zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — game and counter-game, FPS, Iranian nuclear attack ]

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Following up on two earlier posts [i & ii] on gaming a strike on Iran — from the FPS leagues…

The upper image shows “the designer of the first Iranian made Nuclear Energy computer game”, according to the tag-line in the Sydney Morning Herald game review, Iranian game promotes sacrifice and martyrdom — the image credit is AP.

According to the review:

In “Rescue the Nuke Scientist,” U.S. troops capture a husband-and-wife team of nuclear engineers during a pilgrimage to Karbala, a holy site for Shiite Muslims, in central Iraq.

Game players take on the role of Iranian security forces carrying out a mission code-named “The Special Operation,” which involves penetrating fortified locations to free the nuclear scientists, who are moved from Iraq to Israel.

To complete the game successfully, players have to enter Israel to rescue the nuclear scientists, kill U.S. and Israeli troops and seize their laptops containing secret information.

But there’s more: the game itself is a “tit for tat” move in an overarching game of games:

The “Rescue the Nuke Scientist” video game, designed by the Union of Students Islamic Association, was described by its creators as a response to a U.S.-based company’s “Assault on Iran” game, which depicts an American attack on an Iranian nuclear facility.

That would be the US designed Kuma\War game, Mission 58: Assault on Iran, described in the lower of my two frames.

As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran’s capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won’t be easy. Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Never before has so much hung in the balance… millions of lives, and the very future of democracy could be at stake.

Seems like it’s hanging in the balance still — the Kuma\War game was released in 2005, the Iranian response in 2007.

[ by Charles Cameron – board game and board-room simulation of an Israeli strike on Iran ]

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[graphic & headline from the New York Times]

[continuing from part I]

5.

Osiraq Redux

Karim Sadjadpour described a very different style of game in Foreign Policy just one day after Michael Peck’s description of Persian Incursion. It was conducted by the Brookings Saban Center, and also written up by Kenneth Pollack in the Center’s Middle East Memo of February 2010, and by David Sanger at the New York Times.

Here is Pollack’s description of the structure of the Brookings game:

The simulation was conducted as a three-move game with three separate country teams. One team represented a hypothetical American National Security Council, a second team represented a hypothetical Israeli cabinet, and a third team represented a hypothetical Iranian Supreme National Security Council.

As a scholar of religion, I would be tempted to add, after the manner of the Athanasian Creed, “Yet there are not three hypotheticals but one hypothetical.”

More:

The U.S. team consisted of approximately ten members, all of whom had served in senior positions in the U.S. government and U.S. military. The Israel team consisted of a half dozen American experts on Israel with close ties to Israeli decision-makers, and who, in some cases, had spent considerable time in Israel. Some members of the Israel team had also served in the U.S. government. The Iran team consisted of a half-dozen American experts on Iran, some of whom had lived and/or traveled extensively in Iran, are of Iranian extraction, and/or had served in the U.S. government with responsibility for Iran.

This game begins with an Israeli strike – that is to say, the strike itself is not what is gamed here: the game is designed to be “a day-long simulation of the diplomatic and military fallout that could result from an Israeli military strike against the Iranian nuclear program.” Again, I will not rehearse nor comment in much detail on what has been reported of play, both in Pollack’s official Brookings report on the game and in Sadjadpour’s account, noting only that the Brookings game features a response from Hizbollah which (as Michael Peck noted) was lacking in the board game.

6.

Differences of style

What interests me is the difference in style between the two games, the two approaches:

• The emphasis on the initial strike in Persian Incursion focuses that game more tightly on questions of materiel and logistics, while the Brookings game naturally puts greater emphasis on the responses of individuals and groups. And I’d suggest that the structures of the two games in some sense parallels that distinction:
• The board game is played by two players, typically experienced grognards, wargame hobbyists or designers, often with military backgrounds. Their skill is in decision-making in the context of such games, and Larry Bond has provided them with an exhaustively-researched briefing on the issues he considered salient.
• The board-room sim is played by a couple of dozen players, each of them already possessing their own highly detailed “takes” on the specific aspects of the game their voices will “represent”.

One might say that Persian Incursion is an entertainment and the Brookings game a high-level albeit informal strategic deliberation — but that comparison fails to account for the detailed research that has gone into PI — and the Harpoon gaming system which underlies it. Both games are serious attempts, at the limit of human imagination, to figure out — to “game” — one specific, now perhaps looming, future.

Taking both games with equal seriousness, then, we can say that both players of PI have Larry Bond and his two associates (in the form of those booklets, maps, target specs and so forth) as their intel resources, whereas the Brookings game features the combined (cooperating and competing) intelligences of the two dozen or so participants.  That’s not quite crowdsourcing, as is the Naval Postgraduate School‘s ongoing MMOWGLI anti-piracy game, but it is polyphonic — it allows and attends to a variety of voices…

Of course, if those various voices are selected in such a way that they form too much of a “choir” or “chorus” this advantage is diminished: there’s no great benefit to hearing a dozen or two versions of group-think. And while the individual voices in a group may in fact propose usefully distinct ideas, there’s always the possibility that some key factor or factors will be overlooked, because a single world-view is operating where a true polyphony would require a deeper and richer diversity.

Is Persian Incursion more practical, having a greater emphasis on actual force projection? Is Osiraq Redux more realistic, having a wider set of expertises to draw on?

7.

Omnium gatherum

For the sake of completeness, I should mention that a game not unlike the Brookings game of 2009 was played by a similarly qualified group at the behest of the Atlantic magazine in 2004, as reported by James Fallows. I was particularly intrigued by this piece because Mike Mazaar, with whom I once collaborated briefly, was playing SecDef.

What I’d hope for from ZP’s readers would be some discussion of these two different approaches to gaming, and of gaming itself– along with scenario planning — as a means of exploring possible futures where the impact downstream may be considerable.

The piece of the puzzle that I fear may be missing from both games, as those who know me will have guessed, is the potential influence of messianism — from the Israeli / Judaic, the U.S. / Christian Zionist, and the Iranian / Mahdist sides. But then I generally expect the seriousness of millennial aspirations to be discounted, and try to keep track of those things accordingly myself.

Three puzzle pieces that I would find relevant would be:

(i) the Ayatollah Khamenei‘s fatwa “that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons”;

(ii) Timothy Furnish‘s observation:

The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the Fatwa My own study of both geopolitics and of Shi`i traditions on the 12th Imam leads me to conclude that the clerical regime does NOT believe in nuking Israel (or anyone else), because while the Mahdi will return at a time of great violence and upheaval, there is no Shi`i teaching that creating such bloodshed would induce Allah to send him. Also, I think the ayatollahs are crazy like foxes, not literally crazy-and they know full-well what would be the Israeli (and perhaps American ) response to any use of nuclear weapons against Israel. The Mahdi would not be happy to return and rule over a radioactive wasteland..

For more detail, see also Furnish’s A Western View on Iran’s WMD Goal: Nuclearizing the Eschaton, or Pre-Stocking the Mahdi’s Arsenal?

and (iii) Benjamin Netanyahu‘s statement in opening the Knesset:

Our policy is guided by two main principles: the first is “if someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first,” and the second is “if anyone harms us, his blood is on his own hands.”

The first is “im ba l’hargekha, hashkem l’hargo” — a well-worn phrase that can be found in the Talmud and derives from Exodus; I’m unsure whether the second — “If anyone harms us, his blood is on his own hands” — comes from a Talmudic source, or whether it is an abbreviated restatement of Ezekiel 33 1-9.

8.

Some trivia for good measure…

As Michael Peck points out, the game’s graphic designers write Persian Incursion using a faux-Devanagari script more properly associated with Sanskrit and Hindu sources than Iranian Shi’ism…a minor pity, that.

And ha! — I’m left wondering whether the title, Persian Incursion, came to Larry Bond or his crew out of the ethers — or whether someone had been watching…

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Season 5, Episode 39?

GMTA?

[ by Charles Cameron — board game and board-room simulation of an Israeli strike on Iran ]

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1.

We suppose we can game the world.

It may in fact be the best thing we can do, or the only thing: we guess, guesstimate, estimate the possible outcomes of an act or series of acts — and somehow in there, we hope to match the major trends in the complexity we seek to understand with selected complexities of our own that we build into our games.

And yet as Richard Danzig noted in the opening paragraph of his Driving in the Dark: Ten Propositions About Prediction and National Security which I quoted here yesterday, “whereas routine, short-term predictions are generally right, strategic judgments about future environments are often, one might say predictably, wrong.”

So we have knee-jerk responses, which can suitably be expressed in barks or sound-bites, and we have deliberative inquiry, which requires suitably nuanced exegesis. And our games and simulations are attempts at the deliberative approach.

2.

The chess board:

So the question of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is once again in the air, and we would like to be able to peer as far down the chess-board as a Kasparov, computing the counter-move an adversary would make against a friend’s counter-move to the adversaries response to an initial move. Sadly, though, we all too often find ourselves in the bind that a senior US official in Iraq described to Anthony Cordesman a while back, where our best efforts at gaming the situation are “like playing three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you.”

Except that my own version of the board may be more accurate:

it’s more like an n-dimensional spider’s web, with multiple gravities, tugs, and tensions – and some of those tensions are in the category of known unknowns that one of your predecessors talked about, some of them unknown unknowns, and some of them literally unknowable – hidden in the hearts of more devious men than you, and known only to God.

3.

So, anyway, we game things out as best we can.

And since the idea of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities has been in the news of late, so have two attempts to “game” that particular possibility and its sequelae.

What interests me here is not the outcomes envisioned – but the inherent differences between the two games. Let’s take a look.

4.

Persian Incursion.

As Michael Peck — he splashed Persian Incursion into our consciousness with one post on Foreign Policy and another on Danger Room last week, not to mention an interview on NPR – puts it:

Persian Incursion is basically two games in one. There is a highly detailed military game of a seven-day Israeli air offensive in which Israel plans and executes its strikes while the Iranian air defenses try to stop them. But there is also a political game that unlocks the military aspect. Persian Incursion assumes that an Israeli attack is only possible if one of Iran’s neighbors — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or a U.S.-influenced Iraq — either publicly or tacitly allows Israeli entry into its airspace for the strike on Iran. (The rules state that though Israel could chance an initial airstrike without an agreement, it would need permission for follow-up attacks.) With that in mind, the game comes with various starting scenarios, such as a super-radical Iran that scares its neighbors into allowing Israeli access, or Turkish support for an Israeli strike (note that the game came out in 2010, before the current Israeli-Turkish spat).

Here’s how Clash of Arms, the publisher, describes the game packet:

Persian Incursion provides comprehensive and detailed information on:

• Orders of battle for the Israeli and Iranian Air Forces and the Iranian Air Defense Force
• Analysis of the Iranian nuclear and oil infrastructure
• Iranian ballistic missiles and Israeli ballistic missile defenses
• Target folders for Iranian nuclear facilities, oil terminals and refineries, and airfields
• Variable starting conditions

Components:

• Rulebook; Briefing Package and Target folders;
• 17 x 22″ Full color map;
• Short Deck of “Super Cards” (4.25 x 6″);
• 2 Full decks of playing cards (110 cards);
• Cardboard counters;
• Box and dice.

Now I am absolutely not the guy you want to ask about the game-play, or about the game’s possible implications for policy analysis. Michael Peck may well be that guy, but even he doesn’t leave the game with a clear sense of how things might play out in real time:

The real question of this exercise, however, is whether an Israeli strike on Iran is a good or bad idea. Persian Incursion’s answer is an unqualified “maybe.” Israel can’t stop Iran from retaliating with missile attacks and terrorism. But it also can’t guarantee complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps most importantly, the key to victory is winning the public-opinion, political war.

And when you get granular, “public opinion” turns out to mean the interwoven opinions of many, many and diverse people — some influential, some easily influenced, some whose world-view features a rigorous scientism, some a potentially wrathful deity – all of whom are themselves beset by a myriad of doubts, certainties, hopes, fears, bouts of toothache and who knows what else…

Modeling even one of those minds (and associated hearts) would be quite a trick…

So. That’s the “reference library” approach, to use Peck’s term:

Persian Incursion isn’t a novel — it’s a reference library inside a game. The background information included is staggering. Besides the rules book, there is a target folder and a briefing booklet listing the precise dimensions of Iranian nuclear facilities down to the meter…

The gamer has what we’ll assume is a highly accurate representation of the materiel side of things. Morale, at the granular level of a Netanyahu or a Khamenei?

Who can game the workings of a single human mind (and heart)?

[continued in Pt 2]

[ by Charles Cameron — parallels, opppositions, analysis, games, coincidentia oppositorum ]

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My friend Cath Styles, who has been developing an iPad playable version of my HipBone Games under the name Sembl for the National Museum of Australia, made a point I’ve been trying to make for a while now, with sweet lucidity, in a recent blog post:

A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.

That’s absolutely right, and it gets to the heart of my games and analytic practice — to see and acknowledge both parallelisms and differences, oppositions…

Oxford is the polar opposite of Cambridge as anyone at the annual boat race between them will tell you — yet they’re so similar that the term Oxbridge exists to distinguish them as a dyad from all else the wide world round…

Similarly, in the example illustrated above, Cath shows two items from the Museum collection that were juxtaposed by players of an early version of her game, and writes:

the Sembl players who linked the above branding iron to the breastplate – because both are tools for labeling bodies – cast new light on the colonial practice of giving metal breastplates to Aboriginal people.

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Since the essence of my own analytic style (and that of HipBone and Sembl games) is the recognition of parallelisms and oppositions, I was particularly interested to see one group of early Tea Party folk reaching out to the emerging Occupy movement. Here, then, are two posts in which we can see the beginnings of recognition that there may be a kinship between the two…

Occupy Wall Street: Another View:

You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?
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It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

That comes from a post on FedUpUSA, a site with the Gadsden flag as its web-logo that was [as “Market
Ticker”], one of the founding orgs behind the TP. It’s from someone who identified as a Libertarian Party activist.

Here’s another post from FedUpUSA, not so identified:

An Open Letter From FedUpUSA To Occupy Wall Street Protestors All Over The Country:

This is a letter to OWS from FedUpUSA, one of the original Tea Parties:
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We support you in exercising your First Amendment Right. We are outraged that any peaceful demonstrator would be assaulted or abused by any authorities.
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If you are protesting because there are no jobs— We stand with you.
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We are for a free economy and recognize that what we have now is NOT a free economy; it is not capitalism what we have is a fascist state or crony-capitalism. There is nothing free about doing business with Countries that manipulate their currencies to attract cheap labor. We agree that these jobs need to come back to America.
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If you are protesting because no one has gone to jail— We stand with you.
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Regardless of what is being said from the white house and media, we know that there are many in the financial district and the banks that have committed fraud and outright theft and we too want to see them prosecuted. We support the stop looting and start prosecuting.
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If you are protesting because everything costs more— We stand with you.
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We see prices rise in our food, gas, clothes yet our wages have stayed the same or have decreased. The Federal Reserve has bailed everyone out but us and not only are we going to have to pay for that, those bailouts make the price of everything else go up because it devalues our currency. We support monetary reform.
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If you are protesting because you are tired of our bought and paid for government on both sides— We stand with you.
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We are also against the banks and big corporations buying our politicians and writing laws that favor their special interests. We understand that our economy is broken BECAUSE of this and that all of our other issues will never be addressed as long as the financial elite control OUR government.
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We understand that these issues cross party lines and ideologies and effect each and every one of us. We also understand that these issues will never get fixed as long as we continue to let the media, the elite, and members of the government separate us by our differing ideologies.
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Only Together, can we Implement Change
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It is time, We Americans, put our ideologies in our back pocket and not let them separate us so that we can work together for this ONE COMMON GOAL: to get the special interest money and elite out of OUR Government and return it to US — the people.
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As long as the banks, largest corporations, and wealthy elite control our government, we will never have a representative republic and laws will continue to be passed that only benefit the few 1% at the expense of us 99
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Demand that NOT ONE MORE LAW gets passed until they pass:
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Lobby reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:

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Lobby any member of the US Congress outside of the district you live, work, or own a business.
Lobby a member of congress while they are physically outside the district they represent.
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Campaign Reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:
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For any one person, corporation, enterprise, group, union or the like, to donate more than $2,000 to any one candidate during one campaign period.
For any member of the media to deny equal access to competing candidates.
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These two laws will cut the control the Financial elite have on our government by leveling the playing field. You will have just as big as a voice with your representative as the big box retailer that resides in your town. Simply, it will end the Crony-Capitalism that is strangling our economy.
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I encourage all my fellow Tea Partiers to join Occupy Wall Street protesters in their non-violent, peaceful protests and together demand that the Government be returned to the people. After all, this is precisely what the Tea Party was intended to be before it was taken over and marginalized by the establishment politicians.

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FedUpUSA.org

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And we’re deep into John Robb territory…

What do you think? Do the parallelisms strike you, or the oppositions — or, perhaps, both?

FWIW, Cath’s Sembl version of my game looks like it is going to be a beautiful steampunk affair…

[ by Charles Cameron — hypertext, rhetoric, glass bead games, civility ]

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My second attempt at a format for online debate is, as I said, a variant on the “Dart Board” sometimes used for playing my HipBone Games (see, for instance, my solo game War is Sexy, says Dawn).

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The idea here would be to format a blog post and series of 7 comments by a Querent (the one with the Question) who may also be the Umpire — both roles would be issue-neutral — a Proponent who would propose and support a thesis, and an Antagonist who would oppose it.And I should add, right at the outset, that this is a formal process for the named participants — as a white tie debate at the Oxford Union is a formal process — no matter how raucus the kibitzers may get, and accordingly requires a day or two between moves to allow for consideration, research and preparation.

The Querent makes the first move in the first position on the board, giving it short move title (short enough to be typed on the board graphic in the space currently occupied by the word “issue‘) and a paragraph or so of move content setting forth concisely the issue to be discussed — ideally via an issue neutral anecdote or quote. After each move, the Querent (or a graphically inclined observer) would ideally update and post the game board after inserting the relevant move title.

[ Those who are not among the named participants may of course kibitz at any time… ]

The Proponent next carefully chooses a pithy quote or anecdote, gives it a move title (as above), and posts the move title, the chosen move content (the anecdote or quote selected), the link claimed (setting forth concisely the nature of his or her argument as it relates to the move content of the Querent‘s issue), and if she or he so chooses, a comment (the comments in a HipBone Game are intended for meta-conversations among the various players).

The Antagonist then similarly chooses an anecdote or quote, and posts move title, move content, links claimed — in this case, showing the links with both the issue as stated at position 1 in the Querent’s move, and the thesis as stated in position 2 in the Proponent’s move — and a comment if so desired.

Okay, that’s thesis and antithesis, the Umpire then posts a move title, some move content and links claimed to all three positions in play, with a comment if so desired, in the fourth position (labeled synthesis).

The rule is that whenever playing in a position which links via a board line to one or more previous moves, the links claimed must include explanations of how the move relates to those previous moves.

The Antagonist plays next in position 5 — playing move title, move content, links claimed, comment — providing an instance with which to dispute the thesis, and linking as per the rule just stated to the thesis proposed at position 2 — only!

Since position 5 is only connected to position 2 of those positions in play, no other links should be claimed.

Similarly, the protagonist then plays in position 6, a move which I’ve called the “prothetical” instance without a clue as to whether prothetical is a real word — tho’ I like it — linking only to the antithesis in position 2, which it seeks to refute.

Move 7 is by far the trickiest of the game, and is made by the Umpire, who now has to provide move content that synthesizes the game thus far, explaining links claimed to positions 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 (ie to the original thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but moving the synthesis to encompass also the two instances)…

But the Umpire can take consolation in the fact that in the final move 8, the Querent gets to raise afresh those questions which remain — now that both sides have had their say, and the Umpire has attempted reconcile them.

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Three quotes, the first one on debate:

Harmony among conflicting viewpoints, not the victory of one of them, should be the ultimate goal…

— from Bizell & Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, as quoted here

The second moving from debate to dialog:

One way of helping to free these serious blocks in communication would be to carry out discussions in a spirit of free dialogue. Key features of such a dialogue is for each person to be able to hold several points of view, in a sort of active suspension, while treating the ideas of others with something of the care and attention that are given to his or her own. Each participant is not called on to accept or reject particular points of view; rather he or she should attempt to come to understanding of what they mean.

— David Bohm, Science Order and Creativity, p 86

And the third, from Buddhist Madhyamika philosophy, moving into the contemplative realm where all answers are seen as the stepping off points for open questions:

I wanted to use one word in Tibetan that I’ve found very useful for myself… and this is the word zöpa.. this translates usually as patience or endurance or tolerance, but there’s this very subtle translation of zöpa, which is the ability to tolerate emptiness basically, which is another ways of saying the ability to tolerate that things don’t exist in one way, that things are so full and infinite and leave you so speechless, and so undefinably grand – and these are just descriptive words, but you have to use some words to communicate, I guess — the ability bear that, that fullness, like we’ve been talking about, not turning away, not turning away.

— Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, in (if I recall) a Shambhala-sponsored retreat video

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A blank Dart board, downloadable for your convenience: