The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War
– You know how PMG videos are
either like fun deep dives into cool communities or we cover just the
heaviest **** imaginable? Yep. This is a video about
how government wargaming is on the rise again like
it's never been before and how that stands to affect
your and my games industry. And by wargaming, I mean countries using things that resemble video games,
board games, role playing games, and LARPs to try and practise, plan, and preempt things like disasters, political manoeuvring,
and, most of all, conflict.
Now, historically, the popularity of wargames
has always ebbed and flowed. You have times like World War II, where wargames 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 Defence 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 practise dating back hundreds of years, today is the first time
the practise 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 Defence 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' 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 realised that
it was gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna be explaining
the secret backdoor in the fun-time 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 wargames. And I will explain how
this is our opportunity or curse that we, as a community, can shape government wargames right back.
Because at the extreme
end, today, in 2024, your country's wargames
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 labour 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 just figured all we could do for you is prove to you that
wargaming is coming back and trying to 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 summarises a
good chunk of this debate. (upbeat music) What evidence can you give, would you give people that wargaming is kind of on the rise or the resurgence? – 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. The supply of wargame experts is way too short and the demand for good
wargames is way too high. – Frightening. So let's kick off with
the question of: Why? Why is this happening now? (light mysterious music) 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 wargame studies at King's 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 grew up as gamers and then we are still gamers.
And so I think there's
a kind of a willingness to accept gaming just as a concept. – We're in interesting times because, I'm not gonna talk politics here, 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 are looking at war in Europe.
And the potential for that escalating and spilling over and
pulling in more of Europe, it's not impossible. 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 wargames is cheap. So if wargames can make what
you build, where you place it, or how you use it even
fractionally more efficient, you'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? (whimsical music) So you might be imagining
an older white man with facial hair pushing little boats and planes around a map. And no one was more surprised than me to find out that that image is still absolutely part
of 21st century wargaming. At the Connections Conference, I saw a new design from
a man considered by some to be the best naval wargame
designer alive today.
And his work looked, from a distance, like a hex and counter
wargame from the 1970s. I was also taken aback
by a cutting-edge tool shown to me at the Defence
Science and Technology Lab that was used for, among other things, modelling 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 H. G. Wells. Did you know H. G. Wells also popularised the concept of time travel? (mysterious music continues) – [Narrator] It became intoxicating. – What a guy. Anyway, that today we still play some of these old-fashioned
looking wargames 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 documents the story of the Western Approaches
Tactical Unit in World War II, which was mostly staffed by the Women's Royal
Naval Service, or WRNS.
They created wargames to help Britain better survive submarine warfare, which was threatening a famine in the UK. But also Germany had developed
such good U-boat 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
Harbour 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 wargame interest and funding, with David Banks telling PMG that today it feels like, quote, "Every game being commissioned is a South China Sea game", simulating various flashpoints
around Taiwan. Today, many wargames 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 we can add
things on the internet, so softwares and
behaviours on the internet, how it fits into conventional warfare is the fact that it can, you know, send a message or persuade an action or a country to take a
particular course of action should they want to.
– For example, in recent years, a lot of ink 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 practise of rather than using spies, as would be the case in the Cold War, they're now allegedly using Bitcoin to pay would-be saboteurs to do stuff like enact some performative antisemitism 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 flatfooted? Well, so thinking in the sector goes, a good start would be to game it, just like the WRNS 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
defence and security personnel, exploring why they should maybe
start practising this game that it would appear the Russians are
currently beating them at.
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 playing 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 cybersecurity, 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 gonna 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 roll 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 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 Anni
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 modelled,
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. Ah, 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 gotta get the
local superpower in there, so that's 13 players, chuck another 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, which I have the pieces here, was a single game about Russia versus NATO squabbling over Finland. Finland's exceeded to NATO. The brief was to make a
game about crisis dynamics, signalling 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, it wasn't simple for me, but it 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, which actually put a huge amount of onus on the facilitation side. – [Quinns] 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 visualise 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 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 industry? (inquisitive music) "Quinns, what are you on about
modelling military hardware? Most of us can't model a successful car in Tears of the Kingdom. (explosion booms) Unfortunately, let's
do a nice Venn diagram, thanks, Anni. You might think of government wargaming 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 wargames, and why if you are ethically opposed to some aspect of the
practise 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 Defence.
Do 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 gonna keep happening and the checks are gonna
keep getting bigger. Billionaire Palmer Luckey, 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. – So I'm actually building
a new headset right now. It's driven by-
– Whoo! – Yeah, yeah. It's driven by military requirements, but it's also gonna be used
for non-military stuff. And it's really cool. It's really something. – How do you imagine companies
like these two might adapt if World War III were
to break out tomorrow? And let's not forget that in World War II, companies like Mitsubishi and Ford 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 Slitherine, where he told us, quote, "The Pentagon said they
were getting more use from the Slitherine games
they downloaded from Steam than the games they commissioned
from wargame 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 gonna 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 flash 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 wargames
are not video games, right? They're tabletop games and board games. (light dramatic music) 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 advisors to governments, military personnel from America, specialists who had travelled 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 & Sit Down. You see, what united this community wasn't just that they made
wargames to spec for a living for clients ranging from
governments to militaries, to NGOs, to corporations. For many of them,
including the organisers, they were simply passionate
about some aspect 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 manoeuvring, they can pull in innovations
from "Diplomacy," to "Twilight Imperium," to "John Company," to the "King's 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 really (beep) me up was learning that this influence goes both ways. One of the most innovative
commercial board game designers Volko Ruhnke was a figure
I had been making fun of and praising on the Shut
Up & 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 Volko Ruhnke used to
be an analyst for the CIA, making games for them. So there I was, on Shut Up & Sit Down, covering Volko's games about
counterinsurgency 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 & Sit Down ever did was where we went to play
something called a mega game about aliens invading the Earth. Everyone was putting those things down, people were yelling at me. 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 games 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
gonna blow your mind if you're a Shut Up & Sit Down fan, but the key organiser of the Connections Wargaming Conference was the designer of Watch the Skies. And the UK Society of Mega Game Makers was an organisation
that was created for fun by wargaming professionals using their experience running large, on-your-feet political
games for governments. And the reason that these
people were so successful in their career as professional wargamers and also were able to invent
this thing called a 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 iteration. (sighs) But that's just my
personal tale of terror. Lemme 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 betitted kung fu experts
Tifa from Final Fantasy VII (dramatic music) without the existence of king of Prussia Frederick William III. (comical music) So, listen, in 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, Georg Leopold von Reizzwitz, popularly considered the
father of modern wargaming, begins working on a design that
his son eventually finishes and calls "Kriegsspiel," the German word for wargame.
I like to think of this period of history as men will invent Warhammer
instead of going to therapy. So Kriegsspiel is played
on accurate topological maps. It simulates the fog of war. It even invented something
like a dungeon master. Games of Kriegsspiel 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'd 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. (comical music) So how does this get us to Tifa? (dramatic music) No problem. In 1870, when Prussia defeats
France, many countries, including the United Kingdom
and the United States, take an interest in Kriegsspiel; 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 wargames who continue simulating
war after World War II. 20 years later, in 1971, two members of this hobbyist
wargaming community, Jeff Perren and one Gary Gygax, make a game called Chainmail, which is simulating
mediaeval miniatures combat. Then the Chainmail
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 realise is fun. And eventually this dungeon mini game grows into Dungeons & Dragons. Incidentally, why do you
think Dungeons & Dragons is all about tactics and killing ****? Why do you think a sequence of Dungeons & Dragons
games is called a campaign? If you know what you're looking for, the wargaming ancestry of DnD is as visible as a giant tribal tattoo.
But after the invention of DnD, 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 DnD, including mimics and illithids. And, obviously, if there's
no Final Fantasy I, there's no Final Fantasy
VII with beautiful Tifa and her lovely, vacant face. (dramatic music) One thing I find cute is that it's not just
that the birth of the RPG is a direct result of
military innovations, but hundreds of years ago, Prussians were getting in
the same sort of fights about the editions of
their game as today's DnD and Warhammer fans. In 1873, Lieutenant Wilhelm Jacob Meckel published a treatise saying the current
edition of Kriegsspiel was too complicated and the game was better
when it was simpler. And then there was a new edition 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 wanna alarm you, but this is sort of 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 news stories, and 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 as 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 imbues 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 POV 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 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 wargames
is that 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 our questions and show us their games. Why would they do that? It is surely because
His Majesty's government wants DSTL's wargaming arm to look good in front of People Make Games' audience of gamers for reasons of public
relations and recruitment, because this global push,
arguably a race now, to design more wargames
and better wargames has to involve bringing in more people with the right skills, with expertise in working in video games, in board games, even LARP. 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 LARP community who talked about the
importance of immersion in government wargames. 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, of, like, you know, organising things for people shooting zombies running
around a warehouse. – Yeah.
– You have now swapped that for the kind of, the bleaker end of the spectrum of people running around and shooting weapons at each other. Was that something you wanted to do? – Oh, it's an interesting question. So there is an overlap of interest there because it's all gaming, you know? This has 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, whereas yeah, like, 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, 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 are seeing in our games industry is being completely replicated in theirs.
– Gaming and wargaming's
very often been seen as the domain 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 through our recruitment and our training and our
retention of existing people. To your audience, I'd like to say if you're
sitting there and thinking, "I couldn't be a wargame designer because of my background and my ethnicity and my diversity," ask yourself why and actually
get in touch with DSTL to find out what we can do 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 polyhedron in the
colours 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 of this video to start talking about
the ethics of all of this, a topic I feel better
equipped to handle than most and also just in awe of what
a frightening subject it is.
(dramatic music) So, like, the well-trodden path to success for a YouTube video
essayist 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 you 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 wargames have returned as theory, as funding buzzword, and as praxis, 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, but 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 wanna 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 practise
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 gonna 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 this sector, I was bowled over by how honest
and introspective they are. You wanna talk about
controversies, politics, do these games even work? Wargaming professionals
will yes-and your criticism by pointing 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 wargames are
commissioned and used. It was all about wargame designers struggling to make ends meet 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%, hmm, 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 canned 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 doublespeak 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 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 defence, 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 defence 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 wargame designers in the sector, the people who most fervently believe that wargaming has
applications outside of war, and 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 in conflicts would potentially result in more deaths on the other side.
– Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's- – [Quinns] It that a plausible conclusion? – It's more than plausible. It's absolutely correct because warfare is obviously adversarial. To reduce the lives on our side, you are potentially gonna 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 wargamed, for example, are we successfully deterring Putin? We should have wargamed,
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 pre-considered to reduce the conflict
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 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 defence,
the D in in DSTL, really. I wanna 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
background 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, these are, people who are designing these games, ultimately, like, yeah,
it's about defence, but these, this is game design that
could result in real death of not necessarily UK citizens, but of other people around the world. That seems like something that'd be tricky for some of the game designers that watch People Make
Games to, I don't know, square their design practise with. – Yeah, and of course you're entitled to your own personal
opinion on that aspect. The way I'd argue is, you know, if you go to B&Q, B&Q sell hammers. B&Q aren't, you know, advocating the fact you use a hammer to hit someone around the head, they're used to hitting nails. So it's how you use the particular tools and how you use the particular analysis I think is the important bit.
And as long as you can
square it away with yourself and you are comfortable you're defending and assisting and supporting, then I think 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. – And the objective for this game, or the task that Blue Force, you know, the UK are doing is to clear
the enemy out of this town. – And Lee's analogy implies
you'd have to be a lunatic to use a tool such as this
to assist in a dark purpose.
And, 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 worse wars to come in the 21st century. But I'd just like if when I talk to people who are involved in the creation and facilitation of wargames and I say, "Wow, this feels like
a uncomfortable thing to design and to play," they're not like, "Why?" God, when DSTL was showing
us one piece of software that showed planes fighting
over a country that, of course, in the simulation was 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 ******* "Ender's 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.
It 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 fun 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 normalise our actions
and make them seen 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 countries 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 pawns
in this analogy represent? Those pawns 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 Make 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 world class bigot. And so because this is
one of the better wars that my 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. Now, for the record, the people in the wargaming 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 wargames whatsoever. However, it's also true that countries that are allies regularly conduct wargames and military manoeuvres
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 practise and refine those wargames 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, it 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, the question is, do you feel responsible
if a maniac uses it? I think where Lee and I differ is I just think there might
be more maniacs than he does. Like, most of the audience for this video are gonna be living in the United Kingdom or the United States, and those are two
countries with, let's say, very chequered decision making. And so it just feels to
me that on one level, if you are signing up to make
wargames for your country, you are just crossing your fingers that what you make and what it's used for does not later become a source of shame. That said, it was pointed out to me that for lots of wargame 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 NATO conference and I was on my own having dinner. And I got talking to somebody
at the table next to me who was also from Ireland.
And I thought, "Oh, well,
that's a nice coincidence." It turned out he was actually Belgian. And I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I work in the central bank. I'm an economist." And he said, "What do you do?" And I explained 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 I'm like, "Well,
NATO's trying to help." And he's like, "Well,
it's making it worse." And I just was like, "Oh, I think I'm the bad
guy in this conversation with a central banker." And it's kind of stuck with me. And I haven't quite got the answer to it. I think one of the things I tell myself is this is being done; whether I study it or
not, it's being done.
And it would be useful to
know how it actually works. I suspect that most wargames are creating some form
of distorted knowledge or distorted training, negative learning of some kind very often. It'd be useful to understand that better so that we do it less. But the downside is that, you know, when I say this, I 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 like wargaming 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. – [Quinns] This relates
to my last question, which is, I mean, just, is this discipline taking
commercial game design and turning it into weapons? – Is it turning it into weapons? I'm not sure it's turning it into weapons.
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 a wargame. But indirectly, is this harming people? At least sometimes, yes, definitely. So then it's, "Well, how do
you sleep with yourself?" And I don't know. I mean, it's, right now, at this moment in history, 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 had 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 to just be the same.
I think we're 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 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 tchotchke
given to me at Connections by a gentleman promoting
his company MINES: Mission Impacts of
Nuclear Events Software. And it is a pocket size 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 wargames, the moment someone decides
to launch a nuclear weapon, the game is over. – [Automated Voice] The only
winning move is not to play. – 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 practising 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 counter argument would go, "Okay, if everyone around
the world is playing games where using tiny nuclear
bombs is an option, aren't we all that much more likely to reach for that in real life?" To which my answer is, "I don't know." So all of that makes
this a 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 wargames. (mellow music) So there's this joke in
the wargaming community that on his deathbed,
the inventor of wargames, Georg Leopold von Reizzwitz, 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 practise, plan, and preempt a war, you can use games to practise, plan, and preempt any other problem. – It probably shouldn't
be called a wargame. It should be called a serious game 'cause it is used by
humanitarians, by NGOs. It is just a technique, but it can save lives,
money, time, resource, and things like the climate. – To which the cynical response would be, "Hang on, Quinns. 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 that President Trump might
have tried to exploit back in 2020. – I did work, as well,
out in South Africa.
I spent six months out there during COVID looking at water strategies for drought. Wargaming 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 organisations, crisis response plans,
crisis management plans, security plans, business
continuity and resilience plans, even in planning to deliver
business opportunity, it may be a big construction
project or something like it, 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 organisations being represented there really interested in how we
apply these processes, you know, a little bit of the rigour 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 wanna call it decision gaming or crisis and risk gaming. It all looks remarkably similar. – Two of the wargame designers
I spoke to at Connections had the Red Cross and Britain's National
Health Services as clients, two entities that were
able to look at games designed for armies to
practise their logistics and they said, "Hey, that would be
exactly as useful for us." So from this perspective, wargaming is just the latest invention 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 popularised in the 1920s after British and American nurses began using their militaries'
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 wargames, 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 wargaming and reasonable challenge into government. – [Quinns] Okay. What does that mean? – 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
delivering 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. 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 realised
that using wargames, they can make better decisions, they can explore the
consequences of their actions, and they can be better equipped to question the assumptions
of their superiors, doesn't that perhaps even mean that we as gamers have something
like a moral obligation for there to be more
wargames 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? (suspenseful music) So, practitioners of wargames 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 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 wargames 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 drones, 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 wargames 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
wargame practitioners don't fundamentally
misunderstand their subject in the way that Ukrainian
general was talking about. Wargaming is a deeply fraught practise. For starters, the genre
of game and who plays it will inform takeaways. An international relations
scholar who studied wargames played about nuclear weapons
exchange during the Cold War found that the games
that presented players with basically mathematics
and probability, as if you're playing "Settlers
of Catan" with nukes, saw players becoming more likely to launch their nuclear weapons, while games that involved negotiation and talking with other
human beings who held nukes made players less likely to
utilise their nuclear weapons.
And let's talk about "The
Three Witches of Wargaming." This is a paper by wargame developer Stephen Downes-Martin that capably explains how basically absolutely everyone involved with a wargame can ruin it. So it all starts with a sponsor, like the United States Navy, who has the budget and wants its staff to wargame 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. No, 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 wargame backs up
what people in the navy are already talking about doing. If the wargame then act
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 wargame, it makes them look incompetent. Or they can say, "Mm, no. We think that wargame
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 biassed. The second witch of wargaming is what's known as the chain of command, basically the people directly
above the wargame 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. About all the game designers
are 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 of their colleagues. But even if you duck these two issues, Downes-Martin adds that senior players will often try and redesign the game as they're playing it. Remember how in Kriegsspiel 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 wargames 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/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. (dramatic music) No. No, 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 realise what they've really designed is a menstrual pad, wargames 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 wargames 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 end
that report's, it's like, "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 2000 units?" You know, you still are kind
of lost a little bit, like, "What's the game? I don't know the game." 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, you know, it may be completely true, but I can't independently
verify what you're saying, 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. 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 kinda 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, "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 wargamers focus on design and assume it's producing
knowledge or educational outcomes. Academics focus on the way
that the existing methods, or 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
wargaming 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 cannot 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? I don't know, man. And now I need to try and
put a takeaway on this? (lively music) 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 **** off, we continue this line that
games and play is for everybody.
Our community's 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 recognise
it as our kind of games. Oh, predatory business practises and the reinvention of gambling
in the mobile sector, yeah, we're not gonna talk about
that or think about that because mobile gamers, yeah, they're not our people.
Or, 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 gonna be this time, gamers? Hmm?" Are we once again gonna claim that this is not our problem? Because lemme 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 arse now, but I'm talking about maybe game unions having clauses in their contracts so their work isn't used
for military applications. I'm talking about the now
well-established 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 wargaming we do, it actually works. And I suppose in an ideal world, I'm talking about those
young wargame 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
demilitarising the sector. Honestly, I don't really know exactly what we can do. I just know I feel really uncomfortable about what I think is gonna happen over the next 10, 20, 30 years. I think mostly, as an industry, we're gonna 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 gonna 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 realise 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 human'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, "Hmm, I don't buy it. I don't recognise what they
do as what we do at all." But you know who doesn't feel that way? The organisations who gave
People Make Games access for this story and the military higher ups 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/peoplemakegames for funding journalism like this. This video took an extra long time. So from me to you, if you
supported our work, cheers. (lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music fades).
