The Games People Play
Fabius Maximus has hit his stride as a blogger with a highly informative set of posts on wargaming that later expanded to DNI.
War games, the antidote to “Victory disease”
Are war games a competitive edge of conventional forces vs. non-state 4GW foes?
The Achilles’ Heel of military simulations
At DNI:
During Millenium Challenge 2002
It is generally underestimated by the public (and even academics) how powerful games – especially free-play games- can be as a tool for learning; the cognitive potential of a well-constructed and rigorously moderated game is literally immense. ( and when coupled with mass-collaboration, social-networking, MMORPG technology a level of validity might be realized that the old Prussian Grossgeneralstab or RAND apparatchiks could only have dreamed. Unfortunately, a rigged game becomes a powerfully persuasive lie, so integrity is key if gaming is to guide decision-making in the real world) A few examples:
” The gamers argued that insights arose from immersion in play. In 1956 Joseph Goldstein noted that the war game demonstrated ‘ the organic nature of complex relationships’ that daily transactions obscured.War-gaming gripped its participants, whipping up the convulsions of diplomacy ‘ more forcefully…than could be experienced through lectures or books’.”
” A team from the Social Science Division [ at RAND ] posed a number of questions which they hoped the unfoldig month of gaming would resolve. Chief among them was whether gaming could be used as a forecasting technique ‘ for sharpening our estimates of the probable consequences of policies pursued by various governments’. Would gaming spark “political inventiveness“, and more importantly, how did it compare to conventional policy analysis? Did gaming uncover problems that might otherwise be neglected? And invoking the emerging touchstone of intuition, did the experience impart to policy analysts and researchers “ a heightened sensitivity to problems of political strategy and policy consequences?”
Sharon Ghamari- Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn [ emphasis mine]
Another example:
“What we encountered, though, once our game-called Therapy, as it happens-was finished, were two remarkable things, both of which Colin Powell and Richard Duke might have told us. First, of all the professions, psychiatrists and psychologists tended to do worst at the game; secondly, the synthetic process worked even better in reverse. Playing the game expanded people’s grasp of human nature in general and their particular group’s dynamics. But even more, watching people play revealed a depth of information about them, and about the world at large, that you would ordinarily expect only from months of official therapy“
The quote comes from an article “Wanna Play ?” in Psychology Today. Further insights in the article:
“In fact, the phrase “just a game” is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. Games are anything but “just” anything. They cover the gamut of human endeavor and come in every package and medium you can imagine. Last year in the United States alone, 126 million board-style games were sold for $1.14 billion; video and computer games accounted for another $5 billion. It is impossible to calculate how much people benefit from games:
* Games are primers on turn-taking, the basis of all relationships.
* They can solve major crises in industry and teach people not to pilfer pencils from the company storeroom; in fact, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on them for that.
* They can be training grounds for legendary generals and make the difference between winning and losing wars.
* Finally, and most important, games can reopen doors into the world of pretending and childhood, reminding us of unadulterated fun, sparking creativity
Psychologically speaking, games have a knack for setting us free”
Instead of reading about games, you should be playing one 🙂
January 24th, 2008 at 2:32 am
The discussion continues over at the DNI blog with a new paper posted by by Dag von Lubitz, Chairman of the Board of MedSmart:
What we should have learned from MC02
It’s worth a look!
January 24th, 2008 at 6:17 am
I’d like to game an idea entering a mind. Ideas can be infectious. We know this, and thus we can explore the spread of ideas using models drawn from epidemiology, an approach which Malcolm Gladwell takes in his book Tipping Point. Ideas can also be viewed as existing in an ecosystem, and thus what we know of genetics can be applied to them, as Dawkins suggested in coining the term "meme". Having said that, I’d still like to game an idea entering a mind. Specifically, I would like to game the way in which the idea that constitutes "martyrdom" (shahada) in an al-Qaida mind enters a mind that’s primed with the ideas of Tablighi Jamaat, for instance, and once it’s "in," conforms the idea of "obligation" (fard) that’s already present in TJ’s non-violent and apolitical version into the al-Q sense of the word — that "to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it"… I’m thinking of something along the lines of the kind of research that allows someone to write, describing the John Cunningham virus (JCV):
The thing is, we can manage a very brief verbal sketch of how an idea enters a mind and becomes part of a person’s "thinking" — and we can model in some detail the way that an idea spreads through a population — but we’re not very good at modeling, or gaming, thought processes. And from my POV, that’s the most fascinating challenge of all.My question is: what kind of game should this be, how do we set up the board, what markers shall we have for ideas or parts of ideas and for views or congregations of ideas, what rules do we need to use in combining them, etc — how do we get as close to a mental conversation as humanly possible.I happen to think that meditators will have quite a bit to teach us here, that the Tibetans may have a better vantage point than we as a culture do… because they’ve been watching the mind, and in particular watching its various coiled springs uncoil, and putting the process into words, for longer than we have. But it will take a whole new series of aha!s to really figure this out.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
[…] the Zenpundit note on this series is (as usual) worth a look. Esp. his comments on the nature and function of […]
January 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
[…] the Zenpundit note on this series is (as usual) worth a look. Esp. his comments on the nature and function of […]
January 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
[…] the Zenpundit note on this series is (as usual) worth a look. Esp. his comments on the nature and function of […]
January 25th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
[…] Zenpundit’s note on this series is (as usual) worth a look. Esp. his comments on the nature and […]
January 26th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Hi Charles,
The only Westerners who could play your game would be Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy, Tim Furnish, Juan Cole, Michael Scheuer and Bernard Lewis. :o)
On a more substantive note, your premise "I’d like to game an idea entering a mind. Ideas can be infectious. We know this, and thus we can explore the spread of ideas using models drawn from epidemiology, an approach which Malcolm Gladwell takes in his book Tipping Point. Ideas can also be viewed as existing in an ecosystem, and thus what we know of genetics can be applied to them, as Dawkins suggested in coining the term "meme" gave me an immediate visual image of an unfolding fractal pattern. Not sure why that was the case because I don’t think neuronal-synaptic patterns link like that. On further reflection, I imagined a 360 degree sphere of an unfolding root system network of increasing complexity as it radiated outward.
" "in," conforms the idea of "obligation" (fard) that’s already present in TJ’s non-violent and apolitical version into the al-Q sense of the word — that "to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty "
This kind of "obligation" reminds me of the On-Giri dynamic of the Meiji-Taisho-pre-1945 Showa period in Japan. Re; Benedict’s Chysanthemum & the Sword, The 47 Ronin etc.
January 26th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Yup. And we need, I think, a Ruth Benedict for the various contemporary Islams.
January 26th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Yes, but Ruth Benedict did not have to contend with an organized lobby of pro-Imperial Japan apologists and an academic climate that was entirely hostile to honestly critical ( heck, anything not hagiographic and celebratory) scholarship of non-Western cultures.
Such study can be done but the author should prepare well ahead to counter a campaign of character assassination and demonization that will be launched even before the work is published
December 21st, 2011 at 7:11 pm
blogger wordpress…
[…]zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » The Games People Play[…]…