How
should wargame designers respond to the new military environment of the war
between the United States and Islamofascism?

Rule number
one: Don?t make the game into a mere vehicle for whatever didactic lesson you
are trying to teach. In particular, don?t force the game to lead to particular
results. Nobody knows how history will turn out, including you.

As a
cautionary tale, consider two games which violated Kopel?s First Rule of Wargame
Design.

In late
2002, Californian Dermot O?Connor released a web-based wargame called Gulf War 2.5 about the impending
invasion of Iraq. According to the Feb. 20, 2003 ElectricNews.net, the game was
made available at O?Connor?s website, www.idleworm.com. Today,
though, it?s no longer listed among the available games at the site. And no
wonder.

According
to ENN, the game had ?only one possible outcome.? Although the invasion of Iraq
was ?quick and easy,? Gulf War 2 then
mandated the following events: ?Iraqi anthrax attacks on Israel and a nuclear
strike on Baghdad in response. From there, warring Middle East nations all vie
to carve up the remains of Iraq, with Iran invading in the South and a Kurdish
revolt in the North. Soon, militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan,
Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia rise up and nuclear weapons are spread
throughout the region. War between India and Pakistan ensues, while Iran and
Saudi Arabia contemplate war with the US.?

Not
one of Gulf War 2?s mandates came
true. Saddam may not have even had any anthrax. And the problems that did ensue
in Iraq (terrorist warfare by Ba?athist remnants and al Qaeda foreigners, with
logistical support from Iran and Syria) were not among Gulf War 2?s range of outcomes.

Now
Gulf War 2.5 never pretended to be a
sophisticated simulation; it worked through Flash animations. And in response
to an irate player, O?Connor posted a disclaimer on his website, ?Technically,
Gulf War 2.5 is NOT a game.? Instead, ?It?s a satirical cartoon.?

Even
so, Gulf War 2.5 got respectful
treatment as a realistic game from Reuters, Yahoo, and Excite, garnering
newspaper coverage from Dubai to the U.S. to New Zealand.

Now
it?s easy to dismiss O?Connor as an angry nut, because he is. His website is
filled with the hatred and vicious language which characterize the
anti-American fringe of today?s so-called ?peace movement.? He says that Bush
is a Nazi, the U.S. is ?the Fourth Reich,? and warns his readers about the Zionists.

But if Gulf
War 2.5 is a deservedly-forgotten effort which attracted more attention
from credulous journalists than from serious wargamers, consider one of the
best-selling wargames from the mid-1980s: Balance
of Power. Designed by Chris Crawford for the Mac, it was ported to the PC,
and grossed over ten million dollars.

Crawford?s book,
Chris Crawford on Game Design,
contains many valuable insights on what makes a good game, and how to design
for playability and long-term player interest.

Nevertheless,
his best-selling Balance of Power,
which was in its time the most sophisticated commercial computer wargame yet
designed, was a failure?an abject lesson in how a talented designer allowed his
ideology to ruin a game.

In a book
excerpt on GameDev.net, Crawford explains how he came to design Balance of Power, a Cold War simulation:

?I embraced
the core values of the 60's counterculture, the most prominent of which was
pacifism. War, in that view, was the greatest evil mankind had ever created,
and was to be avoided at all costs. As the 1984 electoral campaigns heated up,
there was plenty of belligerent talk from the right wing, and a series of
alarming events boded ill for the future of peace. And here I was, profiting
from the sale of wargames, and contemplating designing even more. It was wrong,
and I knew it. But what could I do??

His answer:
?I would design an unwar game, a game about the prevention of war, a game about
peace.?

The result
was Balance of Power. When I bought my first personal computer in
1987, I purchased two pieces of software: WordPerfect
4.2, and Balance of Power.

Balance of Power had very sophisticated
graphics, for its day. The game was filled with chromatic detail about various
countries, and seemed to exude realism.

Yet the
game was so tied to Crawford?s political theory that it was extremely unrealistic.
Essentially the game forced the player (US or Soviet) to promote his national
objectives only by extremely cautious diplomacy. If an opponent threatens your
sphere of interest, you can threaten back even more strongly. But never try to
out-threaten an opponent in his sphere of influence. Try to make marginal gains
in areas outside the sphere of either player. If you could turn Ethiopia from
pro-Soviet to pro-US, that was about as good as it got.

Balance of Power was a good simulation
of the timid foreign policy style of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.
The game got a laudatory review in the New
York Times from a former National Security Affairs assistant to Jimmy
Carter. Crawford credited the memoirs
of Ford?s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, with ?a large influence on my
design.?

As Ronald
Reagan pointed out in speeches, Kissinger was ?quoted as saying that he thinks
of the United States as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta. ?The day of the
U.S. is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union.? And he added, ?. . . My
job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best
position available.??

History, of
course, turned out entirely differently from how Kissinger, Carter, and
Crawford expected. Reagan aimed for something which Balance of Power made off-limits: the destruction of the Evil
Empire. Reagan achieved his goals with strong and repeated anti-Communist
rhetoric, with huge increases in conventional forces, and by building up intermediate
nuclear weapons in Europe, challenging the Soviets to a strategic arms race
which bankrupted them, and shipping arms to resistance fighters in the Soviet
sphere of influence (Afghanistan).

Balance of Power had absolutely no way
to win the Cold War the way that Reagan actually did win it. To the contrary,
such strategies could never succeed in the game, which amounted to a computer
version of Helen Caldecott?s hysterical prediction in the Fall of 1984 that the
re-election of Ronald Reagan would make nuclear war ?a mathematical certainty.?

I abandoned
Balance of Power after a particular game
in which I, as the U.S. President, rhetorically declared my support for the
democratic opposition in Eastern Europe. Despite Soviet indignation, I refused
to back down from the rhetoric?although I never went beyond mere rhetorical
support. Pursuant to Crawford?s simplistic system, the computer (playing the
Soviet side) found that I had infringed in a Soviet sphere of interest, and had
ignored every possible threat from the Soviets warning me to shut up. So the
computer declared nuclear war, and announced that I had lost the game, since a
nuclear war had begun.

Obviously,
this is a preposterous result for the game to impose. Imagine if Ronald Reagan
had gone on television every week to denounce human rights violations in
Soviet-dominated Poland. And further imagine that he did nothing else, in any form, to challenge the Soviets. Do you think
the Soviet Union would have started a nuclear war just because of Reagan?s
words?

The Soviets
might have reduced or severed diplomatic or trade relations with the U.S. They
almost certainly would have escalated their own anti-U.S. rhetoric. They might
have increased their funding for anti-U.S. proxies such as the Communists in El
Salvador. Perhaps if they were really furious, they might have even brought the
Nicaragua?s Sandinista dictatorship into the Warsaw Pact.

But would
the Soviet Union have launched an all-out nuclear strike because the U.S.
President kept harping about freedom in Poland? Of course not. The possibility
is only infinitesimally higher than zero, and would depend on the Soviet
dictatorship being suicidal and irrational, which it definitely was not.

Now for the
First Corollary to Kopel?s First Rule of Wargame Design: Don?t underestimate
how much ideology can constrict a nation?s actions.

Consider Diplomacy, an extremely simple game from
the 1959, which I still rank as one of the greatest wargames of all time. It doesn?t try to be realistic about the
mechanics of war, but instead teaches some very valuable lessons about great
power diplomacy?about how duplicitous diplomats can be; about the difficulty in
telling whether your allies are really allies or are really in league with your
enemies; about how to confuse people into acting against their long-term
self-interest.

But there?s
one important way in which Diplomacy teaches
the wrong lesson as a diplomatic simulation. In real life, national leaders have much less freedom of action to
changes sides suddenly than do the players in diplomacy. Diplomacy is set in early 20^th century Europe. Some of
the nations, such as Czarist Russia, really did have the ability to change
alliances almost at will.

But the
democracies, especially England, did not. Even though popular opinion can, to
some extent, be manipulated by a national government, the democratic public is
not, and never has been, so gullible that it can switch from ?Oceania is allied
with Eastasia against Eurasia? to ?Oceania has always been as peace with
Eurasia, and has always been at war with Eastasia? in a single day. Changing public opinion and obtaining
democratic consent takes time?sometimes longer than the six-month turns of Diplomacy.

I?m not
faulting Allan B. Calhamer for his brilliant game design. Trying to impose too
much realism would have gummed up the mechanics, and made Diplomacy much less accessible to new players. And when a game needs six or seven players,
it?s usually necessary that it be newcomer-friendly.

What I am
suggesting is that a realistic design for ?Terror War 2010? has to incorporate,
at least in the optional rules, some of the ways in which ideological
constraints limit a player?s freedom of action. For example, in ?Terror War
2010?, if the person playing Franco-Germany spends five years of game-time supporting
Iran, and trying to undermine U.S. influence in the Middle East, the
Franco-German player should not in a single turn be able to switch sides, and
send troops to join in the surprise American invasion of Iran. Elected
officials in Franco-Germany simply would not dare to switch sides so quickly,
without an interval of gaining support from public opinion.

Conversely,
the Iran player might realize that he and Israel could form useful strategic
alliance against Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the Shah of Iran and Israel did
sometimes cooperate. But if the game
presumes that Iran remains ruled by its current theocracy, then the game should
make the Iran player pay a high price (such as automatically forfeiting 80% of
its terrorist units) for cooperating with Israel.

One final
thought: Thomas P.M. Barnett has written in Fire
& Movement about the U.S. military continuing to wargame the Chinese
invasion of Taiwan, and the ensuing U.S. naval intervention, while failing to
wargame asymmetric terrorist warfare. I?d agree that the military should
wargame more than just ?Raging Dragon: The Battle for the Straits of Taiwan.? But
I think Barnett goes much too far in concluding that wargaming the Chinese
invasion is a waste of time.

Just
because Chinese aggression would be contrary to Chinese commercial interests
does not mean that Chinese aggression could never occur. The Taliban could
still be running Afghanistan as their private hell on earth, and making a lot
of money from an international gas pipeline, if they had not been so wedded to
their ideology that they stupidly allowed their nation to be used as a base for
attacks on the world?s only superpower.

Mussolini
could have made himself and his nation rich by staying neutral in World War II,
but he was led into war by his crazy ideological vision of recreating the Roman
Empire.

The current
Chinese dictatorship may not believe much in Communism anymore, but it does
believe in the historical Chinese empire. They want Taiwan ?back? just as much
as the French wanted Alsace-Lorraine back in 1914?perhaps even at the cost of
jumping into a major international war, as the French did (against their own economic
interests).

Moreover, dictatorships
have often found that a good remedy for domestic dissent is promoting foreign
aggression. Many of the Chinese people have very little faith in the central
government; much of China is already quasi-anarchic, and if the Chinese economy
stumbles, the central dictatorship might decide that?although attempting a
swift conquest of Taiwan would be risky?it would be less risky than failing to
distract domestic dissent.

So I would
like the Pentagon, and commercial wargame designers, to produce future history games
on new-fangled asymmetric conflicts, and
on traditional conventional warfare. If, perhaps, the Pentagon can be criticized
for thinking too much about Taiwan, commercial wargame designers have not
thought about it at all. Perusing the various wargame websites, I found no game
on the subject of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. So can somebody produce something about Taiwan? Perhaps such a
game (like the older games about a hypothetical Soviet attack on West Germany)
could help deter future war, by revealing strategies about how to successfully
resist Communist imperialism.

Dave Kopel is Research
Director of the Independence Institute, a public policy research organization
in Colorado (www.davekopel.org;
i2i.org). He has previously written
about wargames in National Review Online and Jagdpanther.