Why immersion — and not realism — is critical for wargaming

With both ⁠Danny Crichton⁠ and ⁠Laurence Pevsner⁠ on vacation, we bring back our independent Riskgaming designer ⁠Ian Curtiss⁠ to host ⁠David Banks⁠, a Senior Lecturer in Wargaming at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he also serves as the Academic Director of the King’s Wargaming Network. They talk about the methodology of wargaming, why militaries embrace it, and where gaming is going in the future.

For more of their conversation, please subscribe to the Riskgaming podcast.

Ian Curtiss:

David, thank you so much for joining us. Tell me a bit more about your background and how you got so deep into the wargaming field.

David Banks:

I'm a senior lecturer in the War Studies department in King's College, London. Specifically, I'm the wargaming lecturer. I also serve as the academic director of the King's Wargaming Network, which is a collection of scholars located in King's.

My training is international relations (IR) theory, and I came into wargaming originally by using games in my classroom. I thought they'd be a great tool for giving students an experience of politics that they otherwise wouldn't get.

Now wargaming, specifically wargaming as a methodology, has become my core research focus. So not just building and using games, but how do we know they work? How can we evaluate them? How can we compare them with one another so that we can produce better games and have a little bit more confidence in the analytic results that these games produce?

I think my road is the standard road into academic wargaming, which is to say I was something else first. As an academic field of inquiry and as a method, this field is very much in its infancy.

Ian Curtiss:

The fact that it's so new in so many ways is so interesting to me because it's not new at all. Gaming as a practice of decision-making has existed for thousands of years.

David Banks:

Yeah. It is a really interesting field to be in because as you say, it's been around for a long time. Play in general is a human activity that precedes most of the structures that organize our society. Play predates trade, it predates capitalism, it predates money, predates probably religion. There's no culture in which there isn't play. There's a very famous book called Homo Ludens (Man the Player), which essentially makes this point.

Wargaming as a distinct tool for planning, strategy, analysis, or education is somewhere between 200 and 250 years old. It has been used extensively by militaries, particularly the Prussian military, the U.S. Navy, and others. And yet, academically, it's really very much in its infancy.

Ian Curtiss:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office just came out with a report about wargaming and how it could be improved for applications and so forth. And I'm always shocked when I hear like, "Oh, we have one of the first studies ever done that measures the impact of wargaming on certain learning outcomes." It's like, "Wait, we're just now doing this? We've been wargaming for 80 years or whatever and the DOD has never thought to fund a learning outcome research and so forth?"

David Banks:

I'm not as familiar with the U.S. funding ecosystem as I am with the U.K. one, which is obviously a bit smaller. I should say, though, that the Ministry of Defense (MOD) is very behind wargaming at the moment, and their Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), the U.K. equivalent of DARPA, has been expanding their wargaming activity considerably over the last few years.

The MOD has also set up a different body called the Defence Wargaming and Experimentation Hub to help ensure that wargaming activity in the U.K. defense sector is being coordinated in the most efficient way. So they're taking it very seriously.

Some of the things MOD is now requesting is a bit more of exactly what you're describing. Okay, what is our bang for our buck here? How do we know?

Right now, I'm assisting on a project on how we evaluate impact or return on investment. And I think this is a really tricky thing.

There are probably at least a few things we should flag. One is what is the purpose of the game. Very often, we play a game and we take a personal experience out of that game. But really one of the things we need to be doing when we establish or evaluate the value of a game is first answer what the game was built for?

There's no point in playing a game and saying, "That wasn't realistic." Of course, it wasn't realistic. It's a game. Did the game do the thing it was supposed to do? If there was a particular thing we're trying to get out of it, did we get the thing?

The other part, which is sometimes related to this, is the bigger question of whether the game is an analytic game or an educational game or an entertainment game, which is typically not what the MOD or the DOD is worried about. But games, in principle, have this core meta purpose, and very often, when you play a game, it can do all three. You can play an educational game that's also fun, but fun may not be its core purpose.

We have to be careful when we evaluate things that we're not looking for the wrong thing. People can walk out of a game and say, "Oh, that was really unfair." That's a very common reaction in classroom settings where I might design a politically realistic game. Part of political realism is that it's not fair, and the game is about learning to deal with it.

Ian Curtiss:

Two things I'm curious to touch on:

One is the sense that a wargame has to be a serious thing. One subconscious assumption might be that if you're having fun, then you can't be learning.

It is also so interesting that this methodology is so frequently used in war, in the defense industry, and yet this methodology is still frequently pushed aside by other industries because it can't be a serious thing.

David Banks:

I think you're right, your point about fun. Right now, the term I tend to use in an effort to make it sound a little bit more expansive or scientific is “engagement.” Because you can also be playing a game that you're really into, but you actually may not be having a fun time. You might actually be getting quite stressed or worn out or exhausted, but it doesn't mean you don't still want to participate.

Engagement pulls people in, but I think on one level, embarrasses people because then they go, "Well, this is childish. This is for kids."

But instead of hiding from the fact that games are engaging, I think we should just say, "Yeah, that's right." In my estimation, that's one of the method’s key distinguishing factors. Not only does it engage, I would contend that it must engage to produce educational or analytic outcomes.

But back to your military bit, which is why does the military like this so much if at the same time it have a mild allergic reaction to it? I think one of the reasons is because gaming is good at modeling kinetic things in a consistent way, in a way that we have a lot of validity about the results.

Take a video game like Microsoft Flight Simulator. You can learn how to fly by playing that game. We've got such confidence about the internal validity of the models we use for that realm that we can actually build a really effective facsimile.

Where gaming starts to have much more questionable applications is once you leave the kinetic realm behind, because we don't have much confidence about other factors, like how do I know I'm looking at a democracy? How do I know I'm looking at the national will? How do I know I've identified interest groups correctly and the way they work together?

Ian Curtiss:

This gets to a second point that I was going to raise, to your comment about immersion. It is one of the cheapest ways to get people to actually think about a future scenario.

To spend a solid two hours thinking about a potential future scenario that forces you to wrestle with the pain, the cortisol, the stress, the dopamine. So in the end the player is already asking, well, would it work that way? Would it not? And so the value of gaming is worth more than killing oneself over building the perfect model.

David Banks:

Yeah. We can talk about building the perfect model. Firstly, we don't have a consistent evaluative metric to identify how I would know my model is perfect. My North Star is always asking, "What's the purpose of my game?"

You should be able to articulate that purpose reasonably clearly and then that can help you know, "Hang on a second. Am I going off-piece?" Am I adding design features to a game that really don't serve any function? Why am I doing that? We might be doing that for immersive reasons, but in terms of the game mechanics, if it isn’t core to what I want to study, I'm just adding complexity.

To your point about immersion, I think the argument is that immersion is what makes gaming a better method than alternatives under certain conditions. I'm paraphrasing Thomas Schelling, the economist, and I'm getting the quote slightly wrong, but the one thing that nobody can ever imagine is something that never occurred to them.

That's what gaming gives you. You can play a game of chess against yourself in terms of testing out strategies, but you can't actually surprise yourself. But when you're playing against somebody else, they might play better than you expected or worse than you expected, but they won't play exactly like you expected.

That's where a lot of the unique and interesting stuff comes out of gaming. For example, we at the Wargaming Network built a game for NATO. For some of the early iterations, we had a bunch of experts in the room, foreign policy experts on China, the United States, Asia, climate security, the U.K., Europe, space, a bunch of different domains. Of course, they're all experts in their specific things, but they're not experts in all of these things.

There are a lot of outcomes that came out of the game that were not usable. Silly outcomes. But occasionally, players would propose things and then they'd adjudicate as a group. One example that stuck with me was an instance where the U.S. team recognized Taiwan without Taiwan being invaded. And the U.S. team, which was populated by U.S. specialists, was like, "Okay, in this instance, under these circumstances, it is plausible that the United States might choose to recognize Taiwan.” As an event, it was highly implausible. But in that specific instance in the game, given the right preceding conditions, this was a plausible outcome.

What it gave us is what I call a synthetic causal mechanism, a non-real causal route toward an outcome that, prior to it happening in the game, nobody in the room would have anticipated it.

Ian Curtiss:

You're building complex systems where exigencies occur that nobody thought could occur.

David Banks:

You'll actually hear stories of that in other wargames, where people will come into the room and say, "I'm a nuclear policy specialist. Under no circumstance in this game am I ever going to authorize nuclear weapons use?" And then six hours later, they find themselves authorizing nuclear weapons use. I think it's exactly that.

Now we have to be very, very careful about how much of this is an artifact of the game? How much is the game forcing them down certain roads?

There's interesting research by a scholar called John Emery about how RAND wargames in the fifties and sixties, nuclear wargames, depending on how they were designed, tended to have more or less nuclear escalation and nuclear outcomes. So it's a model. Garbage in, garbage out. You've got to be very careful about that.

Part of my own research project at the moment is finding ways of being able to report game results that disaggregate the game into its constituent pieces, individual decisions, events, and outcomes, and be much more willing to identify and much more clear about which bits of those are good.

In our reports about the game we built for NATO, it says exactly that, "Hey, these bits are good. These bits are not so good. So don't read this or play this game and walk away going, 'Aha, now we know X,' because we ourselves, as the designers said, ‘This game cannot tell you X.’ But you should take these other bits more seriously."

Ian Curtiss:

So what's coming down the pipeline for you?

David Banks:

I have this research about subject matter experts and how you know you've got the right people in the room and how you get the best out of them when they're in the room. As we know, people suffer from biases. Even experts suffer from bias. I'm actually quite hopeful that when it gets published, it'll be useful for gamemakers and academics.

One of the really useful lessons we learned, was that when people start to get really engaged and emotional in the game, a very obvious but simple thing you can do is just periodically pause and say, "Hey, I just want to remind everyone what the purpose of this game is, why we are actually in this room because right now." That's a very useful little facilitation trick.

But that research is a precursor. It's combined with two other projects I have right now about evaluation, how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a game model using as the initial tension between representation and playability. And that's all going to hopefully feed into a wargaming book. I do want to write a book about wargaming methodology.

In terms of game designs, what's exciting is that there are more professional style games coming out onto the market. They’re sometimes hard to get your hands on, but they're there.

RAND has a game called Hegemony, which is about strategic decision making. Sebastian Bae's game Littoral Commander is about operational tactical warfighting at the coastal level. The Air War College just has a new air force wargame out. UK Fight Club has Take That Hill! which is an infantry wargame. DSTL has a strategic wargame called CONTESTED.

Most recently, we ourselves at King's have built games — as individual members and also now as an organization, the Wargaming Network. The more recent one that we built this game called Horizons. All games have limitations, but I'm very proud of how our team was able to build a game that really gets at the politics that are going on in the world. We're hoping to get that up on Game Crafter in the next few months. There'll be announcements if you're interested. Follow our KCL Wargaming comms on Twitter and LinkedIn.