How to think about Red – video

Connections-Online was a couple of weeks ago.

Robert Domaingue and I made a presentation on the idea of “Red” as a prompt to creativity – how we think about Red shapes what we create.

You can see that Robert is by far the better presenter. Don’t miss my embarrassing coughing fit about 9:00!

The playlist of videos for all the presentations for Connections-Online 2023 is here:

Creative math

On the weekend someone asked on Facebook (a place where I am spending too much time, I’ll admit) about designers’ favourite methods of managing workflow or design projects generally.

I answered that I suppose if it were more of a business for me, like Ty Bomba and Joe Miranda who are Living The Dream, I’d be more businesslike about it. As it is, progress on my projects flows according to the equation

Pr = sqrt (TA – DG) x (IN – MWD)

Where Pr is Progress, TA is Time Available, DG is Daily Grind, IN is Inspiration, and MWD is Middle of the night Wakefulness Doubts.

Note that it is possible for Pr to have a negative value, where IN < MWD. This is where I go back and rip things apart because of something I thought at oh-dark-thirty.
Also note that where TA < DG, the square root will involve imaginary numbers, and any progress on the project will also be imaginary.

Back from Connections-UK 2018

Well, that was a great time! Connections was great, went better than I expected.

Rex Brynen did a very good report, and the Connections-UK website has audio and some slide decks.

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/connections-uk-2018-conference-report/

http://professionalwargaming.co.uk/2018.html

The first day was the megagame – “Green and Pleasant Land” by Jim Wallman. It concentrated on UK government internal operations as they dealt with different natural and artificial crises and emergencies – floods, a death in the Royal Family, and some nefarious doin’s as well. I had fun as the the “Adversary” (Russian) Minister of Defense (Phil Pournelle played Putin). Before the game began, Anja v.d. Hulst and I “bugged” seven tables in the UK Government room with sticky notes – they had no game function but when the Cabinet found one of them they panicked and withdrew to a secure bunker. Their nuclear submarine fleet had just put out to sea so we didn’t know what they were up to! Uh oh…

Photo: Tom Mouat

Second day was my “Game design as Journalism” presentation and later, the dialogue between me and Volko Ruhnke. It went far better than I ever thought it would, I had been spinning so many brain-cycles over it I thought it was no good. But I never want to talk or write about Creativity itself ever again, it’s easier just to make things.

Practicing our officerly pointing skills.

Second Lebanon War

Phil Pournelle liberates Mosul.

There was also a game fair: I had brought giveaway copies of Guerrilla Checkers, which attracted quite a few people, and got two fellows into a game of Second Lebanon War.  “We are Coming Nineveh”, which we had playtested a couple of days before, was also on display. (two right photos: Tom Mouat)

With LCol Neil Stevens and LCol Ranald Shepherd, all looking very pleased with ourselves.

On the third day, I chaired a plenary session on “validation” that featured two presentations by people who had used my work. The first was by two LCols in the British Army who had used A Distant Plain as a training aid for their staff officers to give them some appreciation of the complexity of the Afghan situation, and in the second John Curry talked about recent games that examined the Ukraine Crisis… I am quoted as saying I got it “half right and half wrong.” (Yes, just don’t ask me which half is which.) Even if the games are not a perfect mirror of historical reality I felt validated myself and was very grateful, as always, to hear about my stuff being used in contexts outside sheer entertainment.

Before and after the conference, I had a day or two to enjoy London… I went museum hopping. At the Imperial War Museum I saw this:

“Douglas” the ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Douglas” and his handler have quite a story. Arthur Harden joined the Artillery and served in the 59th Division’s Divisional Ammunition Column. He was a hobby ventriloquist and entertained the troops with Douglas (possibly named after Douglas Haig) when out of the line. His commanding officer recognized the morale-maintaining function of the dummy and took him on his orderly room staff and promoted him to Sergeant (Harden, not the dummy). Harden said later, “The Colonel enjoyed Douglas so much that he prevented my posting elsewhere and mildly discouraged my taking a commission.” It certainly saved his life, though Douglas’ case has a hole in it from a piece of shrapnel (hidden in this shot).

https://www.forces.net/news/creepy-dummy-entertained-soldiers-during-ww1

The kids didn’t quite get the point.

I also went to the National Army Museum, which was quite fun. There was an interactive display where a CGI drill sergeant from the Guards would come out and berate you (in clean language) over your sloppy drill when you stood on the footprints.

Wellington’s cloak and barometer. Also, the skeleton of Marengo, one of Napoleon’s horses.

 

T.E. Lawrence’s robes and dagger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also went to the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, but did not have a lot of time to spend in either. I liked the 20th century design rooms at the former and just went to the Roman Britain room in the latter to take some pictures for my dad.

early example of a multitool.

Ancient dice.

I also went to Richmond, to see a puppet show in a barge moored in the Thames river. The barge is brought up into London during the winter for shows. Very talented puppeteers.

Puppets from earlier shows hung on the walls.

On my last day I went out to suburban Dagenham to visit David Turczi, where we talked about our newest projects and played Root, a very interesting asymmetric game by Cole Wehrle. I didn’t really know what I was doing but still won as the Cats, on a Domination card.

Now, back to work!

 

And awaaay we go once more…

For the Last Big Trip of 2018. I’m leaving for the UK on Friday the 31st, for the Connections-UK conference on professional wargaming at Kings College London, 4-6 September.

http://professionalwargaming.co.uk/2018.html

I’ll be presenting on game design as journalism (a very revised version of the San Diego PCA presentation), doing a semi-structured dialogue on creativity and design with Volko Ruhnke on stage (and I think I will never write about creativity or the creative process again, I’ve spent weeks dithering and thinking about it and it has been driving me nuts…), and chairing a plenary session on “wargame validation” where the speakers are using A Distant Plain and Ukrainian Crisis as examples.

“Journalism” presentation text: Games journalism 29 Aug and the slides: Games journalism 29 aug

We’ll also have the game demos and plays: I am bringing Guerrilla Checkers as always, and advertising play of Second Lebanon War from the Brief Border Wars quad (actually I am bringing the whole quad, in case someone wants to play Cyprus 1974 or Vietnam 1979 instead). And we will be demonstrating We Are Coming, Nineveh! too.

Before and after will be playtesting of things, merry meetings, a megagame organized by Jim Wallman (one of my favourite madmen), a puppet show on a barge, and general snooping around!

I may post from Blighty, or I may not… as usual I am working off the little tablet with tiny keyboard.

Be good while I’m gone!

Burden of Command

Nope, not quite…

I never made a practice of playing computer wargames much, and I don’t think I am about to start now.

But it seems to me that there are a few digital designers and developers out there who are thinking about what a game about war should be, and what it should mean to its players, quite deeply. This is an interesting article.

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/j5v3kp/meet-the-developers-behind-a-wargame-about-people-not-weapons?utm_campaign=sharebutton

Tactical narratives are not games

LT Backsight Forethought. Why does every subaltern try to grow a mustache?

Over at Rex Brynen’s great blog Paxsims is his reaction to a recent post on The Strategy Bridge website, about the first of a series of “tactical decision games” – the first is Kaliningrad Fires, about a hypothetical American force deployed in Lithuania to thwart an advance by Aggressor Fantasian Soviet Russian forces.

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2017/05/10/kaliningrad-fires-is-war-but-no-game/

As he points out, the piece is called a game, but it isn’t really… because it’s not adversarial, nor does it have any real cycles to it. It could be called a wargame only in the narrow sense that the US Army uses the term: when a commander is deciding on a Course of Action (COA), he is said to “wargame” out how each COA might unfold, just to see how logical and feasible it is.

There is a long tradition to these pieces. They form part of a junior officer’s training and have been called any number of names – DIs, tactical problems, TEWTs – and their purpose is not to play out a game with rules, conflict and an outcome, but to see how well the student can formulate a logical plan of action in the time allotted, with due consideration for the problem’s parameters and its likely implications. “Creativity” (or more often, buggering about with what the text of the problem didn’t say in order to try and pull a Kobayashi Maru on the Directing Staff), comes later… first show us you’re smart.

There is an equally long tradition of presentations of worked-out tactical problems with solutions and discussion, presented in books in fictional form. They are called tactical narratives (or at least that is what I will call them, for purposes of this post).

The first of these to get wide circulation was The Defence of Duffer’s Drift written in 1904 by Ernest Swinton, then a Captain but who went on to develop the concept of tanks in battle, trained the first British tank units and finished his career in 1938 as a Major General and Commandant of the Royal Tank Corps. This is a classic and has been reprinted and reproduced many times, by all English-speaking armies (and was also translated into Urdu, for the Indian Army). It describes the experience of young Lieutenant Backsight Forethought, in command of a platoon of 50 riflemen and tasked with defending a “drift” or river crossing site during the Boer War. Forethought has no prior experience, so the book is a series of six “dreams” or visions where his first attempt is a disaster, then each subsequent dream explains a different principle or set of lessons as the scenario is played through again and again and he does better each time.  (link at the bottom, for this and other pieces)

This book was probably not on the required reading list for junior British officers then, insofar as a professional officer before the First World War was encouraged to read at all. But it was widely read, and its “serial dream” structure inspired several imitators:

• The Battle of Booby’s Bluffs, written 1921 by Brigadier General William A. Mitchell (no, not the “Billy” Mitchell of Air Force iconoclasm);
• The Defence of Bowler Bridge (about 1930);
• The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Emma Gees (1979 by LCol Ken Nette, PPCLI – this one is on the history and tactical employment of machine guns, and I still have a reprint of the article from when I went on my Machine Gunner’s course in 1982);
• The Defense of Hill 781: An Allegory of Modern Mechanized Combat  (1988)
• The Attack on Duffer’s Downtown (2001)
• The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa (2009, placed in Iraq)

The first three are all available as a collection of tactical primers at http://regimentalrogue.com/primers.htm ; the fourth is available for preview at https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Defense_of_Hill_781.html?id=zGDZ43PhWEIC&redir_esc=y and the fifth is available on the Net at http://www.benning.army.mil/mssp/security%20topics/Global%20and%20Regional%20Security/content/pdf/Defense_of_Jisr_Al_Doreaa(2008).pdf but it was and is also available for sale on Amazon, bound with Duffer’s Drift.

It’s interesting that all of these tactical narratives deal with the defensive phase of operations except for The Attack on Duffer’s Downtown, which is not only about the offensive phase, it is set in an urban environment. Written by Russell W. Glenn, an authority on urban warfare who has been writing on the subject since 1996, and published by RAND in 2001. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA396520.pdf

One of the older items on my bookshelf is “The Solution of Tactical Problems”, by LCOL Joseph Needham, from 1907. Subtitled “A Logical and Easy Way of Working Out the Tactical Schemes Set at Examinations”, that is exactly what it is: a series of little vignettes placing the student who wants to pass the exams to enter RMA Sandhurst or some other military school in the position of a junior officer, tasked with commanding a flank guard or setting out pickets or something… the student thinks about his disposition and the author tells him the correct answer, as set forth in whatever Field Service Regulations there were for the infantry in 1906-07. Needham would rewrite and update the book each year, adding and changing the problems, up to the end of the First World War.

https://books.google.ca/books/about/Solution_of_Tactical_Problems.html?id=XEkenQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

There are also examples of interactive tactical primers, written in the “choose your own adventure” style. Three examples are by John F. Antal: Infantry Combat: the Rifle Platoon (1995); Armor Attacks: the Tank Platoon (1991); and Combat Team: The Captain’s War (1998). Again, this is an interesting way to present the information, and it does verge on being a game, in that progress through the lessons is influenced by decisions made by the reader and the text is somewhat adversarial.

Then there are the extended narratives that read like novels but started life as manuals. There is Kenneth Macksey’s book, First Clash, written in 1985 and which takes an operational look at how things might have played out for the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group in southern Germany – it was also sold commercially as a book.

In 2005, a Canadian science fiction writer named Karl Schroeder was hired by the Canadian military to write Crisis at Zefra, a conceptual book about how Canadian soldiers would deal with asymmetrical threats in a generic African city of the near future (2025). A bit too goshwow with respect to the technology for me – nano-this and nano-that – but these things are valuable just by having been written down. The whole work is available at http://www.kschroeder.com/foresight-consulting/crisis-in-zefra/Crisis-in-Zefra-e.pdf . Annex B of the work is a survey by then-Major Andrew Godefroy of fictional narratives used by and for the Canadian military, beginning with Duffer’s Drift, which kind of brings things full circle.

This post has gone on longer than I planned to make it, and my original intention was to write about two other interesting items I found recently, on the uses of wargaming as tools for professional development. That will have to wait for another day, but I put the URLs here as a reminder for me, and a curiosity for you:

https://www.cove.org.au/wargaming/article-thespian-officers-narratives-and-planning/

http://cimsec.org/interwar-period-gaming-today-conflicts-tomorrow-press-start-play-pt-2/31712

News Paper Games

… is the not-quite-as-bad-as-last-year title I picked for the short talk I am giving at the national conference of the American Popular Culture Association in San Diego next week.

http://pcaaca.org/national-conference/

Here is my abstract:

Ian Bogost’s 2011 book Newsgames: Journalism At Play described the growing use of videogames distributed via the Internet to fulfill the basic objectives of journalism: to inform, educate, criticize and persuade. Manual games (also called board games) distributed or published through magazines or newspapers were long used for the same purposes prior to the creation of the Internet, and the practice continues to this day. Manual games are more permissive of remixing/ reskinning for these objectives than video games, by a wider range of people. As physical and tactile objects, they demand and offer a different form of engagement with the material, on the ludic and informational level. They also particularly lend themselves to parody and satire, leading to a greater consciousness of “critical play” (Flanagan, 2009).

 This paper will focus on past and current examples of how manual games, as inclusions or features in print journalism products, have portrayed and “covered” (in the journalistic sense) contemporary issues and episodes of social, political and actual armed conflict. It will also discuss and present examples, including ones from my own work, of use of the Internet to disseminate manual games with critical and analytic content on current topics, as a form of citizen journalism.

Surprisingly, Bogost’s book does not mention paper games at all (or manual, or board, or analog, or tabletop, whatever term you want to use for games not played on a computer), except for a chapter on crosswords and other word puzzles with some news content in them appearing in newspapers.

Actually, nothing surprising about that… hardly anyone in the field of game studies writes anything about tabletop games. Last year’s conference had nearly 100 presentations in the game studies area, and three of them were not about some aspect of computer, video, digital games generally … two guys talking about people who play tabletop RPGs, and me.

Bored of War…          Back from Seattle

This year there are only about 50 presentations – it seems to be a smaller conference overall, though there will still be a couple of thousand people there – and still only three on non-digital games: one person presenting about narrative in Pandemic: Legacy (still can’t get used to the idea of a game that you scribble on, without first having made it yourself) and one person talking about “Policing Responsible Citizens: The Gamification of Crime Resistance in Children’s Table-Top Games” (seems interesting), and again me.

The fact remains, the practice of producing manual “newsgames”, under most of these genres, has been going on for some time. They remain as uncommon but clear acts of citizen-based social criticism and analytic journalism. And through DTP software, the PDF file, and the Internet for production, storage and distribution they carry on, in ever-greater numbers of PnP designs from ever-greater numbers of people.

Before there were video games there were manual games. But no one talks about it, at least not at an event like this. My talk is not even an argument, really, which I guess is fine because this seems to be a field profoundly ignorant of its origins.

Am I the skeleton at the feast?

Or does this just not have anything to do with elephants, in the room or out of it?

Anyway, there will be a game night like they had the year before, so I am bringing a few PnP items along for show, tell and play.

 

Interview in C3i 29

Apropos of nothing, a picture of me drinking a cuppa joe I really did make myself (long story).

 

I’ve been lucky enough to be asked by several people over the last few years about my  opinions on games, game design, and the games I design. I don’t think there is any one blog post or podcast or paper that encapsulates my philosophy – I am not sure I even have one, I think I just have thoughts and methods to express the thoughts (but maybe that’s what one is).

But last year Sam Sheikh interviewed me for C3i, a board wargaming magazine published by Rodger B. MacGowan (a longstanding great wargame artist, and a designer in his own right). The interview appeared in issue #29 and it’s a good selection of answers about how I got into game designing, what I like to see in the games I design, and how games portray modern irregular warfare (or don’t).

This is a scan of that section of the magazine. I hope you will find it interesting.

C3i29 intvw

Material is copyright RBM Studio 2015, reproduced with permission.

The early history of matrix games; 2p matrix games

Bob Cordery talks about the early history of matrix games:

http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.ca/2016/07/28-years-later-my-small-part-in-early.html

I read about these in the 90s (it may have been from when they started to get mentioned and printed in Wargames Illustrated magazine) and may have been one of the first to mention them to the US professional wargaming community, back when I set up a small wargaming wiki (now defunct) for the Military Operations Research Society’s Community of Practice on Wargaming. If I wasn’t, so what – I’m glad this useful method is having its moment in the sun over on this side of the pond.

The US military has always had a bit of a problem with the “not invented here” issue, but then again, in the very beginning, it was invented there. Or “here”, depending on where your here is. Either way, we owe Chris Engle much.

EDIT: Over at Rex Brynen’s blog Paxsims, Chris Engle himself contributes a piece about how he came to conceive of and develop them! He is now writing a book that sets out the intellectual argument for, and varied uses of, matrix games. Looking forward to this one!

https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/engle-a-short-history-of-matrix-games/

2-player matrix games?

Over on BGG.com Peter Perla and I were discussing the argument resolution mechanism for a small press game by David Janik-Jones called “Move it, Soldier!”. It’s a card game, an attempt to render the Engle matrix game engine for two players – that is, no umpire.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/132795/move-it-soldier

The strength of each player’s arguments are rated by the other player, and the differences between the two ratings add or subtract dice from a total number of d6 to be rolled (highest total wins the argument). Peter pointed out that someone who looked at game mechanics, or at least knew about game theory, would never bother rating one’s argument at less than 5 (the highest possible), just to exploit the mechanism. My counterpoint was that the probable point of David’s game is for both players to work at creating a believable and enjoyable narrative together, and that hypercompetitive Lizard People who view all games as elaborate puzzles to break and win ought not to play it. David said much the same thing, less bluntly and more articulately. Peter responded that if that is really the case, then the formalism of the argument resolution mechanism actually got in the way of what the players were trying to do, that trying to make the mechanism objective undermined the motivation to make persuasive arguments. Players would be better off not  using it at all, or at least talking it through and coming to a consensus on who ought to get a DRM and how much.

In the end I suppose Peter is right, as he usually is. But there ought to be a way to solve this 2-body problem. Chris Engle always wrote about these games in terms of role-playing, and perhaps there are mechanisms in that world that could help without getting into thick rulebooks and lists of conditional DRMs. I don’t know enough about what’s been done with RPGs.

Network-centric Go

 

Well now, this is kind of interesting:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-networks-fight-jeff-cares

Basically, about 10 years ago the author came up with an idea to re-wire the Go board. The new Network-Centric Go board had the same number of nodes and links (381 nodes, 684 links), but were arranged according to the “preferential attachment” process that researchers have found in models of the internet and world-wide web. You can see from the diagram this kind of network has a very, very large number of lightly connected nodes, a moderate number of moderately connected nodes, and a very small number of very, very well connected nodes.

The first-move advantages are obvious: the move in each turn will be to occupy the point with the highest number of nodes connected to it, until all available points have the same number of nodes. The author claims to have fixed this and made it susceptible to analysis by reducing the board to about a quarter of its size (a 10×10 grid) and adopting a “decreasing clustering coefficient” strategy. (“Clustering Coefficient is a measure of local cohesion, representing the proportion of a node’s neighbors that are also neighbors of each other” – so it kind of sounds like he decided to play normal territorial Go).

Now he has an Indiegogo project to make this game playable online. And you can give him your money!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kayanet#/