NOTES ON A SYSTEM



Presentation at Universite de Montreal Game Design class

5 May 2016

Good afternoon everyone.

My name is Brian Train.

Today I’m going to talk about board or tabletop wargames, which are the genotype of computer or video wargames.

Specifically, I will talk about the small number of these games that concern themselves with the default mode of post-World War Two armed conflict - modern irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, or COIN.

I want to talk about their poor reception by hobby gamers, and their capability to act as subversive and critical objects with respect both to the mainstream media portrayals of the conflicts they model, and to the larger body of wargames themselves.

As an example of this type of object, I will be making special mention of the “COIN” system designed by Volko Ruhnke and published in several volumes by GMT Games, with special reference to A Distant Plain, a game Volko and I designed together. (we’re extremely lucky today to have Volko himself here in the audience!)

Personal note: I am a practitioner, not an academic.

I have been designing board wargames for the civilian market for about 25 years, with about 45 titles published

The majority of my work has been dedicated to political-military gaming and topics in irregular warfare.

Board wargames

The hobby of civilian wargaming emerged in the mid to late 1960s as an imitation of professional military gaming, which started 200 years ago as a training aid for officers.

It peaked in the early 1980s, and then declined due to a variety of factors - basically, the market for these games corrected itself, people grew up and got kids, and then there were computers to play with.

Board wargames are still being produced today, and are examples of some of the most complex cultural artifacts we have, in terms of the topics addressed and the sophistication of their components.

Superficially, the elements of a board or tabletop wargame are similar to most board games.

(slide with game components)

There is a playing surface, usually rendered as a semi-realistic map of part of the real world.

The map is often subdivided into cells called “hexes”, originally done in imitation of the look of the professional wargames that the RAND Corporation designed for the US military in the 1950s and 60s.

[slide of RAND Baltic game map]

In fact, RAND is still doing this sort of thing – this map is from a game they played six months ago, about a hypothetical Russian invasion of the Balkans.

The map is the largest part of the game physically, and the spatial arrangements and graphics used in its presentation are an important clue to what assumptions and priorities the game has – that is, how the designer intends the game to be played.

[slide of counter images]

There are pieces, called units or generically counters, that usually represent a military formation of some kind.

These are the smallest parts of the game physically, and each component contains at least several discrete pieces of information used for play of the game, unlike the undifferentiated checker or pawn found in an abstract strategy game.

[slide of rulebooks]

Finally, there are rules.

The rules are the richest and most complex part of the game, since they supply the main elements of the game’s semantic architecture:

That is, the game’s narrative premise, the goals, the actions and choices permitted the players, the rules for interaction with other players and the game’s environment, and so on.

They are also the clearest reflection of the designer’s intent, preoccupations, research and assumptions about the game’s topic.

Matt Kirschenbaum, a professor at the University of Maryland who writes on the digital humanities and new media as well as wargames, calls the unfolding of the play of a board wargame the construction of a “vast procedural narrative” –

• vast because the number of permutations and decisions in even a small wargame is much, much larger than those in a game of chess,

• procedural because the decisions are both driven and limited by an elaborate but quite transparent set of rules, and

• a narrative of the play of the game – optimistically called an “after action report” by players - can read like a very plausible and even entertaining piece of history (depending on the skill of the writer).

The narrative that emerges from the game flows from both the dense information packed into the game via its components and from the way the players have processed that information.

In both circumstances the rules are what most strongly affects the processes.

A game with elaborate detailed rules tends to have a map and pieces with a similar level of sophistication and detail, but these components are just the medium through which the game takes place, subject to and limited by those rules.

This points up an important differentiation.

I said board wargames are of course the genotype of computer wargames; at first, the early digital games inherited from their paper papas their mechanics, settings, and appearance.

[In some respects this still continues today, as there is software commonly available that will allow anyone to make a simple digital port of the appearance of a board wargame, for asynchronous play by e-mail or synchronously over the Internet. The two best-known programs are VASSAL and Cyberboard, and in either case the games simply mimic the map and pieces of the game, but do not provide or enforce the rules… the players have to provide these guidelines and boundaries.]

But as the programming of computer wargames gained in sophistication, the rules faded from sight.

Chris Crawford, the author of the first book on computer game design, wrote in 1981 that this permitted the player to move from the role of game executor (mover of pieces, adjudicator of combat, shuffler of paper) to focus on the role of game player.

Well and good for many people, but it also removed access to and understanding of a game’s rules, the critical site for analysis of a games assumptions and mechanics to model reality.

James Dunnigan, then and still one of the most influential people in wargame design, called this the Black-Boxing Syndrome.

Later this term was spread further to talk about how rules, roles and expectations are embedded into structures physical and social to the extent they are no longer even visible.

Gonzalo Frasca, an early writer on academic game studies, wrote (“Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology” in the Video Game Theory Reader, 2003) that there were three different levels that display the ideology of a video game:

• first, the Representation of characters and events within the game.

• Second, Manipulation rules – what a player can and cannot do within the game.

• Third, Goal rules – how a player is rewarded and punished within the game, how the player wins.

• Fourth – aha! – Meta-rules: the extent to which a player can suspend, alter, delete or replace anything in the previous three levels.

Looking at it this way, computer games, consciously or not, generally obscure their ideology, and are especially weak in the fourth level of meta-rules or mutability of the design – even when you can edit a game, you can only edit it in ways the code the design team wrote permits you to.

In contrast, though, board games wear their ideology on their sleeve.

A manual wargame demands that the players understand far more of the designer’s intention and work, through the simple fact that they must work harder to make sense of it, through reading and interpreting the rules, shuffling the cards, moving the bits and rolling the dice.

I believe the very tactility, the fact of physical engagement with the game and its components, promotes a different understanding and processing of the information the game offers.

This additional investment of effort pays off in a more complete understanding of what it is the designer was trying to do …

The desirable end result here is not just the players’ acquiescence and acceptance of the game’s world but a desire to know more, to organize information, question it and eventually criticize it.

Because the scope of a manual game is much more open to players interpreting and improvising on the design, the even more desirable result here is players being inspired to create their own works, either through a desire to imitate the designer’s success, or correct his or her perceived failures, if the game annoyed them enough.

In any case James Dunnigan’s motto holds: “if you can play them, you can design them.”

Anyone who can read and write can do this.

But it does not apply so easily to computer wargames, which rely on intricate written code or at the very least a user interface much more intimidating than a blank sheet of paper.

The grimy corners of history

[slide of game box covers]

Approximately 5,000 civilian board wargames have been published in the last 50 years.

The historical and hypothetical conflicts they cover range from the Stone Age to fantasy subjects and the far science-fiction future.

But there is an embarrassingly large gap in coverage of what has actually been going on in the real world in those last 50 years.

The true predominant mode of armed conflict since the end of World War Two has not been formal inter-state, force-on-force warfare.

Instead, it has been a range of activity captured by the general term of “irregular warfare”, especially counterinsurgency (COIN).

Retired Marine Colonel TX Hammes says that there have been three somewhat overlapping waves of insurgencies after World War 2:

- a wave of anticolonialist uprisings and wars; then

- a wave of conflicts to decide which groups would dominate within the newly independent areas; finally

- a wave of transborder and regional conflicts, as the artificial divisions and states created by the colonial empires crumble.

This last wave is what we are going through now, and as relevant as these contemporary conflicts may be to us now, civilian market wargames devoted to exploring and understanding them are not common.

My research identifies out of those 5,000 titles, fewer than 100 that deal primarily and seriously with post-1945 counterinsurgency topics at a level higher than the board wargame equivalent of a tactical “first-person shooter”.

Less than 20 of these deal with insurgencies of the last 25 years.

[A Distant Plain, Andean Abyss, BCT Command Kandahar, Battle for Baghdad, Decision: Iraq, Fallujah 2004, Kandahar, Labyrinth, Liberia – Descent Into Hell, Next War in Lebanon, Operation Anaconda, Somali Pirates, Shining Path, Somalia Interventions, Third Lebanon War, Ukrainian Crisis]

[slide with three points]

Why is this?

I think there are three reasons for this scarcity:

• the sensitivity and relative recency of the subject matter.

• The position of these games as critical of the portrayals of these contemporary conflicts by mainstream media, accounts which are at best simplified, and at worst sanitized and dishonest.

• The position of these games, in their attempts to model complex conflicts, as subversive of many of the design traditions of “conventional” wargames.

These three factors mark these games for criticism, disregard or dismissal by many players.

Not everyone likes to have their assumptions and opinions questioned, still less their playing habits.

But therein lies their value.

[slide with Gahan Wilson cartoon – read the caption]

The sensitivity of the subject

Certainly there are people who have difficulty with the concept of games about war, and condemn the entire hobby of wargaming as being in bad taste.

Personally I’ve always found it ironic that wargames attempt to model the species at war, its most illogical and atavistic activity, through a framework of rules full of consistent logical regulations and mathematical procedures.

But that’s Rationalism for you.

As artifacts of the culture that produced them, wargames do serve in the continual exercise of historical revision and socially useful amnesia.

Warfare has been romanticized for as long as there has been rhetorical language, image and metaphor.

Geographical, chronological and psychic distance also help.

Frankly, the hobby in general appears more comfortable with players, who are mostly Americans, taking the roles of Hitler or Stalin in wargames, due to the distance now separating them from World War Two and its cultural status in American culture as the “last good war”.

Because of the quest for historical validity and to include all relevant factors in the model, board wargames on modern insurgency often feature morally objectionable and upsetting aspects as terrorism and violence against non-combatants.

Understandably, this excites comment, condemnation, and resistance among wargame players, even as the very thought of treating war as a game upsets other people.

This is what I call the “indecency of recency”.

I also would not discount the effect of mere apathy and distraction in this situation.

Relatively speaking only a small number of people play manual wargames – and my impression is that while every board wargamer may have a deep interest in particular periods of history, they are often no more interested in current affairs than non-gamers.

Even after 9/11, with the explosion of books, magazine articles, blogs and websites devoted to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, there has been no great increase in publication of intellectually demanding commercial games on the subject.

Insurgency game as critical object

While board wargames on contemporary irregular warfare may be scarce, unpopular and downright indecent, that does not mean that they are irrelevant or useless.

A great deal of their potential power rests in the raw information contained within them.

A properly researched board wargame is a distillation of a great deal of information, placed in context and worked into the game in such a way that players discover it and absorb it as they go along.

As I said, a board game intrinsically demands more physical “doing” than a video game; to experience it and interact with it, a player has to understand the written rules, read and manipulate its various bits, and repeat these actions cyclically throughout the game.

This focuses players’ attention on what they are actually doing, what it represents, and what is the context of both the information provided and the process by which it is provided.

[slide: ADP Event Cards]

For example, in A Distant Plain, a game I co-designed with Volko Ruhnke on the most recent war in Afghanistan, the Event Cards which are used in each turn of the game have a small amount of flavour text printed on them.

The Event Cards come up randomly, but each one is based on one or more actual historical events, tactics, or tendencies that affected the conflict.

Full descriptions of what is represented by that card in history are supplied in the game’s playbook, with a reference to the game’s bibliography – yes, this is a game with citations and a reading list.

When you compare the information contained in this game and how it’s presented to the firehose of disjointed, contextless words and images that came out of coverage of the war in Afghanistan, you can see the potential contained within one of these games for someone to educate themselves on the complexities and nuances of this conflict.

This was the principal theme I perceived in reading reviews and commentary by players on the game.

Players said they had discovered not only that the war was much more complex than they had been led to believe, but also the different and interpenetrating ways in which it was complex… leading them to an entirely new understanding of why and how the war was fought.

I think to offer people a game that organizes “the rest of the story”, and presents information not just in context, but also shows the origins and development of the conflict, is to give them a powerful tool.

It is an act both critical and subversive of the fragmented, edited and oversimplified mainstream media narrative.

When players ask themselves first, “Why was the card written to behave that way?”

They then ask themselves, “What’s the real story here?”

That’s important.

I’m actually happy when players tell me a game bugged them enough to lead them to explore that reading list...

Or even better, that they did some work of their own to add to or adapt an exiting game or even create their own.

To go back to my earlier notion of board wargames being easily adaptable, there are examples of games being supplemented or slightly changed to fit new circumstances and new assessments of events.

For example, Labyrinth, a game on the Global War on Terror designed by Volko Ruhnke and published in 2010, will this year receive an expansion kit called The Awakening, which will account for the events of the last five years and stretch the game to include coverage and the possible impact of the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the civil wars that followed.

[slide: Ukrainian Crisis in play]

It’s also possible to consider games on recent topics to be almost a type of free-form speculative journalism.

In March 2014, over the very weekend that the people of the Crimea voted in the referendum that saw their region rejoin Russia, I designed in 48 hours a simple political-military game called Ukrainian Crisis that explored the possible outcomes of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

I made, and still make, this game available free on my personal website: anyone can download the rules, map and counters, print them out, and make a paper copy of the game for themselves.

This is called a “Print and Play” and is a good way to get this kind of game distributed, as long as your customers aren’t afraid of a little craft project involving some gluing and cutting.

In the game, both sides sought to reduce their enemy’s Prestige, which was shorthand for their general sense of power or agency, to zero, which implied a stable end state to the crisis more or less favourable to them.

The hook was that while the mainstream media at the time were breathlessly predicting that a large and overt Russian invasion and conquest of Ukraine was only hours away, in the game the players had a variety of non-military tools to use, and could win the game by not going to overt war at all.

This game was not designed to have any predictive value, I designed it to “explore the problem space” as it were, but that is more or less how it turned out.

The first Minsk ceasefire brought this phase of the crisis to an end in September, with no Russian tanks rolling into Kiev.

And as a matter of fact, it wasn’t long before a fan of the game came up with an expansion kit of his own for the game that reflected his view of how the Crisis could have unrolled, and posted it to Boardgamegeek, a popular board gaming site.

[slide: WoT, Bycatch, SBCG]

Finally, there are other manual wargames that are not very complex or heavily researched, but are there to make a critical point through satire.

A game called War on Terror was published in 2006; it begins by adapting the familiar conquer-the-world mechanics of RISK, but adds a Terrorist player. Players begin by trying to build an empire, but in most games they go bankrupt and become Terrorist players themselves, as the entire world expires in chaos and violence.

More recently, a game called Bycatch has appeared, exploring the quandaries of drone warfare. Players hold hands of cards, and choose which cards of their rivals are eliminated based on badly focused cellphone pictures of those hands, taken the previous turn.

This is a potent commentary on the collection and use of intelligence and its human costs.

Finally, there are simplistic and frankly rather immature card games like Fishing for Terrorists or The Suicide Bomber Card Game.

I present them as mere examples of black humour.

Subversive of “standard” wargame play

[slide – revolucion chess by Eduardo Salles]

Mary Flanagan, in her 2009 book Critical Play, examines classical board games and how they have been re-interpreted by artists and activists to critique the origins and direction of their contemporary society and culture.

She presents many examples of contemporary computer games that do the same thing, and concludes her book with a call for a change in how games of either type are designed – that they include multiple viewpoints and multiply valid methods of play that offer alternatives to the “norms” of how a game is put together.

The great majority of board wargames focus on episodes of conventional war, and so have created a common lexicon of mechanics, traditions, structures and assumptions among them… a set of norms of how a game is put together, what concepts it holds in its basic structure, and how it is expected to be played.

Wargames that focus on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, in their quest to model a form of complex and indeterminate conflict, only partly share that language and end up questioning those norms.

I find this approach not only the more satisfying in modelling the contemporary world, but also the more realistic one in describing and modelling warfare generally.

Therefore, I think we ought to adopt the same critical principles with board wargames on irregular warfare, and consider their use in subverting the design and play of the greater body of games.

Someone who’s critical of a game’s assumptions or structure, will find quicker and surer satisfaction with an analog game, through their ease and openness to accommodate additions, expansions, alterations and “reskins” in unexpected ways.

I’d like to illustrate some basic “lines of attack” on aspects of conventional board wargames by contrasting the practices of their structure and play with those found in games using the GMT COIN system, with particular reference to A Distant Plain.

[slide with Labyrinth]

A word on the development of this system, for those who don’t know it already:

Volko Ruhnke’s second published design was Labyrinth in 2010.

It was a 2-player card-driven game about Global War on Terror, in that both players had hands of cards, but with two important twists in it:

- the USA player and the Jihadist player have two entirely different sets of actions to select from, creating different gaming experiences;

- when a player plays a card for its “discretionary” points, the “special event” aspect of the card is implemented for the enemy player.

This game caught a tremendous amount of interest, in that it was the first widely published commercial game to try to come to grips with the American reaction to the 9/11 attacks.

It was an important step forward in reminding players that modelling asymmetric wars required asymmetric game structures.

It also featured a sophisticated set of flowchart-like routines we now call ‘bots to allow for solitaire play.

[slide with COIN system box covers and dates]

Volko’s next project after this was Andean Abyss, on the insurgency in Colombia in the 1990s.

It was published in 2011, and was the first game in the COIN system.

Unlike Labyrinth, it was not a 2-player, card-driven game; it was a 4-player card-assisted game in which one card at a time is exposed from a deck, and players may choose either to execute the event or to conduct an operation from their individual menu of possible actions.

I helped to playtest this, in 2010, and I could see that Volko was on to something very special.

I did not actually meet Volko until we attended the same conference in the summer of 2011.

So imagine my surprise and pleasure, to read in his designer’s notes for Andean Abyss about the contribution of my game Algeria to the conceptual bases for the asymmetric operations in the game.

[“The greatest recent advances in boardgaming COIN, in my view, are to be found in the designs of Canadian Brian Train. Brian’s wargames feature insurgency itself (rather than a hex-and-counter tradition) as their starting perspective, then build accessible simulations from there. His game Algeria: The War of Independence, more than any other game, provided the conceptual basis for ANDEAN ABYSS. ANDEAN ABYSS’s mechanics rendering asymmetric Operations, Troops and Police, Underground Guerrillas, Government Redeploy and Guerrilla March, Civic Action,

territorial Control, Terror and political Support all have starting points in Algeria.”]

I am so proud and honoured to have contributed to the creation of Volko’s game system, which has taken off like a rocket.

You can see from the slide here that there are no fewer than eight (?) titles in the family that have been published or have the go-ahead to be published in the next year.

Beyond these, there are at least four other titles I know of that are actively being worked on that may appear in the next couple of years.

I’m now going to talk about the specific departures and differences exhibited by the COIN system games that set them apart from conventionally designed wargames, with specific reference to A Distant Plain, a game on the most recent war in Afghanistan that Volko and I designed together in 2012.

[slide with 6 points]

1. Binary, zero-sum opposition vs. multiple, frictional points of view.

Most board wargames on conventional topics are binary contests which rarely deal with the problems caused by the inevitably divided aims of the people and organizations on each side, or the unreliability of allies. Irregular war situations have these problems in spades.

Practically all irregular war situations feature shifting loyalties and utility of civilian government agencies, tribes, classes, foreign powers, social organizations and military formations.

A good way to treat factionalism is simply to have more than two players, who supply a lot of randomness and complexity in a game just through natural human obstinacy, deviousness and lust for revenge.

Each game in the COIN Series published so far accommodates up to four players, each player representing a faction very different in its methods and objectives from the others.

When fewer than four players are available, the game system provides flowcharted algorithms to operate the spare factions and keep the multiparty nature of the depicted conflict in view.

Players can also run two factions at once, if they don’t want to use these algorithms, though they are prevented by the rules from having one collude with the other.

The trick is to choose factions that will make an interesting game; to strike a rough balance between their historical size and material power and their aspirations, from which the designer can derive their victory conditions.

So for example, in A Distant Plain we have four factions, each with very different composition and very different aims:

The Coalition - Represents the International Security Assistance Force, mainly combatant troops from the US and NATO countries – many other countries sent contingents but are not directly represented, or are subsumed into the game’s immovable Base pieces.

The Coalition, in game and comparative terms, has infinite resources but is sensitive to taking casualties.

The Government of Afghanistan - Whenever Afghanistan has had a central leader, he has proven to be a man adept at creating and maintaining coalitions, making deals and temporary alliances with a wide variety of ambitious competitors.

These competitors in turn associate with him in expectation of both material and political gain and the opportunity to advance their own agendas and interests.

Consequently in the game the Government player is seeking something we called “Patronage” – this is not strictly graft or other forms of theft or even abuse of power, but an acknowledgement that at its base most of politics is based in a complex and elaborate network of acquaintances, mutual understandings and favours to pay off, and a high level of Patronage implies a high level of survivability.

The Taliban - This faction represents three major sub-factions within the Taliban movement, plus an indeterminate number of smaller groups and “accidental guerrillas” who may temporarily join with them.

The great majority of Taliban members are Pashtun in origin, this is an ethnic minority that predominates in the southern section of the country and whose homeland straddles the border with Pakistan: we thought of several ways to reflect this very important demographic feature of the actual conflict in the game’s structure.

The Warlords -These forces represent an even greater abstraction than the Taliban – not only do they represent organized crime groups and dissident Pashtun tribes, this faction also encompasses many of the non-Pashtun ethnic groups of Afghanistan.

They oppose both the Taliban and the national government, because both of them pose the threat of establishing a centralizing and dominating authority, under which they would suffer.

They seek to create and maintain a power vacuum in the country and to accumulate Resources, which they gain through a number of methods.

Finally, friction manifesting as poor command and control and inter-faction coordination is also an important part of COIN system games.

In A Distant Plain, such friction is precisely the point of including multiple player roles. An example is the complex and ambiguous relationship in A Distant Plain between the Coalition and as the Government of Afghanistan, who must manage a joint account of resources toward their divergent tastes and needs.

Players have variously described this as “like a bad marriage” or “two scorpions hitched to a wagon”.

2. Ordered situations vs. chaotic and nonlinear game states

Many standard board wargames are relatively “ordered” games.

That is, the parameters of the conflict are set and the battle or war will be fought out more or less as it was historically, with only a few variations supplied by individual engagements, and all in pursuit of set goals in set ways.

In A Distant Plain the combinations and confluence of the Event Cards I mentioned earlier give the game a great deal of chaos and replayability, as they introduce what we call “cascading effects” or “second-order effects”, where a change in one part of a system will have unanticipated results in unexpected other parts later on, as rules are partly modified or suspended.

Many events and some game mechanics also reflect political, not military developments that materially affect how, when and where factions could conduct operations.

Insurgencies are primarily contests of political will and psychology, and the effect of actions and reactions in an actual conflict may have ultimate effects far greater than their physical impact.

A game attempting to model an insurgency has to respect this in its combat mechanics; also, a game may feature combat-like but non-kinetic operations that have no immediate military or material result but have strong political and psychological effects.

For example, in A Distant Plain the “Terror” activity is available to both the Taliban and Warlord factions.

This does not directly affect the counterinsurgent forces but it does erode popular support for the government and, through sabotaging economic lines of communication, its ability to operate against insurgents.

A game design needs to include randomness and unexpected consequences; causes are never tied neatly and linearly to effects.

In many wargames this is reflected through use of dice, but in the COIN system the dice are rolled very few times during a game.

Much of the randomness comes from multiple devious human players, but it’s the Event Cards that make for a whole deck of monkey wrenches to throw into things.

The Event Cards do come up randomly, but each one is based on one or more actual historical events, capabilities, tactics, or tendencies that affected the conflict, and is thoroughly researched.

Explanations of events and a research bibliography are presented in the back of the Playbook that comes with each game in the COIN system – you don’t have to treat it as a reading list, but it’s there all the same.

3. Rigid treatments of time, space and force vs. flexible ones

Most wargames have a rigid assumption of the amount of time a game turn encompasses, and the amount of activity a player can complete during each turn.

Usually the pieces represent set units of military force.

Insurgencies tend to last longer, sometimes much longer, than conventional wars, and there are long periods of inactivity.

Consequently COIN games, at the operational and strategic level and in contrast to most wargames on conventional conflicts, tend to have a relaxed attitude to the amount of time a game turn encompasses, and the amount of activity a player can complete during each turn.

The GMT COIN series of games does this, and refines it further with the concept of periodic Propaganda Rounds, which represent an inevitable break in the action as the combatants regroup, assess and adjust their positions, and take into account some longer-term effects of sustained fighting.

In a conventional war game, often a given game piece is congruent with one identifiable military unit or force.

But in the COIN system of games, all player force pools are abstracted - players need to keep in mind that the pieces in the games do not represent exact discrete combat units, or even any fixed ratio of troops, but rather the “effective” portions of the manpower assumed to be present in or deployed to a particular space.

For example, in Afghanistan, in reality elements of the Afghan National Army and Police were and are physically deployed throughout the country, but it’s equally true that their physical presence in an area did not guarantee their ability to affect events there – during the years covered by this game, many units of these organizations were simply incapable of doing their jobs, for a variety of reasons.

Hence, the Government player has Troop cubes and Police cubes to reflect their differing missions and abilities, distributed unevenly during play.

[slide with ADP Faction interactions]

4. Asymmetry of information

Asymmetry of information is a marked aspect of war generally, and insurgencies specifically.

An essential problem with many conventional wargames - I would argue perhaps THE essential problem with them - is that they are near perfect-information exercises.

This is their greatest departure from the professional wargames played by the military, and the greatest criticism that can be lodged against them in their claim to simulate anything like actual warfare.

In the GMT COIN system there is little hidden information, but there is still a respectable information gap, or rather a gap in the ability to react to information, through the semi-randomized turn orders set and reset each turn by the Event Cards and prior player choices.

Also, the insurgent is given an in-built advantage in that the counterinsurgent has to first Sweep in an area with guerrillas before Assaulting them, so he has a chance to leave the area.

Something that was introduced later in the playtesting of A Distant Plain was the notion of optional Deception markers - at the beginning of the game each player draws 2 of these; a marker may slightly adjust his victory condition, allow a surprise extra activity, or just be an empty threat.

This has also been adopted in some subsequent designs using the same system.

5. Asymmetry of methods

The antagonists in an insurgency are quite unlike each other in terms of resources, structure and capabilities, much more so than in a conventional war setting.

This quality should permeate the design as completely as possible, and give players fits in trying to make choices in trying to resolve the problems that confront them during play.

The main way this is done in the GMT COIN Series is through different operations menus for each player.

Only some of the choices—“Training” and “Rally”, “Patrol” and “March”, and so on—can be recognized as different flavors of basic activities such as building forces, maneuvering, and striking the enemy.

Even these flavors are quite distinct in mechanics, however, and many other activities—eradicating drug crops, suborning local officials, and so on—are entirely unique.

In the development of this series of games, we have to test out, balance and tune all these dissimilar menus to ensure that reasonable decisions result in a roughly historical array of tactics, and result in an enjoyably tense contest.

6. Asymmetry of objectives

[slide showing table]

Who wins an insurgency?

More to the point when you’re playing a game about an insurgency, how do you win, and when?

As I noted, insurgencies are contests of physical preponderance, political will and psychology.

Only rarely do they have the rapid and completed conclusions normally found in conventional wars.

The COIN Series uses a different combination of victory conditions for each player, to put a point on the overlapping but not always directly opposed goals of the multiple factions in the game.

In A Distant Plain, for example, each faction pursues a set of two objectives: one in direct opposition to an objective on another faction; a second objective independent of the other factions, though always opposable somehow.

|Faction |Opposed incentive |Independent incentive |

|Taliban |Raise opposition to the government |Build insurgent infrastructure |

|Coalition |Raise support for the government |Minimal presence in Afghanistan |

|Government |Consolidate military control |Strengthen patronage network |

|Warlords |Keep military control divided |Amass wealth |

Conclusion

[slide with ZOC cover]

To some, these games may seem quaint, superseded by technology, ludicrously complex, or just the product of an unbalanced mind.

But to me, they are objects rich in information and with great potential to both help players make sense of recent history and current events, to offer them the ability to explore past and present alternatives through play, and maybe to bring the state of board wargaming a bit closer to what it is supposed to model.

I want to refer to Mary Flanagan’s work one last time, in quoting from her piece called “Practicing a New Wargame”, her contribution to the book Zones of Control, a new anthology just out from MIT Press.

“I loved the idea of wargames when I was young because planning tactics, outsmarting the enemy and ‘destroying them all’ is a fantasy that engages us with human history and myth…. But ultimately I don’t want to live in a world where only can be victors lording over the slaughtered, defeated Other. I doubt most of us truly do. So how do we find new models?

What will wargames look like with different kinds of rules, with new expectation, with radical strategies and compromises thrown in? What if their simulation of conflict isn’t so much about war as it is about critical thinking and critique form an outsider status? We know that games can change over time. It is vital that game scholars, game makers and game players see these familiar models on a continuum of change, so new play forms that model new solutions to our problems, can be invented. Our games are constantly evolving, and this means we all have an opportunity, even a responsibility, to evolve with them and push ourselves to model the world we wish to create.”

As game designers, I hope you will adopt some of these principles and practices in your work.

[concluding slide with contact information and URLs for sources]

Thank you.

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