, versions, etc as Harpoon has developed over the years ---


By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, Luminaries Demo'ing Games

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, afternoon sessions

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Afternoon session

I missed some of the introductions when I was in the wrong room. D'oh!

Anders Frank (Swedish Defence College) is discussing the development of wargaming in the Swedish military.
Low-fidelity wargames that focuses on "good enough" and capture the major attributes of warfare without detail overkill. Designed for good gameplay to learn by doing.
Pros: shorter dev times; day to learn & use; increased freq of use; engages students
Cons: Some responsibility shifted to instructors; well-suited for their base design purpose, but not more generalizable; require certain pre-req level of knowledge

First game was SSM: Simple Surface warfare Model
Cadet course in naval/littoral warfare for basic tactics
(video demo of the game)
Another game: MAO - Master of Air Operations

Lo-fi wargame issues
-- Maintaining students suspension of disbelief
-- Over-enthusiastic team "Gamer mode"
-- Not enough time for iterative use
-- essential/delicate relationship between gaming & debriefing

Wargaming research
-- Document structure & knowledge of wargaming
Build off of pedagogy, interaction, etc

"Gamer mode": desire to win over-rides the desire to learn, and rational game-based decisions take over rational real-life decisions


Ellie Bartels (CASL) talking about GEMSTONE.
Originally created to support a CISA/SPOLIC program in ICTF; mostly foreign students (20-30 nations represented)
Models US FM 3-24; doesn't have to model reality, has to be in line with doctrine
Why multi-method gaming? Social science of COIN / Systems Dynamics Modeling
-- Social science of COIN: complex causality and mix of hard/soft metrics
-- SD: dynamic adjudication that lets red & blue impact the environment
Discussion of Pearl Conflict, the actual scenario run last year
-- Blue team is 5 sub-teams, 1 nat'l gov't, plus 5 regional subordinate gov'ts
-- Red team is 5 independent non-coordinating teams; red team played by alumni from host nation
Turn sequence (will post graphic later) in which 1 day of game-play = 1 year of game time.
A lot of coordination btw blue teams in which they move resources / assets / budget around the country.
Player outputs are metrics (scaled scores + GIS data) and qualitative feedback (headlines & narrative)
Key findings:
-- GEMSTONE fills hole in DOD model, strat level, limited resources, host-nation focused
-- MMG eases staff burden while maintaining complexity
-- SD model provides a consistent underpinning to inform students



Dr Stephens Downes-Martin, talking at the level of serious, high-stakes wargamers
The Three Witches of Wargaming: Boss, Sponsor, Players
They are the three people who will interfere with your game
Even if they were once expert wargamers, they are not now (their experience will be perishable)
They will want to 'help' your design process; if they do it at the beginning of the process you can recover, but if they do it on day one of your game, it's too late
You need to have the professional courage to stand up for your design and face down higher-ranking leadership
The gamble is when the holes in your design will show through (before or after your sponsor rotates out)

The boss: research shows that once a practitioner ("doer") is moved to leadership (responsible for overseeing "doers") and then moves back to doing (i.e., giving you advice as a practitioner) they are not as effective as they were before. You can reduce these conflicts by ensuring your boss stays informed with your developments.

The players: you're not "inviting" senior leader to play in your game; you're "recruiting" them. Keep the players focused on the objectives of the sponsor (the four-star who may not be there) instead of their personal thoughts on what's happening. Explain what the sponsor is wanting and recruit them to lead the game cell through the game as designed.

The sponsor: fixing the sponsor can potentially fix the other two. You want the sponsor to bring to you a clearly-articulated problem and some guidance on participants. What you usually get is a poorly-thought-out solution with no real problem articulated. Or you get a sponsor that's too busy to talk to you, and puts an "action officer" in the middle of the communication flow.
You need to meet with the sponsor, not the action officer, not matter how much their subordinates claim to represent it. Don't start until you meet the sponsor. Need a full-scale analysis with the sponsor
4 questions:
-- What do you want?
-- Why do you want it? (and if they mention stakeholders, drill down about why they want it)
-- Why don't you have it already? (a wealth of information: bureaucratic issues, incompetence, etc?)
-- When are you leaving? (establishes your time horizon)
(No known correlation between being good at your job and being good at analyzing your job)


By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, morning sessions again

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

As per Connections tradition, we didn't make it past the first panel and we're already off-schedule.

---

1030 – 1200 "Needs Pull," Defense Decision Support Wargaming Today
Co-chairs: Prof Stephen Downs-Martin & Col Westy Westenhoff
Speakers:
Approaches to Title X Gaming: Concepts or Capabilities, Doug Ducharme Shawn Burns, Naval War College
Wargaming In Support of Science and Technology Decision- Making, Paul Vebber, Naval Underseas Warfare Center
Aids to Effective Contingency Planning, Westy Westenhoff, Col USAF (ret) Checkmate

---

Shawn Burns
Talking about Title X wargaming, which are the Congressionally-mandated annual (or semi-annual) exercises that are supposed to look forward to future force requirements, capabilities, strategies, and commitments. Great slides that lay out the legal requirements for the Title X wargames, by citing and highlighting the legal/policy documents that specify the requirements.

How do diff's btw service approaches matter? (analytical vs educational)

Paul Vebber, who is not here representing NUWC, associated with NUWC, affiliated with NUWC, or any way whatsoever on the same planet on NUWC.
Talking about how wargaming can be used in support of science and technology, and using wargaming to explore S&T concepts
"It's all fun & games until someone loses an eye. Then it's fun you can't see." - James Hetfield

Don't argue over what's a "game" or what's a "simulation" but focus instead on the verbs: "gaming" and "simulating".
Types of games being used for S&T
-- BOGSAT
-- Semi-adjudicated, resembled COA wargaming w/ action -> reaction -> counteraction
-- Contested, with head-to-head performance, but with the caution of "black box" effects where players can't see "why" certain things work.
-- Full CPX, w/ live and non-cooperative red-team

Building an S&T game requires a solid understanding of the customer and purpose. Also want to understand what decisions have already been made, and whether or not your purpose is merely to advocate on behalf of the sponsor. Perhaps you need to "help" the sponsor identify the likely ways in which his product/process/idea will be attacked.

SW, Ep3 - RotS scene with flying robots carrying buckets of lava - what is the question to which "Flying robots carrying buckets of lava" is the answer?
Why are we putting xyz gadget into the game? BECAUSE WE CAN

Design to detail or design to effect
--- "simulation fidelity" - cram in all the details vs "player understanding" - how much time and effort the players can muster for it
--- scenario design that matches echelon of analysis with echelon at which effects are discernible
--- design and implementation of the red force



COL(R) Westenhoff now addressing contingency planning

Feasibility, cost, time, and risk estimation
- National decision-makers have big questions and few big questions have a pat answer
First task in a wargame: Don't lose
- Avoid failure, and anticipate an active adversary
(will admit to getting a little distracted in here, and didn't take great notes while listening... sorry)
Wargames can influence decisions about wars, and can alleviate burdens of cognitive fallacies.
Participants should strive for integrity and fidelity.


By: Brant

Connections - Day 2, morning sessions

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Dr Kjonnerod kicking off the real sessions with a discussion of how the wargaming community needs to pull together more and meet their counterparts and find solutions that other people are already having success with.

Uh, we tried that after last Connections, and were met with stunning indifference on the part of most of the professional wargaming community.

Matt Caffrey loves to talk about the importance of wargaming, and loves to address lessons of pre-WWII wargaming at the Naval War College and how lessons learned in those events informed their decisions, especially in the Pacific. When I get Matt's links to those articles / stories / books, I'll link or post them.

Dean Robert Rubel (NWC) is talking about current status of wargaming at the Naval War College. He notes that the topics that their constituents are interested in are among the toughest to wargame, and are going in new and different directions.
"Fast and objective" are still key requirements for wargaming. Can we use computers as an impartial umpire? If so, how do we impartially adjudicate non-kinetic factors?
Participants are a key component of wargames, and where senior staff/flag officers would show up for weeks at a time for the exercise, these days they only show up for a few days, max. "Fast" now means that useful game feedback comes quickly enough to be meaningful to the participants, not just that the computer calculates it quickly.
Networking players is not enough - need a way to make the interactions more meaningful.
No such thing as machine objectivity, since all machines are programmed by people. Can run tactical-level games that address kinetic actions, but at the operational/strategic levels need to bring in non-kinetic factors.
Three ways to bring in other factors into a wargame: portray it, represent it, or talk about it.
Talk about it = bring in SME's to address the exercise on how their domain will impact what's going on.
Represent it = some form of rules-based mechanism to account for the effects.
Portray it = played as a full partner.
Systematic vs Heroic vs Disruptive Warfare: disruptive warfare is based around "outlasting" the other guy (insurgency, commerce raiders, etc). A great example of "disruptive warfare" is Washington in the AWI.

Dr Philip Sabin is being web-conferenced in through a video link, and it sounds like he's in an echo chamber on his end.
First slide of Sabin's talk is

Dunnigan was WRONG
Rubel was WRONG
Perla was WRONG
Sabin was WRONG

As 2 of those guys are in the audience (and one of them was just speaking), it got a chuckle.
Dunnigan was wrong in that manual wargaming has not died out, and in fact, the numbers of titles are expanding. Among the reasons it's not died out include the lack of technological obsolescence (can still play board games from 40+ years ago, but can't play computer games from 10 years ago), and budgetary issues. Sabin's key reason that board wargaming is still popular is the accessibility and transparency of the designs.

Rubel was wrong because he was advocating a professionalization of the wargaming community in an attempt to weed out the poor designs. Sabin's argument is not to narrow the wargaming field, but to widen it as much as possible so that you have more educated consumers who can recognize poor design, as well as customers who may be capable of creating their own game rather than have to bring in someone. As an example, he shows some of the works of his students who have created games within the parameters of his master's program at King's College and had students turn out some great work, despite never having played a wargame.

Perla was wrong in that trying to account for the "black swans" ignores the variability in war that's not caused by them. (Here we go again...) Is every bit of variability in war due to "black swans" or are there other ranges that can inject necessary variability, but still with a reasonable likelihood of outcome?

Sabin war wrong: "Lost Battles" was intended to be a form of scholarship as well as recreational game. However, for ancient warfare, the volume of scholarship generated by the academic world far outweighs the amount of evidence available to scholars. Wargames force players to make decisions in the eyes of the participants.

Sabin admits he's being deliberately contrarian to make some points.
- Manual wargames are increasingly vibrant and useful even in a digital age
- Wargame design is more art than science and needs to be more accessible
- Chance is essential to wargames, but the unexpected cannot dominate
- Wargames are only taken seriously by those who actually play them (if then...)


Dr William Lademan, MCWL
"Wargaming as a Substrate for Innovation"
Without a good definition of what a wargame is, we're all partitioners, if not professionals.
Without those definitions, there's no lexicon that can unify the discussion of terminology such that we're all speaking the same language.
As a substrate, wargaming is required for innovation.
Wargaming is a great vehicle for innovation to influence and drive strategic changes. Better to have 2 cardboard carriers sunk and learn the lessons rather than learn them with real people.
Comment of MCWL as the "headlights" of the Marine Corps to look forward.
Title X wargaming - fundamental responsibilities enshrined within the the US Code that created DoD' includes the execution of annual wargames to address future capabilities in context of Title X responsibilities
Wargame definition: an artificial vehicle made up of a field of variables that replicates conflict and allows the human intellect to consider a real problem.
-- Variable - a function that may assume difference values in time and space. Too few variables and it's just tic-tac-toe; too many variables and it's too unwieldy.

Start off with objectives of the wargames
Develop an estimate of the situation: Force, Domains, Threat, Risk
Strategy / Theory of Action to help shape the enemy through Freedom of action (maximize yours, eliminate his); Cohesive user of power; Misdirection --> allows operational decision-making
(Discussion of how to wargame Joint Operational Access Concept, using a model that incorporates a series of "bands" of enemy activities as you approach the area where you want to access.)
Wargaming process:
-- Preparation (organization of variables)
-- Execution (entanglement) - not there to control, but to facilitate
-- Assessment (coherence)

(Q&A, but I'm not going to try to capture it)


By: Brant

Streaming Connections

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

I'm not going to try to fully liveblog-as-I-go this time, but instead I'm going to point you toward NDU's "Livestream" of the Connections sessions. I'll still post things during the conference, but not necessarily a running commentary.

By: Brant

Connections - Day 2 schedule

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Day 2, Tuesday, 24 July

0800 - 0810 Welcome
Prof. L. Erik Kjonnerod, Center for Applied Strategic Learning, NDU
0810 - 0950 Keynote Addresses,
Moderator: Mr. Matt Caffrey, Col USAF (ret), AF Material Command
Speakers:
Dean Robert Rubel, Dean of Naval Warfare Studies, Naval War College
Prof Phil Sabin, King's College London, Wargame Designer, Author
Dr. William Lademan, Director, WGing Div, USMC Warfighting Lab

1030 – 1200 "Needs Pull," Defense Decision Support Wargaming Today
Co-chairs: Prof Stephen Downs-Martin & Col Westy Westenhoff
Speakers: Approaches to Title X Gaming: Concepts or Capabilities,
Doug Ducharme, Naval War College
Wargaming In Support of Science and Technology Decision
Making, Paul Vebber, Naval Underseas Warfare Center
Aids to Effective Contingency Planning,
Westy Westenhoff, Col USAF (ret) Checkmate

1430 - 1600 "Opportunities Push," Developments/Potential of Popular Wargaming
Co-chairs: Chris Carlson & Gordon Bliss
Speakers: Miniatures/Figure, Alan Zimm
Print/Board, John Prados, WG designer, historian
Computer, Paul Vebber


By:

Connections Day 1 - Wargame Design Panel

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

Current panel is Joe Miranda, Dr John Prados, and Al Nofi talking about how to design a game. After a few humorous war stories about early game play and game design, they started talking about how things have developed over the years.
Prados got started by buying his own posterboard & cardstock and trying to develop his own prototypes of forthcoming TAHGC designs.
Al Nofi has noted that where TAHGC used the same CRTs, rules outlines, etc forever, SPI wanted to really change the way the games themselves were built on their research of the situations being modeled, the victory conditions, etc. The research for the articles that accompanied the games in S&T were pretty heavily researched such that the articles and rules could almost footnote each other.
Prados' contrast to that was that his approach was to put a scenario on the map & counters first, then start adjusting based on the research, but only after the initial draft was done.
Nofi: "Scrimmage was just Firefight with a football."

Question from the audience about game design failure - after research and design and successful
creation of an actual game, there are still 2 points of failure: playtesting and rules writing/editing.
Prados: "Evolution of the rules framework has to proceed in tandem with the design as it approaches testing."
Nofi: "One of the most difficult things about rules is getting people to read them."
Nofi on playtesting your own stuff: "You're thinking the rule, but you may not be playing the rule, as it's written."

By: Brant

Connections Day 1 - Joe Miranda's Wargame Design 101, part 2

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

So someone just asked Joe Miranda "how long does it take to design a wargame?"
Joe started with the stock answer of "it depends" but then follows up with "I've got it down to about a week."
That collective groan you heard was every game designer in a 10-mile radius ready to kill Joe, as all of the folks in the room who don't understand wargame design now think that this is just some rote, automated process that just involves a few days of looking up ORBATs and then you crank out a game, and how could this possibly take you 3-4 months to fully flesh out the design and why the heck are we paying you to do this project for the government when we could just go get Joe to do it in a week even though we totally don't understand at all that he's building those one-week projects off of a tried-and-true rules engine that bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we need in our non-hobby-game way.

ugh.


Someone just asked about the "golden BB" and/or "black swan" effect. See our discussion here or here about that in the GameTalk feature.

By: Brant

Connections Day 1 - Joe Miranda's Wargame Design 101

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

After a long discussion over lunch about the upcoming HADR GameLab scenario, Brian Train and I snuck into the back of the Joe Miranda's Wargame Design 101 talk. Like any Joe Miranda talk, it involves a lot of showing off his own work, and one of the discussions is about a new card-driven game system called the "commando" system. The first design will be Congo in the 60s, and other upcoming games on the drawing board are LRDG, US SOF in Iraq in '03, and something else that went by on the sled too fast for me to grab. If I can steal an image or two from Joe, I'll try to post them later. Essentially, you have some card-driven missions that determine what you have to do, and "operations" cards to help you do it.

By: Brant

Connections AARs

There are some Connections AARs around the web...

Brian Train's is here

Rex Brynen's wrapup is on PaxSims

Matt Kirschenbaum threatened to write one for Battles Magazine that should be in the next issue.
Matt's got another one online that mixes Connections coverage with some deep big-brain thought, too.

Others as I find them.

update: Larry Bond's slides from his talk on Persian Incursion (pdf download here)

By: Brant

Connections, Day 4, Working Group Outbriefs

Working Group outbriefs

First group outbrief on Expanding the Applications of Wargaming didn't spend any of their time talking about how wargame tools can actually be applied in other places, but spent their briefing talking about how to reach out to new audiences. The part where I got up and walked out to "stretch my back" was when the speaker devolved into an infomercial for one particular company, repeating over and over again how great that one company does their job, and how they do such great things for people, and how they're the recognized leaders in the field, and how this NDU faculty member who is supposed to be presenting an impartial working group is going to completely ignore anything else any other company has done as a success story. It did *not* reflect well on the working group that they seemed to be so into the tank for that contractor.

The Toward a Better Adjudication was more entertaining, but I didn't have the computer out to catch more of it.
The group split into 2 sub-groups. The first was discussing wargaming PMESII problems, and how social science models can inform them. He also noted the that if you take the "M" out of DIME, you get to "DIE".
Second discussion was how to fight futures wargames. Some of the key takeaways I grabbed were that (a) the enemy is watching your technology developments, just like you are, so these things should surprise you, and (b) try to look for and focus on the large *negative* possible outcomes that could be potentially catastrophic, rather than trying to get to the "best" answer.

The working group I was a part of - Building a Wargame Profession - should be entertaining... I'm curious to see how much of the presentation is actually reflective of the discussions that went on, or if they're reflective of the canned presentations that were thrown at us before the discussions.
Aaaaaand the roster goes up, with *BOTH* of my names spelled wrong. Geez folks... My name, and company (which was wrong on an earlier slide) were both on my registration. It can't be that hard to get it right.
There's an "objectives" slide on-screen right now that we never saw yesterday. I guess it would've been nice to know what our objectives were in the working group yesterday. So now we're running through the "sub"-presentations - each condensed to a single slide. Methinks there's a restroom break coming up in a bit (too much water at breakfast). Besides, there's been enough that didn't seem accurate enough for me that I had to walk away for a second.
This has now devolved into "here's why we can't/shouldn't/won't do this". News flash to folks: the plan is already in the can. It can be done. It will be done. It will probably be done before the working group gets re-convened.

By: Brant

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

Connections 2011, Day 3, Other Morning Panel

1010 - 1130 Toward More Comprehensive Wargame Adjudication Panel, Co-chairs: Jon Compton & Al Nofi
Speakers: Dr. Stephen Downes-Martin, Adjudication, the diabolus exmachina of wargaming; Rich Phares, The Why and How of Adjudication; Mike Markowitz, Wargaming the Future & the Future of Wargaming

as always, my comments in red

Dr. Stephen Downes-Martin talking about adjudication
Using it to solve useful conflict in a game between participants
NOT BOGSAT - it's not a wargame without a game, which implies the ability to figure out who won

Using the dice as a model to tell us what happened. Sorry Navy, there's a non-zero chance that the aircraft carrier would've sunk, and it just did. So now what?

How to build adjudication models looking into the future when no statistical model exists?
How to build adjudication models for things for which no statistical or historical model exists?
Posted the (in)famous spaghetti-bowl slide of the AfPak COIN and noted that this is the model through which the COIN needs to be adjudicated.
---- I think I was going a bit to fast to capture Dr Downes-Martin's true nuance here... please see his comments below

Deductive gaming* is useless - no statistical model. This is all inductive gaming.
---- ditto :)
If the adjudicators are trying to sort out the rules of the game as they work through it, why aren't they playing the game themselves first?
Multiple 'fraud factors' in wargames. Personal experience not always generalizable...
Design the game to include adjudicators as players and evaluate their inputs/outputs.
Design a belief-based system that includes player beliefs about self and adversary.

* later edit: Dr Downes-Martin was speaking of this particular context - PMESII and similar social science contexts

more after the jump

Connections 2011, Day 3, Morning Panel

0800 - 0950 Expanding The Application of Wargaming Panel, Co-chairs: Merle Robinson & Mark Montroll
Speakers: Steven P. Webber, Lt Col, USAF, AF Future Capabilities WG; Garth Jensen, About MMOWGLI; Skip Cole (whose arrival we're awaiting); Larry Bond, designer extraordinaire
(as always, we're going to try to link to the slides)

First up, Garth Jensen talking about MMOWGLI
What is MMOWGLI? (slide of Rorschach blot)
Online game designed to find and collectively grow breakthrough ideas to some of our most "wicked problems" - those 21st century threats that demand new forms of collaboration and truly outlying ideas
First scenario dealt with piracy off the coast of Somalia
Three books being highlighted:
Bennis, Organizing Genius
Senge, The Fifth Discipline
Schwartz, The Art of the Long View
---- and holy crap, -zero- mention of Surowiecki!?
Genesis of MMOWGLI from ONR, trying to get "innovations" into the hands of users
Hostility/indifference from Pentagon to ONR's "game-changing technology"
Discussions with the Institute For The Future about technology and how to leverage it.
---- Question to the crowd about how many people had been to IITSEC, disappointingly few hands went up...
Had some ideas coming from elsewhere on the ideas that no matter the interface or flashiness of the game, the game itself lives in the minds of the participants
---- a point that would be well-remembered by the last presentation from yesterday about Global Engagements
Mention of knowledge accidents - what happens in the brain when the 'aha' moments occur
Picked the Somali piracy scenario because (a) it's unclass, and (b) everyone has an opinion on it

Actual run of the game:
- 3 chapters set up by video: Somali-Yemeni union, and the aftermath
Play of "cards"
- Innovate (positive-ish)
--- Reaction cards: expand, counter, adapt, another one I didn't get quick enough
- Defend (negative-ish)

presentation cut off for time, but will try to get more later in Q&A.

more after the jump, including Larry Bond!

Connections 2011, Observations

A few observations:

1) *Big* crowd compared to last year. lots of agencies here, with no significant reduction in the 'regulars' like Markowitz, Nofi, Robinson, Gresham, etc.

2) Lots of people who had no clue how deep and rich wargaming is in both the military and (especially) the hobby world. The depth and breadth and decades of experience of the hobby crowd seems to be slightly overwhelming the military guys who are just trying to get a sense of what sort of wargaming is going on.

3) This leads to occasional things like yesterday's presentation of a 'wargaming tool' that is essentially a pretty-looking GUI on top of SharePoint-level functionality, because the creator had no clue what else was going on in the wargaming world.

4) Someone from TICM-Gaming should be required to be here, if only to see that FPS games have yet to be mentioned, except in passing and with much derision. I wonder, though, if they would disregard the entire conference because their pet projects aren't being lauded.

By: Brant

Connections 2011, Day 2, Demo Night!

Andean Abyss with Volko Ruhnke. Some very, very interesting mechanics on how to keep assets "underground" and how to juggle the turn sequence and look ahead to what's coming next and how much you want to try to do now, versus marshaling your strength and preparing for something bigger. A very interesting balance of mechanics that does well to simulate the non-kinetic/economic components of the situation.

By: Brant