A lot is made of the morality of serious wargames, but the thing I find incredibly interesting is the whole "we don't actually know if they work particularly well" bit.
@@JadedJackalope the numbers and specificity can make serious games feel “scientific,” but as the interview in the video discusses, the results don’t really follow the scientific method at all (even when they are public). I think wargaming / “serious gaming” is better thought of like a more serious brainstorming or planning tool. You can imagine the playground arguments along the lines of “who would win, Superman or Batman?” The military has those exact same arguments (about tanks and planes and so on), but the result of the argument influence policy. Wargames give policy makers a way to get more specific in their brainstorming without getting overwhelmed by details. You can put all those details into the game mechanics so you can focus on the strategic questions (that is what gaming is all about, after all).
@@alexanderbrady5486well put, the gaming is more about learning about analyzing decision-making itself rather than the scenarios being simulated. Not unlike how tests in school are meant to determine that you’ve learned how to learn, as much as the subject being taught
@@GreatistheWorld Maybe a bad example, since school tests are also questionably effective at predicting someone's ability study for things besides taking more tests.
I think the only benefit of wargaming you can have any confidence on is that it *might* train people to react better under pressure, or remind them to check something critical but easy to forget early on. I think that the value of testing tactics or a macro-strategy will always be limited because fundamentally you can only work out that a strategy works within the specific confines and assumptions of the game, which will always be deeply flawed, and anyone who plays a lot of games can probably metagame things which work in the game, but maybe not in reality, or vice versa.
Is it weird I’m surprised people are surprised that so much of video gaming is hand in glove with the military? Like, ARMA is basically just Bohemia Interactive’s civie street version of their military trainers.
@@Ozzianman That's true but that's the obvious one created specifically for the military. I'm more highlighting that even the seemingly innocuous "civilian" stuff likely has a military contracted version.
fun fact: former executive president of bungie started a game studio in 2001 that primarily developed military training software. also look up InQtel, CIAs investment company cofounded by a Videogame designer Gilman Louie
I feel like it's one of those "open secrets?" Like, this doesn't feel like new info to me, but I'm almost certain I don't understand the full scope of it. Excited and terrified to watch and find out.
I am a bit surprised, because most of the links are not at all secret. For example, the bio of Volko Ruhnke's (the designer mentioned in the video) on BGG reads "Volko Ruhnke is a game designer and a CIA national security analyst..." His connection to the CIA is literally in the first sentence. His series of games are called "COIN" which is short for "Counter Insurgency." If you read the rule book to any of the games, they all mention that the COIN system was originally developed for the USA military. That said, I can understand how people who just see games as "toys" can just breeze past all of that information. It isn't a secret, but it also isn't always front and center.
As a Ukrainian, i once played a wargame that was wargaming the ukraine-russia conflict. Millenium Wars was it. And it also had a layer of informational warfare incorporated into it. It was a mind blowingly unusual feeling, seeing your hometown represented as an icon on a board, on which tanks and planes blow up and people are ground to dust by artillery. And then the information warfare thing clicked for me, and the penny dropped. My family was mildly pro-russian, and this little game blew a seal out into the theory of modern conflict for me. And it all was way before the war began. I realised i was as much of a game piece as i was a player, and information space was a battlefield, and on a battlefield you can become a casualty, and, as a matter of fact, i did. I was very lucky my parents were not too deep into the rabbithole that i we were able to shake off the influence and make up our own minds. But most importantly, i was exposed to these chilling concepts in a safe environment, where i was able to process my feelings about these phenomena which would totally destroy me if i got hit by them out of nowhere in a real situation. To this day i still a member of the IKS community, playing kriegsspiel on the regular, and through this practice i have managed to solidify my stance on what it means to me when real geopolitics and fun games intersect. It helps me remain firmly anti-war, while confronting these topics and ideas head on. Im fascinated with learning about headscratcher ideas of tactics and strategy, engineering of weapons systems and real world battlefield dynamics, to fully and completely understand why and how these things can bring suffering. And hey, wargames are fun.
PMG's perspective is quite naive, prolly a symptom of pacification propaganda in which you relinquish your advantage at your own detriment under the guise of "it kills less people now" which clearly is a trade off to kill more people in totality
@@Jszar Its a neccessary evil. In war, truth is the first casualty, Even if you win, culturally you will be still recovering for years. And on top of that, you are an irreversably changed person once you've seen the frontlines. We will have another lost generation on our hands once it all over. But at the same time, you must give it all you've got, or there wont be a tomorrow. A deal with the devil that a nation has to make if it wants to survive. So i shut the fuck up and salute the brave men who do their part, because without them i wouldnt be alive.
I'm also battling with the morality of defence tech development, as on one hand I want to help Ukraine, but on the other I don't know who's hands it can land in.
I was in Iraq from 2004-2011 and processed my feelings and emotions about my participation there on the front end as all humans do when faced with a new dangerous environment. Before the first year was out I was calm to the environment in a way that predictably baffled newcomers. Having a new experience in a room with realistic wargames and realizing the further implications which create emotions in you while not seeing that mirrored in the other participants in the room is predictable. They got a head start on that process, you just didn't get to be there when they were coming to terms with their feelings. Furthermore, the more sensitive one that had the fiercest reactions likely exited the area before they could be part of your sample. War is tough.
The video doesn't go into detail, but I want to note that corporations are also sponsoring wargames (or "serious games" or "crisis management games"). I will have to find the references, but I have seen reports of things like ports (as in, places where ships load and unload products) in the USA gaming out disaster scenarios such as another pandemic or a cyber attack. There are also techniques like "red teaming" (where part of a team role plays as a competitor) used to simulate things like product launches, or deciding where to open new stores. On the darker side, I have heard (but can't find references right now) that some companies will game out union-busting strategies. The approach is very similar to the "irregular warfare" scenarios described in this video, but the adversaries are the company and its workers (instead of a hacker and a ship of medical supplies).
On smaller scales, it's important that a company test out its incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans to respond to things like cyber attacks, natural disasters, and pandemics (lots of real life experience with that one now). Similarly, penetration tests are a critical part of many cybersecurity frameworks. All of these, and the bigger wargames in general, are simulations looking to produce actionable data. The question of if that data is any good and the inability to replicate due to secrecy is also true in the private corporate world. That's why the bit in the middle of this very interesting video about games, play and childhood that rubbed me a bit wrong. Like does that argument go away if we didn't call them 'war games' but instead 'battlefield simulations'? It shouldn't, the actions are the same.
@@Meikulish The phrase "Business Wargaming" brings up a lot of references on Google, including the Wikipedia page. Most of the examples I listed are on there, but I still can't find any good references for business use to help with union-busting.
This hits at what I was thinking the entire time. “Imagine if this was being used to rehearse union drives and strikes…. Oh, it’s probably already being used by union busters…. Well shit…”
The podcast The Red Line had an excellent interview fairly recently with a wargame creator/facilitator who did just that: providing games opportunities for corporate teams as well as Pentagon types. Great episode!
When i was getting my master's degree I was interning at a Games user research lab, one of the lead researcher who now works for a triple A developer, got his start doing user research for the army. studying the experience of soldiers in combat, what they liked and what they would seriously need.
Hey I am pursuing a master in international affairs atm, I also have a strong interest in security and media/narrative warfare and am starting to look for internships, would you advise me to try to get one in one of these companies? What was your experience and are there some you suggest more strongly than others?
Quinns, you are such an incredible journalist. So many journalists uncritically relay the information they get from their access to subjects. Your ability to understand why you were given access and how that impacts the information you get and relay it to your audience is incredible.
I played a larp a few years ago as a marine commander who ended up in a peacekeeping role in a tense, highly militarised situation with a lot of non-combatants present. One of my big takeaways from the game was how poorly trained and equipped and supported this person was to be able to handle civilian policing. The big takeaway from a lot of the people around me was "oh cool, big explosion go boom!" What you learn from a game is coloured so much by what you're looking out for and how you're analysing the experience, and that's really hard to shape as a game designer, especially if you're in a client/vendor relationship with the person you're making the games for.
PMG's perspective is quite naive, prolly a symptom of pacification propaganda in which you relinquish your advantage at your own detriment under the guise of "it kills less people now" which clearly is a trade off to kill more people in totality
I'm not sure if it's really related to your point, but your last paragraph reminded me of a problem that came up from the study into the Iraq War and America's lack of prep for counter insurgency and nation building: Mainly, that they didn't want to do it as Vietnam had left such a bad mark on the armed forces that they chose to instead practice what America was good at. Overwhelming firepower in conventional warfare. So they practiced for the war they 'wanted' to fight, rather than the one that they were 'likely' to fight. And it's interesting seeing that come around again somewhat with the comments at the start about how theorists have said for years that state on state open warfare in Europe is a thing of the past, only for it to reappear with Ukraine
I was a particularly active member in a digital wargame community and helped admin a lot of their events. It was always a strange experience. Me, a young person who likes military technology and tactics, but is also anti war. And here I was, admining 60-80 people simulating a real life designed mission. Many of these people were vets, some were active duty or looking to go on another tour. Most of these guys were genuinely kind and thoughtful people that, for the most part, play wargames as a way to experience their old lives of which they have complicated pasts with (a really common phenomenon with vets, the desire to relive a time they resent). But there were always some people that took it all... a little too seriously, and it always felt weird navigating the community politics with those people, especially since one was a senior admin. War and wargaming, for me, fit in this odd, nebulous position of "I like that we have these things, I like that they can serve some use to people in non harmful ways, but also I resent that war is a large piece of life, will probably grow in time, and that these games can actively contribute to that. I do like what the one interviewee said about wargaming, where many now are on conflict avoidance, playing the intelligence and political game rather than the kinetic game. However, if this becomes the justification for using games to train for war, there better be evidence that it actually succeeds at preventing conflict.
Just as a practical question, what would that evidence be? I can point to literal thousands of wargame scenarios that didn't turn into full scale war. Claiming a causal relationship there would be somewhat absurd. What would or could constitute evidence of the effectiveness of wargames in this regard? China is almost certainly wargaming the invasion of Taiwan, is likely getting less than desirable results and that might be a contributing factor to them deciding not to invade for the past 7 decades. Would that count? Equally, in what situations would wargaming defensive wars, planning the defense of Taiwan or Europe in case of Russian on Chinese invasion be anything other than perfectly moral? Making violent conflict easier on the aggressor very likely would save lives. I wouldn't hesitate to claim that Ukraine losing the war in the first week would have seen countless fewer casualties on both sides, and yet I also see the current situation as significantly preferable as do the Ukrainian's themselves. I can't definitively state how much wargaming was involved, but there was likely a reasonable amount done and it ultimately lead to a longer and bloodier conflict, but a better outcome for everyone who isn't Russian. So do we count that as evidence in favor or against real world wargaming?
@@NeoHellPoet I mean, I genuinely don't know xD. Like the only real strong evidence is decades of "we ran this scenario and it contributed to this decision and we estimate we saved x many lives." which is still suspect because it's based on stuff that didn't happen, trusts the words of the military telling you this, etc. It's an incredibly complex topic that I honestly don't have a good answer for.
I'm a bit surprised about why anyone would be surprised by this close connection. Even this video's history of Kriegsspiel and Gygax doesn't go far enough. Staff rides, where military officers visit the site of old battlefields and try to put themselves in the heads of the commanders, are effectively a form of strategic role playing. Started by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (the Prussians again!), staff rides are a bedrock of modern military officer education. Crisis simulations and tabletop exercises happen throughout governments and are also effectively a form of role playing and tabletop gaming. And is anyone arguing that chess and its predecessor chaturanga aren't abstractions of military conflict? Framing wargaming to be an offshoot of "regular" gaming arguably reverses the actual relationship.
The premise of being surprised is strange. Given the long history. It is an analytical and training tool in this context. So yes, Quins: "you are weird".. and very naive..
i mean chess and checkers makes sense. i was just surprised that DnD was inspired by irl wargames bc it always felt like it was too fantastical to be based in reality
Chess and it's predecessors (and _many_ other "traditional" board games) are _absolutely_ wargames, and you have to be exceptionally naïve to not see that they are. However, I don't believe Quinns is a naïve person, the impression I get from the video is that he got properly confronted with an uncomfortable truth of the industry and, instead of internalising that, decided to make a video that's a borderline rant about "the military are using play to murder people" like it's something that hasn't been happening since Sumer.
I already knew a lot of the background info that is mentioned in the video. Expected it. Of course. The feeling was still weird and strange and unpleasant. The reality is always something that I want to deny or escape from. I guess some of the people in the comments are the same. DSTL's interview was literally them trying to win Quinns over. Pretty much a propaganda department in the work but for military recruitments.(And failed miserably in their task.)
Combat mission at 20:15 is actually Company of Heroes 3 (I think), and the game right after is Combat Mission BLACK Sea, for anyone wondering. To put my few thoughts in as a student game designer & developer; I like wargames, I play 40k and the idea of designing one gets me excited. I don't like war, but I do think countries are obviously allowed to defend themselves. If wargames help countries defend their people and make war... "safer"... I think it's pretty good.
Ethics aside, I'm surprised by none of this. The gaming industry drives tech and high-speed simulation developments purely from its popularity and profit. This leaks over into other industries. I myself am an R&T Engineer, I use PLCs using chips originally developed for gaming, I've even implemented a Unity based machine control for real-time data visualisation, AR and VR is increasingly common for training and data visualisation, physics based simulations are becoming more accurate and faster... with AI and deep learning being a hot topic at the moment, it's not a stretch to think that thousands or millions of players in a game would provide the data required to train behaviour or strategy models.
As someone who's dabbled in serious games design to work out some of the complexities of certain policy issues, I can tell you that the games themselves aren't really the problem. It's the buy-in of of decision makers belief in their effectiveness and utility that is their number one blocker.
Yeah, but if we're reasonably confident that most of the people who will leverage the information from these wargames will not use them effectively or ethically, then the continued development of them in collaboration with those people does start to become a problem. Like the hammer analogy. Sure, if most of your hammer contracts are with hardware stores selling to the general population, you shouldn't feel responsible for the odd hammer murder. But if you're biggest hammer contract is to "Hammer Murders, INC," you should probably self-evaluate
And a funny counterpoint to that, said bluntly from a Soviet war planner during the height of the cold war: "The real problem with preparing to face the American doctrine is that American's do not read their manuals, and feel no obligation to follow their doctrine. You can read though German, French, or even our manuals and written doctrine and come to a pretty good conclusion of how our forces will fight, but the American's can't tell you what their warfighting doctrine even is, let alone consistently follow it on battlefield. They do not build their equipment to meet their doctrine, their branches do not train together and have no idea what the goal of the others even is, and their weapon systems are a disorganized redundant mess with capabilities far greater than any rational need while simultaneously ignoring entire clusters of capability. How can we possibly prepare to fight that?"
@@ASDeckardThis description of the American military doctrine sounds exactly like how I played Pokémon as a young child, when I was too little to understand how type matchups worked. Instead of using strategy, I just level-grinded until my party was 20 levels ahead of my opponents, and then I won by using my moves randomly. In the same way, they describe the American military as being so overpowered that they can get away without an especially organized doctrine or strategy to follow
I sub-consciously knew about the backdoors between videogames and the military but Chapter 3 really blew away any argument I could mount that it is not, and as a long time SUSD subscriber seeing the ways it linked through games I like hit hard. I appreciate the time you've taken to set that up to present this information in context.
Yeah, I knew that games like ARMA and COD were completely controlled by the CIA (in exchange for using more detailed models of weapons and stuff like that), but I too didn't think it would go much deeper than that, and holy hell if it did
War games have literally prevented conflict by demonstrating the high risk of associated costs. If you think there are moral costs then build those in so that achieving the objective with fewer enemy deaths results in a higher score. I think the real problem with game designer cross over is they might accidentally include elements intended to keep the game engaging.
Games, play and warfare have been with us even before ancient times. Roman children had wooden toy swords, and millions of years ago, before humanity even existed, I can guarantee our ancestors play-fighted together. Play-fighting is the oldest form of play and is not unique to humans. Kittens play fight to learn to hunt. To use games as part of research or training is truly time tested and baked into our DNA as a species.
I’m very interested in the civic use cases for these games. Especially for efforts that involve marshaling public will, like building parks or planning infrastructure. Having other people who are representing conflicting motivations would be a big deal for that.
When i was working for the NZ Defence force back around the time of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, i participated in a 4 day wargame with many different agencies to practice for a terrorist attack. It was incredibly interesting and I did feel somewhat better prepared in the case that did happen to us. They're very strange things and you really need to buy into the serious nature of them. For me, it was being paid for 4 days to basically LARP, so i was so fine with that.
Because I haven’t heard anything about it yet in the video by the 5:00 mark, and I assume they didn’t but better to ask, did the UK DOD have any editorial in this video? Beyond censorship of classified information?
Good question! No UK government entity (or anyone else, for that matter) had any oversight over the editorial content of this video besides checking for classified information. - Quinns
Absolutely no editorial input was taken! We shared the footage from our trip to DSTL with them in case we needed to blur any sensitive information that had been filmed accidentally, although that didn't prove to be the case. Our policy is to never take editorial feedback from the subjects of our documentaries, whether they're video game studios or the UK Ministry of Defence. -Chris
They did notably have editorial decision in who they showed and what information they gave them though. For example this video contains a diverse group of well-spoken individuals. While in reality, as it hints at, this field is not very diverse and consists far more of the jingoists than the well spoken university professors and women with dyed hair. But they weren't allowed access to those. Even in showing them critically, they still have to work with the footage they're allowed to get.
Actually, Napoleon played a big part in how military simulations evolved. He and his generals used to do these map exercises to plan out battles, kind of like early war games. They weren't as formalized as what the Prussians did later with 'Kriegsspiel,' but Napoleon's approach to strategy definitely laid the groundwork for it. Plus, his tactics and the Napoleonic Wars had a huge influence on Europe, shaping military thinking across the continent. And when it comes to using maps simulating terrain and tactics, that goes all the way back to Roman or Babylonians times, as far as we know It’s a major historical oversight not to include Napoleon’s impact on military planning and modernization. His era was pivotal in transforming military tactics and organizing armies more effectively. Napoleon’s innovations in map exercises and strategic simulations were groundbreaking and played a key role in modernizing military strategy. Ignoring those contributions leaves out a crucial part of how military planning evolved and how his era influenced future developments, and in war games. If the terms used in the army in English or German are taken from French, it's not a coincidence, just like using word like simulation in english come from middle french.
The alternate to wargaming, which is a thought exercise, is NOT thinking about defense, warfare, or conflict. THAT is a scary space. The only thing worse than a thought out war plan, is a campaign of violence that is given absolutely no thought. The skew here is reminiscent of the D&D scaremongering of the 80s.
A game reviewer once said "if it wasn't for all the death, suffering and destruction, war is really fun, which is why there are so many games _about_ war." I don't think people making games for the military is a problem in itself. Like you said, playing a game is a lot cheaper than doing actual war, and that's always been true. I really don't believe that the Prussians were the first to ever come up with the concept. I don't think you can say "war is bad, so working on wargames is bad". I don't think wargames necessarily lead to war. The problematic elements in my opinion are what you mention about normalization of certain actions, and the thing about reinforcing preconceptions. That can lead to echo chambers that birth horrible decisions.
Yeah in my opinion wargames themselves are much more justified than your average Call of Duty. Wargames are literally just another tool used in the military - what makes it different between 'playing it out' in a scenario vs laying an actual battle plan or researching enemy capabilities? In return, your CoD emphasizes war being fun for a person with likely no relation to the military. I like shooters, so I'm not saying we shouldn't have them, but it's just interesting that there's such a strong moral stance against games being used to play out a potential war vs playing out make-belief wars just for fun.
Yeah.. playing video games totally desensitizes people to violence and turns them all into mass murderers. This is a well known fact that has been known for years, which is why video games are banned in China. Obviously, if we just made our military guys sit around and watch Bambi and Disney videos, there wouldn't be any war. Nobody would start them because war is bad.. mmmKay?
@@daytonmargramarnsom1641 That's inconsequential as hell. Whether you and i disagree with actions done by the US Military in the past or not, it's still going to have to train and prepare for future conflicts, whether aggressive or defensive. Any country, really.
The (better trained) militaries of the world will use everything at their disposal to get an edge or at least keep up with potential enemies. Why would you want to hamstring this training? As for effectiveness, especially regarding the failed Uktraine offensive, that is more due to the rapid evolution of warfare rather than wargame inefficiency. It's just like during WW1 generals were trained on outdated forms of warfare and the troops fighting the war suffered for it. But those same generals (well, some of them at least) learned and adapted and got better at it and made less mistakes. This is happening in Ukraine right now on both sides. Wargaming gives them a chance to maybe not get so many people killed doing stupid shit. It's a form of training like any other, and training requires tools.
@@Ravi9A I’d argue that the list of who to exclude should be pretty short. If, say, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. (the Golden State Killer) was somehow writing about _any_ kind of ethics, no publication should agree to carry his work. But… that’s a should. Here in the U.S., it’s up to an informal, societal assessment of who ought to have their voice amplified, and under what circumstances. I also think that neo-Nazi sentiments should be unacceptable in the mainstream of public discourse, but it’s a collective decision to be made. (I have to grit my teeth about government non-censorship, sometimes, because I know that if people who want me dead on three different axes could be censored, I would be silenced first.)
Thanks Quinn, it’s great to see content discussing the ethics and utility of professional wargaming. You’re clearly passionate about your perspective but you state the pins handed to you by the Major @34:24 “…also a bit meaningless.” For many people they’re not meaningless as they represent commitment to the Derby House Principles. It would be great if you could highlight those principles.
The thing is, those principles are nice and all, but they also explicitly state that it's for the purpose of getting better results in wargames. Even as someone involved in the D&I stuff at my own workplace, which by necessity includes the idea that more diverse staff makes our products better, I don't blame Quinns if he considers that "commitment to diversity" to be "a bit meaningless" as a result.
@@Blacknight8850 I don't think it's "a bit meaningless" if it creates reduces negative experiences in the profession and creates new opportunities for historically marginalized or underrepresented groups. The actual DHP statement is pretty clear that the cosponsors believe it is "the right thing to do" well beyond reasons of productivity or better results.
As a mathematician I just want to add that the mathematics of analyzing games, i.e. game theory, also had its beginnings in War related activities in the 1950s. Most famously people like von Neumann and Nash helped develop the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Fun fact, that Ukrainian drone game he mentioned is a commercial version of a simulator that the UA army uses to practice FPV strikes. Literally as close as youre gonna get to the bleak reality of modern combat.
I once found myself at a Magic: The Gathering draft in a garage with ten people, four of whom were ex-military and three of whom went to West Point. One of those three left early because they had an argument about the state of wargaming at West Point. It was very eye-opening to hear a bunch of massive nerds arguing about the games they played at a military academy where they learned to be officers. And kinda not surprising that, due to the reason being ability to kill and prevent deaths more effectively, they had some of the strongest opinions on games i've ever seen. On the level with the 12 year-old who once stormed out of a D&D game because i wouldn't let him play a ninja in a pirate game.
You know what, that doesn’t really surprise me honestly. The kind of doublethink it takes to proudly blow people up for money and the kind of doublethink it takes to presume you’re better than the devs at making the game you’re playing aren’t too dissimilar. And case in point, this comment puts a completely different and even funnier spin on the time a British military office accidentally leaked documents to win an argument about War Thunder
I once worked with guys that wrote the software for the air-defence network in the UK. They took it very seriously at the time. Then we worked on the air traffic control systems that stop planes crashing into each other. We took this seriously too.
@@chastermief839 Look, i was 12 or 13. Today, i absolutely would, and it would be awesome. Also, get out of my house, whatever your name was. Aiden? Aldon? Something like that.
as someone currently doing a unit on overseas aid and international development, we've actually used roleplay and similar games to model and learn about different interest groups and their perspectives when it comes to what they need and their limitations. The roleplay situations reminded me of my times playing mega games and then that quickly made me realise how I am connected to this kinds of wargames and how yeah, maybe serious games is a better term because they do have some real world, maybe good, applications.
I startled loudly at Finland being mentioned about 15 minutes in, and the whole thing went from abstract and concerning to, like. My lived life. What an experience.
To speak a little towards chapter 5, on the non-military use of wargaming: I am involved in the state disaster relief system here in Germany, and in all organizations (firefighting, emergency medical care, logistical and technological support), at all levels of leadership from squad level (where you would be in charge of ~8-15 people) to county level and beyond (potentially thousands of units that you're responsible for organizing, and hundreds of thousands of impacted civilians you have to take care of), wargames are used at the very least in initial training, and at leadership levels above platoon size (~30-50 people) also in regular practice and exercises. This continues up to international level with events such as the EU MODEX MODTTX, which are wargames for practicing disaster relief on an EU-wide scale. So wargames are definitely genuinely and extensively used for purposes that are pretty indisputably as close to being an unmitigated good as is possible. Yes, I'm sure the military versions still get a lot more funding (because the military just has a lot more cash to throw around; that is simply a fact of reality as it currently is), but it isn't a complete copout to claim there are alternative uses, because those do exist in practice rather than just theory, and they are very much in widespread use. And as someone in another comment already pointed out: To reflect this, the german word for wargaming has long changed away from "Kriegsspiel" (even in military use) and is now "Planspiel" or just plan/planning game, because that's what it really is - a game to help you plan, which in the beginning may have been military battles and associated actions, but overall has a much, much wider potential to (hopefully) improve decision making in all manner of circumstances.
Planspiel derives from Plan = Karte/map, it has nothing to do with planning. Aaaber eine ganz andere Frage: Nutzt ihr Neustart auf der lokalen/regionalen Ebene oder gibt's da vielleicht Interesse an Workshops?
As someone involved in the 'defense' industry for years, I'm glad this is being covered. Getting people talking about this and spreading awareness is good. A better informed society makes better informed decisions. I am biased of course, so take everything from here on out with a Boulder of salt: I think Quinn seemed a bit out of his depth here. I think a part of it may be due to the fact that, as a viewer, it seemed like this was his first exposure to real war, albeit indirectly. As in his first tangible link to conflict. Not a movie, not a portrayal of it, but a direct interaction with an apparatus that informs decision making on how to kill people and how to better make decisions to preserve your own. The insistence to get a reaction felt... naïve? I can't blame that desire for validation. I've been in that spot - I've felt it. Though, I think my Ukrainian coworker sobered me on this: "Everyone thinks conflict is oceans away; a thing of the past. What a luxury."
It is true that conflict is a reality of politics, as someone who is an anti-war anarchist; it is more about how society is structured to necessitate war like a much larger gaming reward incentive structure. Conflict causes the strong to rise to the top, which makes it advantageous for people who are already in a position of power. Creating a post-war society means creating a new game that rewards solidarity and equality. That won't mean the end of conflict of course; but the needs of the many will have a lot more weight than than the entitlement of warmongers.
As someone who has no military experience, I'm genuinely curious, do you not think if rather focusing on NATO (and the arms race), EU, for example, focus on being independent of Russian gas, cleaning up their economy from Russian oligarchs' money, etc, the current war wouldn't have happened? I think an actual non-military pressure from EU would've worked much better in weakening, if not even removing, Putin. NATO's arms race has only resulted in increase in Russian nationalism and support for the dictator because of the resulting "us vs them" mentality.
Yeah, this is my first PMG video and it was immediately clear that Quinn's perspective is very different to my own. To him, seeing a computer simulation of strategic missile & air strikes is "disquieting imagery". To the people he's observing, it's Wednesday.
I think you are mixing up naiveté with the absence of desensitization. It is the opposite of naive to view a system that optimizes killing people with suspicion, fear, and natural human disgust.
@@commissarcactus1513 I ask, as a fan, that you give Quinn a shot despite this first impression 'Shut Up & Sit Down' and 'Quinns Quest' are both fantastic.
Had my class watch this in my TTRPG course I'm teaching. Caught a lot of attention from the students thinking the topic of game studies was a joke. Excellent timing sir.
I was at a UK MOD hackathon about 7 years ago as a budding software developer, we built a fuzzy logic threat analysis using AIS (ship) data. I remember we came 3rd but we were the team that got business cards from an officer who asked us to use data from the Indian ocean in the final demo. Hadn't thought much about it for a while but a lot of that weekend makes a lot more sense now.
Not surprised at all. We have had a big uptake at French Wargame Holidays by current serving Defence personnel in the last two years from 9 countries. We predominantly play historical games, walking from Caesar to ww2 battlefields in western France, then replaying battles from regimental to division sized games using miniatures and terrain. However we are now playing a lot more modern based board games focused on traditional tactical games rather than asymmetric games. It is important to move away from asymmetric to a modern Wargame. We have also moved to larger board games as we were required to successfully market to government body groups. As for your “feelings” we are practicing war when we Wargame, this is what it is designed for.
Come on. I know you miss the days of roaming support on bard or blitzcrank... The adrenaline rush of buying mobility boots on your first back. One last job.
I think some of what they're running up against in section 4 is the desensitization at the core of all military training and projects. Everyone involved in warfare is conditioned in different ways to normalize the experience of mass death and killing - it is essential to the project of war. And it takes many forms, including dehumanization of the enemy, hero worship, nationalism, etc. Part of the answers that he is getting feel like the ways that these individuals have been conditioned to normalize and tolerate their job, and how they're reconciling them. Some of them can take the step back and see the more morally complicated picture (i.e. "saving lives of our military likely means ending the lives of others, but it still feels morally justified") and others need to cognitively shield themselves from that dissonance ("this just saves lives, so it is justified"). The psychology of getting individuals to participate in warfare is complicated. Especially the moment where he described the map of English feeling so odd and strange. Most other people in that room have been totally desensitized to that map, and they've already had to reconcile the way it makes them feel.
If that were true, we'd see record recruitment due to the popularity of Call of Duty etc. Perhaps the fact that recruitment is at an all time low is because, on the contrary, after running simulations and seeing the consequences, the players are much more sensitive to the destruction and death they are dealing with.
@@JasonChown Yeah, because there's only 1 factor that determines recruitment numbers. Even if "seeing the consequences" as one might in CoD was a factor, it probably ranks far lower than not really knowing anyone younger than their grandparents who spent time in the military.
@@JasonChown But most western countries are having no issues meeting their recruitment goals, usually the issue is keeping people in the military not getting them to sign up in the first place.
I think it's just peoples ability to realise that dots on a screen of the UK are not reality. I think 95% of this entire video is Quinns coming to terms with the reality that militaries exist.
I do tend to find myself agreeing with the people involved in the wargames, namely that yeah it is horrible to think about and there is the potential bad actors could use it for evil ends. But the thing is... that's always been the case for many now common inventions, and I think it's more dangerous people don't plan or play out what could happen if things get tense in the world and then make bad decisions that these sessions could hopefully cause a reality check over months or years before that.
I think you're still sidestepping the moral issue. "This is the case for another invention", yes and we are also critical of those. As we should be, if they kill people in some sort of way. It's being a bit lazy to suggest "well, someone's ought to be the bad guy. If I won't do it, someone else will!" This isn't what you're saying, but it also kind of is. Assuming you are morally superior to any foreigner is how you not only perpetuate and make war worse, but also literally how you start it. I know people who work for military contractors and they all assume that since they're the one doing it, and they're not doing X evil thing that they imagine some foreign threat might be doing, it must be acceptable. I think they are mistaken, still working from that nationalist mindset. By excusing war we are also creating it.
This topic reminds me of the MCU's relationship with the US military. Quite chilling how we're seeing similar influences in many popular shooter games in the recent years. Makes you look at them in a whole new light in retrospect.
They've been in games for over 15 years, and movies even longer, from Top Gun to Transformers. That's why "Keep politics out of my XXXX" is bullshit. It's there, it's always been there, those people are just too propagandised to see it.
@@invaderjp1984 I'm saying, not of this is chilling to me because none of it is surprising to me. To push the metaphor, in order to experience something as "chilling", you have to be warmer going in. A cold thing can't cool you if your already cold. These stories about governments doing anything they can to be more effective doers of violence aren't chilling, because my understanding of these organisations is already so much colder than anything in this video. On the scale of evil, I'm accustomed to zero kelvin, while the content of this video is barely freezing. If that's still too confusing, let's just say I can't be scared because it's better than what I expect from them, not worse
In recent years? America's Army, a US Army themed FPS game, was developed BY the US Army, explicitly as a recruiting tool, was released in 2002. Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, later renamed to Arma: Cold War Assault, was a MilSim developed by Bohemia Interactive, and released in 2001. After nearly going bankrupt building the Xbox version of the game, they were approached by the US Marine Corps to develop a version tailored to military applications, and was released as Virtual Battlefield Systems 1, or VBS1. This directly lead into the creation of many other simulators, the current iteration being VBS4, built on top of Arma 3. There are many, MANY other examples, dating back to the 80's with combat flight simulators that were repurposed for training applications, this is nothing new. It has been happening since video games have been a thing.
I suspect I know why Quinns got the reaction he did. As a fellow Extremely Online Lefty, we love to handwring about complex moral issue, but it feels like a lot of the time that the handwringing is the end of it. We seldom come to a firm conclusion like "Wargaming is morally wrong and we shouldn't do it" because then we'd have to defend that and all its consequences, including from our own side. Instead, the handwringing becomes the point, feeling upset and conflicted becomes an end in itself, a sort of puritan self-flaggelation. I really don't think most people feel a degree of constant, paralysing self-doubt and self-loathing about everything they do, and honestly I don't think it's healthy how much we do.
Watching this from a halfway across the globe, knowing that there are thousands of people dying barely a few hours flight from the UK, who would all LOVE the luxury of worrying about the morality of making their military stronger, well. I know folks in Ukraine begging for a few dollars just to keep holding Russia back from its genocidal program. And then there's this. It's quite a vibe.
I'm glad someone said it. This video made it obvious to me, and I'd detected it in previous vids on the channel but couldn't put a name to it at the time, but it's this underlying theme of guilt-by-association. Playing video games doesn't make you responsible for wars existing. I think the reason you don't often hear firm conclusions drawn is because simply hinting at them allows the person to feel like they've "done their duty as a progressive" in pointing out the moral quandary, without actually having to commit to the laughably flawed and overreaching assertions (and without looking hypocritical when they - quite reasonably - fail to follow their own fantastical moral code). You could make a case that our watching a TH-cam video is morally wrong, because it requires electricity and electricity generation is destroying the biosphere, and it supports a psychologically manipulative advertising industry. If you're willing to follow any thread far enough, across whatever tenuous link you can imagine, you can find problems with literally anything, which only leads, as you say, to a state of paralysis where you take pleasure in nothing for fear of inadvertently supporting one injustice or another. It's little wonder there's a mental health crisis in society today. The left responds to the problems in the world with guilt, self-loathing, and blaming themselves, and the right responds with bitterness, anger, and blaming anyone else. Neither is a healthy nor productive attitude. It's important to be aware of and engaged with these issues, but a key part of intellectual discourse and debate that seems often missed is the ability to engage intellectually with a topic while remaining distanced from it emotionally. You don't want your logical analysis to be clouded by emotion, nor do you want your emotional state jeopardized by internalizing every problem you discuss. You can't be expected to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. There's nearly 8 billion people on this planet - there are infinitely many things happening all the time completely outside of your influence or control. All you can do is live your life, try to do a little good, try not to be a total dickhead, and stop blaming yourself for imagined wrongdoings. It won't solve any problems, it will only drive you mad.
@@kaelananderson9237 Yeah, to be absolutely clear, I do get feeling unsettled about the thought using gaming to figure out how to more efficiently kill, but I can only imagine these people resolved that mental conflict pretty quickly. After all, I can't think of a plausible scenario where your game mechanics expertise leads directly to death and suffering *increasing*. It's not like they're figuring out how to keep India suppressed through acts of terror. But there's a trend to want that dilemma to deliberately stay unresolved. Grasping nuance is really important, but we have to keep one foot in reality and pragmatism. It's the same attitude that keeps us doomscrolling even though it makes us anxious and depressed, far beyond the point we need to stay politically informed. Misery and guilt doesn't fix anything unless it's directly tied to real world action.
In Germany we actually have POL&IS - an "interactive simulation game conducted by the German Armed Forces that takes into account political, economic and ecological aspects of international politics." (From Wikipedia) From what I remember our Politics Teacher at our school organized it for us as a school trip, I think it was 3 days in total and we had a couple countries, each represented by 3 students and then "the terrorist groups" and "the journalists" also represented by three. Each country had one leader, these got to go to a table with a world map and also had to carry the responsibility for any war decisions. We were heavily informed about the consequences of especially atomic bombs but on the last day one of us found it funny to deploy one and even though "it was just a game" it felt so devestating that that decision was made - the rest of the day we had really disappointed instructors that told us this never happened and they made us all watch videos on the disastrous impacts of that decision if it would have been real. That was around 12 years ago. I wonder how they adapted that game nowadays.
I think the end conclusion hits upon something that wasn't said out right: the ethics in games and the academics of games. The former is more obvious questions like "If we know that gambling is addictive, how do we build reward systems in games that minimize that potential harm?", "(Depending on the game), Is it more important to represent the reality of something or represent the expected experience of it?", and "If we build a level based off a real world location... and change it, what is the impact of that?" I don't know if these are the best example questions, but the point is, as Quinns has noted, we've run into these kinds of questions before. And it's not enough to say "No, it doesn't matter because we won't do that." because someone might use them and perhaps more applicable, if we don't know how a problem happens, we can't know how to prevent or stop ourselves from running into it. It is the sorts of questions that some industries have ethics boards, ethical guidelines, and ethical oaths for. In modern psychological experiments, it's required for the researchers to debrief and help participants afterwards to avoid long term harm. And these things occurs in other entertainment fields as well - magicians, generally speaking, avoid presentations and illusions that would make the audience feel complicit in a crime or in violence; they avoid effects that would traumatize the audience because there's not really a great way to handle the effects on such a large crowd. The second is better studying of games and integrating that into the commercial games industry (as professionals and as students). We can't say that games don't have impact/games are 'just' games when the outcomes are negative while turning around and talking about uplifting stories where games had positive outcomes and impact. We have to avoid over generalizations and knee jerk defenses when the nascent academic study of games comes forward with findings. As with the ethics of games, the more we can understand the academics of games - how of games can shape people, perceptions, and opinions - the more we can at least do things with better intentionality, and recognize when others are doing something we should perhaps be uncomfortable withm or at least, careful with. We can better talk about actionable things to do when something does happen. We can make games better. After writing these two notes, I am reminded of a serious game made a number of years ago. In it "...players receive instructions from a typewriter to load people, represented by yellow pegs, to different railway stations. The player moves their trains by rolling dice, and they can use cards to slow down their opponents' trains, or accelerate their own. Once the player reaches the final destination, it is revealed to be a [Nazi] concentration camp." While far more philosophical and contemplative than the war games/serious games in the video, as an artifact of gaming, it's historical relevant feels significant. There is also the more commercially available games of Freedom: The Underground Railroad and Alice Is Missing, both games covered on Shut up and Sit down. And both games that invoked incredibly heavy responses from the reviewers. Regardless of what one may think of the mechanics or what not of, say, Alice Is Missing, that the game can become so... emotionally 'real' means there must be some guidance in how to manage that, on some level. The only way to even start to do that is for designers to recognize that something they're working on CAN do that and to not become defensive that it's something that can happen.
Games as a form of distraction are usually more effective than the therapies on offer, especially with CBT overtaking everything else. Every demographic seeks the escapism of fantasy, and any catharsis that speaks to their lived experience. Unchecked intergenerational trauma invented Warhammer, and simply offering therapy misses the point: its our world being terrible that causes most mental health struggles.
@@nathanlevesque7812 as a table top war gamer myself, it is a distraction, yes, but it’s a distraction that inherently indulges in jingoistic and martial violence fantasies that men have been raised to celebrate. just because it soothes does not mean it is always good. but also, playing warhammer does not mean your the devil. we can play with a critical eye. the issue is not games in general, but games that glorify a particular type of crisis. and yes generational trauma is the cause of people wanting to indulge in fantasy play, but again if the fantasy play reinforces and normalizes the violence of the world, we need to question the play.
For anyone confused by this comment The "this gives us mixed feelings but we're talking about it anyway" style of video essay is this person's favourite. The quotation marks do a lot for readability
Wargaming has been instrumental for me to understand humans and their behavior. Enabling me to understand the actions of other people and groups through putting myself into a situation where my incentives point into a different direction in a game. This is an insight i wish for everyone to have access to. Sure, a better understanding of peoples actions might be applied to war, but that i dont see as a real negative. Just like i dont see the development of better material sciences through an exclusively militaristic lens. Better tools will also always make for better weapons. The problem is not the better tool, it is to make sure the tool is in the right hands under the right restrictions. Maybe we should develop a wargame about how we allocate positions of power and how much power that should be.
I work for a company that provides materials for all sectors of industry. Recently we have had an increase in orders tied to producing weapons. We provode a product that requires extensive additional processong before it could become a weapon. I can look at that material and see the production bonus I'll get because the order books are good. I can also look it and see Russian and Chinese Soldiers who's life might end if that material is used as intended. If you work in manufacturing, the military and government agencies will purchase from your employer and use that material to wage wars and suppress/ control people who they don't like. Life is messy and complicated.
Having designed two war-simulations (PvP and PvE) within an MMO, this video has given me so much to think about. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be discussing this topic for a very long time 😅
Eisenhower said “A plan means nothing. Planning is everything.” That’s all this category of ‘serious gaming’ is. Fascinating look at this industry/sector of practices, extremely well done! I just don’t see oblique methodologies as having inherent metaphysical values. It’s running mental fire drills
@@justonkyunclear if truly autonomous drones have seen combat yet. But it will happen, because war will happen. I don’t see the point in lamenting this stuff-that’s exactly the kind of Western, pacifistic solipsism that Putin, Khomeini, and Xi are banking on.
Absolutely tremendous! I've been watching and supporting SUSD for years and only recently learned about this channel. I remember back in the late 90s when I was stationed at RAF Mildenhall, Channel 4 ran a program with two individuals engaged in a wargame with a third individual serving as the mediator. In the bygone days of letter writing, I still have the response I received from a Channel 4 executive upon my request for more television productions like the one they had aired, as an avid wargamer. Having served 28 years in the Air Force and having developed dozens of military wargames for Academy Games, Compass Games, and Decision Games, I certainly can understand the views so well articulated in your piece. Masterful!
@@BigLouie_e_e This was dripping in anti-war bias. The dude basically called all the ppl working there sheep. What’s honest about that? It’s incredible how belittling he was towards people who are necessary for a country’s survival. They clearly see the importance of their work. Just like any scientist would but you wouldn’t call them “canned lines”. it’s fine to be anti-war but conflict is inevitable. Europe is surrounded by enemies. It’s okay to have military defense spending.
@@illsaveus You're confusing bias with opinion, Quinns put his own opinions into the video but that didn't mean he biased the information within the video. He didn't cherry pick qoutes to make people sound worse or leave out key information, instead he actually tried to make everyone look as good as possible. There's nothing wrong with a journalist making their own opinion clear, in fact that's probably better since it removes the impression of false objectivity from a piece. However it is dishonest when you try to conflate a journalist being honest about their opinion with bias and thus try to dismiss a piece you don't agree with. If you aren't anti war then just say that and present your own arguments instead of trying to dismiss information because the person presenting it didn't share your views.
@@illsaveus He did NOT call them sheep in any way whatsoever. In fact he said they were exceptionally articulate, had well-considered opinions, and gave them plenty of space to demonstrate that even while he admitted his own lack of assurance with some those more boilerplate statements. You ironically sound quite hawkish if this bothered you, tbh.
I worked an internship for the Serious Games Showcase at ITSEC, the largest milsim conference in the world. As part of the internship, I got to attend for free. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. I remember walking past booths of sci-fi looking combat armor, VR headsets showing training demos, and going up to the Unreal Engine booth to grab a free shirt while standing next to a massive screen and real-scale model of a minigun designed to train people how to aim and fire it out of a moving helicopter.
@@Cats-TM I mean, that is a bit the problem here. That a minigun sounds fun. Which certainly is kinda the fault of games, where you use them to mow down some aliens.
@@Healermain15 From a U.S. perspective I'd rather they developed a viable simulation that taught the basics of what is expected than spend the money on ammunition and fuel while dumping tons of lead contamination and debris into the appropriated lands of indigenous peoples on training runs that are also a risk of life in and of themselves.
@@blueberryiswar No, I just think firearms are interesting. They have a lot of interesting mechanics and history to them. Also, war is a fascinating topic. Terrible, yes, it is something humans have and will always do. And learning about it is something that I enjoy doing. Not that it is a good thing at all, just interesting.
I like the video and some of the questions you've raised, but I have had a thought that I think you've kinda overlooked... War will always happen whether we play these kind of wargames or not. People will be killed regardless of whether or not we're using these tools to enhance our ability to react to different situations. I think any person from any county would much sooner see thier own countries using this kind of tool than to be the only county not using it. To not use it in this case would indirectly killing your own citizens and service people which is worse than these tools indirectly killing those citizens and service people of other hostile countries. It would be like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There is much that needs to be explored about how effective these tools are, I absolutely agree. If they, through the nature of thier existence, make negative outcomes more certain, then that will certainly need addressing; but as a tool, it's not something we can afford to leave behind when other adversaries will certainly be improving thier capabilities. Long time fan, love the video, but I wonder whether you might agree with this or not, as it seems like undeniable knowledge to me. Thanks for reading :)
There is a growing body of academic evidence about the effectiveness of serious games, which includes professional wargaming e.g. See the first issue of the MORS (Military Operationis Research Society) new Journal of Wargaming. The first issue is online (and open access)
Since the subject of Ukraine came up, something worth noting is that the Russian Federation's military capabilities had traditionally been vastly overestimated (which presumably informed wargaming that in turn informed decision making) prior to the full scale invasion of Ukraine and this failure in imagination directly led to incalculable suffering as UA's allies were prepared to write an entire country of human beings off as a lost cause in the opening days of the war. To this day, a lack belief in the Ukrainian people's ability to win has led to their supposed allies dragging their feet on the delivery of crucial military aid that could turn the tide of the war. The failed offensive mentioned in the video was critically hampered by failure to deliver necessary armoured vehicles and directly resulted in lightly armoured IFVs being used to storm entrenched positions with catastrophic results. Another example is the obscenely restrictive rules of engagement forbidding use of western-supplied weaponry inside Russian territory that are directly enabling the bombardment of Ukrainian civilians from the safety of Russia for fear of some sort of escalation scenario that has been played out in western high command. I guess all of this is to further illustrate the "garbage in, garbage out" issue that improperly-designed simulations can have leading to dire consequences when too much faith is put in them.
They can't win, because Russia can't afford to lose, it's an existential conflict for both countries. There's plenty of escalation scenarios. Do you want Iran to have nukes? Do you want Yemen to have hypersonic missiles? How much would overseas shipping cost if you have to physically protect all of the ships against USVs? And in the end, testing whether those rockets are rusty and whether those nukes are working or not isn't the best idea. And no, the offensive failed because Western planning is literally "just go around the minefields", what was the last time they fought a war against an actual military? Korea? It had nothing to do with the lack of resources, Ukraine literally already lost more armor in Kursk borderland than in the counteroffensive, they have plenty. The planning was the issue. Still is. Also, do you know why Russian military capabilities have been overestimated? Because Western think-tanks that are supposed to evaluate them are all delusional, the way their source data is absurd.
I think that overstimation has also hit the Russian mod hard. They are grooming several game titles trained and funded by westerners that overestimate their own cability, so when they're in the real world, they are failing hard. The real problem now is Steam allowing shady developers with anticheat to embed code on boot sectors and similar shenanigans.
That might have been the case early in the war, but by now it's blatantly obvious that the war is being dragged on to benefit the military industrial complex, to distract from domestic problems, and potentially to goad Russia into doing something with long term repercussions that would cause normal people to suffer while doing little if any damage to those in power. If WWIII is what it takes to prevent you know who from getting elected, I'd be shocked if no-one tried to push for exactly that. They hate and fear him that much, because he calls them out on their nonsense, and refused to start or prolong any wars while in office. Before Ukraine, our war machine was starving.
@@modelenginerding6996 I mean, a game does not need the root access of an anti-cheat to read out all the documents on your PC and send them to whoever it wants.
Another banger! Not only a subject most of us didn't know anything about, but also a great take on it that I don't think we could have gotten from anyone else. I was about to ask for some sources for further reading, since I thought the video (while it did its best) didn't explain too well how this games actually work... until the bit where it's shown that even the academics in the field are somewhat in the dark about it. Maybe if/once this type of games are more widely used for something other than war, like this Alex Vince guy seem to be doing, we'll be able to learn more about it in an accessible way. Because, war aside, games as tools is a super interesting topic.
In regards to your comment on the gunship missions in military shooters I will slightly disagree in the context of the original CoD 4 mission "death from above". You comment that it made you sick, and that's a completely valid response, but I think this instance provides a little more depth that I think is given credit. CoD 4 Modern Warfare has a mission called Death From Above, the famous AC130 mission, in said mission you are supposed to give support to the SAS team on the ground and focus on withering away the converging Russian Ultranationalists closing on Price and the team. The entire atmosphere of the mission is rather light, all AC130 operators are rather jolly and banter with each other while turning people into red mist (which is shockingly close to real life footage of AC130 operations). The mission makes no commentary on the excessive levity that they apply during all of it, it’s very much delivered matter of fact (which could be applied for the entirety of CoD4, very blunt and to the point), and deliberately chooses this framework in order to separate the player from the carnage inflicted. It’s giving you the most raw expression of such a situation and allowing you to judge by yourself. It manages to exists both as an engaging power fantasy and highlighting how it’s slightly grim that you could be so trivial within said context (regardless of practicality and justifiability) when it’s just white dots on a screen, which can even be taken in the meta sense of it being essentially a video game (dots on a screen) within the context of a modern military shooter. CoD 4 Modern Warfare in general is surprisingly cynical in it's depiction of US foreign interventionism. The USMC are essentially framed as an unstoppable fighting force but also completely incapable of accomplishing their end goal (finding and capturing Al Assad) due to logistical incompetence and relying on terrible intel, they essentially bumble their way though everything in regards to providing actual results. Which as a consequence escalates the conflict to the point of them being nuked. It’s less about justifiability and more that they just made everything worse by merely being there and being incompetent about it. They do put the SAS on a pedestal tho, which, ironically enough, is the starting point of the series obsession with hyper special operator characters rather than regular grunt/infantrymen.
The aircraft featured in that mission, the AC-130, was developed for and exists solely for shooting at farmers, it cannot contribute to symmetrical warfare.
I think people's response to that mission depends a lot on whether they saw the infamous wikileaks heliicopter gunship video where a journalist and people with him are killed with enthusiasm because the pilot mistakes them for an enemy combatants. If you've watched that (and to a lesser extent bomb camera video from the two Iraq wars) similar video game scenes just feel different.
I did like in MW2 where they specifically made a point out of showing how the cynical brutality of the SAS can easily just make things worse, though that kinda got forgotten. The first MW triology is really odd like that, it occasionally manages to grasp some fairly serious points about western military adventurism in the early 21st century but then also seemingly gets distracted by cool military hardware.
@@hedgehog3180 Not only that, MW2 also has Shepherd as a stand in for blind jingoistic patriotism and the unrestrained nature of the Military Industrial Complex (regardless if he’s a rogue element, he literally gives Soap a speech about how “tomorrow there’s not gonna be a shortage of volunteers, a shortage of patriots”, after rambling about self serving patriotic jingoism while being deliberately framed to look as evil as possible and was the main instigator of WW3 alongside Makarov).
While I appreciate Quinn's exposition on the potential moral quandaries of "war-games as potential weapons", and the implied moral corruption of the art/science of gaming to serve the national interest, if these tools have utility as conflict mitigators that could reduce both military and civilian casualties then is seems a prudent investment. The irony of the "mineshaft gap" as depicted in Dr. Strangelove is not lost on me, although we are now apparently discussing the "gaming gap" if potential aggressor states are using these models to achieve an advantage.
Some of my old friends are the guys behind Door Kickers, and they've got enormous pulls and shoutouts from people that do small unit tactics for real that their game is probably the best tool to teach and show people how to clear corners and prep a room for entry and why any of all of that is important to not dying. Alternatively, i am a.. member.. of the /r/noncredibledefense subreddit, which on the surface, it's flat out a meme sub with armchair defence experts that... every so often, you feel some of them know a hell of a lot more than the level you're expected to take things at. It's all a lot of Non-The-Onion style of impossible situations (apart from fringe plane-wife anime chick interests), but if we're looking at it through a lense of 'what if', all those 'what if' scenarios have a seedling of truth and possiblity, and in the UA war so far... i'll just say the meme came before the real life situation a few times. Not enough, but i bet enough to be statistically important that i bet somewhere, someone, is tasked to monitoring and compiling memes from that subreddit. And i feel that's what wargames have always been and always will be using imagination preemptively, and i can't believe there's a cap on that or any real line anywhere in the sand. From the earliest human that went 'huh, can i throw this rock to kill that pray?' to the most complex tactical missile use and flood simulations from the Three Gorges Dam, figuring out contigencies and what ifs and figuring out if something will actually work, if not just the exercise in itself.. has been something we've always done. Those were the thoughts that got us to the Moon, and opened the biggest gates for us to the future, and they will not be limited to military use. LE: Also remembered this little bit, i attendend milsim airsoft larping, a week of 'on-base' missions and interactions with LARP players which were civilians or infiltrators or etc. I was tasked with a friend to chitchat with a dude and find out if he has some sort of bomb piece. We talked like people, we ended up sitting down for tea.. and there was this thought behind my head that 'what if he's playing us'. I remember i had unclicked my pistol holster and held my hand near it for the entire discussion. It's entirely possible the bloke was just friendly (like real life person) and we were having a good time, but as the immersion worked, my orders of the situation rang in my mind.. i was expecting at any time for him to kill us with our guard down and prevent our search as we hobbled for 30 minutes back to base. My friend ended up distracting him while i searched his tent, and we left emptyhanded, probably bad info or just sent there for random spot checks. But yeah. My experience playing military simulation airsoft has given me experiences that make me at least frame, if not understand, some of the real horrors of war. How a 6 meter street that i cross daily to get bread and milk during a war can become an unpassable no-man's land, how effective supressive fire can be when the consequences are grave even in context (walking back 3 hours to base), and yes, how deep mistrust can go for just a friendly civilian sharing their tea with you all on the basis of what your chain of command tells you about him and the situation. And all of that happened through.. well.. a game of make believe and tiny plastic balls.
Playing the civilians, wounded people, thugs and other non-military is pretty fun. Sometimes we might duck away and appear as new faces. Sometimes there is a whole little village life going on where some dude just owes another money or a family is being ostracized. As an intelligence guy at lower level you aren't doing the big picture analysis I think. You are there to collect and process information to send upwards and receive actionable info. information to distribute downward. It's not just one dude to talk to but a whole town of weirdos. And it's hard to filter out which one you need to be weary of.
@@krityaan It's a wink and nod to other edgy redditors who masturbate to fantasies about murdering Chinese civilians. A pretty gross thing to put in like an easter egg in the middle of a comment trying to appear thoughtful
I used to airsoft in this same way. I think its bad business, people self traumitizing themselves or at least trying to get a taste of that from what real soldiers experience and it can be pretty toxic in that respect. People living peaceful lives in a country without war who clamour for that trauma but defanged of "real" danger
the fact that video games are so intrinsically intertwined with war and military is not new information to me but it was still super interesting to learn a lot of the nittygritty and details!!
As much as it honestly irks me, the reality is that we live in a dangerous world right now, gone are the post soviet period with American hegemony as a stabilizing influence. I'm a pacifist by nature, always hated conflict, but I'm also a bullying victim to the extreme, I know intimately how some people will never stop until you force them. I studied human psychology for 30 years because of that last part, I analysed bullying as a phenomenon for a long time in a very nuance way. War gaming is a nuanced subject and yes, it can be used for ill, but as you said, unarmed nations tend to suffer at some point. Are war gaming weapons, yes, are they perfect? Not by any stretch, but are the exercise they provide functionally useful yes because they allow to find out of the box ideas to defeat prestige collosi, to break the sentiment of invincibility, to force a more flexible way of thinking. You were uncomfortable in that room with nobody awnsering, I'm guessing that many had the same reserves you did but made their minds long before you came. Had they all been first timer you would have heard awnsers from them then. Gone are the days of a stable world order based on rules, we have to come to therm with that, it's just a fact. Now to reach a new equilibrium and stability we need to be ready enough to deter Putin, Xi and their ilks, narcisists as heads of totalitarian states maybe Trump if he ever wins back his throne. We have to be ready to defend ourselves and hiding our heads in the sand is not a solution. You talk at the end of the responsibility of game designers relating to abuses in the video game industry, well politically we are living the same and reffusing the fight is defaulting to automatic defeat against people without any shred of morality. Do not make false equivalency between an imperfect democracy and ethno fascist totalitarism in the harm generally done by their actions. Was Iraq and Afghanistan horrendous mistakes with terrible impacts absolutely, and our games should reflect that reality, that invading and occupying countries create more issues than it ever fixes. This is how we adress the issue, not by refusing to play and leaving it to less rational actors, because want it or not, that type of game will always happen.
Around the 45-minute mark, you look to people who have lived and breathed conflict for years to validate your negative feelings about something they've sat with it, processed it, and channeled it into a force for good. It isn't weird, it's their job and for probably all of them, their passion. I'm sorry, but for me, I get 2nd hand embarrassmentt to watch. The way I see it, wargaming, as with every tool can be used in positive or negative ways. War is going to be a reality for a long, long time but, if wargaming can be used to reduce friendly casualties and innocent bystanders then I can't see it as anything but positive. It allows theory craft, thought exercises, and planning without risking lives.
So he should talk to someone who has never fought a war or experienced anything like that firsthand? he should interview a hoi4 modder or something? The point is valid in that these things form the schemas in how we see the world and people from these war games DO think of countries in terms of how they have invaded them in a wargame. I realized that personally all the geography I was interpretating in terms of EU4 and HOI4 invasions; viewing the world in terms of belligerent military action ISNT HEALTHY. A plan of defense for your own country is different Of Course
For reading on the dangers of War Games, try AJP Taylors "War by Timetable" and his WW1 chapter on "How Wars Begin", which details how planning for war created war
Your whole discussion on nuclear weapons reminds me of a situation in a legacy board game where you can get a nuclear weapon and I remember being the only person in my group opposed to getting it. But then in a situation we were going to lose if I didn't use it, I had my hand forced to nuke a place to save the rest of us. And it just makes me think that if someone like me who is very opposed to nuclear armaments would make that decision in a game. How long until real life military operatives also make that decision in the face of a losing battle?
the difference is that IRL multiple countries have nukes, designed in a way that launching your nukes triggers everyone else to launch their nukes, resulting evin everyone losing. Probably a better situation than just one country with the authority to nuke wherever they want, but not as good as no one having nukes.
@@Appletank8 But the point here is what lessons do people take away from games about the use of nuclear weapons and how might they influence the real world? The Cold War had many close calls where the only thing that saved us from Nuclear annihilation was someone being hesitant and unwilling to give the final order, we definitely want more people like that and not people who are quick to order a nuclear strike so it's important that any games used for training teach hesitancy.
Great video! I wanna try to shoot down the idea of there being a risk that decision gaming might lead to the wrong conclusions. It might, for sure. BUT, that's irrelevant because in all likelyhood, the alternative is to make decisions with less data, less attempts of predicting outcomes, and ultimately fewer plans for readyness. People have never had an issue with making decisions regardless of available data. That's one of our evolutionary superpowers probably. And researching and gathering data is work, which humans generally try to avoid. Decisions will be made without simulating the problem space, just with more confidence and a higher chance of failure. Lets do more decision gaming!!
About how players can screw games. Back in university I participated in a business wargame. It was about oil companies strategics decisions. There were 5 teams each with 5 people. We could set the oil quantities that we would sell. The thing was that, the best move was to each company should sells the oils slowly throughout the game. It was to show why oil companies behave the way they did. The problem is that I was completely stupid in college. I started thrash talking all the other teams and people started getting emotional sold their reserves. And in the second turn there was no more oil. Hahahah 😂
War games are like medical mannequins for officers, generals and policy makers. It's better to practice than to 'dip your toes' live because real people's lives are at stake.
it's so cute when people believe the megapowerful governments of the world are actually interested in minimizing conflict and the death and destruction that comes along with conflict
Yes. Especially for education. There is a vast library of articles on gamification and learning and why/how it works. And it's really really good at making people understand concepts, expand their critical thinking skills, and come to terms with their field. Wargames also do not stand alone. But its a hell of a lot better at having someone understand the theory they've been taught, than simply sitting in a lecture hall or classroom being told XYZ.
Yeah, but we don't know if these games are a realistic representation of war and if they maybe teach us to do it wrong. In your analogy it's like giving students medical mannequins with totally wrong anatomy. And then they're supposed to do a complicated surgery on someone's heart
@@morgenson1148 The games dont have to be a realistic representation IOT teach concepts, they just have to be good enough. The analogy of mannequins would be more appropriate to exercises and training, not wargaming. We generally dont use wargames to train with (except decisionmaking), but to teach.
The perfect military is 100% practice 0% practical. Practice drill, manoeuvres, exercises, simulations. Part of that simulation, is to prevent conflict, disengage from incidents without escalation. Defence without conflict.
The leather chair in the background of Quinns' to camera bits looks like pictur of a "closed eye". I kept thinking "that's a nice piece of art, why is it on the floor... also, why is it a chair".
I cannot fathom the complexities in navigating every aspect of making this video. From research to interviews to formulating a thesis on a topic as intricate as this, the incredible work shines through. Thank you for taking the time to look at it from a variety of perspectives and building a framework for viewers to digest the existence of this industry. I know I'm gonna be mulling it over in the back of my head for a good long while.
Thanks Quinns, for this enlightening update to a nearly forgotten wing of game knowledge. And yes, there are plenty of armed forces members that do in fact not only roleplay in Warhammer Fantasy, but also use a Mad Cat Prime to ROFLstomp the opposing Mobile HQ during DT in a quick Alpha Strike session. PMCs also need hobbies to apparently.
Edit: Apparently, this is a myth. I remembered it from reading about the battle when I was younger and the scene from the somewhat recent Midway movie. Damn you, Roland Emmerich! 9:30 You missed my favorite wargaming anecdote from WW2 in the Pacific. When wargaming their upcoming operation to capture Midway Atoll, a junior Japanese admiral stationed the US carriers NE of Midway, ambushing the incoming Japanese fleet, winning the game. The senior admirals immediately declared these results impossible because the US could only be in that position if they had forewarning of the surprise attack. In reality, the US had (partially) broken Japanese radio codes and knew of the surprise attack. They stationed their carriers NE of Midway, ambushed the Japanese fleet, won the battle, and took the initiative in the Pacific.
While this anecdote sounds nice, its not accurate. The source is Fuchida Mitsuo, commander of the air group that attacked Pearl Harbour. There are no other sources, formal papers, other eyewitnesses that corroborate Fuchida's story about this wargame. In addition, Fuchida's story did not involve "carriers NE of Midway", it involved a land based bomber group of B-17s from Midway launching a strike and scoring 2 carrier kills. In the actual battle of Midway, the B-17 group on the island scored no hits - so if the story was true, the admiral's overriding was actually the correct decision. Midway was a battle won on a knife's edge, it could very easily have been a stalemate or an American defeat. Also, no one at the time understood the gravity of the battle given naval thinking still centred on battleships rather than carrier groups.
@@krityaan ...midway is weird yes, on one hand, it could have been a toss-up if many more things had gone right for kido butai - but the expert analysis i'm most familiar with, john parshal's work, suggests that midway was not really pivotal given the overall strategic position of japan. midway is the battle they lost, but they were bound to eventually lose a battle, and once they did there was not going to be a recovery. the plan was to use midway to project air power over hawaii and then use the islands as a hostage to try and win a favorable exit from the war, but this was simply not on the table. americans were not going to just shrug and accept a white peace because of bombs dropping on honolulu and it isn't accurate to suggest it was all down to chance either. americans had a superior scouting strategy, had broken japan's operational codes and had bypassed their submarine cordon. it was not something that could have gone either way except by virtue of near-miraculous luck on the side of the IJN, which thankfully they lacked it also isn't accurate to say that the admiralty did not understand the importance of carriers. kido butai means 'first air fleet'. they knew the importance of their carriers and put them at the center of their combat groups, and were attempting to hunt down and destroy america's carriers. yamato's heavy surface combatants didn't even participate in the midway battle out of feat that they would require too much air support to be effective (which was probably a correct assessment). meanwhile, america also knew of the importance of their carriers and emphasized their strategic victory in the battle of the coral sea not by the sinking of any surface combatants but by the sinking of a japanese carrier: 'scratch one flat top!' the idea that by midway any military still thought of the battleship as the pinnacle of modern navy power is just a myth
@@ItWasSaucerShaped That just isn't true, many US carriers were targeted and either hit mildly or barely missed, in fact it is unclear which side sustained more hits, what is very clear however is that the US sustained far fewer ship losses and that is partly due to better fire management onboard but also enormously due to luck, two bombs hitting a bit differently and the situation is completely different as to who is viewed as having won the battle. That said you are quite correct that Japan was never going to win the war by that point even if they had decisively won Midway.
@@ItWasSaucerShaped Your analysis is correct. Even if Japan won Midway, the Essex class carriers would roll out within 6 months. The IJN air crews were already considerably attrited, and the tactical advantage of the Zero was soon to be mitigated by new US tactics and the F4U Corsair. A major IJN defeat was nearly guaranteed to occur. It was only a matter of time.
59:34 last year's Ukraine offensive was stopped by kilometers of minefields after their leadership had been bragging for months about where they are going to attack Russians... so Russians listened and planted mines... I don't think wargames are to be blamed. moreover wargames are flexible tools that can quickly adapt to new situations to simulate FPV drones usage - you just have to come up with some rules or - in case of matrix games - just arguments
not to mention i highly doubt the wargames counted on mix-mash of nato and soviet equipment, nato and soviet tactics, nato and soviet strategies, nato and soviet training, as has been in ukraine throughout the war, causing all kinds of chaotic contradictory situations at all levels. also lack of long range antiair.. lack of artillery support.. air support..lack of everything, really.
I also think that the context of the Ukrainian general’s quote was responding to US criticisms of Ukrainian strategy. The US had advised UAF to mass on one operational axis, relying, in part, on wargaming in their analysis. The UAF disagreed and instead launched offensives on multiple axes.
Really interesting video for a broad overview of a fairly unspoken of part of the industry. I tend to think it's best if policy makers and soldiers of all ranks do have a bit of practice of what they might have to do, and hopefully learn ways to avoid that occuring. You take driving lessons so you don't run people over, crash, and to make sure you understand the road rules. You do martial arts, not to get into fights or beat people up, but so that you don't (and don't get beaten up yourself). You understand the damage you could cause, so you take steps to ensure you don't. This is similar, if more abstract, to these examples. Prior preparation prevents ps-poor performance, and all that. You'll always get a few rev-heads and thugs, but by and large the system works.
A closer example might be US police training which makes the cops more afraid, more panicked, more likely to escalate conflict, more likely to use lethal force, etc. Sure, you can make the potential of simulation training sound very rosy if you only cherrypick examples where it arguably achieves a positive outcome, but that's not representative of reality.
@@notnullnotvoid So, we shouldn't train soldiers and policy makers? I'll agree, that it can dehumanize the decisions able to be made, but that might be the fault of the (war)game and the required objective outcomes, not the fault of training people itself. War is abhorrent by default. People are going to die. I'd prefer the people on my side be good at it, somewhat to minimize casualties (on both sides), but also so they win. Because you really don't want maximized casualties on your own side in a war, due to stupid planning (or a lack of planning at all), or a lack of training for a range of potential theoretical scenarios. I probably look at it differently, being Australian. We've had a gut-full of poorly planned, trained for, provisioned for, and executed scenarios for our troops (often by other countries), where we were an afterthought. Screw it, we can do the thinking and planning as well, even if we're working alongside others.
@@hedgehog3180 Why on earth would anyone think that? It's hard enough to determine one's own moral correctness without relying on self-justification or assumptions of truth, let alone another's or a group's. Large shades of grey, inconsistencies, points-of-view and ambiguities are immediately present.
i find it hard to find wargaming as a whole morally objectionable. Especially in northern and eastern europe wether we like it or not having a competent military force is a necessary evil if you want to remain being a sovereign country. the case is harder to make for the states where its being used for dronestriking civilians in the middle east and whatnot but in nato countries where youll be putting good money into the military eitherway i dont see the very small slice of that thats being invested in wargaming as anything other than a sensible investment. The actual strategic benefit of it is a good question that needs to be researched far more thoroughly but also i fail to see how the alternative of training i.e military higher brass based on past, now largely obsolete warfare would be any more effective. the games ABOUT war that function effectively as propaganda or that glorify the horrors of war i feel like dont have much to do with wargaming in terms of what they actually do at the end of the day. I'm also not a philosopher nor a professional military stretegist so I'd love to be persuaded either way
This feels a lot like showing up to a martial arts seminar and asking everyone if they are training to murder people with their hands. Then, being shocked when you discover that, not only is sparing fun, but no one in the room thinks of sparing as murder simulation. I'm also struck by the glossing over of wargames which are used in historical analysis. Volko Rhunke designed the COIN system, which was used in the game Fire in The Lake, which is a game that helps to understand the Vietnam conflict on a deeper level than "US=good/North Vietnam=bad." By seeking to understand your opposition and their true motivations, you learn that both sides are human, with human goals. This is the opposite of propaganda.
Yeah, but also in this parallel scenario, the marital arts seminar is directly funded by the "government ministry of using our hands to kill people," so I think the discomfort is warranted
It's more like he showed up to a discussion round table of people trying to design a martial art and started asking "but what if someone uses these design principles to make their own martial art and kills people with it".
Quinns has faced a lot of criticism in the comments for his personal feelings and reaction to modern wargames(plangames), but I do just want to applaud him, and the P.M.G. crew, for making a video that nonetheless handled the topic well and with a pretty strong degree of neutrality. Much more than telling me what to think, this video made me think. People's criticism/dissection of Quinn's reactions have made me think too. I find myself agreeing with the view that wars are inherently adverserial and the reduction of losses in one side will quite probably cause/be caused by more losses in another, as well as honestly acknowledging that plangames can potentially be used to prevent larger scale conflict. I also respect that Quinns was primarily seeking honest, reflective answers from his interviewees as opposed to, arguably, poorly formed justifications. I do feel that his point was somewhat undermined by his final focus on the non-military applications of plangames as it seemed to confirm that he himself was unable to find any kind of peace with the military applications. Yet, as I said, I really do feel like this video informs and then pushes you to form, or at least consider, your own opinions more than anything else - which I find very valuable.
During my research on JOSS (a system run by RAND in the 50s-70s), I found out that it was heavily used for wargaming. Computer-based wargaming has existed since the 1960s--likely before the rise of the modern video game. There are three from this era are somewhat publicly documented. One is STROP, one is COMBAT, and the other is RECESS. All three involve munitions--either conventional or nuclear. It's a part of our past, but we must understand that it's always been there.
Fascinating subject-I was dimly familiar with some of the history by studying TTRPG history, and of the Root connection. Military wargaming is a fraught topic for sure, but I feel like I'd agree with the stance that while military wargames are immoral in the same way any war is immoral, from a practical perspective it makes sense for them to exist. The historical run-ups to many wars are a series of miscommunications and mistakes. Simulations like these can possibly reduce those even if I agree they feel very unnerving as a fan of 4x strategy and the like. Military wargame outcomes affect the lives of common people and should be treated with that gravity.
Hard not to feel like a race to engage more with military funding creates the possibility for more conflict and the willingness for it as opposed to the opposite. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture by Patrick Crogan has more thoughts on the way computer games and technology are deeply entwined and feedback to and with the military industrial complex.
I'll be sending that opening 2-3 minutes of the Conclusion to everyone - it's such a succint and brilliant introduction to the topic (and reflection of the industry), and I love that you gifted that to us as a means to attract others to the conversation. Terrfiic video, big love x.
I've always been an enjoyer of these sorts of games but as I get in my late 20's and start to reflect, especially watching world events, I'm glad someone made a nice video on this topic specifically. It's tough because people get very defensive and don't want to feel ANYTHING about the things they enjoy; they think you either need to stop completely to prove a moral point or embrace the full monty position of downplaying any concerns. It's okay and healthy to enjoy certain things like wargames or war thunder and have healthy reflections on how they are real tools used to manufacture consent and DO carry real political weight, if politics is an extension of warfare to quote bismark then these war games are also very political in my opinion and should be engaged with critically and with an eye not to self flagelate or punish yourself for enjoying such a game, but to remain a critical consumer in the same way other media we acknoledge is political as well
"The purpose of thinking is to let the [bad] ideas die instead of you." Governments using games to make better decisions is good for the governed. But if your government is at war with another government... may the odds ever be in your favor.
I'm surprised that this is a surprise to anyone. These things are called wargames. I can understand an initial negative reaction to this, but most of the games we play depict violence (1P shooters / RTS / simulations) or economics. It's a bit hypocritical to condemn groups for using these provided tools to simulate violence. I also find it difficult to come up with inventions that have not been adapted for military purposes. On the subject of how accurate these simulations are: that can be very different and it is also a question of what the underlying issue is. You gave the example of the atomic bombs and the study in which various simulations were compared with them. The actual games don't play a role here, from the different ways of playing one could draw the conclusion that communication and personal conversations make the use of nuclear bombs less likely. Political measures can now be derived from this. Wargames can also help decision-makers learn how to deal with limited information. The actual scenario is only a framework. You can train how to deploy units in an evolving situation (disaster relief or military action) without blocking huge areas to conduct large-scale exercises. Whether conclusions can be drawn about a particular tactic or system depends heavily on the quality of the simulation and the willingness to accept the results. But this applies to everything that has to do with people. We see this in our daily work. There may be a good solution to a problem, but the boss doesn't like it.
1. In what world is it hypocritical to criticize war gamers for using violent games because gamers play violent games. Tarkov players are maybe an exception lol but otherwise gamers DO NOT use games to get better at killing people in real life! That is obviously the reason why people condemn this, it’s because they are simulating violence in order to actually kill REAL people, it’s not being condemned just because it’s a game with violence in it. 2. Sure, the military uses all sorts of products, yes. But there is a difference between a generic commodity like clothing that happens to also be used by the military and something especially designed specifically for informing the highest levels of decision making for the military. 3. While it just so happens that your example does come to the right conclusion about stopping nuclear war, saying you can come to that conclusion “based on how the game is played” is simply not rigorous at all because it is a GAME and not a simulation. The reason we know that talking stops nuclear war is because that is what actually stopped it in the past, not this bullshit. They seem to act like it’s just as good as a simulation but it’s not, maybe a very good training tool I guess but for coming to novel conclusions this method is simply not rigorous enough (because it’s really not rigorous at all) for a subject which involves actually killing people.
@@Nosirrbro it's hypocritical to criticize some people for violence in videogames but not others, yes. You can criticize the killing irl sure, but it is by definition hypocritical to criticize them for the videogames here and not the average gamer. And for your second point, that exact same thing could be applied to radios or computers, are these suddenly unethical because they help decisionmaking, guidance, and whatnot?
@@christophernoneya4635 But I’m not criticizing the military for having violent video games, I’m criticizing the military for using games as a way to improve their abilities to do real violence. Most of these war games aren’t even violent like call of duty is a violent game anyway, this is a really stupid point and I don’t get it at all. And, yes, if you design a specific radio or a specific computer for military purposes, I would personally say you are a bad person. If you design a computer or radio for civilian purposes, and a soldier happens to use one, you can’t really be blamed for that, but if you design the computer system for lockheeds newest missile, then yeah I’m gonna hold you responsible at least partially for killing those Palestinian children.
@@Nosirrbro So would you then argue that anyone who donated to ukraine is also a bad person for enabling a war to continue? Would you argue that anyone supporting Palestine are bad people? These are both not just enabling but actively encouraging ongoing conflict that could be ended with much less loss of life by surrendering. Obviously not, so clearly its not the capacity or the tool or the device or even the actual violence in itself... its the target that makes the difference.
I will say this as a TLDR : I don't think this is a problem, what can be used in civilian affairs can AND WILL BE USED in military settings. We all know that military stuffs can also be used in civilian affairs like the internet, cargo pants, and bomber jackets and if that can happen then why deny that the vice versa can also be true? we civilians can only look at the results and then make a fuss about it afterwards or if they got the details first. Graham Longley Brown has it right, Wargames are mainly for Foresight and in the context of war means either preventing it or ending it quickly with the least amount of deaths. Mind you foresight is not always accurate after all wargames are trying to do the almost impossible thing of putting rationale in an area of mankind's history that is not rational AKA Wars and armed conflicts. This is why i prefer to talk about "will this even work?" because we lack the information to know if it really worked well with military secrecy and such academics cannot validate the efficiency of a certain wargaming situation. WE HAVE LITTLE TO NO PUBLIC PROOF THAT THIS SHIT WORKED!!
Chess was theorized to be designed to teach early military leaders strategy. Games and their connection to war has always been constant in the ages of man
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 87 วันนี้!! คู่เอก "ก้องชัย vs โชคปรีชา"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YN6e7HVnekw/mqdefault.jpg)
A lot is made of the morality of serious wargames, but the thing I find incredibly interesting is the whole "we don't actually know if they work particularly well" bit.
@@JadedJackalope the numbers and specificity can make serious games feel “scientific,” but as the interview in the video discusses, the results don’t really follow the scientific method at all (even when they are public).
I think wargaming / “serious gaming” is better thought of like a more serious brainstorming or planning tool. You can imagine the playground arguments along the lines of “who would win, Superman or Batman?” The military has those exact same arguments (about tanks and planes and so on), but the result of the argument influence policy.
Wargames give policy makers a way to get more specific in their brainstorming without getting overwhelmed by details. You can put all those details into the game mechanics so you can focus on the strategic questions (that is what gaming is all about, after all).
@@alexanderbrady5486well put, the gaming is more about learning about analyzing decision-making itself rather than the scenarios being simulated. Not unlike how tests in school are meant to determine that you’ve learned how to learn, as much as the subject being taught
@@GreatistheWorld Maybe a bad example, since school tests are also questionably effective at predicting someone's ability study for things besides taking more tests.
"So I saw these Russians and I decided to try a Zerg Rush..." -- DoD strategist, 2026.
I think the only benefit of wargaming you can have any confidence on is that it *might* train people to react better under pressure, or remind them to check something critical but easy to forget early on. I think that the value of testing tactics or a macro-strategy will always be limited because fundamentally you can only work out that a strategy works within the specific confines and assumptions of the game, which will always be deeply flawed, and anyone who plays a lot of games can probably metagame things which work in the game, but maybe not in reality, or vice versa.
Is it weird I’m surprised people are surprised that so much of video gaming is hand in glove with the military? Like, ARMA is basically just Bohemia Interactive’s civie street version of their military trainers.
There is also America's Army which is a series of video games developed by the US Army.
@@Ozzianman That's true but that's the obvious one created specifically for the military. I'm more highlighting that even the seemingly innocuous "civilian" stuff likely has a military contracted version.
fun fact: former executive president of bungie started a game studio in 2001 that primarily developed military training software. also look up InQtel, CIAs investment company cofounded by a Videogame designer Gilman Louie
I feel like it's one of those "open secrets?" Like, this doesn't feel like new info to me, but I'm almost certain I don't understand the full scope of it. Excited and terrified to watch and find out.
I am a bit surprised, because most of the links are not at all secret. For example, the bio of Volko Ruhnke's (the designer mentioned in the video) on BGG reads "Volko Ruhnke is a game designer and a CIA national security analyst..." His connection to the CIA is literally in the first sentence. His series of games are called "COIN" which is short for "Counter Insurgency." If you read the rule book to any of the games, they all mention that the COIN system was originally developed for the USA military.
That said, I can understand how people who just see games as "toys" can just breeze past all of that information. It isn't a secret, but it also isn't always front and center.
As a Ukrainian, i once played a wargame that was wargaming the ukraine-russia conflict. Millenium Wars was it. And it also had a layer of informational warfare incorporated into it. It was a mind blowingly unusual feeling, seeing your hometown represented as an icon on a board, on which tanks and planes blow up and people are ground to dust by artillery. And then the information warfare thing clicked for me, and the penny dropped. My family was mildly pro-russian, and this little game blew a seal out into the theory of modern conflict for me. And it all was way before the war began.
I realised i was as much of a game piece as i was a player, and information space was a battlefield, and on a battlefield you can become a casualty, and, as a matter of fact, i did.
I was very lucky my parents were not too deep into the rabbithole that i we were able to shake off the influence and make up our own minds. But most importantly, i was exposed to these chilling concepts in a safe environment, where i was able to process my feelings about these phenomena which would totally destroy me if i got hit by them out of nowhere in a real situation.
To this day i still a member of the IKS community, playing kriegsspiel on the regular, and through this practice i have managed to solidify my stance on what it means to me when real geopolitics and fun games intersect. It helps me remain firmly anti-war, while confronting these topics and ideas head on. Im fascinated with learning about headscratcher ideas of tactics and strategy, engineering of weapons systems and real world battlefield dynamics, to fully and completely understand why and how these things can bring suffering.
And hey, wargames are fun.
PMG's perspective is quite naive, prolly a symptom of pacification propaganda in which you relinquish your advantage at your own detriment under the guise of "it kills less people now" which clearly is a trade off to kill more people in totality
Thanks for the insight, hope you and your people are well
Thank you for writing this.
What does it mean to you to be anti-war, when war is being waged on your country?
@@Jszar Its a neccessary evil.
In war, truth is the first casualty, Even if you win, culturally you will be still recovering for years. And on top of that, you are an irreversably changed person once you've seen the frontlines. We will have another lost generation on our hands once it all over.
But at the same time, you must give it all you've got, or there wont be a tomorrow. A deal with the devil that a nation has to make if it wants to survive. So i shut the fuck up and salute the brave men who do their part, because without them i wouldnt be alive.
I'm also battling with the morality of defence tech development, as on one hand I want to help Ukraine, but on the other I don't know who's hands it can land in.
the wrong name thing is kinda funny, in Germany we actually don't call them war games (Kriegsspiel) but planning games (Planspiel)
Am Anfang wurde es Kriegsspiel genannt, in der BRD dann militärisches Planspiel, das hat sich nach Wiedervereinigung durchgesetzt.
@@PeaceSparks danke
For the same reason the first verse of the Deutchlandlied is omitted.
I think the corresponding English is strategy games.
I was in Iraq from 2004-2011 and processed my feelings and emotions about my participation there on the front end as all humans do when faced with a new dangerous environment. Before the first year was out I was calm to the environment in a way that predictably baffled newcomers.
Having a new experience in a room with realistic wargames and realizing the further implications which create emotions in you while not seeing that mirrored in the other participants in the room is predictable. They got a head start on that process, you just didn't get to be there when they were coming to terms with their feelings.
Furthermore, the more sensitive one that had the fiercest reactions likely exited the area before they could be part of your sample.
War is tough.
The video doesn't go into detail, but I want to note that corporations are also sponsoring wargames (or "serious games" or "crisis management games"). I will have to find the references, but I have seen reports of things like ports (as in, places where ships load and unload products) in the USA gaming out disaster scenarios such as another pandemic or a cyber attack. There are also techniques like "red teaming" (where part of a team role plays as a competitor) used to simulate things like product launches, or deciding where to open new stores.
On the darker side, I have heard (but can't find references right now) that some companies will game out union-busting strategies. The approach is very similar to the "irregular warfare" scenarios described in this video, but the adversaries are the company and its workers (instead of a hacker and a ship of medical supplies).
On smaller scales, it's important that a company test out its incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans to respond to things like cyber attacks, natural disasters, and pandemics (lots of real life experience with that one now). Similarly, penetration tests are a critical part of many cybersecurity frameworks. All of these, and the bigger wargames in general, are simulations looking to produce actionable data. The question of if that data is any good and the inability to replicate due to secrecy is also true in the private corporate world.
That's why the bit in the middle of this very interesting video about games, play and childhood that rubbed me a bit wrong. Like does that argument go away if we didn't call them 'war games' but instead 'battlefield simulations'? It shouldn't, the actions are the same.
I would find those references very useful. That would be awesome if you found them.
@@Meikulish The phrase "Business Wargaming" brings up a lot of references on Google, including the Wikipedia page. Most of the examples I listed are on there, but I still can't find any good references for business use to help with union-busting.
This hits at what I was thinking the entire time. “Imagine if this was being used to rehearse union drives and strikes…. Oh, it’s probably already being used by union busters…. Well shit…”
The podcast The Red Line had an excellent interview fairly recently with a wargame creator/facilitator who did just that: providing games opportunities for corporate teams as well as Pentagon types. Great episode!
When i was getting my master's degree I was interning at a Games user research lab, one of the lead researcher who now works for a triple A developer, got his start doing user research for the army. studying the experience of soldiers in combat, what they liked and what they would seriously need.
OMG, somebody actually listening to soldiers? What a novel concept!
Hey I am pursuing a master in international affairs atm, I also have a strong interest in security and media/narrative warfare and am starting to look for internships, would you advise me to try to get one in one of these companies? What was your experience and are there some you suggest more strongly than others?
Quinns, you are such an incredible journalist. So many journalists uncritically relay the information they get from their access to subjects. Your ability to understand why you were given access and how that impacts the information you get and relay it to your audience is incredible.
I played a larp a few years ago as a marine commander who ended up in a peacekeeping role in a tense, highly militarised situation with a lot of non-combatants present. One of my big takeaways from the game was how poorly trained and equipped and supported this person was to be able to handle civilian policing. The big takeaway from a lot of the people around me was "oh cool, big explosion go boom!"
What you learn from a game is coloured so much by what you're looking out for and how you're analysing the experience, and that's really hard to shape as a game designer, especially if you're in a client/vendor relationship with the person you're making the games for.
PMG's perspective is quite naive, prolly a symptom of pacification propaganda in which you relinquish your advantage at your own detriment under the guise of "it kills less people now" which clearly is a trade off to kill more people in totality
I'm not sure if it's really related to your point, but your last paragraph reminded me of a problem that came up from the study into the Iraq War and America's lack of prep for counter insurgency and nation building:
Mainly, that they didn't want to do it as Vietnam had left such a bad mark on the armed forces that they chose to instead practice what America was good at. Overwhelming firepower in conventional warfare.
So they practiced for the war they 'wanted' to fight, rather than the one that they were 'likely' to fight.
And it's interesting seeing that come around again somewhat with the comments at the start about how theorists have said for years that state on state open warfare in Europe is a thing of the past, only for it to reappear with Ukraine
Wargames isn't a rifle, it's a rangefinder.
I barely started the intro but I wanted to give a shoutout to the guy at 0:00:40 who ate absolute shit in front of all his friends.
😂😂😂
I was a particularly active member in a digital wargame community and helped admin a lot of their events. It was always a strange experience. Me, a young person who likes military technology and tactics, but is also anti war. And here I was, admining 60-80 people simulating a real life designed mission. Many of these people were vets, some were active duty or looking to go on another tour. Most of these guys were genuinely kind and thoughtful people that, for the most part, play wargames as a way to experience their old lives of which they have complicated pasts with (a really common phenomenon with vets, the desire to relive a time they resent). But there were always some people that took it all... a little too seriously, and it always felt weird navigating the community politics with those people, especially since one was a senior admin.
War and wargaming, for me, fit in this odd, nebulous position of "I like that we have these things, I like that they can serve some use to people in non harmful ways, but also I resent that war is a large piece of life, will probably grow in time, and that these games can actively contribute to that. I do like what the one interviewee said about wargaming, where many now are on conflict avoidance, playing the intelligence and political game rather than the kinetic game. However, if this becomes the justification for using games to train for war, there better be evidence that it actually succeeds at preventing conflict.
yeah the pull to relive highly traumatic experiences is real and such a weird urge. I see it a lot in kink spaces too
Just as a practical question, what would that evidence be?
I can point to literal thousands of wargame scenarios that didn't turn into full scale war. Claiming a causal relationship there would be somewhat absurd. What would or could constitute evidence of the effectiveness of wargames in this regard?
China is almost certainly wargaming the invasion of Taiwan, is likely getting less than desirable results and that might be a contributing factor to them deciding not to invade for the past 7 decades. Would that count?
Equally, in what situations would wargaming defensive wars, planning the defense of Taiwan or Europe in case of Russian on Chinese invasion be anything other than perfectly moral? Making violent conflict easier on the aggressor very likely would save lives. I wouldn't hesitate to claim that Ukraine losing the war in the first week would have seen countless fewer casualties on both sides, and yet I also see the current situation as significantly preferable as do the Ukrainian's themselves. I can't definitively state how much wargaming was involved, but there was likely a reasonable amount done and it ultimately lead to a longer and bloodier conflict, but a better outcome for everyone who isn't Russian. So do we count that as evidence in favor or against real world wargaming?
Same actually.
@@NeoHellPoet I mean, I genuinely don't know xD. Like the only real strong evidence is decades of "we ran this scenario and it contributed to this decision and we estimate we saved x many lives." which is still suspect because it's based on stuff that didn't happen, trusts the words of the military telling you this, etc.
It's an incredibly complex topic that I honestly don't have a good answer for.
How do I join
I'm a bit surprised about why anyone would be surprised by this close connection. Even this video's history of Kriegsspiel and Gygax doesn't go far enough. Staff rides, where military officers visit the site of old battlefields and try to put themselves in the heads of the commanders, are effectively a form of strategic role playing. Started by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (the Prussians again!), staff rides are a bedrock of modern military officer education. Crisis simulations and tabletop exercises happen throughout governments and are also effectively a form of role playing and tabletop gaming. And is anyone arguing that chess and its predecessor chaturanga aren't abstractions of military conflict? Framing wargaming to be an offshoot of "regular" gaming arguably reverses the actual relationship.
The premise of being surprised is strange. Given the long history. It is an analytical and training tool in this context. So yes, Quins: "you are weird".. and very naive..
i mean chess and checkers makes sense. i was just surprised that DnD was inspired by irl wargames bc it always felt like it was too fantastical to be based in reality
Chess and it's predecessors (and _many_ other "traditional" board games) are _absolutely_ wargames, and you have to be exceptionally naïve to not see that they are.
However, I don't believe Quinns is a naïve person, the impression I get from the video is that he got properly confronted with an uncomfortable truth of the industry and, instead of internalising that, decided to make a video that's a borderline rant about "the military are using play to murder people" like it's something that hasn't been happening since Sumer.
I already knew a lot of the background info that is mentioned in the video. Expected it. Of course. The feeling was still weird and strange and unpleasant. The reality is always something that I want to deny or escape from. I guess some of the people in the comments are the same. DSTL's interview was literally them trying to win Quinns over. Pretty much a propaganda department in the work but for military recruitments.(And failed miserably in their task.)
Fun fact: there is kinda similar-idea TH-cam Russian video putting blaim (re war) on Russian Larp/gaming movement
Combat mission at 20:15 is actually Company of Heroes 3 (I think), and the game right after is Combat Mission BLACK Sea, for anyone wondering.
To put my few thoughts in as a student game designer & developer; I like wargames, I play 40k and the idea of designing one gets me excited. I don't like war, but I do think countries are obviously allowed to defend themselves. If wargames help countries defend their people and make war... "safer"... I think it's pretty good.
Ethics aside, I'm surprised by none of this. The gaming industry drives tech and high-speed simulation developments purely from its popularity and profit. This leaks over into other industries. I myself am an R&T Engineer, I use PLCs using chips originally developed for gaming, I've even implemented a Unity based machine control for real-time data visualisation, AR and VR is increasingly common for training and data visualisation, physics based simulations are becoming more accurate and faster... with AI and deep learning being a hot topic at the moment, it's not a stretch to think that thousands or millions of players in a game would provide the data required to train behaviour or strategy models.
As someone who's dabbled in serious games design to work out some of the complexities of certain policy issues, I can tell you that the games themselves aren't really the problem. It's the buy-in of of decision makers belief in their effectiveness and utility that is their number one blocker.
Yeah, but if we're reasonably confident that most of the people who will leverage the information from these wargames will not use them effectively or ethically, then the continued development of them in collaboration with those people does start to become a problem.
Like the hammer analogy. Sure, if most of your hammer contracts are with hardware stores selling to the general population, you shouldn't feel responsible for the odd hammer murder. But if you're biggest hammer contract is to "Hammer Murders, INC," you should probably self-evaluate
Let's not forget about meta-wargaming: getting info on others capabilities through leaked classified documents from the WarThunder forums :D
And a funny counterpoint to that, said bluntly from a Soviet war planner during the height of the cold war: "The real problem with preparing to face the American doctrine is that American's do not read their manuals, and feel no obligation to follow their doctrine. You can read though German, French, or even our manuals and written doctrine and come to a pretty good conclusion of how our forces will fight, but the American's can't tell you what their warfighting doctrine even is, let alone consistently follow it on battlefield. They do not build their equipment to meet their doctrine, their branches do not train together and have no idea what the goal of the others even is, and their weapon systems are a disorganized redundant mess with capabilities far greater than any rational need while simultaneously ignoring entire clusters of capability. How can we possibly prepare to fight that?"
@@ASDeckardThis description of the American military doctrine sounds exactly like how I played Pokémon as a young child, when I was too little to understand how type matchups worked. Instead of using strategy, I just level-grinded until my party was 20 levels ahead of my opponents, and then I won by using my moves randomly.
In the same way, they describe the American military as being so overpowered that they can get away without an especially organized doctrine or strategy to follow
I sub-consciously knew about the backdoors between videogames and the military but Chapter 3 really blew away any argument I could mount that it is not, and as a long time SUSD subscriber seeing the ways it linked through games I like hit hard. I appreciate the time you've taken to set that up to present this information in context.
Yeah, I knew that games like ARMA and COD were completely controlled by the CIA (in exchange for using more detailed models of weapons and stuff like that), but I too didn't think it would go much deeper than that, and holy hell if it did
War games have literally prevented conflict by demonstrating the high risk of associated costs. If you think there are moral costs then build those in so that achieving the objective with fewer enemy deaths results in a higher score. I think the real problem with game designer cross over is they might accidentally include elements intended to keep the game engaging.
Games, play and warfare have been with us even before ancient times. Roman children had wooden toy swords, and millions of years ago, before humanity even existed, I can guarantee our ancestors play-fighted together.
Play-fighting is the oldest form of play and is not unique to humans. Kittens play fight to learn to hunt.
To use games as part of research or training is truly time tested and baked into our DNA as a species.
I’m very interested in the civic use cases for these games. Especially for efforts that involve marshaling public will, like building parks or planning infrastructure. Having other people who are representing conflicting motivations would be a big deal for that.
When i was working for the NZ Defence force back around the time of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, i participated in a 4 day wargame with many different agencies to practice for a terrorist attack. It was incredibly interesting and I did feel somewhat better prepared in the case that did happen to us. They're very strange things and you really need to buy into the serious nature of them. For me, it was being paid for 4 days to basically LARP, so i was so fine with that.
Hey! Love your channel! Interesting story
Could you talk more about the experience you had then?
What kind of LARP-ing did you do?
What kind of attack was it?
Because I haven’t heard anything about it yet in the video by the 5:00 mark, and I assume they didn’t but better to ask, did the UK DOD have any editorial in this video? Beyond censorship of classified information?
Good question! No UK government entity (or anyone else, for that matter) had any oversight over the editorial content of this video besides checking for classified information. - Quinns
Absolutely no editorial input was taken! We shared the footage from our trip to DSTL with them in case we needed to blur any sensitive information that had been filmed accidentally, although that didn't prove to be the case. Our policy is to never take editorial feedback from the subjects of our documentaries, whether they're video game studios or the UK Ministry of Defence. -Chris
Oh hey, we both replied to this. Hi Quinns!
@@PeopleMakeGames I assumed as much, but thank you for clarifying!
They did notably have editorial decision in who they showed and what information they gave them though. For example this video contains a diverse group of well-spoken individuals. While in reality, as it hints at, this field is not very diverse and consists far more of the jingoists than the well spoken university professors and women with dyed hair. But they weren't allowed access to those. Even in showing them critically, they still have to work with the footage they're allowed to get.
Actually, Napoleon played a big part in how military simulations evolved. He and his generals used to do these map exercises to plan out battles, kind of like early war games. They weren't as formalized as what the Prussians did later with 'Kriegsspiel,' but Napoleon's approach to strategy definitely laid the groundwork for it. Plus, his tactics and the Napoleonic Wars had a huge influence on Europe, shaping military thinking across the continent. And when it comes to using maps simulating terrain and tactics, that goes all the way back to Roman or Babylonians times, as far as we know
It’s a major historical oversight not to include Napoleon’s impact on military planning and modernization. His era was pivotal in transforming military tactics and organizing armies more effectively. Napoleon’s innovations in map exercises and strategic simulations were groundbreaking and played a key role in modernizing military strategy. Ignoring those contributions leaves out a crucial part of how military planning evolved and how his era influenced future developments, and in war games.
If the terms used in the army in English or German are taken from French, it's not a coincidence, just like using word like simulation in english come from middle french.
Absolutely, Simmons Games designs are specifically modelled after the red and blue blocks napoleon used (Albeit with modern iconography)
The alternate to wargaming, which is a thought exercise, is NOT thinking about defense, warfare, or conflict. THAT is a scary space. The only thing worse than a thought out war plan, is a campaign of violence that is given absolutely no thought.
The skew here is reminiscent of the D&D scaremongering of the 80s.
no
A game reviewer once said "if it wasn't for all the death, suffering and destruction, war is really fun, which is why there are so many games _about_ war." I don't think people making games for the military is a problem in itself. Like you said, playing a game is a lot cheaper than doing actual war, and that's always been true. I really don't believe that the Prussians were the first to ever come up with the concept. I don't think you can say "war is bad, so working on wargames is bad". I don't think wargames necessarily lead to war.
The problematic elements in my opinion are what you mention about normalization of certain actions, and the thing about reinforcing preconceptions. That can lead to echo chambers that birth horrible decisions.
Yeah in my opinion wargames themselves are much more justified than your average Call of Duty. Wargames are literally just another tool used in the military - what makes it different between 'playing it out' in a scenario vs laying an actual battle plan or researching enemy capabilities? In return, your CoD emphasizes war being fun for a person with likely no relation to the military. I like shooters, so I'm not saying we shouldn't have them, but it's just interesting that there's such a strong moral stance against games being used to play out a potential war vs playing out make-belief wars just for fun.
Making games for a military isn’t bad; making games for the US military is wrong on every level
HOI4 comes to mind tbh
Yeah.. playing video games totally desensitizes people to violence and turns them all into mass murderers. This is a well known fact that has been known for years, which is why video games are banned in China. Obviously, if we just made our military guys sit around and watch Bambi and Disney videos, there wouldn't be any war. Nobody would start them because war is bad.. mmmKay?
@@daytonmargramarnsom1641 That's inconsequential as hell. Whether you and i disagree with actions done by the US Military in the past or not, it's still going to have to train and prepare for future conflicts, whether aggressive or defensive. Any country, really.
The (better trained) militaries of the world will use everything at their disposal to get an edge or at least keep up with potential enemies. Why would you want to hamstring this training?
As for effectiveness, especially regarding the failed Uktraine offensive, that is more due to the rapid evolution of warfare rather than wargame inefficiency. It's just like during WW1 generals were trained on outdated forms of warfare and the troops fighting the war suffered for it. But those same generals (well, some of them at least) learned and adapted and got better at it and made less mistakes. This is happening in Ukraine right now on both sides. Wargaming gives them a chance to maybe not get so many people killed doing stupid shit. It's a form of training like any other, and training requires tools.
He seems like a wokey kuck
34:01 Imagine if that British Army major handed you a pin that said ‘Ethics in Games Journalism’
Especially as this video really is about ethics in video games
Video games journalism should be ethical, thus inclusive.
Pushing a Canadian dev to unalive moment
@@arcticwulf5796 sometimes ethics says we should exclude.
@@Ravi9A I’d argue that the list of who to exclude should be pretty short. If, say, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. (the Golden State Killer) was somehow writing about _any_ kind of ethics, no publication should agree to carry his work. But… that’s a should. Here in the U.S., it’s up to an informal, societal assessment of who ought to have their voice amplified, and under what circumstances. I also think that neo-Nazi sentiments should be unacceptable in the mainstream of public discourse, but it’s a collective decision to be made. (I have to grit my teeth about government non-censorship, sometimes, because I know that if people who want me dead on three different axes could be censored, I would be silenced first.)
Thanks Quinn, it’s great to see content discussing the ethics and utility of professional wargaming.
You’re clearly passionate about your perspective but you state the pins handed to you by the Major @34:24 “…also a bit meaningless.”
For many people they’re not meaningless as they represent commitment to the Derby House Principles. It would be great if you could highlight those principles.
The thing is, those principles are nice and all, but they also explicitly state that it's for the purpose of getting better results in wargames. Even as someone involved in the D&I stuff at my own workplace, which by necessity includes the idea that more diverse staff makes our products better, I don't blame Quinns if he considers that "commitment to diversity" to be "a bit meaningless" as a result.
@@Blacknight8850 I don't think it's "a bit meaningless" if it creates reduces negative experiences in the profession and creates new opportunities for historically marginalized or underrepresented groups. The actual DHP statement is pretty clear that the cosponsors believe it is "the right thing to do" well beyond reasons of productivity or better results.
As a mathematician I just want to add that the mathematics of analyzing games, i.e. game theory, also had its beginnings in War related activities in the 1950s. Most famously people like von Neumann and Nash helped develop the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Fun fact, that Ukrainian drone game he mentioned is a commercial version of a simulator that the UA army uses to practice FPV strikes.
Literally as close as youre gonna get to the bleak reality of modern combat.
Wait, what- really?!
I once found myself at a Magic: The Gathering draft in a garage with ten people, four of whom were ex-military and three of whom went to West Point. One of those three left early because they had an argument about the state of wargaming at West Point. It was very eye-opening to hear a bunch of massive nerds arguing about the games they played at a military academy where they learned to be officers. And kinda not surprising that, due to the reason being ability to kill and prevent deaths more effectively, they had some of the strongest opinions on games i've ever seen. On the level with the 12 year-old who once stormed out of a D&D game because i wouldn't let him play a ninja in a pirate game.
You know what, that doesn’t really surprise me honestly. The kind of doublethink it takes to proudly blow people up for money and the kind of doublethink it takes to presume you’re better than the devs at making the game you’re playing aren’t too dissimilar.
And case in point, this comment puts a completely different and even funnier spin on the time a British military office accidentally leaked documents to win an argument about War Thunder
I once worked with guys that wrote the software for the air-defence network in the UK. They took it very seriously at the time. Then we worked on the air traffic control systems that stop planes crashing into each other. We took this seriously too.
Damn, that's pretty fucked up.
Why not let him be a pirate ninja? that would have been awesome.
@@chastermief839 Look, i was 12 or 13. Today, i absolutely would, and it would be awesome. Also, get out of my house, whatever your name was. Aiden? Aldon? Something like that.
as someone currently doing a unit on overseas aid and international development, we've actually used roleplay and similar games to model and learn about different interest groups and their perspectives when it comes to what they need and their limitations. The roleplay situations reminded me of my times playing mega games and then that quickly made me realise how I am connected to this kinds of wargames and how yeah, maybe serious games is a better term because they do have some real world, maybe good, applications.
I startled loudly at Finland being mentioned about 15 minutes in, and the whole thing went from abstract and concerning to, like. My lived life. What an experience.
To speak a little towards chapter 5, on the non-military use of wargaming: I am involved in the state disaster relief system here in Germany, and in all organizations (firefighting, emergency medical care, logistical and technological support), at all levels of leadership from squad level (where you would be in charge of ~8-15 people) to county level and beyond (potentially thousands of units that you're responsible for organizing, and hundreds of thousands of impacted civilians you have to take care of), wargames are used at the very least in initial training, and at leadership levels above platoon size (~30-50 people) also in regular practice and exercises. This continues up to international level with events such as the EU MODEX MODTTX, which are wargames for practicing disaster relief on an EU-wide scale. So wargames are definitely genuinely and extensively used for purposes that are pretty indisputably as close to being an unmitigated good as is possible. Yes, I'm sure the military versions still get a lot more funding (because the military just has a lot more cash to throw around; that is simply a fact of reality as it currently is), but it isn't a complete copout to claim there are alternative uses, because those do exist in practice rather than just theory, and they are very much in widespread use.
And as someone in another comment already pointed out: To reflect this, the german word for wargaming has long changed away from "Kriegsspiel" (even in military use) and is now "Planspiel" or just plan/planning game, because that's what it really is - a game to help you plan, which in the beginning may have been military battles and associated actions, but overall has a much, much wider potential to (hopefully) improve decision making in all manner of circumstances.
Planspiel derives from Plan = Karte/map, it has nothing to do with planning.
Aaaber eine ganz andere Frage: Nutzt ihr Neustart auf der lokalen/regionalen Ebene oder gibt's da vielleicht Interesse an Workshops?
As someone involved in the 'defense' industry for years, I'm glad this is being covered. Getting people talking about this and spreading awareness is good. A better informed society makes better informed decisions.
I am biased of course, so take everything from here on out with a Boulder of salt:
I think Quinn seemed a bit out of his depth here.
I think a part of it may be due to the fact that, as a viewer, it seemed like this was his first exposure to real war, albeit indirectly. As in his first tangible link to conflict. Not a movie, not a portrayal of it, but a direct interaction with an apparatus that informs decision making on how to kill people and how to better make decisions to preserve your own.
The insistence to get a reaction felt... naïve? I can't blame that desire for validation. I've been in that spot - I've felt it.
Though, I think my Ukrainian coworker sobered me on this: "Everyone thinks conflict is oceans away; a thing of the past. What a luxury."
It is true that conflict is a reality of politics, as someone who is an anti-war anarchist; it is more about how society is structured to necessitate war like a much larger gaming reward incentive structure. Conflict causes the strong to rise to the top, which makes it advantageous for people who are already in a position of power. Creating a post-war society means creating a new game that rewards solidarity and equality. That won't mean the end of conflict of course; but the needs of the many will have a lot more weight than than the entitlement of warmongers.
As someone who has no military experience, I'm genuinely curious, do you not think if rather focusing on NATO (and the arms race), EU, for example, focus on being independent of Russian gas, cleaning up their economy from Russian oligarchs' money, etc, the current war wouldn't have happened?
I think an actual non-military pressure from EU would've worked much better in weakening, if not even removing, Putin. NATO's arms race has only resulted in increase in Russian nationalism and support for the dictator because of the resulting "us vs them" mentality.
Yeah, this is my first PMG video and it was immediately clear that Quinn's perspective is very different to my own. To him, seeing a computer simulation of strategic missile & air strikes is "disquieting imagery". To the people he's observing, it's Wednesday.
I think you are mixing up naiveté with the absence of desensitization.
It is the opposite of naive to view a system that optimizes killing people with suspicion, fear, and natural human disgust.
@@commissarcactus1513 I ask, as a fan, that you give Quinn a shot despite this first impression
'Shut Up & Sit Down' and 'Quinns Quest' are both fantastic.
Had my class watch this in my TTRPG course I'm teaching. Caught a lot of attention from the students thinking the topic of game studies was a joke. Excellent timing sir.
I was at a UK MOD hackathon about 7 years ago as a budding software developer, we built a fuzzy logic threat analysis using AIS (ship) data. I remember we came 3rd but we were the team that got business cards from an officer who asked us to use data from the Indian ocean in the final demo. Hadn't thought much about it for a while but a lot of that weekend makes a lot more sense now.
Not surprised at all. We have had a big uptake at French Wargame Holidays by current serving Defence personnel in the last two years from 9 countries.
We predominantly play historical games, walking from Caesar to ww2 battlefields in western France, then replaying battles from regimental to division sized games using miniatures and terrain.
However we are now playing a lot more modern based board games focused on traditional tactical games rather than asymmetric games. It is important to move away from asymmetric to a modern Wargame. We have also moved to larger board games as we were required to successfully market to government body groups.
As for your “feelings” we are practicing war when we Wargame, this is what it is designed for.
Its 2024. They call me up
"We've seen your prowess. Your dedication. We need a support laner." I hang up. Im retired. I only play aram now
Come on. I know you miss the days of roaming support on bard or blitzcrank... The adrenaline rush of buying mobility boots on your first back. One last job.
I think some of what they're running up against in section 4 is the desensitization at the core of all military training and projects. Everyone involved in warfare is conditioned in different ways to normalize the experience of mass death and killing - it is essential to the project of war. And it takes many forms, including dehumanization of the enemy, hero worship, nationalism, etc. Part of the answers that he is getting feel like the ways that these individuals have been conditioned to normalize and tolerate their job, and how they're reconciling them. Some of them can take the step back and see the more morally complicated picture (i.e. "saving lives of our military likely means ending the lives of others, but it still feels morally justified") and others need to cognitively shield themselves from that dissonance ("this just saves lives, so it is justified"). The psychology of getting individuals to participate in warfare is complicated.
Especially the moment where he described the map of English feeling so odd and strange. Most other people in that room have been totally desensitized to that map, and they've already had to reconcile the way it makes them feel.
If that were true, we'd see record recruitment due to the popularity of Call of Duty etc. Perhaps the fact that recruitment is at an all time low is because, on the contrary, after running simulations and seeing the consequences, the players are much more sensitive to the destruction and death they are dealing with.
@@JasonChown Yeah, because there's only 1 factor that determines recruitment numbers. Even if "seeing the consequences" as one might in CoD was a factor, it probably ranks far lower than not really knowing anyone younger than their grandparents who spent time in the military.
Indeed, it might have shocked quinns, but these people have been dealing with the question and have arrived at their answer long ago
@@JasonChown But most western countries are having no issues meeting their recruitment goals, usually the issue is keeping people in the military not getting them to sign up in the first place.
I think it's just peoples ability to realise that dots on a screen of the UK are not reality. I think 95% of this entire video is Quinns coming to terms with the reality that militaries exist.
I do tend to find myself agreeing with the people involved in the wargames, namely that yeah it is horrible to think about and there is the potential bad actors could use it for evil ends. But the thing is... that's always been the case for many now common inventions, and I think it's more dangerous people don't plan or play out what could happen if things get tense in the world and then make bad decisions that these sessions could hopefully cause a reality check over months or years before that.
I think you're still sidestepping the moral issue. "This is the case for another invention", yes and we are also critical of those. As we should be, if they kill people in some sort of way. It's being a bit lazy to suggest "well, someone's ought to be the bad guy. If I won't do it, someone else will!"
This isn't what you're saying, but it also kind of is. Assuming you are morally superior to any foreigner is how you not only perpetuate and make war worse, but also literally how you start it. I know people who work for military contractors and they all assume that since they're the one doing it, and they're not doing X evil thing that they imagine some foreign threat might be doing, it must be acceptable. I think they are mistaken, still working from that nationalist mindset. By excusing war we are also creating it.
This topic reminds me of the MCU's relationship with the US military. Quite chilling how we're seeing similar influences in many popular shooter games in the recent years. Makes you look at them in a whole new light in retrospect.
They've been in games for over 15 years, and movies even longer, from Top Gun to Transformers. That's why "Keep politics out of my XXXX" is bullshit. It's there, it's always been there, those people are just too propagandised to see it.
In order to be chilled by it, don't you have to, be in non chilled state to start with? When did you not think this was a thing?
@@lulairenoroub3869WTF are you talking about?
@@invaderjp1984 I'm saying, not of this is chilling to me because none of it is surprising to me. To push the metaphor, in order to experience something as "chilling", you have to be warmer going in. A cold thing can't cool you if your already cold. These stories about governments doing anything they can to be more effective doers of violence aren't chilling, because my understanding of these organisations is already so much colder than anything in this video. On the scale of evil, I'm accustomed to zero kelvin, while the content of this video is barely freezing.
If that's still too confusing, let's just say I can't be scared because it's better than what I expect from them, not worse
In recent years?
America's Army, a US Army themed FPS game, was developed BY the US Army, explicitly as a recruiting tool, was released in 2002.
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, later renamed to Arma: Cold War Assault, was a MilSim developed by Bohemia Interactive, and released in 2001. After nearly going bankrupt building the Xbox version of the game, they were approached by the US Marine Corps to develop a version tailored to military applications, and was released as Virtual Battlefield Systems 1, or VBS1. This directly lead into the creation of many other simulators, the current iteration being VBS4, built on top of Arma 3.
There are many, MANY other examples, dating back to the 80's with combat flight simulators that were repurposed for training applications, this is nothing new. It has been happening since video games have been a thing.
I suspect I know why Quinns got the reaction he did.
As a fellow Extremely Online Lefty, we love to handwring about complex moral issue, but it feels like a lot of the time that the handwringing is the end of it. We seldom come to a firm conclusion like "Wargaming is morally wrong and we shouldn't do it" because then we'd have to defend that and all its consequences, including from our own side.
Instead, the handwringing becomes the point, feeling upset and conflicted becomes an end in itself, a sort of puritan self-flaggelation.
I really don't think most people feel a degree of constant, paralysing self-doubt and self-loathing about everything they do, and honestly I don't think it's healthy how much we do.
You've definitely named it. Worrying as an endpoint rather than a process.
Watching this from a halfway across the globe, knowing that there are thousands of people dying barely a few hours flight from the UK, who would all LOVE the luxury of worrying about the morality of making their military stronger, well. I know folks in Ukraine begging for a few dollars just to keep holding Russia back from its genocidal program. And then there's this. It's quite a vibe.
I'm glad someone said it. This video made it obvious to me, and I'd detected it in previous vids on the channel but couldn't put a name to it at the time, but it's this underlying theme of guilt-by-association. Playing video games doesn't make you responsible for wars existing. I think the reason you don't often hear firm conclusions drawn is because simply hinting at them allows the person to feel like they've "done their duty as a progressive" in pointing out the moral quandary, without actually having to commit to the laughably flawed and overreaching assertions (and without looking hypocritical when they - quite reasonably - fail to follow their own fantastical moral code).
You could make a case that our watching a TH-cam video is morally wrong, because it requires electricity and electricity generation is destroying the biosphere, and it supports a psychologically manipulative advertising industry. If you're willing to follow any thread far enough, across whatever tenuous link you can imagine, you can find problems with literally anything, which only leads, as you say, to a state of paralysis where you take pleasure in nothing for fear of inadvertently supporting one injustice or another.
It's little wonder there's a mental health crisis in society today. The left responds to the problems in the world with guilt, self-loathing, and blaming themselves, and the right responds with bitterness, anger, and blaming anyone else. Neither is a healthy nor productive attitude.
It's important to be aware of and engaged with these issues, but a key part of intellectual discourse and debate that seems often missed is the ability to engage intellectually with a topic while remaining distanced from it emotionally. You don't want your logical analysis to be clouded by emotion, nor do you want your emotional state jeopardized by internalizing every problem you discuss.
You can't be expected to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. There's nearly 8 billion people on this planet - there are infinitely many things happening all the time completely outside of your influence or control. All you can do is live your life, try to do a little good, try not to be a total dickhead, and stop blaming yourself for imagined wrongdoings. It won't solve any problems, it will only drive you mad.
@@kaelananderson9237 Yeah, to be absolutely clear, I do get feeling unsettled about the thought using gaming to figure out how to more efficiently kill, but I can only imagine these people resolved that mental conflict pretty quickly.
After all, I can't think of a plausible scenario where your game mechanics expertise leads directly to death and suffering *increasing*. It's not like they're figuring out how to keep India suppressed through acts of terror.
But there's a trend to want that dilemma to deliberately stay unresolved. Grasping nuance is really important, but we have to keep one foot in reality and pragmatism. It's the same attitude that keeps us doomscrolling even though it makes us anxious and depressed, far beyond the point we need to stay politically informed.
Misery and guilt doesn't fix anything unless it's directly tied to real world action.
So much of online leftism comes across as: "I hate myself, because I'm a pussy, so you should hate yourself too, because I'm a pussy."
In Germany we actually have POL&IS - an "interactive simulation game conducted by the German Armed Forces that takes into account political, economic and ecological aspects of international politics." (From Wikipedia)
From what I remember our Politics Teacher at our school organized it for us as a school trip, I think it was 3 days in total and we had a couple countries, each represented by 3 students and then "the terrorist groups" and "the journalists" also represented by three. Each country had one leader, these got to go to a table with a world map and also had to carry the responsibility for any war decisions. We were heavily informed about the consequences of especially atomic bombs but on the last day one of us found it funny to deploy one and even though "it was just a game" it felt so devestating that that decision was made - the rest of the day we had really disappointed instructors that told us this never happened and they made us all watch videos on the disastrous impacts of that decision if it would have been real.
That was around 12 years ago.
I wonder how they adapted that game nowadays.
I think the end conclusion hits upon something that wasn't said out right: the ethics in games and the academics of games.
The former is more obvious questions like "If we know that gambling is addictive, how do we build reward systems in games that minimize that potential harm?", "(Depending on the game), Is it more important to represent the reality of something or represent the expected experience of it?", and "If we build a level based off a real world location... and change it, what is the impact of that?" I don't know if these are the best example questions, but the point is, as Quinns has noted, we've run into these kinds of questions before. And it's not enough to say "No, it doesn't matter because we won't do that." because someone might use them and perhaps more applicable, if we don't know how a problem happens, we can't know how to prevent or stop ourselves from running into it. It is the sorts of questions that some industries have ethics boards, ethical guidelines, and ethical oaths for. In modern psychological experiments, it's required for the researchers to debrief and help participants afterwards to avoid long term harm. And these things occurs in other entertainment fields as well - magicians, generally speaking, avoid presentations and illusions that would make the audience feel complicit in a crime or in violence; they avoid effects that would traumatize the audience because there's not really a great way to handle the effects on such a large crowd.
The second is better studying of games and integrating that into the commercial games industry (as professionals and as students). We can't say that games don't have impact/games are 'just' games when the outcomes are negative while turning around and talking about uplifting stories where games had positive outcomes and impact. We have to avoid over generalizations and knee jerk defenses when the nascent academic study of games comes forward with findings. As with the ethics of games, the more we can understand the academics of games - how of games can shape people, perceptions, and opinions - the more we can at least do things with better intentionality, and recognize when others are doing something we should perhaps be uncomfortable withm or at least, careful with. We can better talk about actionable things to do when something does happen. We can make games better.
After writing these two notes, I am reminded of a serious game made a number of years ago. In it "...players receive instructions from a typewriter to load people, represented by yellow pegs, to different railway stations. The player moves their trains by rolling dice, and they can use cards to slow down their opponents' trains, or accelerate their own. Once the player reaches the final destination, it is revealed to be a [Nazi] concentration camp." While far more philosophical and contemplative than the war games/serious games in the video, as an artifact of gaming, it's historical relevant feels significant.
There is also the more commercially available games of Freedom: The Underground Railroad and Alice Is Missing, both games covered on Shut up and Sit down. And both games that invoked incredibly heavy responses from the reviewers. Regardless of what one may think of the mechanics or what not of, say, Alice Is Missing, that the game can become so... emotionally 'real' means there must be some guidance in how to manage that, on some level. The only way to even start to do that is for designers to recognize that something they're working on CAN do that and to not become defensive that it's something that can happen.
So much information and quotable remarks. "Men will invent Warhammer instead of going to therapy." Love it.
concidering how 40k can be a gathering ground for fascist aligned fanasty role players, this tracks
Games as a form of distraction are usually more effective than the therapies on offer, especially with CBT overtaking everything else. Every demographic seeks the escapism of fantasy, and any catharsis that speaks to their lived experience. Unchecked intergenerational trauma invented Warhammer, and simply offering therapy misses the point: its our world being terrible that causes most mental health struggles.
@@nathanlevesque7812 as a table top war gamer myself, it is a distraction, yes, but it’s a distraction that inherently indulges in jingoistic and martial violence fantasies that men have been raised to celebrate. just because it soothes does not mean it is always good. but also, playing warhammer does not mean your the devil. we can play with a critical eye.
the issue is not games in general, but games that glorify a particular type of crisis.
and yes generational trauma is the cause of people wanting to indulge in fantasy play, but again if the fantasy play reinforces and normalizes the violence of the world, we need to question the play.
@@nathanlevesque7812hehe CBT
@@lilchinesekidchen Every party needs a pooper and that's why they invited you, party pooper, party pooper...
This gives us complicated feelings, but we're going to talk about it is my favourite genre of video essay
This is a documentary, not a video essay.
What are you trying to say?
For anyone confused by this comment
The "this gives us mixed feelings but we're talking about it anyway" style of video essay is this person's favourite. The quotation marks do a lot for readability
@@IssyMomentTTV holy shit. You're right. That's what he was trying to say.
@@EricDMMillerI got it without even trying must be a left brain right brain thing.
Wargaming has been instrumental for me to understand humans and their behavior.
Enabling me to understand the actions of other people and groups through putting myself into a situation where my incentives point into a different direction in a game.
This is an insight i wish for everyone to have access to. Sure, a better understanding of peoples actions might be applied to war, but that i dont see as a real negative. Just like i dont see the development of better material sciences through an exclusively militaristic lens. Better tools will also always make for better weapons.
The problem is not the better tool, it is to make sure the tool is in the right hands under the right restrictions.
Maybe we should develop a wargame about how we allocate positions of power and how much power that should be.
I work for a company that provides materials for all sectors of industry. Recently we have had an increase in orders tied to producing weapons. We provode a product that requires extensive additional processong before it could become a weapon. I can look at that material and see the production bonus I'll get because the order books are good. I can also look it and see Russian and Chinese Soldiers who's life might end if that material is used as intended.
If you work in manufacturing, the military and government agencies will purchase from your employer and use that material to wage wars and suppress/ control people who they don't like.
Life is messy and complicated.
The description of the NATO game made me immediately think of "Watch the Skies."
Having designed two war-simulations (PvP and PvE) within an MMO, this video has given me so much to think about. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be discussing this topic for a very long time 😅
Eisenhower said “A plan means nothing. Planning is everything.” That’s all this category of ‘serious gaming’ is.
Fascinating look at this industry/sector of practices, extremely well done! I just don’t see oblique methodologies as having inherent metaphysical values. It’s running mental fire drills
It's all mental fire drills until the data points for these get fed to an AI in charge of the drones. Oh wait, that already happened.
@@justonkyunclear if truly autonomous drones have seen combat yet. But it will happen, because war will happen. I don’t see the point in lamenting this stuff-that’s exactly the kind of Western, pacifistic solipsism that Putin, Khomeini, and Xi are banking on.
Absolutely tremendous! I've been watching and supporting SUSD for years and only recently learned about this channel. I remember back in the late 90s when I was stationed at RAF Mildenhall, Channel 4 ran a program with two individuals engaged in a wargame with a third individual serving as the mediator. In the bygone days of letter writing, I still have the response I received from a Channel 4 executive upon my request for more television productions like the one they had aired, as an avid wargamer. Having served 28 years in the Air Force and having developed dozens of military wargames for Academy Games, Compass Games, and Decision Games, I certainly can understand the views so well articulated in your piece. Masterful!
PMG are my favorite games journalists because they are willing to explore controversial spaces with an honest lens.
They really are something very special! I love all their videos!
@@BigLouie_e_e This was dripping in anti-war bias. The dude basically called all the ppl working there sheep. What’s honest about that?
It’s incredible how belittling he was towards people who are necessary for a country’s survival. They clearly see the importance of their work. Just like any scientist would but you wouldn’t call them “canned lines”.
it’s fine to be anti-war but conflict is inevitable. Europe is surrounded by enemies. It’s okay to have military defense spending.
@@illsaveus You're confusing bias with opinion, Quinns put his own opinions into the video but that didn't mean he biased the information within the video. He didn't cherry pick qoutes to make people sound worse or leave out key information, instead he actually tried to make everyone look as good as possible. There's nothing wrong with a journalist making their own opinion clear, in fact that's probably better since it removes the impression of false objectivity from a piece. However it is dishonest when you try to conflate a journalist being honest about their opinion with bias and thus try to dismiss a piece you don't agree with. If you aren't anti war then just say that and present your own arguments instead of trying to dismiss information because the person presenting it didn't share your views.
@@illsaveus He did NOT call them sheep in any way whatsoever. In fact he said they were exceptionally articulate, had well-considered opinions, and gave them plenty of space to demonstrate that even while he admitted his own lack of assurance with some those more boilerplate statements. You ironically sound quite hawkish if this bothered you, tbh.
I worked an internship for the Serious Games Showcase at ITSEC, the largest milsim conference in the world. As part of the internship, I got to attend for free. It was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. I remember walking past booths of sci-fi looking combat armor, VR headsets showing training demos, and going up to the Unreal Engine booth to grab a free shirt while standing next to a massive screen and real-scale model of a minigun designed to train people how to aim and fire it out of a moving helicopter.
That sounds fun and interesting but also incredibly depressing and just kind of terrible.
That is incredibly disturbing. Both in what it represents and in how this implies these people think about this.
@@Cats-TM I mean, that is a bit the problem here. That a minigun sounds fun. Which certainly is kinda the fault of games, where you use them to mow down some aliens.
@@Healermain15 From a U.S. perspective I'd rather they developed a viable simulation that taught the basics of what is expected than spend the money on ammunition and fuel while dumping tons of lead contamination and debris into the appropriated lands of indigenous peoples on training runs that are also a risk of life in and of themselves.
@@blueberryiswar No, I just think firearms are interesting. They have a lot of interesting mechanics and history to them.
Also, war is a fascinating topic. Terrible, yes, it is something humans have and will always do. And learning about it is something that I enjoy doing. Not that it is a good thing at all, just interesting.
I am 99% sure that there's a single line in the USAF budget that says "DCS Module purchases"
And PlayStations. Lots and lots of PlayStations. For 1 guy in particular.
Remember Marine Doom?
The black miney dcs module must go crazy
I like the video and some of the questions you've raised, but I have had a thought that I think you've kinda overlooked... War will always happen whether we play these kind of wargames or not. People will be killed regardless of whether or not we're using these tools to enhance our ability to react to different situations. I think any person from any county would much sooner see thier own countries using this kind of tool than to be the only county not using it. To not use it in this case would indirectly killing your own citizens and service people which is worse than these tools indirectly killing those citizens and service people of other hostile countries. It would be like bringing a knife to a gunfight. There is much that needs to be explored about how effective these tools are, I absolutely agree. If they, through the nature of thier existence, make negative outcomes more certain, then that will certainly need addressing; but as a tool, it's not something we can afford to leave behind when other adversaries will certainly be improving thier capabilities. Long time fan, love the video, but I wonder whether you might agree with this or not, as it seems like undeniable knowledge to me. Thanks for reading :)
There is a growing body of academic evidence about the effectiveness of serious games, which includes professional wargaming e.g. See the first issue of the MORS (Military Operationis Research Society) new Journal of Wargaming. The first issue is online (and open access)
Since the subject of Ukraine came up, something worth noting is that the Russian Federation's military capabilities had traditionally been vastly overestimated (which presumably informed wargaming that in turn informed decision making) prior to the full scale invasion of Ukraine and this failure in imagination directly led to incalculable suffering as UA's allies were prepared to write an entire country of human beings off as a lost cause in the opening days of the war. To this day, a lack belief in the Ukrainian people's ability to win has led to their supposed allies dragging their feet on the delivery of crucial military aid that could turn the tide of the war. The failed offensive mentioned in the video was critically hampered by failure to deliver necessary armoured vehicles and directly resulted in lightly armoured IFVs being used to storm entrenched positions with catastrophic results.
Another example is the obscenely restrictive rules of engagement forbidding use of western-supplied weaponry inside Russian territory that are directly enabling the bombardment of Ukrainian civilians from the safety of Russia for fear of some sort of escalation scenario that has been played out in western high command.
I guess all of this is to further illustrate the "garbage in, garbage out" issue that improperly-designed simulations can have leading to dire consequences when too much faith is put in them.
They can't win, because Russia can't afford to lose, it's an existential conflict for both countries. There's plenty of escalation scenarios. Do you want Iran to have nukes? Do you want Yemen to have hypersonic missiles? How much would overseas shipping cost if you have to physically protect all of the ships against USVs? And in the end, testing whether those rockets are rusty and whether those nukes are working or not isn't the best idea.
And no, the offensive failed because Western planning is literally "just go around the minefields", what was the last time they fought a war against an actual military? Korea? It had nothing to do with the lack of resources, Ukraine literally already lost more armor in Kursk borderland than in the counteroffensive, they have plenty. The planning was the issue. Still is.
Also, do you know why Russian military capabilities have been overestimated? Because Western think-tanks that are supposed to evaluate them are all delusional, the way their source data is absurd.
I think that overstimation has also hit the Russian mod hard. They are grooming several game titles trained and funded by westerners that overestimate their own cability, so when they're in the real world, they are failing hard. The real problem now is Steam allowing shady developers with anticheat to embed code on boot sectors and similar shenanigans.
That might have been the case early in the war, but by now it's blatantly obvious that the war is being dragged on to benefit the military industrial complex, to distract from domestic problems, and potentially to goad Russia into doing something with long term repercussions that would cause normal people to suffer while doing little if any damage to those in power.
If WWIII is what it takes to prevent you know who from getting elected, I'd be shocked if no-one tried to push for exactly that. They hate and fear him that much, because he calls them out on their nonsense, and refused to start or prolong any wars while in office. Before Ukraine, our war machine was starving.
@@modelenginerding6996 I mean, a game does not need the root access of an anti-cheat to read out all the documents on your PC and send them to whoever it wants.
@@cameron7374 For sure. I just find it amusing they can get away with that level of control.
Another banger! Not only a subject most of us didn't know anything about, but also a great take on it that I don't think we could have gotten from anyone else.
I was about to ask for some sources for further reading, since I thought the video (while it did its best) didn't explain too well how this games actually work... until the bit where it's shown that even the academics in the field are somewhat in the dark about it. Maybe if/once this type of games are more widely used for something other than war, like this Alex Vince guy seem to be doing, we'll be able to learn more about it in an accessible way. Because, war aside, games as tools is a super interesting topic.
In regards to your comment on the gunship missions in military shooters I will slightly disagree in the context of the original CoD 4 mission "death from above". You comment that it made you sick, and that's a completely valid response, but I think this instance provides a little more depth that I think is given credit.
CoD 4 Modern Warfare has a mission called Death From Above, the famous AC130 mission, in said mission you are supposed to give support to the SAS team on the ground and focus on withering away the converging Russian Ultranationalists closing on Price and the team. The entire atmosphere of the mission is rather light, all AC130 operators are rather jolly and banter with each other while turning people into red mist (which is shockingly close to real life footage of AC130 operations).
The mission makes no commentary on the excessive levity that they apply during all of it, it’s very much delivered matter of fact (which could be applied for the entirety of CoD4, very blunt and to the point), and deliberately chooses this framework in order to separate the player from the carnage inflicted. It’s giving you the most raw expression of such a situation and allowing you to judge by yourself. It manages to exists both as an engaging power fantasy and highlighting how it’s slightly grim that you could be so trivial within said context (regardless of practicality and justifiability) when it’s just white dots on a screen, which can even be taken in the meta sense of it being essentially a video game (dots on a screen) within the context of a modern military shooter.
CoD 4 Modern Warfare in general is surprisingly cynical in it's depiction of US foreign interventionism. The USMC are essentially framed as an unstoppable fighting force but also completely incapable of accomplishing their end goal (finding and capturing Al Assad) due to logistical incompetence and relying on terrible intel, they essentially bumble their way though everything in regards to providing actual results.
Which as a consequence escalates the conflict to the point of them being nuked. It’s less about justifiability and more that they just made everything worse by merely being there and being incompetent about it.
They do put the SAS on a pedestal tho, which, ironically enough, is the starting point of the series obsession with hyper special operator characters rather than regular grunt/infantrymen.
The aircraft featured in that mission, the AC-130, was developed for and exists solely for shooting at farmers, it cannot contribute to symmetrical warfare.
I think people's response to that mission depends a lot on whether they saw the infamous wikileaks heliicopter gunship video where a journalist and people with him are killed with enthusiasm because the pilot mistakes them for an enemy combatants. If you've watched that (and to a lesser extent bomb camera video from the two Iraq wars) similar video game scenes just feel different.
I did like in MW2 where they specifically made a point out of showing how the cynical brutality of the SAS can easily just make things worse, though that kinda got forgotten. The first MW triology is really odd like that, it occasionally manages to grasp some fairly serious points about western military adventurism in the early 21st century but then also seemingly gets distracted by cool military hardware.
@@hedgehog3180 Not only that, MW2 also has Shepherd as a stand in for blind jingoistic patriotism and the unrestrained nature of the Military Industrial Complex (regardless if he’s a rogue element, he literally gives Soap a speech about how “tomorrow there’s not gonna be a shortage of volunteers, a shortage of patriots”, after rambling about self serving patriotic jingoism while being deliberately framed to look as evil as possible and was the main instigator of WW3 alongside Makarov).
@@ghosthand3737 Because the SAS are the best soldiers on the planet. Not sure why you think it strange they are highlighted as such in the game.
While I appreciate Quinn's exposition on the potential moral quandaries of "war-games as potential weapons", and the implied moral corruption of the art/science of gaming to serve the national interest, if these tools have utility as conflict mitigators that could reduce both military and civilian casualties then is seems a prudent investment. The irony of the "mineshaft gap" as depicted in Dr. Strangelove is not lost on me, although we are now apparently discussing the "gaming gap" if potential aggressor states are using these models to achieve an advantage.
You are the opposite of canceled for this one. Nuanced, ethical, and educational? That’s good content
Some of my old friends are the guys behind Door Kickers, and they've got enormous pulls and shoutouts from people that do small unit tactics for real that their game is probably the best tool to teach and show people how to clear corners and prep a room for entry and why any of all of that is important to not dying.
Alternatively, i am a.. member.. of the /r/noncredibledefense subreddit, which on the surface, it's flat out a meme sub with armchair defence experts that... every so often, you feel some of them know a hell of a lot more than the level you're expected to take things at. It's all a lot of Non-The-Onion style of impossible situations (apart from fringe plane-wife anime chick interests), but if we're looking at it through a lense of 'what if', all those 'what if' scenarios have a seedling of truth and possiblity, and in the UA war so far... i'll just say the meme came before the real life situation a few times. Not enough, but i bet enough to be statistically important that i bet somewhere, someone, is tasked to monitoring and compiling memes from that subreddit.
And i feel that's what wargames have always been and always will be using imagination preemptively, and i can't believe there's a cap on that or any real line anywhere in the sand. From the earliest human that went 'huh, can i throw this rock to kill that pray?' to the most complex tactical missile use and flood simulations from the Three Gorges Dam, figuring out contigencies and what ifs and figuring out if something will actually work, if not just the exercise in itself.. has been something we've always done. Those were the thoughts that got us to the Moon, and opened the biggest gates for us to the future, and they will not be limited to military use.
LE: Also remembered this little bit, i attendend milsim airsoft larping, a week of 'on-base' missions and interactions with LARP players which were civilians or infiltrators or etc. I was tasked with a friend to chitchat with a dude and find out if he has some sort of bomb piece. We talked like people, we ended up sitting down for tea.. and there was this thought behind my head that 'what if he's playing us'. I remember i had unclicked my pistol holster and held my hand near it for the entire discussion. It's entirely possible the bloke was just friendly (like real life person) and we were having a good time, but as the immersion worked, my orders of the situation rang in my mind.. i was expecting at any time for him to kill us with our guard down and prevent our search as we hobbled for 30 minutes back to base. My friend ended up distracting him while i searched his tent, and we left emptyhanded, probably bad info or just sent there for random spot checks. But yeah.
My experience playing military simulation airsoft has given me experiences that make me at least frame, if not understand, some of the real horrors of war. How a 6 meter street that i cross daily to get bread and milk during a war can become an unpassable no-man's land, how effective supressive fire can be when the consequences are grave even in context (walking back 3 hours to base), and yes, how deep mistrust can go for just a friendly civilian sharing their tea with you all on the basis of what your chain of command tells you about him and the situation. And all of that happened through.. well.. a game of make believe and tiny plastic balls.
Playing the civilians, wounded people, thugs and other non-military is pretty fun. Sometimes we might duck away and appear as new faces. Sometimes there is a whole little village life going on where some dude just owes another money or a family is being ostracized.
As an intelligence guy at lower level you aren't doing the big picture analysis I think. You are there to collect and process information to send upwards and receive actionable info. information to distribute downward.
It's not just one dude to talk to but a whole town of weirdos. And it's hard to filter out which one you need to be weary of.
What is it with NCD members and mentioning the Three Gorges Dam once in every 3 paragraphs
@@krityaan It's a wink and nod to other edgy redditors who masturbate to fantasies about murdering Chinese civilians. A pretty gross thing to put in like an easter egg in the middle of a comment trying to appear thoughtful
*20 feet
I used to airsoft in this same way. I think its bad business, people self traumitizing themselves or at least trying to get a taste of that from what real soldiers experience and it can be pretty toxic in that respect. People living peaceful lives in a country without war who clamour for that trauma but defanged of "real" danger
Not 5 minutes in and there's a Jim Wallman sighting! Excellent stuff.
the fact that video games are so intrinsically intertwined with war and military is not new information to me but it was still super interesting to learn a lot of the nittygritty and details!!
As much as it honestly irks me, the reality is that we live in a dangerous world right now, gone are the post soviet period with American hegemony as a stabilizing influence. I'm a pacifist by nature, always hated conflict, but I'm also a bullying victim to the extreme, I know intimately how some people will never stop until you force them. I studied human psychology for 30 years because of that last part, I analysed bullying as a phenomenon for a long time in a very nuance way. War gaming is a nuanced subject and yes, it can be used for ill, but as you said, unarmed nations tend to suffer at some point. Are war gaming weapons, yes, are they perfect? Not by any stretch, but are the exercise they provide functionally useful yes because they allow to find out of the box ideas to defeat prestige collosi, to break the sentiment of invincibility, to force a more flexible way of thinking. You were uncomfortable in that room with nobody awnsering, I'm guessing that many had the same reserves you did but made their minds long before you came. Had they all been first timer you would have heard awnsers from them then.
Gone are the days of a stable world order based on rules, we have to come to therm with that, it's just a fact. Now to reach a new equilibrium and stability we need to be ready enough to deter Putin, Xi and their ilks, narcisists as heads of totalitarian states maybe Trump if he ever wins back his throne. We have to be ready to defend ourselves and hiding our heads in the sand is not a solution. You talk at the end of the responsibility of game designers relating to abuses in the video game industry, well politically we are living the same and reffusing the fight is defaulting to automatic defeat against people without any shred of morality. Do not make false equivalency between an imperfect democracy and ethno fascist totalitarism in the harm generally done by their actions. Was Iraq and Afghanistan horrendous mistakes with terrible impacts absolutely, and our games should reflect that reality, that invading and occupying countries create more issues than it ever fixes. This is how we adress the issue, not by refusing to play and leaving it to less rational actors, because want it or not, that type of game will always happen.
Around the 45-minute mark, you look to people who have lived and breathed conflict for years to validate your negative feelings about something they've sat with it, processed it, and channeled it into a force for good. It isn't weird, it's their job and for probably all of them, their passion. I'm sorry, but for me, I get 2nd hand embarrassmentt to watch.
The way I see it, wargaming, as with every tool can be used in positive or negative ways. War is going to be a reality for a long, long time but, if wargaming can be used to reduce friendly casualties and innocent bystanders then I can't see it as anything but positive. It allows theory craft, thought exercises, and planning without risking lives.
So he should talk to someone who has never fought a war or experienced anything like that firsthand? he should interview a hoi4 modder or something? The point is valid in that these things form the schemas in how we see the world and people from these war games DO think of countries in terms of how they have invaded them in a wargame. I realized that personally all the geography I was interpretating in terms of EU4 and HOI4 invasions; viewing the world in terms of belligerent military action ISNT HEALTHY. A plan of defense for your own country is different Of Course
Have they processed it, or have they become desensitized to the idea that other people must die for peace?
For reading on the dangers of War Games, try AJP Taylors "War by Timetable" and his WW1 chapter on "How Wars Begin", which details how planning for war created war
Your whole discussion on nuclear weapons reminds me of a situation in a legacy board game where you can get a nuclear weapon and I remember being the only person in my group opposed to getting it. But then in a situation we were going to lose if I didn't use it, I had my hand forced to nuke a place to save the rest of us. And it just makes me think that if someone like me who is very opposed to nuclear armaments would make that decision in a game. How long until real life military operatives also make that decision in the face of a losing battle?
the difference is that IRL multiple countries have nukes, designed in a way that launching your nukes triggers everyone else to launch their nukes, resulting evin everyone losing.
Probably a better situation than just one country with the authority to nuke wherever they want, but not as good as no one having nukes.
but in your example, the weapon saved lives, correct? you did feel it was a valid and necessary use?
I'd rather have someone who is very opposed to nuclear armaments making the decision, than someone else...
@@Appletank8 But the point here is what lessons do people take away from games about the use of nuclear weapons and how might they influence the real world? The Cold War had many close calls where the only thing that saved us from Nuclear annihilation was someone being hesitant and unwilling to give the final order, we definitely want more people like that and not people who are quick to order a nuclear strike so it's important that any games used for training teach hesitancy.
Great video! I wanna try to shoot down the idea of there being a risk that decision gaming might lead to the wrong conclusions. It might, for sure. BUT, that's irrelevant because in all likelyhood, the alternative is to make decisions with less data, less attempts of predicting outcomes, and ultimately fewer plans for readyness. People have never had an issue with making decisions regardless of available data. That's one of our evolutionary superpowers probably. And researching and gathering data is work, which humans generally try to avoid. Decisions will be made without simulating the problem space, just with more confidence and a higher chance of failure. Lets do more decision gaming!!
About how players can screw games.
Back in university I participated in a business wargame. It was about oil companies strategics decisions.
There were 5 teams each with 5 people. We could set the oil quantities that we would sell.
The thing was that, the best move was to each company should sells the oils slowly throughout the game. It was to show why oil companies behave the way they did.
The problem is that I was completely stupid in college. I started thrash talking all the other teams and people started getting emotional sold their reserves. And in the second turn there was no more oil. Hahahah 😂
Just an incredible video. Thanks so much for this.
War games are like medical mannequins for officers, generals and policy makers. It's better to practice than to 'dip your toes' live because real people's lives are at stake.
it's so cute when people believe the megapowerful governments of the world are actually interested in minimizing conflict and the death and destruction that comes along with conflict
Yes. Especially for education. There is a vast library of articles on gamification and learning and why/how it works. And it's really really good at making people understand concepts, expand their critical thinking skills, and come to terms with their field. Wargames also do not stand alone. But its a hell of a lot better at having someone understand the theory they've been taught, than simply sitting in a lecture hall or classroom being told XYZ.
Yeah, but we don't know if these games are a realistic representation of war and if they maybe teach us to do it wrong. In your analogy it's like giving students medical mannequins with totally wrong anatomy. And then they're supposed to do a complicated surgery on someone's heart
@@morgenson1148 The games dont have to be a realistic representation IOT teach concepts, they just have to be good enough. The analogy of mannequins would be more appropriate to exercises and training, not wargaming. We generally dont use wargames to train with (except decisionmaking), but to teach.
The perfect military is 100% practice 0% practical. Practice drill, manoeuvres, exercises, simulations.
Part of that simulation, is to prevent conflict, disengage from incidents without escalation. Defence without conflict.
"Everything to do with wargaming is cheap"
*James Workshop has entered the chat*
The leather chair in the background of Quinns' to camera bits looks like pictur of a "closed eye". I kept thinking "that's a nice piece of art, why is it on the floor... also, why is it a chair".
I cannot fathom the complexities in navigating every aspect of making this video. From research to interviews to formulating a thesis on a topic as intricate as this, the incredible work shines through. Thank you for taking the time to look at it from a variety of perspectives and building a framework for viewers to digest the existence of this industry. I know I'm gonna be mulling it over in the back of my head for a good long while.
Thanks Quinns, for this enlightening update to a nearly forgotten wing of game knowledge. And yes, there are plenty of armed forces members that do in fact not only roleplay in Warhammer Fantasy, but also use a Mad Cat Prime to ROFLstomp the opposing Mobile HQ during DT in a quick Alpha Strike session. PMCs also need hobbies to apparently.
Edit: Apparently, this is a myth. I remembered it from reading about the battle when I was younger and the scene from the somewhat recent Midway movie. Damn you, Roland Emmerich!
9:30 You missed my favorite wargaming anecdote from WW2 in the Pacific.
When wargaming their upcoming operation to capture Midway Atoll, a junior Japanese admiral stationed the US carriers NE of Midway, ambushing the incoming Japanese fleet, winning the game. The senior admirals immediately declared these results impossible because the US could only be in that position if they had forewarning of the surprise attack.
In reality, the US had (partially) broken Japanese radio codes and knew of the surprise attack. They stationed their carriers NE of Midway, ambushed the Japanese fleet, won the battle, and took the initiative in the Pacific.
While this anecdote sounds nice, its not accurate. The source is Fuchida Mitsuo, commander of the air group that attacked Pearl Harbour.
There are no other sources, formal papers, other eyewitnesses that corroborate Fuchida's story about this wargame.
In addition, Fuchida's story did not involve "carriers NE of Midway", it involved a land based bomber group of B-17s from Midway launching a strike and scoring 2 carrier kills.
In the actual battle of Midway, the B-17 group on the island scored no hits - so if the story was true, the admiral's overriding was actually the correct decision.
Midway was a battle won on a knife's edge, it could very easily have been a stalemate or an American defeat. Also, no one at the time understood the gravity of the battle given naval thinking still centred on battleships rather than carrier groups.
@@krityaan ...midway is weird
yes, on one hand, it could have been a toss-up if many more things had gone right for kido butai - but the expert analysis i'm most familiar with, john parshal's work, suggests that midway was not really pivotal given the overall strategic position of japan. midway is the battle they lost, but they were bound to eventually lose a battle, and once they did there was not going to be a recovery. the plan was to use midway to project air power over hawaii and then use the islands as a hostage to try and win a favorable exit from the war, but this was simply not on the table. americans were not going to just shrug and accept a white peace because of bombs dropping on honolulu
and it isn't accurate to suggest it was all down to chance either. americans had a superior scouting strategy, had broken japan's operational codes and had bypassed their submarine cordon. it was not something that could have gone either way except by virtue of near-miraculous luck on the side of the IJN, which thankfully they lacked
it also isn't accurate to say that the admiralty did not understand the importance of carriers. kido butai means 'first air fleet'. they knew the importance of their carriers and put them at the center of their combat groups, and were attempting to hunt down and destroy america's carriers. yamato's heavy surface combatants didn't even participate in the midway battle out of feat that they would require too much air support to be effective (which was probably a correct assessment). meanwhile, america also knew of the importance of their carriers and emphasized their strategic victory in the battle of the coral sea not by the sinking of any surface combatants but by the sinking of a japanese carrier: 'scratch one flat top!'
the idea that by midway any military still thought of the battleship as the pinnacle of modern navy power is just a myth
@@ItWasSaucerShaped I came for the PMG but stayed for the discussion of the importance of Midway in the trajectory of the Pacific Theater!
@@ItWasSaucerShaped That just isn't true, many US carriers were targeted and either hit mildly or barely missed, in fact it is unclear which side sustained more hits, what is very clear however is that the US sustained far fewer ship losses and that is partly due to better fire management onboard but also enormously due to luck, two bombs hitting a bit differently and the situation is completely different as to who is viewed as having won the battle. That said you are quite correct that Japan was never going to win the war by that point even if they had decisively won Midway.
@@ItWasSaucerShaped Your analysis is correct. Even if Japan won Midway, the Essex class carriers would roll out within 6 months. The IJN air crews were already considerably attrited, and the tactical advantage of the Zero was soon to be mitigated by new US tactics and the F4U Corsair.
A major IJN defeat was nearly guaranteed to occur. It was only a matter of time.
59:34 last year's Ukraine offensive was stopped by kilometers of minefields after their leadership had been bragging for months about where they are going to attack Russians... so Russians listened and planted mines... I don't think wargames are to be blamed. moreover wargames are flexible tools that can quickly adapt to new situations to simulate FPV drones usage - you just have to come up with some rules or - in case of matrix games - just arguments
not to mention i highly doubt the wargames counted on mix-mash of nato and soviet equipment, nato and soviet tactics, nato and soviet strategies, nato and soviet training, as has been in ukraine throughout the war, causing all kinds of chaotic contradictory situations at all levels. also lack of long range antiair.. lack of artillery support.. air support..lack of everything, really.
I also think that the context of the Ukrainian general’s quote was responding to US criticisms of Ukrainian strategy. The US had advised UAF to mass on one operational axis, relying, in part, on wargaming in their analysis. The UAF disagreed and instead launched offensives on multiple axes.
Really interesting video for a broad overview of a fairly unspoken of part of the industry.
I tend to think it's best if policy makers and soldiers of all ranks do have a bit of practice of what they might have to do, and hopefully learn ways to avoid that occuring. You take driving lessons so you don't run people over, crash, and to make sure you understand the road rules. You do martial arts, not to get into fights or beat people up, but so that you don't (and don't get beaten up yourself). You understand the damage you could cause, so you take steps to ensure you don't. This is similar, if more abstract, to these examples.
Prior preparation prevents ps-poor performance, and all that. You'll always get a few rev-heads and thugs, but by and large the system works.
A closer example might be US police training which makes the cops more afraid, more panicked, more likely to escalate conflict, more likely to use lethal force, etc. Sure, you can make the potential of simulation training sound very rosy if you only cherrypick examples where it arguably achieves a positive outcome, but that's not representative of reality.
@@notnullnotvoid So, we shouldn't train soldiers and policy makers?
I'll agree, that it can dehumanize the decisions able to be made, but that might be the fault of the (war)game and the required objective outcomes, not the fault of training people itself.
War is abhorrent by default. People are going to die. I'd prefer the people on my side be good at it, somewhat to minimize casualties (on both sides), but also so they win. Because you really don't want maximized casualties on your own side in a war, due to stupid planning (or a lack of planning at all), or a lack of training for a range of potential theoretical scenarios.
I probably look at it differently, being Australian. We've had a gut-full of poorly planned, trained for, provisioned for, and executed scenarios for our troops (often by other countries), where we were an afterthought. Screw it, we can do the thinking and planning as well, even if we're working alongside others.
@@sambojinbojin-sam6550 Do you always think your own side is in the moral right?
@@hedgehog3180 Why on earth would anyone think that? It's hard enough to determine one's own moral correctness without relying on self-justification or assumptions of truth, let alone another's or a group's. Large shades of grey, inconsistencies, points-of-view and ambiguities are immediately present.
@@notnullnotvoidSounds like bad training rather than training is bad
To improve the system, you have to see wargames as training and train the people who decide on as many different systems as possible. Prep them.
We never stopped wargaming. We just called it strategic planning and maneuver.
We never stopped playing in the sandpit or giving theater performances either. Such things are as old, possibly older than humanity.
@@Hebdomad7 That has literally nothing to do with my post except similar sentence structure. Are you well? Do you need medication or therapy?
i find it hard to find wargaming as a whole morally objectionable. Especially in northern and eastern europe wether we like it or not having a competent military force is a necessary evil if you want to remain being a sovereign country. the case is harder to make for the states where its being used for dronestriking civilians in the middle east and whatnot but in nato countries where youll be putting good money into the military eitherway i dont see the very small slice of that thats being invested in wargaming as anything other than a sensible investment. The actual strategic benefit of it is a good question that needs to be researched far more thoroughly but also i fail to see how the alternative of training i.e military higher brass based on past, now largely obsolete warfare would be any more effective. the games ABOUT war that function effectively as propaganda or that glorify the horrors of war i feel like dont have much to do with wargaming in terms of what they actually do at the end of the day. I'm also not a philosopher nor a professional military stretegist so I'd love to be persuaded either way
This feels a lot like showing up to a martial arts seminar and asking everyone if they are training to murder people with their hands. Then, being shocked when you discover that, not only is sparing fun, but no one in the room thinks of sparing as murder simulation.
I'm also struck by the glossing over of wargames which are used in historical analysis. Volko Rhunke designed the COIN system, which was used in the game Fire in The Lake, which is a game that helps to understand the Vietnam conflict on a deeper level than "US=good/North Vietnam=bad." By seeking to understand your opposition and their true motivations, you learn that both sides are human, with human goals. This is the opposite of propaganda.
Yeah, but also in this parallel scenario, the marital arts seminar is directly funded by the "government ministry of using our hands to kill people," so I think the discomfort is warranted
It's more like he showed up to a discussion round table of people trying to design a martial art and started asking "but what if someone uses these design principles to make their own martial art and kills people with it".
“Is this turning play into a weapon?”
“Always has.”
*pulls trigger*
Play-fighting predates us as a species.
@@Hebdomad7 my cat play fights, the roots of play itself are violent
Quinns has faced a lot of criticism in the comments for his personal feelings and reaction to modern wargames(plangames), but I do just want to applaud him, and the P.M.G. crew, for making a video that nonetheless handled the topic well and with a pretty strong degree of neutrality. Much more than telling me what to think, this video made me think. People's criticism/dissection of Quinn's reactions have made me think too. I find myself agreeing with the view that wars are inherently adverserial and the reduction of losses in one side will quite probably cause/be caused by more losses in another, as well as honestly acknowledging that plangames can potentially be used to prevent larger scale conflict.
I also respect that Quinns was primarily seeking honest, reflective answers from his interviewees as opposed to, arguably, poorly formed justifications. I do feel that his point was somewhat undermined by his final focus on the non-military applications of plangames as it seemed to confirm that he himself was unable to find any kind of peace with the military applications. Yet, as I said, I really do feel like this video informs and then pushes you to form, or at least consider, your own opinions more than anything else - which I find very valuable.
During my research on JOSS (a system run by RAND in the 50s-70s), I found out that it was heavily used for wargaming. Computer-based wargaming has existed since the 1960s--likely before the rise of the modern video game.
There are three from this era are somewhat publicly documented. One is STROP, one is COMBAT, and the other is RECESS. All three involve munitions--either conventional or nuclear.
It's a part of our past, but we must understand that it's always been there.
the ministry of defence stop harassment in gaming pin goes crazy
Fascinating subject-I was dimly familiar with some of the history by studying TTRPG history, and of the Root connection. Military wargaming is a fraught topic for sure, but I feel like I'd agree with the stance that while military wargames are immoral in the same way any war is immoral, from a practical perspective it makes sense for them to exist.
The historical run-ups to many wars are a series of miscommunications and mistakes. Simulations like these can possibly reduce those even if I agree they feel very unnerving as a fan of 4x strategy and the like. Military wargame outcomes affect the lives of common people and should be treated with that gravity.
Hard not to feel like a race to engage more with military funding creates the possibility for more conflict and the willingness for it as opposed to the opposite. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture by Patrick Crogan has more thoughts on the way computer games and technology are deeply entwined and feedback to and with the military industrial complex.
I'll be sending that opening 2-3 minutes of the Conclusion to everyone - it's such a succint and brilliant introduction to the topic (and reflection of the industry), and I love that you gifted that to us as a means to attract others to the conversation. Terrfiic video, big love x.
I've always been an enjoyer of these sorts of games but as I get in my late 20's and start to reflect, especially watching world events, I'm glad someone made a nice video on this topic specifically. It's tough because people get very defensive and don't want to feel ANYTHING about the things they enjoy; they think you either need to stop completely to prove a moral point or embrace the full monty position of downplaying any concerns. It's okay and healthy to enjoy certain things like wargames or war thunder and have healthy reflections on how they are real tools used to manufacture consent and DO carry real political weight, if politics is an extension of warfare to quote bismark then these war games are also very political in my opinion and should be engaged with critically and with an eye not to self flagelate or punish yourself for enjoying such a game, but to remain a critical consumer in the same way other media we acknoledge is political as well
"The purpose of thinking is to let the [bad] ideas die instead of you." Governments using games to make better decisions is good for the governed. But if your government is at war with another government... may the odds ever be in your favor.
Is it just me or is the dude at 0:13 the President of the US from the Shut Up and Sit Down Watch the Skies mega game?
Sure is!
I'm surprised that this is a surprise to anyone. These things are called wargames.
I can understand an initial negative reaction to this, but most of the games we play depict violence (1P shooters / RTS / simulations) or economics. It's a bit hypocritical to condemn groups for using these provided tools to simulate violence. I also find it difficult to come up with inventions that have not been adapted for military purposes.
On the subject of how accurate these simulations are: that can be very different and it is also a question of what the underlying issue is. You gave the example of the atomic bombs and the study in which various simulations were compared with them. The actual games don't play a role here, from the different ways of playing one could draw the conclusion that communication and personal conversations make the use of nuclear bombs less likely. Political measures can now be derived from this.
Wargames can also help decision-makers learn how to deal with limited information. The actual scenario is only a framework. You can train how to deploy units in an evolving situation (disaster relief or military action) without blocking huge areas to conduct large-scale exercises.
Whether conclusions can be drawn about a particular tactic or system depends heavily on the quality of the simulation and the willingness to accept the results. But this applies to everything that has to do with people. We see this in our daily work. There may be a good solution to a problem, but the boss doesn't like it.
1. In what world is it hypocritical to criticize war gamers for using violent games because gamers play violent games. Tarkov players are maybe an exception lol but otherwise gamers DO NOT use games to get better at killing people in real life! That is obviously the reason why people condemn this, it’s because they are simulating violence in order to actually kill REAL people, it’s not being condemned just because it’s a game with violence in it.
2. Sure, the military uses all sorts of products, yes. But there is a difference between a generic commodity like clothing that happens to also be used by the military and something especially designed specifically for informing the highest levels of decision making for the military.
3. While it just so happens that your example does come to the right conclusion about stopping nuclear war, saying you can come to that conclusion “based on how the game is played” is simply not rigorous at all because it is a GAME and not a simulation. The reason we know that talking stops nuclear war is because that is what actually stopped it in the past, not this bullshit. They seem to act like it’s just as good as a simulation but it’s not, maybe a very good training tool I guess but for coming to novel conclusions this method is simply not rigorous enough (because it’s really not rigorous at all) for a subject which involves actually killing people.
@@Nosirrbro Where are you getting all this confidence in the alleged rigor of "simulations"? A simulation is just some code written by some guy.
@@Nosirrbro it's hypocritical to criticize some people for violence in videogames but not others, yes. You can criticize the killing irl sure, but it is by definition hypocritical to criticize them for the videogames here and not the average gamer.
And for your second point, that exact same thing could be applied to radios or computers, are these suddenly unethical because they help decisionmaking, guidance, and whatnot?
@@christophernoneya4635 But I’m not criticizing the military for having violent video games, I’m criticizing the military for using games as a way to improve their abilities to do real violence. Most of these war games aren’t even violent like call of duty is a violent game anyway, this is a really stupid point and I don’t get it at all. And, yes, if you design a specific radio or a specific computer for military purposes, I would personally say you are a bad person. If you design a computer or radio for civilian purposes, and a soldier happens to use one, you can’t really be blamed for that, but if you design the computer system for lockheeds newest missile, then yeah I’m gonna hold you responsible at least partially for killing those Palestinian children.
@@Nosirrbro So would you then argue that anyone who donated to ukraine is also a bad person for enabling a war to continue? Would you argue that anyone supporting Palestine are bad people? These are both not just enabling but actively encouraging ongoing conflict that could be ended with much less loss of life by surrendering. Obviously not, so clearly its not the capacity or the tool or the device or even the actual violence in itself... its the target that makes the difference.
I will say this as a TLDR : I don't think this is a problem, what can be used in civilian affairs can AND WILL BE USED in military settings. We all know that military stuffs can also be used in civilian affairs like the internet, cargo pants, and bomber jackets and if that can happen then why deny that the vice versa can also be true? we civilians can only look at the results and then make a fuss about it afterwards or if they got the details first.
Graham Longley Brown has it right, Wargames are mainly for Foresight and in the context of war means either preventing it or ending it quickly with the least amount of deaths. Mind you foresight is not always accurate after all wargames are trying to do the almost impossible thing of putting rationale in an area of mankind's history that is not rational AKA Wars and armed conflicts.
This is why i prefer to talk about "will this even work?" because we lack the information to know if it really worked well with military secrecy and such academics cannot validate the efficiency of a certain wargaming situation.
WE HAVE LITTLE TO NO PUBLIC PROOF THAT THIS SHIT WORKED!!
Chess was theorized to be designed to teach early military leaders strategy. Games and their connection to war has always been constant in the ages of man
Meanwhile, World of Tanks players are still leaking classified military documents because they're whining about accuracy.