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Subject: Designing Tomorrow?s Wargame
    10/4/2005 8:51:13 PM

By David Kopel

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 greates
 
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Kierkegaard    RE:Deleted   10/5/2005 4:51:00 PM
What a brilliant article--and what a pleasure to read! Wow. A few points, as they occur to me. The first is that Saddam almost certainly possessed anthrax; Iraq was given the Ames strain legally by our own university labs. The only question was whether it was ever milled for use or not, and the testimony of many who claimed to have witnessed test attacks suggests so. Further, the Czech secret service continues to maintain that Iraq passed anthrax on to the 911 terrorists, a claim supported repeatedly by Vaclav Havel, Nobel-prize winner and staunch anti-Communist. His claims ring a bit more true to me than those of the FBI, whose cryptography analyses regarding the anthrax letters are utterly wrong ('Arabs don't divide Roman letters in half'--hah!), and whose fruitless Keystone Kop persecution of Hatfill has embarrassed the agency's reputation substantially. In any case, as our experience shows, anthrax is a difficult weapon to deliver any significant harm with, which is why Saddam purportedly abandoned it. Kissinger, as you point out, is a moron, an ideological kinsman of George Soros. He possessed a near-sexual worship of power, and his description of Soviet military culture as 'Spartan' (I suppose he was deceived by their food and barracks) betrays the bankruptcy of his perception. It was he, you will recall, who devised Nixon's 'secret plan' for abandoning Vietnam. But you do President Carter an injustice. Despite his woeful performance in every other sphere, and his ongoing political presence as a sort of prissy, self-serving old moral scold, it was he and Brzhinsky who were responsible for our strategy in Afghanistan--and President Reagan erred in continuing it past the point of a bleeding perpetual stalemate, as 911 so sadly proved, Your point about 'Diplomacy'--that modern parliamentary democracies cannot abruptly abandon alliances is also incorrect, to some degree, as witness our constant propping up and then abandoning of Kurdistan in this century as a bargaining chip, or the EU's relegation of Israel from protege to pariah. Historically, clients of ours like Norriega or Pinochet have discovered how our patronage can blow hot and cold with the coming and going of various administrations. And what of Nixon's sudden detente with China, a nation which had in the very recent past contributed so much to our battle deaths in Korea and Vietnam? A volte-face worthy of any board game. I look forward very much to reading more of your work.
 
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Kierkegaard    Kopel's Rules of Wargaming (not 'Deleted')   10/5/2005 4:53:12 PM
What a brilliant article--and what a pleasure to read! Wow. A few points, as they occur to me. The first is that Saddam almost certainly possessed anthrax; Iraq was given the Ames strain legally by our own university labs. The only question was whether it was ever milled for use or not, and the testimony of many who claimed to have witnessed test attacks suggests so. Further, the Czech secret service continues to maintain that Iraq passed anthrax on to the 911 terrorists, a claim supported repeatedly by Vaclav Havel, Nobel-prize winner and staunch anti-Communist. His claims ring a bit more true to me than those of the FBI, whose cryptography analyses regarding the anthrax letters are utterly wrong ('Arabs don't divide Roman letters in half'--hah!), and whose fruitless Keystone Kop persecution of Hatfill has embarrassed the agency's reputation substantially. In any case, as our experience shows, anthrax is a difficult weapon to deliver any significant harm with, which is why Saddam purportedly abandoned it. Kissinger, as you point out, is a moron, an ideological kinsman of George Soros. He possessed a near-sexual worship of power, and his description of Soviet military culture as 'Spartan' (I suppose he was deceived by their food and barracks) betrays the bankruptcy of his perception. It was he, you will recall, who devised Nixon's 'secret plan' for abandoning Vietnam. But you do President Carter an injustice. Despite his woeful performance in every other sphere, and his ongoing political presence as a sort of prissy, self-serving old moral scold, it was he and Brzhinsky who were responsible for our strategy in Afghanistan--and President Reagan erred in continuing it past the point of a bleeding perpetual stalemate, as 911 so sadly proved, Your point about 'Diplomacy'--that modern parliamentary democracies cannot abruptly abandon alliances is also incorrect, to some degree, as witness our constant propping up and then abandoning of Kurdistan in this century as a bargaining chip, or the EU's relegation of Israel from protege to pariah. Historically, clients of ours like Norriega or Pinochet have discovered how our patronage can blow hot and cold with the coming and going of various administrations. And what of Nixon's sudden detente with China, a nation which had in the very recent past contributed so much to our battle deaths in Korea and Vietnam? A volte-face worthy of any board game. I look forward very much to reading more of your work.
 
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