As previously advertised I’ll be at the “Game On! Wargaming and the Operational Environment” conference at Georgetown University in Washington DC, 6-7 November.
I’ll be speaking on “Gaming Neglected Aspects of the Operational Environment”. There will also be panels on: “gaming unconventional aspects of the Operational Environment”; using wargaming for professional military education, readiness and decision support; wargaming a total national response; and advances in wargaming technology and digital wargaming.
There’s a Game Night too! I’ll be bringing QUICK and Exurb (game for the phases of the urban battle that shape the battle) and Powers of Persuasion, an interesting game on influence operations that Project Wire of the UK MoD debuted at last year’s Connections.
The event is sold out. There will be no synchronous online content as far as I know.
It will be a quick trip for me, I will be leaving right afterwards to get back to Vancouver, for BottosCon 2024 where I will be showing and playing QUICK Junior, O Canada and Strongman.
Script for short presentation on insurgency games and How They Are Different, using A Distant Plain as an example.
Followed by collective play of A Distant Plain!
Organized by and through Istituto piemontese per la storia della Resistenza e della società contemporanea ‘Giorgio Agosti’ and two professors at the University of Turin, Giaime Alonge and Riccardo Fassone.
It is the first of a series of four talks; other designers include Paolo Mori, Andrea Angiolino and Glauco Babini.
Grazie mille for creating this event and for hosting me to do it!
At Connections-UK 2023: I appeared on a panel on urban warfare with MAJ Shaun Clarke, talking about five games on aspects of urban warfare I have been working on the last two years.
All core Connections Online events will take place from 12-14April, each day 1000 – 1600 EDT(UTC -4). All core events will be recorded and available for future viewing.
A livestream of the conference and the recordings will be free and open to all, but you can register to get access to a whole lot more. A small fee of $5 will be charged to partially cover the IT expenses. Registration cost includes:
All presentations, panels, and keynotes (unlimited seats for participation), including ability to ask questions / interact with the speakers during their presentations
Access to the Connections Online Discord server
Ability to register for any extended conference events, on a first-come, first-served basis for limited-seat events
Oh, and what about those extended conference events you may ask? Well, from 10-18 April there will be many smaller focused events during and to either side of the core hours and dates. Details are still being worked out about these but will include game demonstrations, presentations, and activities similar to the famous “game lab” event where we work in small groups to brainstorm and explore how to game or model certain topics or issues, or general approaches to and utility of games and modelling.
If you are interested in serious games (and this term is definitely not limited to military wargaming!) you should check this out.
This is the latest addition to the Connections franchise of professional wargaming events. Connections-US, the original and American version of the conference will be in June and will also be a virtual event. I’ll post more about that later as details are firmed up. Readers of this and the Paxsims blog will know that there are also Australian, Canadian, Dutch and UK conferences along the same themes. I really miss these events in person, I’ve been several times to the US and UK ones and it’s an intense experience. Maybe next year we’ll be back to doing this sort of thing in person – though we have certainly proven the added value of doing as much as possible online, or making things available online.
Anyway, as part of this particular conference on Monday April 12 at 1500 EDT I will be doing a joint presentation with Mike Markowitz on practicalities of DIY game design. Mike, a really smart guy and a better public speaker than I, will talk about graphic design and I will talk about methods of self-publishing. Both are add-ons and developments of the talks we gave to the Georgetown University Wargaming Society recently, and you should watch these first.
Again, if you want to talk to us and ask questions you’ll have to register. It’s five bucks but you get a whole lot more than just us!
On February 19 I got up early to give a short talk to a class of officers at the US Army War College on “The Uses of Simple Games”.
Simplicity vs. depth in games (yes to both); the value of simple games for personal learning, development and innovative habits of mind (oh yeah); these concepts in action at the GlobalECCO gaming portal (still chugging along!).
Just a reminder that on Tuesday, December 8, from 6pm Eastern (that’s 2200 Zulu Time) for two whole hours (maybe), I will be talking and taking questions on the whys, hows and wherefores of self-publishing and distributing your own wargames. Everything begins with something homemade, and sometimes it just stays that way.
The event is free but you have to register through Eventbrite:
…is the name of my presentation at the Military Operations Research Society’s (MORS) event “Analysis of Urban Warfare”, April 2-5 2019 at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
I’m speaking on Wednesday afternoon but I’m putting my script and slides up here now, just before I leave home because I don’t know what kind of Net access I will have on the base.
The point of my talk is to take three civilian wargames on urban irregular war, and talk about how basic concepts for the situations and supporting research flowed into game mechanics. The three games are
Duration
Urban centre
Type of conflict
Tupamaro
4 years 1968-72
Montevideo
~1.5 million
Low-intensity insurgency, frequent terrorism
Operation “Whirlwind”/ Nights of Fire
5 days 1956
Budapest
~ 1.6 million
Corps-sized operations against disorganized and unprepared insurgents
“We Are Coming, Nineveh”
~ 5 months 2017
West Mosul
~ 600,000?
Corps-sized operations against organized and prepared insurgents
It’s going to be an intense three days – I wish I weren’t fighting off a cold right now. After that I will be in Washington for a day and a half, then back home to the usual three ring circus here….
While in Washington, I hope to check out the Compleat Strategist satellite store in Falls Church!
Over the last five days Victoria has seen a huge dump of snow, the worst since the Great Blizzard of 1996, which was the worst since 1917.
Okay, all in all it’s been about 50 cm over that stretch of time, but it isn’t gone yet and at this time of year we are used to kicking our way through cherry blossom petals, not slushdrifts.
Just yesterday alone Montreal got 40 cm, and more to come… and I am heading into it very early Friday morning (that is, if the airport is not shut down!), to attend the Connections-North conference on professional wargaming, organized by Professor Rex Brynen at McGill University.
This is the second time Rex has run the “northern franchise” of the Connections family of conferences on professional wargaming, started and maintained to this day by Matt Caffrey. Other Connections regulars will include Stephen Downes-Martin, Anja van der Hulst, and Jim Wallman.
I’ll be presenting on “Integrating the Political, Social and Economic in Insurgency Games”, just a quick talk profiling the non-kinetic design elements in Tupamaro and A Distant Plain, as examples. I found a number of other good examples but I don’t have time to cover them all and they were mostly long out of print or small-press hard to find items. A partial list is at the end of my script, which I am putting here with my slides, for the curious to access:
The conference is a one-day event on Saturday the 16th, but I will be staying on a couple of days. Sunday is “Apocalypse North”, a megagame that will have about 70 players in it, and I have the role of Canadian Chief of Defence Staff! And on Monday Rex has laid on something like a master class Q&A on game design with members of his POLI 422 course, in which students design conflict simulation games to present their research topics.
brtrain 
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