The Games Behind Your Government's Next War

Prologue: Oh no it's another serious one you know how PMG videos are either like fun deep dives into cool communities or we cover just the heaviest [ __ ] imaginable y this is a video about how government War gaming is on the rise again like it's never been before and how that stands to affect your and my games industry and by War gaming I mean countries using things that resemble video games board games role playing games and Laps to try and practice plan and preempt things like disasters political maneuvering and most of all conflict now historically the popularity of War games has always ebbed and flowed you have times like World War II where war games are regularly argued to have changed the course of world history but then you also have times like the 1970s when after the disaster of Vietnam and with computers getting more and more powerful governments began thinking that these more primitive games were all maybe a waste of taxpayer money but today governments are bringing their games and their game designers back out of retirement in 2015 the Obama administration's Department of Defense announced that $525 million was to be given to the Pentagon to develop its wargaming capabilities and this was like a starting pistol for governments and military alliances all over the globe today there is simply more demand for wargaming designers than there is Supply a fact that people make games confirmed by heading to the connections wargaming conference for wargaming professionals where we found a generation of Veteran designers unable to retire desperate to pass their skills to the Next Generation and maybe that means you because while wargaming is a practice dating back hundreds of years today is the first time the practice has come back to find itself adjacent to a hyper Advanced commercial games industry with ideas engineering designers and game facilitators all ready for the taking and I personally think it's pretty important that we as a community figure out how we feel about that because listen for this video people make games was given access to the UK's defense Science and Technology laboratory where among other jobs scientists and Engineers design weapon systems so the lab could show off their growing wargaming facility to people make games as audience and me and my cameraman did not stop having incredibly complicated feelings about that for the entire time that we were there it was exactly like visiting a video game development Studio but in some kind of Doctor Who parallel universe where games weren't made for fun but for the most serious purpose imaginable so listen before I kick this video off properly we set out to make something like a documentary on this subject right but it's shaken out more like a video essay for a few reasons so first off we quickly realized that it was going to be impossible for us to capture this story for an audience of Gamers such as yourself without me talking about my personal experience that was so weird of being a gamer in these spaces also as you'll very quickly see this story is a complete moral Labyrinth that it just felt cruel to leave you in alone so instead I'm going to be sharing my ethical standpoint on this story as we go through it please don't cancel me also the more research we did into this story The more we became part of this story which isn't as crazy as it sounds in this video I'm also going to be explaining the secret back door in the Funtime games industry that has always led to and from government wargaming I'll teach you how the games that you love have been shaped by government war games and I will explain how this is our opportunity or curse that we as a community can shape government war games right back because at the extreme end today in 2024 your country's War Games might now be something that you could get a career in or that could otherwise Define your career in games by you deciding that you are ethically opposed to your labor being used by the sector in any way never in the history of people make games has our team had such complicated feelings while researching a story so we we just figured all we could do for you is prove to you that wargaming is coming back and try and equip you so you can know how you feel about that oh and stick around to find out why this promotional ruler I was given is maybe the most haunting object I have ever been given by anyone and why it summarizes a good chunk of this debate Chapter 1: Wait, WHAT'S happening?! [Music] what evidence can you give would you give people that war gaming is kind of on the rise or the Resurgence uh that's really simple so I'm a deliverer of wargaming facilitation and design and I have not got time to breathe I'm trying to retire I can't uh the supply of war game experts is way too short and the demand for good War Games is way too high frightening so let's kick off with the question of why why is this happening now the answer to that question doesn't totally exist but we called up an expert to give us their best guess David Banks a lecturer in the brand new field of war game studies at Kings College London I think there's two things I think one of them is the current strategic environment is so wobbly and weird that I think that you know major States like the us or the UK or whoever it is are kind of not able to rely on some of their old forms of forecasting and Analysis our old models just don't seem to be hitting the target so let's try everything it's a kind of a try everything approach I think the other bit though I think there might be a generational thing where we haven't put our games away you know I think we we grew up as Gamers and then we're still Gamers and so I think there's a kind of a a willingness to accept gaming just as a concept we're in interesting times here because I I'm not going to talk politics yet but not so long ago where a certain prime minister and a certain Chancellor said the days of Tanks Crossing planes were over and very shortly thereafter we saw the invasion of Ukraine we are seeing high-intensity War fighting in Europe again which many people believed would not happen we're addressing concerns where there might be War fighting in the Indo Pacific region we are now facing a situation under financially very constrained times where we're looking at war in Europe and the potential for that escalating and splitting over and pulling in War of Europe it's not impossible but besides which there are many other crisis points around the world related to climate change water and energy security food security large migrations of people we are looking at increasing likelihoods of conflict in places and some of that may be state-on-state high-intensity Warfare we're not prepared for it so one way we can address that Gap in a very very economic Fashion Is by wargaming high-intensity conflict in other words everything to do with Wars is expensive but everything to do with War Games is cheap so if war games can make what you build where you place it or how you use it even fractionally more efficient it'd be a real Bozo not to try now basic question number two what is wargaming or at least what does it look like in the 21st century so you might be imagining an Chapter 2: What modern wargames look like older white man with facial hair pushing little boats and planes around the map no one was more surprised than me to find out that that image is still absolutely part of 21st century war game at the connections conference I saw a new design from a man considered by some to be the best naval war game designer alive today and his work looked from a distance like a hex and counter war game from the 1970s I was also taken back by a Cutting Edge tool shown to me at the defense science technology lab that was used for among other things modeling lines of sight and communication which I could not look at without being reminded of one of the greatest pieces of game design history ever 1913 design little Wars by the author HG Wells did you know HG Wells also popularized the concept of time travel became intoxicating what a guy anyway that today we still play some of these oldfashioned looking war games of people pushing little boats around does make sense because this area contains some of the most well documented success stories in the history of the field gaming journalist Simon Parkin recently wrote a book called a game of birds and wolves which document doents the story of the western approaches Tactical Unit in World War II which was mostly stared by the women's Royal Naval service or Rens they created War Games to help Britain better survive submarine warfare which was threatening a famine in the UK but also Germany had developed such good ubot tactics by wargaming it themselves plenty has also been written about the US Navy's intense wargaming before they commenced their island hopping across the Pacific where they pushed the Japanese Navy back to Japan in this front of the war the United States found that the Japanese could do almost nothing to surprise them because they'd simulated the strategy so many times it's not all success stories wargaming is also what led Japan to think that Pearl Harbor was a good idea arguably a misplay from Imperial Japan however while traditional games like this still make up an enormous amount of today's war game interest and funding with David Banks telling PMG that today it feels like quote every game being committed is a South China Sea game simulating various flash points around Taiwan today many War Games don't feature moving units of any kind around a board they might not even have a board and that's because today a lot of conflict sees countries being aggressive towards one another without firing a shot one such new Battlefield has the term influence Warfare looking at things away from that kinetic sphere so things that are perhaps more to do with the human psyche or perhaps looking at things on the internet so softwares and behaviors on the internet how it fits into conventional Warfare is the fact that it can you know send a message or uh persuade an action or a country to take a particular course of action should they should they want to for example in recent years a lot of Inc has been spilled about Russia's attempts to manipulate democracy in the United States by compromising individual policy makers or funding whole troll Farms full of Russian citizens who then spend all day on the American internet trying to shape Civic discussion or on the week that I was writing this script there was a guardian article about the alleged new Russian practice of rather than using spies as would be the case in the Cold War they are now allegedly using Bitcoin to pay wouldbe sabots to do stuff like enact some performative anti-Semitism on a Holocaust Memorial outside of Paris how do you fight something like this a brand new kind of warfare that is leaving the countries on the receiving end shocked and flat-footed well so thinking in the sector goes a good start would be to game it just like the Rens did great but how do you game that and the short answer is we're still figuring that out but the start of the process is stuff like this published just last year this is the UK Ministry of defense's new influence wargaming handbook a document designed for defense and security Personnel exploring why they should maybe start practicing this game that it would appear the Russians are currently beating them out but this this is not a rule book this is just the start of a discussion arguing what we have to gain from these games and pitfalls we should avoid as to what the games themselves would look like today we're in an era of experimentation and while people do make video games to do complex simulations or mathematics a lot of the time governments are still making tabletop games for the same reason that a lot of video game developers do paper prototyping it lets you get games on their feet quicker so you can test theories iterate on designs and start learning today one of the most popular new kinds of games is what's called a matrix game and this is so close to a tabletop role play game it's kind of unreal in a matrix game you have two teams competing against each other with different objectives there may be resources or not there may be a map or not you might represent something as large as competing Nations or in one Matrix Game I heard of teaching cyber security one player is a computer hacker trying to destroy a shipment of refrigerated medicine being kept in a port finally you then have another human being a neutral adjudicator who ostensibly knows the most about this subject matter teams then take turns describing their action which might be anything for example I'm going to get a mole to get a job in this port and they then offer three justificatory arguments as to why it would work the other team then States three arguments as to why the action wouldn't work the adjudicator then weighs these arguments and turns them into a modifier you add to the role of a die and the action succeeds or it doesn't and then the next player takes their turn and you go back and forth until someone wins or you've learned enough but also if you keep detailed notes on these games as you run the game over and over and over you'll steadily generate a list of actions each side might reasonably take as well as the likelihood of success and consequences for all of them and then in theory you'll be able to play this game without the subject matter expert at all you'll have something like an informative board game where players simply choose their action from a big list however in addition to what genre of game you should use to model a problem being a source of endless discussion in this sector there is also the unanswerable question of how big these games should be let's actually get Annie to animate this as well so let's say you're making a game about influence Warfare between two countries for two players with one game master but if the influence Warfare affects the politics of those countries that's also surely something that needs to be modeled ideally in parallel that would be more instructive so let's take two more players who play the political game so we now have a five player game with two teams of two but you know there's also that other country they both share a border with that's very influential we should model that as well so now we're up to seven players at which point we maybe need two GMS maybe three but you know what affects all of this is everyone's cyberspace Warfare so let's add a cyberspace Warfare player to each team then we really got to get the local superpower in there so that's 13 players chucking the two GMS in and so on and so forth until you've got a game that Teeters on the edge of total chaos that takes all day to play and requires whole teams of adjudicators at which point you probably need extra people just to handle the catering and to tell everyone where they need to stand at what time this other one we did for NATO um which I have the pieces here um was a single game about um rushia versus Nato squabbling over Finland Finland exceeded to Nato the the the brief was to make a game about crisis Dynamics signaling Dynamics multi-domain operations so space cyber info Ops Logistics but not kinetic Warfare because they have those games and so that was fine so what what I did is to try to keep the Simplicity is wasn't simple for me but was a lot of miniature games smaller games so you know you're playing the Cyber game or you're playing the space game or you're playing the command game and then all those games periodically transfer information to each other and which actually put a huge amount of bonus on the facilitation side that's more than two players that was about 50 players so while wargaming might have started with two Prussian generals pushing little blocks around today it can be used to Model A much wider variety of problems facing a state or a military it might take any format of game and it might feature any number of players so in terms of me helping you to visualize what games governments are playing with your tax dollars I'm aware that's all super unhelpful but it does convey something that I felt in all of my field trips to spend time with wargaming professionals which is these people would be the first to admit to you that they don't fully know how it works they just believe so strongly that it does work a lot of these professionals are visibly happy to dedicate their professional careers to trying to make sense of it or just trying to deploy this inscrutable ass power also as we'll get to later in the video many of the young people I spoke to in the sector were equally excited to explore the applications of wargaming outside of conflict to try and make the world a better place and everyone was Keen to talk to me about games used by Britain's National Health Service to better survive covid or games about logistics to help Charities to get their aid to the right place all of these people would also wincingly admit to me that today almost all of the funding in the sector comes from the military so let's move on to the next chapter of this video how does this Mass injection of government interest and money into wargaming stand to affect your and my games [Music] Chapter 3: What does this mean for the games industry? industry quins what do you on about modeling military hardware most of us can't model a successful car in tears of the Kingdom unfortunately let's do a nice vent diagram thanks an you might think of government War gaming and your and my commercial games industry as separate they share the name of games but they're completely different fields that is categorically not true there is a Big Slice here where we cross over it is here that you will find the reasons that professional wargaming will take an interest in hiring Gamers will look to take our Innovations in Tech and also why our games have taken a lot of our Innovations from war games and why if you are ethically opposed to some aspect of the practice of wargaming you should figure that out right now before you end up in a situation like the staff at game engine developer Unity when in 2021 they were blindsided to discover their employer had signed contracts with the US's Department of Defense you remember that story We All Shook our heads in disbelief and then within a year there was another story that Unity had signed yet more even more lucrative contracts with the dod and once again we all shook our heads in disbelief but listen to me listen this is going to keep happening and the checks are going to keep getting bigger billionaire Palmer luuy designer of the Oculus Rift and famous for that Time Magazine cover announced this month that the new VR headset his company is working on is being driven by military applications I'm actually building a new headset right now uh it's it's driven by yeah yeah it's driven by military requirements but it's also going to be used for for non-military stuff and it's it it's really cool it's really something how do you imagine companies like these two might adapt if World War II were to break out tomorrow and let's not forget that in World War II companies like Mitsubishi and for quickly pivoted to making tanks but this is just technology let's talk about actual games did you know that government agencies can buy professional versions of strategy games that you and I can buy on Steam that enable them to change the statistics of military hardware in the game to perfectly match the data they have available on different weapon systems it's true at the connections conference I attended a talk by someone from strategy publisher slytherine where he told us quote the p said they were getting more use from the slytherine games they downloaded from Steam than the games they commissioned from war game designers that is nuts but it makes sense if you are a video game developer you will know the awesome amount of time and money and expertise that goes into developing an engine an interface a simulation of a gun or a plane or a vehicle audio Acoustics net code in terms of hours of expertise invested into their creation video games are some of the cathedrals of the Modern Age you think a government is going to try doing that if I have to use one of my country's websites and it's not [ __ ] that's such a surprise I feel a flush of patriotism of course governments are taking stuff made by the commercial games industry and then tweaking it that costs them half as much and it works twice as well but as we just established a lot of government war games are not video games right they're tabletop games and board games this is where this story gets a little more personal for me so this connections conference that people make games went to it was an intimidating event to go to right it took place at Sandhurst a historic Military Academy that has been training officers of the British army for 250 years attending the conference with special advisers to governments military personnel from America Specialists who had traveled from as far as Australia and Japan and a lot of these people knew who I was from my work with board game YouTube channel shut up and sit down you see what United this Community wasn't just that they made War Games to spec for a living for clients ranging from governments to militaries to NOS to corporations for many of them including the organizers they were simply passionate about some aspects of Gaming Full Stop the event had a social mixer that was just a board game night and to some extent that's why they're good at their job because if they're commissioned to make or run some board game about political maneuvering they can pull in Innovations from diplomacy to Twilight Imperium to John company to the dilemma one of the games I saw at dstl was a game about British Air Force bases having to make difficult decisions about resource allocation during a crisis and the designer proudly told me he used the infection system from board game pandemic to simulate stress to nodal points of a network and what reallyu me up was learning that this influence goes both ways one of the most Innovative commercial board game designers vco run was a figure I had been making fun of and praising in on the shut up and sit down podcast for a decade for making games that were fascinating but maybe just a bit too complicated for me I found out at connections that vulco run used to be an analyst for the CIA making games for them so there I was UN shut up and sit down covering vos's games about counter Insurgency and going man where does this guy get his ideas from but check it out the mechanics in these games about counterinsurgency then got reworked by a different designer into a game called root a great board game that's about a counterinsurgency among sweet little Woodland creatures and root now has a video game adaptation and a ttrpg and I personally know video game designers who are working on designs inspired by root you sound crazy when you talk about root being a product of the CIA but that's this story it's crazy making more uncannily still one of the most beloved videos that shut up and sit down ever did was where we went to play something called um Mega game about aliens invading the Earth everyone was putting l of things down people were yelling forgive the quality of this video it was a different time the game was called watch the skies and it was a huge game played on your feet with dozens of players that's a bit like playing model un meets XCOM it was such a popular video that got so much attention to the game that both the game and the video got a sequel where the designers ran watch the skies again but this time it had hundreds of players and our coverage telling people about these things called Mega games led to the creation of Mega game societies all over the world and opened countless people's minds of what a game can even be and the designers of watch the skies who I didn't pay too much thought to when we made the video back in 2012 called themselves the UK Society of Mega game makers and they were these eccentric older British gentlemen now this is only really going to blow your mind if you're a shut up and sit down fan but the key organizer of the connections wargaming conference was the designer of watch the guys and the UK Society of Mega game makers was an organization that was created for fun by wargaming professionals using their experience running large onyou feet political games for governments and the reason that these people were so successful in their career as professional War Gamers and also were're able to invent this thing called the mega game that inspired people all over the planet is because the skills involved are one and the same it's the same discipline it's all just game design immersing the player then fine-tuning the experience through it iteration but that's just my personal Tale of Terror let me tell you the ancestry of gaming as a whole is completely tangled up with Mankind's desire to study War please allow me to teach you a little bit about Gaming's family tree by explaining how we could have never had bitted Kung Fu experts Tifa from Final Fantasy 7 without the existence of King of Prussia Frederick William III so listen in the the early 1800s a bunch of German States including Prussia were trying to mod chess into a game that could better simulate War by adding rules for terrain and changing the rules of units and in 1812 the Prussian military is like this is all way too abstract in real life there is no grid and you don't have perfect mind control over what all of your troops are doing so this guy George Leopold Von rvit popularly considered the father of modern wargaming begins working on a design that his son eventually finishes and calls Ciel the German word for war game I like to think of this period of history as men will invent Warhammer instead of going to therapy so Kiel is played on accurate topological Maps it simulates the fog of War it even invented something like a dungeon master games of Kiel would wheel out some ancient Prussian General who'd seen some [ __ ] I imagine he'd have like one eye and when you declared your orders you tell them to him and he would tell you what you could expect to happen next or whether it was just dumb and thoroughly impressed with the military applications of this design King Frederick William III had it instated as a training tool in the Prussian military so how does this get us to Tifa no problem in 1870 when Prussia defeats France many countries including the United Kingdom and the United States take an interest in csb they begin studying it and by the time we get to World War II wargaming has grown as a tool and has mass applications all throughout the war but also this creates companies and players of hobbyist War Games who continue simulating war after World War II 20 years later in 1971 two members of this hobbyist wargaming community Jeff perin and one Gary gak make a game called chain mail which is simulating Medieval Miniatures combat then the chain mail Community begins experimenting with rules for Castle sieges that involve sending a team of soldiers to try and unlock the front door by going in Via a dungeon which people realize is fun and eventually this dungeon miname grows into Dungeons and Dragons incidentally why do you think Dungeons and Dragons is all about tactics and killing [ __ ] why do you think a sequence of Dungeons and Dragons games is called a campaign if you know what you're looking for the wargaming ancestry of D and D is as visible as a giant tribal tattoo but after the invention of D and D a whole bunch of video games are inspired by it and begin riffing on it and then riffing on each other this is how we get the first Final Fantasy game which is why in Final Fantasy 1 all of the enemies come from D and D including mimics and ilids and obviously if there's no Final Fantasy 1 there's no Final Fantasy 7 with beautiful Tifa and her lovely vacant face one thing I find cute is that it's not just that the birth of the RPG is a direct result of military innovation but hundreds of years ago prussians were getting in the same sort of fights about the additions of their game as today's d and d and Warhammer fans in 1873 Prussian Lieutenant Wilhelm Jacob meckel published a treaties saying the current addition of creeks bill was too complicated and the game was better when it was simpler and then there was a new addition that took into account his concerns and gave more freedom to the GM and lots of people preferred it but not everybody but more generally if we're talking about the kind of influence the military has on video games and vice versa there is obviously the subject that could make for a whole separate video about the kind of stories that we tell as a society I don't want to alarm you but this is sociology 101 for people living in any society there is this jingoistic self-aggrandizing oxygen that we all breathe that forms our national identity and for me in my country video games along with TV and movies are part of that system they teach me that I am part of a good and Noble country that only goes overseas and kills people when other countries deserve it or when we're stopping fascism maybe we all grow up on a diet of new stories don't just stories in general where military hardware or tactics are shiny and exciting unless it's deployed against us at which point it's to be judged harshly is frightening and indiscriminate now I'm not saying that video game designers are choosing to make propaganda I am saying that our society as with every society is so saturated with certain ways of thinking that we don't even notice we're doing it but nonetheless we are reinforcing it this is the loop that sees Call of Duty games being popular for letting us live out a fantasy that our society Imus us with of being a soldier where we can't help but learn about our country's weaponry and strategies and heroism which is all displayed in Exquisite detail and how now certainly in the UK and America we're getting recruitment adverts for the armed forces that make service look like a video game helpfully in terms of illustrating this point while I was writing this script Ukrainian fight drone simulator was just listed on Steam a game looking to let us experience living out the PO footage you see from real life Ukrainian drone Pilots but for me the ugliest example of this has always been the gunship levels that started appearing in Call of Duty games round about 2007 where in seeking to replicate the distant fuzzy cameras on real life gunships just ended up indistinguishable from footage coming out of the second Gulf War the the first time I played one of these I felt sick I still feel sick watching them back but let's stay on topic perhaps the most self deprecating argument that the games industry should be paying attention to the Resurgence of War Games is the people make games a gaming YouTube channel were given access to a UK government R&D facility where more than a dozen people were kept from doing their day job they had to clear their office of sensitive documents before we arrived they had to sit and answer answer our questions and show us their games why would they do that it is surely because his Majesty's government wants dst's wargaming arm to look good in front of people make games audience or Gamers for reasons of public relations and recruitment because this Global push arguably a race now to design more war games and better war games has to involve bringing in more people with the right skills with expertise in working in video games in board games even lar and the people who were giving us answers in our interviews you could tell they were trying to make working here feel like a great idea I spoke to one woman who got hired from the lp Community who talked about the importance of immersion in government War Games she said it helped players interact emotionally with decisions they were making when they felt something real was at stake forgive me for a wonky segue but it sounds like you've got a really fun job of people shooting like you know organizing things with people being shooting zombies running around a warehouse yeah you have now swapped that for the kind of the Bleaker end of the spectrum of of people running around and shooting weapons at each other was that something you wanted to do um oh that's it's an interesting question so there is an overlap of interest there because it's all gaming you know um this has a this is a lot more meaning behind it so that is fun that was fun this is engagement and meaning this actually changes stuff for the world and for other people uh whereas yeah like gaming gaming it does change stuff for people in a lot of ways particularly in the way they can develop their personal sort of characteristics and skills of those sorts of things but this has like wider effect and not only does the wargaming sector see the benefit in a whole spread of gaming expertise the same push towards diversity that we're seeing in our games industry is being completely replicated in theirs gaming and War gaming has very often been seen as domain of of middle-aged white men and that's something we're trying to move away from at dstl we're trying to change the diversity of our teams we're trying to change the diversity of the way people think and that's for our Recruitment and our training and our attention of existing people for your audience I'd like to say if you if you're sitting there and thinking I couldn't be a war game designer because of my background and my ethnicity and my diversity ask yourself why and actually get in touch with djl to find out what we can do to to help you I would encourage you to take a hot second before getting in touch with dstl maybe just finish this video first also on the subject of diversity at the connections conference I was talking about gamergate and I had the peculiar experience of a major in the British Army in his 60s knowingly nod and reach out and palm me these two enamel pins a polyhedrin in the colors of the pride flag and a stop harassment in gaming sort of demand which was at once sweet and also a bit meaningless so I guess this is as good a point as any in this video to start talking about the ethics of all of this Chapter 4: Is this turning "play" into a weapon? a topic I feel better equipped to handle than most and also just in awe of what a frightening subject it is so like the well trodden path to success for a YouTube video SAS is to tell you exactly how you should feel about something so when the video ends you are left with a sense of resolution maybe even understand exactly who was wrong and who was right but morally I feel that I can't do that it would be ignoring the diversity of backgrounds and World Views in the PMG audience but also among the PMG team but I do believe that the games industry as a whole has an opportunity maybe even arguably a moral obligation to learn about this subject and begin discussing it because what's happening right now is governments taking innovations that we have generated in the service of play and then using them to change how they govern we're at the precipice of something right now our games our expertise our technology is changing the world and yes in some cases directly leading to the deaths of individuals and as I said at the start of this video wargaming has come and gone in the past but this time we have power today is the first time that war games have returned as Theory as funding buzzword and as practice to find games as an industry and a global Community here waiting for it culturally we are now the defining artistic medium of a generation and yeah RPGs might have been spawned from wargaming in an indirect way right now the big actual play shows are playing Madison Square Garden and Wembley Stadium but while I can't tell you exactly what's to be done that's something that you have to decide for yourself I can tell you that doing nothing with this power feels pathetic it feels like a dereliction of the standards of artistry of intelligent debate and of care that we hold ourselves to as a community so what I want to do next in this video is just give you our audience and the larger games industry a starting point for these discussions I think we should be having and so let's start with the elephant in the room the big question that I bothered every single one of my interviewees about and may well have been bubbling away in the back of your brain since you first clicked on this video namely isn't this whole practice totally reprehensible these guys are turning games and play into a war fighting tool and like yeah that is one way to look at what is happening right now I told you I wasn't going to tell you how to feel in this video but I will offer you a little bit of outrage As a treat for 90% of my time in the sector I was bowled over by how honest and introspective they are you want to talk about controversies politics do these games even work wargaming professionals will yes and your criticism by pointing out out other problems that you hadn't even considered Jesus day one of the conference I participated in a mega game that was like this big Icebreaker that simulated the wargaming industry in miniature so some people were on teams role playing like the Air Force some people were role playing the university designing games for them and it played like a knowing satire of everything that was wrong with how war games are commissioned and used it was all about war game designers struggling to make ends me and the militaries getting crap games that didn't work but I said that was 90% of my time in the sector right that remaining 10% repeatedly I kept catching sight of this single dark Cog at the bottom of this industry that keeps the whole machine turning and I'm sure this is something in common with people who do PR for the military proper so I would test the water with these folks by asking them outright so are you designing games that kill people and the line they use is no you've got it wrong these games save lives that's the C line I kept hearing and you'd go okay well whose lives are we saving and they'd say well our servicemen and our civilians but these games are helping us to kill our adversaries right and then they'd say well yes some of them will do that and it made me feel crazy it's pure double speak that shows you the Grim mathematics that this sector has to do to survive now I do genuinely believe that all these same people I was interviewing understood the horror of war better than most probably better than me or you watching this video one of of my interviewees had lost a limb as a result of injuries sustained in military service but still I did not enjoy my time visiting under the stuffy quilt of nationalism that has to cover the people that do this job that the system requires them to do I found it philosophically suffocating because when you talk about the British military exclusively in terms of Defense you immediately remove from the conversation they just vanish all the wars in British history that are now considered morally cataclysmic who are we to hide behind the gleaming euphemism of Defense when our overseas adventurism studs our history from our historic colonialism to our most recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan not to be confused with our previous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan from our role in the creation of Israel through to arming it today now credit where it's due when I spoke to the youngest war game designers in the sector the people who most fervently believe that wargaming has applications outside of War I'll be talking about their arguments in a little bit they told me I wasn't crazy and when I asked them are these games weapons they said well some of them yeah also some of the older wargaming designers gave me answers that I felt were philosophically really quite honest feels to me like assisting the Armed Forces to save lives and conflicts would potentially result in more deaths on the on the other other side yeah yeah absolutely that's is that a plausible conclusion it's more than plausible it's absolutely correct because uh Warfare is obviously adversarial to reduce the lives on our side you are potentially going to be killing more people on the other side I don't dispute that at all the thing that wargaming brings to the party is firstly conflict prevention we should have War gam for example are we successfully deterring Putin we should have War gamed before the conflict started what we might do in response and doing all these things in advance so giving ourselves the foresight as to what's coming down the pike just means that you can react in a better way and in a better way does not mean killing more Russians it means preventing the war from the get-go or taking steps which have been precons considered to reduce the conflict uh right the way through but for every few answers I was given that felt Grim but practical and honest I would get an answer that felt jingoistic and my trust of the scene would be undermined again what would you say to the members of our audience who feel that wargaming is taking you know like game design and then turning it into um a weapon of some kind yeah and I can understand that point of view I mean I'll also state that I'm also anti-war too I'm here for defense the D in dstl really want to make sure that we are protecting our nation we have serving Personnel you know in tricky situations at the moment and to use my skills and my sort of analytical backgrounds to help them inform decisions for the government make the right decision I think that's a real sort of benefit to this particular role and something I'm really proud of so the these are people who are designing these games ultimately like yeah it's it's about defense but these game these are this is game design that could result in in real death not necessarily UK citizens but of other people around the world that seems like something that be tricky for some of the game designers that watch people make games to I don't know Square their design practice with yeah of course you en Ted your own personal opinion on aspect the way I'd argue is you know if you go to B andq bnq sell hammers bnq aren't you know advocating the fact you use a hammer to to hit someone around the head they're used to hitting now so it's how you use the particular tools and how you use the particular analysis I think it's important it as long as you you can square it away of yourself that you're comfortable you're defending and assisting and supporting then I think I think that's that's fair enough yeah but not 30 minutes before that interview was conducted I was being shown software that simulated British Challenger tanks assaulting a village the objective for this game the task that blue Force UK are doing is to clear the enemy out of this town and Le's analogy implies you'd have to be a lunatic to use a tool such as this to assist in a dark purpose like I just don't think that's true but also this is a complicated thing to say I want to live in a country that has tanks and has software that better helps them to use those tanks just speaking historically countries that aren't able to defend themselves tend to have a really bad time and also the war in Ukraine feels to me like a harbinger of worst wars to come in the 21st century but i' just like if when I talk to people who are involved in the creation and facilitation of War games and I say wow this feels like a uncomfortable thing to design and to play they're not like why God when DSL was showing us one piece of software that showed planes fighting over a country that of course in the simulation England when actually software like that is infinitely more likely to have practical applications Elsewhere on the globe on multiple occasions stood in front of the projector I made a comment to the room like ooh this is chilling because it was I was seeing a video game functionally a toy and a kind of toy I've dedicated my life to being used to assist in decision- making regarding the scrambling of jets to conduct real life missions like it's [ __ ] Enders Game and so I was saying things like oh this is weird and what I was fishing for was someone in the room to validate my feelings and be like yeah I know right but instead I was always met with silence which means everyone in that room didn't have an emotional response to this disquieting imagery I was looking at or they simply didn't feel that they could voice those feelings in a room with their boss and a journalist and a PR and that just made me feel super weird as the like Advanced representative of the games industry in this government laboratory made me feel weird and I'm not weird all right I'm sure lots of you will agree with me in the comments that there is something so weird about seeing the games we play reflected in this funh house mirror to include actual war and I'm not saying it's unnatural you know human beings are apes and play is how Apes learn but games and play also have associations with the innocence of childhood and also play has this Sinister capacity to normalize our actions and make them seem mundane and this is on some level like part of the appeal for the military right a game is a prophylactic euphemism we put in front of an act that might be unappealing we're just playing right we're just stabbing a sandbag with a Bayonet until we're not we're just playing a board game that sees us making a decision of launching a missile to sink a ship with thousands of people aboard until we're not I'm reminded of how in the 19th century the British Empire and the Russian Empire fought this proxy war for control over the country of Tibet and Afghanistan and Persia and this war came to be known as the great game a piece of language that has always really troubled me because for the people making the decisions and sending people to die and deciding the fates of these countries they get to enjoy the sort of like Foxy imagery that they're playing a game when what do those porns in this analogy represent those porns are human beings but so long as we think of all this as a game as pieces on a board we don't need to think about the countless lives that we are changing forever and speaking of Russia when people my games started researching this story the war in the public Consciousness was Ukraine in the UK that's a war that most of the public are pretty United on as these things go as it features a smaller country attempting to align itself with Progressive European values standing up to Vladimir Putin a fascistic dictator colonialist and for what it's worth a worldclass bigot and so because this is one of the better Wars that country has been involved in that lent the wargaming sector an extra Sheen of desirability of justification but then of course Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th of last year and Israel's indiscriminate response that at the time of publishing this video continues to lead to the deaths and inconceivable suffering of the Palestinian population has led to Global condemnation and almost overnight this video we were working on became even more uncomfortable than it already was was now for the record the people in the war gaming sector who I spoke to for this story told me that despite Israel very publicly using Western armaments for this conflict they said they didn't think we were assisting Israel using any War Games whatsoever however it's also true that countries that are allies regularly conduct war games and Military Maneuvers together and share expertise so while I have no way to confirm this it seems possible to me that Israeli military officials might have attended events where they were able to learn Western wargaming methods and then take them home to practice and refine those War Games themselves all of which is to say and this is backed up throughout history when you look at the scientists and Engineers who create inventions with military applications if you were to accept a job in the wargaming sector might be quite hard to know who will end up wielding your designs or what they'll be trying to do with them I mean it's sort of what Lee said right if you make a hammer question is do you feel responsible if a maniac uses it I think where Le and I differ is I just think there might be more Maniacs than he does like most of the audience for this video are going to be living in the United Kingdom or the United States and those are two countries with let's say very checkered decision making and so it just feels to me that on one level if you are signing up to make war games for your country you are just crossing your fingers that what you make what it's used for does not later to become a source of shame that said it was pointed out to me that for lots of war game designers they have some degree of autonomy over what they make and who they work for though even this can be complicated I was in Rome at a national conference and I was on my own having dinner and I got talking to somebody at the table next to me was also from Ireland and I thought oh that's a nice coincidence he he was actually Belgian I said what do you do and he said I work in the central bank I'm the Eon I'm an economist he said what do you do when I explain what I was doing there and then he kind of lectured me about you know how do I sleep at night working with NATO and you know when they're doing all these terrible things and you know all the violence in Ukraine and and I'm like well NATO's trying to help and he's like well they just make it worse and I just I was like oh I think I'm the bad guy in this conversation with the central banker and and it's kind of stuck with me and I I haven't quite got the answer to it I I I think one of the things I tell myself is this is being done whether I studied or not it's being done and it would be useful to know what how it actually works I suspect that most war games are creating some form of distorted knowledge or distorted educate training negative learning of some kind very often it'll be useful to understand that better so that we do it less but the downside is that you know when I simp say to my students oh you know you have to study Civil Wars because then you can understand how to prevent them the difference with something War gaming is you're actually studying a tool so as you understand how to refine it more there's every possibility that people you don't like would start using that refined tool this relates to my last question um which is I mean just is this discipline taking commercial game design and turning it into weapons um is it turning into weapons I'm not sure it's turning it into weapons I think it is I think it can influence actual decisions around military war fighting things including weapons procurement so it's used sometimes to test weapons I don't think it is a weapon itself right because I think we'd have to be clear about how are you hurting somebody directly with organ but indirectly is this harming people at least sometimes yes definitely and so then it's well how do you sleep with yourself and I I don't know know I mean it's it's right now at this moment in history I'm I'm more confident than I was maybe even 10 years ago about you know if we have to pick sides I'm a little bit more comfortable picking one Than I Used to Be You know I just have a baby daughter now and I don't think everywhere in the world is the exact same and I don't think any country is interchangeable with any other country in order just be the same I think it be radically different you know it's like there are sides to some degree I just never thought I'd be in a position where I actually have to kind of come down off the fence um and but there you are lots to think about but let's just hit the reset button on this philosophical discussion real quick so I can reframe it by using my ruler from hell this is a promotional charge gear given to me at connections by a gentleman promoting his company Minds Mission impacts of nuclear events software and it is a pocket sized reference for what would keep you safe from different sizes of a nuclear blast as well as what injuries you'll sustain such as Burns to the retina of your eyeball it's also a ruler but when the man gave me this ruler he explained the pitch for his company which is that traditionally in military war games the moment someone decides to launch a nuclear weapon the game is over the only winning move is not to because the consequences are too cataclysmic and far-reaching to hope to simulate and also it doesn't matter you've all lost and the gentleman who gave me this pointed out that this means none of our militaries are practicing for what happens if someone uses a tactical nuclear weapon a small one the kind of thing that could flatten a town or just a building and which there was a lot of fear about Russia using in Ukraine and the gentleman who gave me this ruler pointed out that this surely makes the world a more dangerous place if our decision makers aren't training for the possibility of a small nuclear attack but the counterargument would go okay if everyone around the world is playing games where using tiny nuclear bombs is an option aren we all that much more likely to reach for that in real life to which my answer is hello so all of that makes this a Chapter 5: What if it's immoral to NOT wargame? complicated story for people make games to be covering right no not yet it's not allow me to significantly complicate this story by presenting the ethical case for war games so there's this joke in the wargaming community that on his deathbed the inventor of War Games George Leopold Von rtz turned to his wife and his dying words were I wish I'd come up with a better name and the reason for that is that everyone in this sector agrees that if it is true you can use games to practice plan and preempt a war you can use games to practice plan and preempt any other problem it probably shouldn't be called a war game it should be called a serious game because it is used by humanitarians by NOS it is just a technique but it can save lives uh money time resource and things like the climate to which the cynical response would be hang on quins you've said that the sector gets almost all of its funding from the military in one way or another surely this is just a way of the sector washing its hands and making it seem cleaner and more appealing and that is absolutely correct the wargaming sector loves Wheeling out this argument because it makes it seem more moral more noble but also it Wheels out this argument because I think it's true like the American government wargaming to explore vulnerabilities in election infrastructure the president Trump have tried to exploit back in 2020 I did work as well out in South Africa I spent six months out there during Co looking at Water strategies for for Drought War gaming is something that can be used for professional development for capability and force development if you're talking about the military if you're talking outside of the military it's got real utility you know first of all red teaming organizations crisis response plans crisis management plans security plans business continuity and resilience plans even in planning to deliver a business opportunity it may be a big construction project or something like that where I've seen real disasters in the past because they haven't put the time and the effort into the planning process and then stress testing those plans just a couple of weeks ago I was invited to present on how we do military planning and stress testing of plans at a global supply chain and Logistics conference at the University of Southern California big organizations being uh being represented there really interested in how we apply these processes you know a little bit of the rigor that military planning brings and the experience that comes with it but then how you go about actually stress testing those plans and wargaming is one method of doing that you may want to call it decision gaming or crisis and risk gaming it all looks remarkably similar two of the war game designers I spoke to at connections had the Red Cross and Britain's National Health Services clients two entities that were able to look at games designed for armies to practice their Logistics and they said hey that would be exactly as useful for us so from this perspective wargaming is just the latest in vention on a long list of stuff invented due to deep military funding that has since found wider application in society a star studded list that includes you love it the internet GPS canned food cargo pants and you know what else some of the first disposable menstrual products which were popularized in the 1920s after British and American nurses began using their military's new high-tech bandages when they were on their period which is just like women have been bleeding since the dawn of time and then World War I happens and the patriarchy is like something must be done for our boys and so when you're talking about the ethics of whether you should dedicate your professional career to developing war games we do also have to have as part of that discussion whether it's ethical to refuse to develop something that is in its infancy but has the potential to help all of humanity I've been working in government for the last five to seven years to help bring in a bit more war gaming and reasonable challenge into government okay uh what does that mean um so wargaming is an interesting concept because it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people but actually the kind of core kind of concept of how do we allow a group of people who are trying to deliver public services to Think Through problems come at it from different approaches and say the things that are slightly uncomfortable to say and to kind of raise those risks that you know otherwise you don't want to really think about and to think through what happens next how we think about delivering Healthcare how we think about delivering agricultural policy how we think about in crisis response all of these areas require us to make the right decisions we are always looking for more people who want to move Tiny hospitals around the board and not the tiny tanks uh and it is really vital that actually the ability to challenge each other isn't just something that soldiers do that we do a little bit more on the civilian side as well so that's why I kind of try and do a little bit of my part to make that happen I found my conversation with Alex inspiring if militaries have realized that using war games they can make better decisions they can explore the consequences of their action and they can be better equipped to question the assumptions of their superiors doesn't that perhaps Chapter 6: What if EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS even mean that we as Gamers have something like a moral obligation for there to be more war games in our society for us to assist in this Grand transference of all the skills and design out of the military and into wider Society well maybe not because allow me to complicate this story Just One More Time by asking you does wargaming this thing that your tax dollars are being spent on right now actually work at all so practitioners of War Games agree that the right game at the right time can help humans to make better decisions they also agree that the wrong game at the wrong time or one that's just moderated inexpertly or one that's played badly or had bad data put into it or bad subject matter experts might make humans think they're better informed when in fact some or all of what they just learned and might be wrong this subject was in the news recently when the Washington Post published a two-part article on Ukraine's failed offensive in 2023 the Articles talked about how the offensive played out differently to how American War Games predicted and included a line from a senior Ukrainian General saying that because the war in Ukraine is unlike anything the world's seen before with its World War I trenches and skies full of Jones wargaming quote doesn't work all these methods you can take them and throw them away you know it doesn't work like that now meaning War Games might not only be a waste of man hours and your taxpayer money they might lead decision makers to confidently make decisions that are bad but let's imagine that war game practitioners don't fundamentally misunderstand their subject in the way that Ukrainian General was talking about wargaming is still a deeply fraught practice for starters the genre of game and who plays it it will inform takeaways an international relations scholar who studied war games played about nuclear weapons exchange during the Cold War found that the games that presented players with basically mathematics and probability as if you were playing Settlers of Katan with nukes saw players becoming more likely to launch their nuclear weapons while games that involve negotiation and talking with other human beings who held nukes made players less likely to utilize their nuclear weapons and let's talk about the three witches of of wargaming this is a paper by Warg game developer Steven DS Martin that capably explains how basically absolutely everyone involved with a war game can ruin it so it all starts with a sponsor like the United States Navy who has the budget and wants its staff to war game a particular problem let's pause for a second to think about why are they doing that it's probably not because they have no idea what to do they've never thought about this problem before they're panicking now these people are professionals who make decisions like this for a living so it's likely that before the game designer has even started work they already have research or experience or Instinct of how to resolve this problem and they will be happiest if the war game backs up what people in the Navy are already talking about doing if the war game then acts as this source of evidence that goes ooh no don't do that that would be terrible that's not your best decision at all if decision makers in the Navy listen to that war game it makes them look incompetent or they can say no we think that war game is pointless actually but who paid for it the Navy did so again that makes them look incompetent so from the very beginning this whole quasi scientific process is probably biased the second Witch of wargaming is what's known as the chain of command basically the people directly above the war game designer who's communicating with them and commissioning them this person sort of your customer might have opinions they might also feel that it will reflect badly on them if your game models something in one way or another if it's too complicated or too simple they're thinking about their career and because they're the one paying you if they have feedback it's not like you can say no if you work in any creative field and have ever experienced the torture of getting feedback from your client you'll understand all this implicitly the third Witch of wargaming is the Players the people who actually play your game on the day I bet all the game designers watching this video are nodding like yep players will [ __ ] a game up ideally they're competent at the role they have to take on during the game and ideally they focus on simply playing rather than trying to show off and look brilliant in front their colleagues but even if you duck these two issues Downs Martin adds that senior players will often try and redesign the game as they're playing it remember how in Kiel the prussians would wheel out a general whose job was to sit there and go no that wouldn't work no don't do it like that that is such a natural human instinct that people will do it when playing War Games even if they're not the games master they don't care about the science they don't care about the larger design of the game they just see one mechanic and go no that's not how that works we need to fix it right now all of which makes wargaming a pretty fraught craft SL science to try and draw conclusions from but hey we've been doing this for hundreds of years right at least we have hundreds of years of data and failures and success stories to draw from no no we we really don't because unlike when the military designs a bandage and the rest of the world is free to look at it and realize what they've really designed as a menstrual pad War Games suffer from what was described to me as the military fetish for secrecy if your country's military loves one thing it's for other militaries to have no idea what's going on in there and so practically all war games that have ever been played are designed in secret played in private and then put on a shelf in the basement of a storage facility somewhere to never see the light of day again what did you learn from the game what did you learn from running the game what did you learn to never ever do again hardly anything is published we just don't know that's the biggest block on the ability for us us being academics or researchers or people interested in this to actually be able to really assess and evaluate how wargaming could or should work better because we cannot get access to the raw material so you might get to read the report so you know you'll get 150 page report saying this is the game we ran but even when you get to that report it's I still don't really actually know what the game looks like I don't have a real sense of like did you have 50 units or 2,000 units you know you still are kind of lost a little bit like what's the game I don't know the game and and so then you can't really evaluate the results they're like and then this is what happened you're like says you like I don't you know you may be completely true but I I can't independently verify what you're saying which is which is kind of rule number one of science right it has to be transparent I have to in principle be able to replicate what you did um I have to have access to the same you know you should be giving me your data and I should be able to look at it now with something like statistics you may kind of find statistics in general to be kind of disagreeable or making a lot of kind of questionable assumptions or anything else but it can defend itself right it can sort of say this is It's on this basis that we make knowledge claims these are the assumptions very strictly that we're making about reality now your mileage may vary you might go I still don't buy it which is very often the way I feel about statistics but they can make that claim and I think what wargaming has struggled with always is that ability to be able to articulate you should buy this and I think the key distinction is war Gamers focus on design and assume it's producing knowledge or educational outcomes academics focus on the way the the existing methods work ways we have of justifying knowledge claims so they're fixated on is this like rigorous science and they kind of assume that any game they design is good enough to do it if you know what I mean so they're kind of like not great games but great science which is how we get to this moment in time where we have been War gaming for like 150 years and yet the academic book on how do humans learn from games has as yet unbelievably still never been written mind you that day can canot be too far away now at least because right now the world is seeing the creation of wargaming as a field of academic study so those people will be putting something together soon and hopefully the conclusion is yeah humans don't really learn from games as much as they think they do and so we come to the end of this video what have we learned have we learned a lot have we learned nothing Epilogue: Don't look away I don't know man and now I need to try and put a takeaway on this I guess if I have a note to end on it's this don't look away the games industry has a patchy record of engaging with political causes there are areas we can be proud of you know the push towards inclusivity and diversity while it is achingly slow I do see it happening you know no matter how many bigots we piss off we continue this line that games and plays for everybody our communities history also Glitters with wonderful fundraising efforts for great causes and in recent years it's been really nice seeing the games Community develop an appetite for long video essays that cover really complicated issues but equally as a community we have what I think is a truly pathetic habit of letting absolutely lethal problems exist and thinking oh that's not our responsibility because we don't recognize it as our kind of games oh predatory business practices and the reinvention of gambling in the mobile sector yeah we're not going to talk about that think about that because mobile Gamers yeah they're not our people well like everyone was really supportive of when PMG examined the concatenation of Horrors happening under ROBLOX Corporation but my question to you is why did it take the games industry so long to notice how bad that situation was and it's because we looked at ROBLOX and went oh those games are weird and for kids that's not our kind of gaming and now we're seeing the Resurgence of wargaming the creepy great uncle of gaming coming back and he wants to do his thing again but bigger than ever and he sees us his nephew in this analogy and he wants to reach into our pockets and take a bit of our a bit of our expertise bit of our technology bit of our design bit of our spirit and I'm sat here wondering what's it going to be this time Gamers H are we once again going to claim that this is not our problem because let me tell you it's not just that we have power to influence or keep tabs on this sector we're the only people with power no one else understands games and so I'm just asking us to like think and discuss among ourselves what our opportunities are and perhaps even what our responsibility is I'm just pulling this out my ass now but I'm talking about maybe game unions having Clauses in their contracts that their work isn't used for military applications I'm talking about the now wellestablished field of game academics entering conversation with the brand new field of wargaming academics to see what we can learn from each other I'm talking about whatever Civic War gaming we do it actually works and I suppose in an Ideal World I'm talking about those young war game designers who I met who understand that yes this sector sprung from The Haunted womb of the military but that it really can make the world a better place I would love for them to feel that they have the resources of the games industry behind them when it comes to demilitarizing this sector honestly I don't really know exactly what we can do I just know I feel really uncomfortable about what I think is going to happen over the next 10 20 30 years I think mostly as an industry we're going to ignore that this is happening just like when Unity was revealed to have signed military contracts we all went whoa and then went back to whatever we were doing I think in the years to come our sector is going to continue occasionally glancing over at what's happening in wargaming with the disinterest of a glutted animal and I think by like 2040 we'll look back on this moment in history and realize that there was a time when we could have used our industry's considerable influence to change the very ethical underpinnings of this sector acting perhaps as a companionable Craftsman in shaping Humanity's decision-making machinery or perhaps more importantly acting as a watchdog to ensure that however this technology is used it's not done so carelessly or selfishly or secretively the games industry can look at this whole sector and go I don't buy it I don't recognize what they do as what we do at all but you know who doesn't feel that way the organizations who gave people make games access for this story and the military hups who knew who I was by sight I'm telling you they've got it all figured out it's time the rest of us caught up thank you very very very much for watching everybody and an extra special fourth thanks to the people who support us on patreon.com games for funding journalism like this this video took an extra long time so from me to you if you supported our work cheers [Music] see [Music] oh [Music]