Army Crowdsources Stability Operations Simulation

[DicedT]

I guess this belongs under computer wargaming. http://www.defensenews.com/training-and-simulation-journal

Michael

[DicedT]

Oops. Better link: http://www.defensenews.com/article/20120713/TSJ01/307130010/Army-Crowdsources-Stability-Ops-Sim?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Training%20&%20Simulation%20Journal

[ArizonaTank]

Interesting article.  It was also interesting that the article mentioned the MMO for piracy fighting... http://portal.mmowgli.nps.edu/  Sadly, you can only play by invitation only...

[bayonetbrant]

Yeah, but MMOWGLI has been a train wreck for 3 years and shows no signs of improving.  You can't fight your way through a serious sim using tweet-length responses, no matter how many thousands of participants you have involved.

[bayonetbrant]

my first comment on the original post back at PaxSims

two thoughts at the ‘execution level’ of actually building something

1. There needs to be a *lot* of scoping of what’s really expected to be accomplished by the unit being trained by this sim. The timeline for the training (line 156) is to compress 12-18 months into 2-4 days of real time. However, as noted above, there’s significant research that to truly stabilize a country can take 20-40 *years*. How much do we want to have the brigade staff “reinventing the wheel” and how much should them be falling in on an existing mission? Think of the Sinai peacekeeping mission for a minute, where we’d had US observers for 25 years as a part of the UN mission there. The first 3-5 rotations did a lot of planning, adjusting, modifying, etc, but since about 1988, they’ve been falling in on the same basic plan with minor adjustments. How many years do you want to have already been ‘under the belt’ when the scenario starts.

2. Playing out the time. (similar to Rex’s comment of 08/07/2012 at 1:22 pm) Once the execution is underway, do we run a continuous time scale, where the game runs x-number of equal-time turns? Or jump around to key events? There’s probably a limit to the training value of week-to-week tedium of “your guys go on patrol; nothing happens” until it’s interrupted by “holy shit, the town of Bugtussle just erupted in protests and violence!” At that point, you may want to shift the time scale closer to real-time to allow the participants to actually exercise their proper processes for developing their plans and making their decisions without having to move at warp-2 just to keep up with the game.

Bigger picture is this:
What are the types of decisions we want the player to make, and to train their brains to make, and within what time frame do we expect them to be made?
That’ll drive the echelons represented in the system(s) and the feedback loops (positive and negative) presented to the players based on their actions.
Finally, how wide do you expect the players’ decision-making to reach. I would suspect that no one is going to ‘win the war’ in 12-18 months, but you sure could lose it. That’s a pretty crappy definition of success for a unit training: “Don’t f&#k up” I think most commanders are looking for something a little more meaningful, with the understanding that the unit might do everything perfectly right within their span of control, but some do-gooder missionary NGO starts handing out Bibles with emergency food in an Islamic-dominated disaster area and suddenly everything goes into the crapper.

[LongBlade]

Yeah, but MMOWGLI has been a train wreck for 3 years and shows no signs of improving.  You can't fight your way through a serious sim using tweet-length responses, no matter how many thousands of participants you have involved.

+1

I somehow got in on that. Probably before they closed the door and made it invite only.

Great idea, but execution was terrible.

First, someone (or a couple of them) already had posted my general ideas. So my usefulness was kinda over before it began.

Second, it quickly grew so large that it was nearly impossible to spot duplicate ideas.

Third, a number of folks who were clearly experts quickly turned it into an alphabet soup of incomprehensible jargon exchanges.

It didn't take more than a couple of days for me to figure out it wasn't the place for me, no matter how well I might think out of the box. It's not a bad idea, but Brant summed it up beautifully.

[Smuckatelli]

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6jv4p85m81545403/