Connectsions 2015 SDM PanelED McGrady

mcgradye@cna.org

CNA

3003 Washington Blvd.

Arlington VA 22101

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Quicklook

• By “innovate in gaming” I believe we mean “move us to deal with problems we’d rather not deal with”– This is not the same thing as developing innovative games, or games

on innovation• The “problem we don’t want to deal with” are peer competitors that

give us a run for the money on technology and process– A cunning threat with a terrible plan means you have to be innovative

• Cutting gaming lose from the traditional planning and acquisition process is key– Standard scenarios result in standard values– Gamers think differently– Games provide multiple, cheap, venues for exploring what-if scenarios

• To really innovate in gaming we have to build it as an areas of study and practice, like design, art, or architecture with research, serious study, and a dialog with the arts

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Objective

• Like all good game designers, or, frankly, anyone trying to get something done we need to make sure we understand what we are trying to do

• “…how education can be used to create wargames that produce innovative solutions to future strategic security problems?”

• Lets parse this:– “education” by this I assume we mean “education of game designers, and game

consumers/sponsors on topics of gaming and the use of games” – One obvious question is “how” we might educate them – by telling them, showing

them, or giving them grades– “innovative solutions” by this I assume you mean “cunning things that would not

otherwise be thought of but are neither magical thinking nor twee charades that rely on the stupidity of the opponent”

– “future strategic security problems” – by this I assume you mean future peer competitors like China, or maybe Russia if they actually get around to building a decent military

• Essentially “how do we defeat/deter peers without going bankrupt buying stuff?”

• So my presentation needs to focus on these three topics and come up with some clever ideas for each one

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Teaching about wargaming

• Disclaimer: I don’t think you can teach design, it is something you learn by practice, mentorship, and just plain determination to build that game despite the sponsor, your boss, and your friends

• I also think that game design is a liberal art, not a science, and that if we are going to teach it we have to approach it from that direction

• So how do we teach how to develop innovative wargames?• First we teach the sponsors what needs to happen to foster

innovation– Let the designer work– Take risks– Play games

• Then we teach the designers– Its not the model, it’s the play – even for professional games– Focus on the players, on letting them give each other problems and

solutions– Develop a practice that shows how to build games that incorporate

space for play without becoming silly

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Innovation• Can we generate innovation from wargaming?• Clearly this happened once, in the interwar years, but you might

also argue that the combination of changing technology and social structures created the change, with gaming simply used to recognize that it was happening

• Gaming can do that now: but like then you might not like the answers– Peer wars may not be “winnable” in the conventional sense – gaming

may show us a new way of thinking about the conflict itself• Specific areas to use gaming

– Economic struggle between the US and peers– How peers will develop a long-term competitive strategy with the US– What are the effects of COTS and general use technology – self driving

cars will likely be here before self driving tanks– What offset strategies can we create to deal with these two big

challenges: technology and peer competitors?• We need creative gaming sponsors as well as creative games

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What is getting in the way?• Defense planning scenarios

– Because we all need to agree on the DPS we get into this eternal do-loop of TPFDD, gaming the TPFDD, and detailing CONOPS for a single, highly unlikely, slice of reality

– It becomes all about deployment, the enemy dying heroically but in an unthreatening way, and everything we do becoming mostly about delivering ordinance to targets

• New peer competitors have disrupted this model and we don’t know what to do– So we are turning to gaming because we sense that a cunning

opponent might be trying to make US die heroically instead of the other way around

• So we need to be creative – in what we will accept as a scenario– Truthfully plausibility is only stretched by reality – really? Smuggling

mushrooms into Japan? Invading Ukraine by using proxies? Building whole islands in the SCS?

• We need to be creative in what we will accept as outcomes– We might just lose sometime

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Future strategic security problems

• Um…by now you pretty much know what I’m going to say here– We all know we mean peer competitors when we say we need

innovation– And I add in technology

• So how do we teach wargamers to innovate?• We first teach sponsors to get rid of the old, tired, highly mutually

acceptable scenarios and models and let us innovate in the first place

• Second we identify those gamers who can do innovative wargames and have them show the rest of us how to do it– By creating academic programs – not just to teach but to conduct

research, to publish, and to build an understanding of gaming• Because, fundamentally, unless gaming – not just computer gaming

– is treated as a performance art and studied, taught, and built in an academic setting we really won’t be able to create gamers who have the understanding and experience to create innovative games