Games, simulations, and micronations

 Last week I put up a post about "Collect It All", a card game derived from a CIA training tool. That's got me thinking about games and simulations more generally, and how and why they might be useful to micronations. However, I'll preface this by saying that micronationalism itself isn't a game. It's not a roleplaying game, it's not "playing pretend". Depending on the micronation, there are some elements of imagination involved, but assuming that we're all just playing games does a disservice to the whole community.

Games as training tools are quite common - as we discussed previously, the card game "Collect It All" is based on a CIA training tool, and this article discusses other CIA-developed games used for training their analysts.

Games can also be useful for training people for situations that might be too difficult or costly to replicate in normal life. For example, Slabovia uses the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator to train crews in starship operations, in case we can ever afford to buy one.

First, the obvious: military "war games" have been used to teach militaries the basics of tactics and strategy for a long time - the game of chess dates back to the seventh century, although it's been modified somewhat over the years. Tabletop "sand table" exercises are also a staple of teaching battlefield tactics at military academies, and modern "micro armour" (1:285 scale) miniatures can be purchased to replicate these exercises at home. Board games such as Risk or Axis & Allies present an abstracted form of warfare which can help develop more strategic thinking.  Oh, and then there was the time that some wargamers won an actual war.

In Slabovia, we've been discussing holding a "staff college" training day where our Navel (sic) officers would play various such games. At one level, it's an excuse to hold our own private gaming convention, but we won't talk about that. 😉

More recently the military has also used video games as training; the US military was using networked video games (err, training simulators) via something called SIMNET back in the 1970s, well before the Internet was a public resource. As the home PC market expanded, and as the Internet reached more homes, it seems inevitable that "armchair generals" would want to use the electronic medium. For example, the civilian mil-sim video game "Harpoon" is based on a US Navy training system that was itself based on a miniatures-based simulator. 

Another genre of games that can be useful for micronations is "resource management" games where players have to manage limited resources as they try to claim territory. The classic board game here would be Settlers of Catan. Games such as Pandemic can help teach responses to health crises, which dovetails somewhat with my recent talk about emergency planning for micronations.

There's also a game called Diplomacy, where players take the roles of politicians at the turn of the last century (the game starts in 1901), which does feature the making of alliances, but also encourages the breaking of such alliances, so perhaps it might teach the wrong lessons to some folks.

I don't know anything about it, but apparently there's even a video game called "Commander in Chief" (also known as "Geo-Political Simulator"). The Wikipedia entry for the game states that it "allows a player to simulate being a nation's head of government". There were also several sequels to the game, including "Rulers of Nations" and "Masters of the World".

In summary, then, the use of games as training tools is well established, and there are a number of such games that can train micronational leaders on various aspects of leadership and government.

Was chess one of the first wargames?
(Picture from Microsoft Word image library)

An Intelligence Training Tool - and a fun game!

Did you know that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) uses games to train its analysts? Let's talk about that!

Today, I'm continuing to discuss intelligence techniques, but I'm doing so by looking at a card game called "Collect It All". This game was developed by a CIA intelligence analyst named David Clopper, and was used to teach new recruits at the agency about collection techniques. Originally it was classified "Top Secret", but (after some redactions) it was released into the public domain.

The game can be played in one of two ways - cooperational or confrontational. In confrontational play, the players are different intelligence teams or groups competing with each other, while in coop play they are all on the same team.

There are several kinds of cards in the game, divided into two decks: the crisis deck and the collection deck.

The crisis deck includes a number of possible crises that the players have to avert by gathering enough intelligence based on the difficulty of the card representing that crisis. Every crisis card has a difficulty rating between 1 and 9, as well as symbols indicating which of the intelligence aspects (political, military, economic, and/or weapons) the crisis involves. Each crisis also has a point value between 1 and 3, indicated by dots in the top-right corner of the card - these are used in confrontational play, as the first play to resolve ten points of crises wins.

The crisis deck with a few of its cards.

The collection deck has three kinds of cards: technique cards (divided into HUMINT, GEOINT, MASINT, SIGINT, and OSINT), "Reality Check" cards which can help or block a technique card, and "Resolution/Manager Challenge" cards - the resolution aspect of these cards is used in cooperative play to determine if a crisis was resolved successfully, and the manager challenge aspect can be used in an advanced form of confrontational play to force the player to explain how the technique actually applies. (These latter cards are removed for a simpler confrontational-play game.)

Reality Check cards can help or block a technique

Resolution/Manager Challenge cards

Basically, you use technique cards to gather information about a crisis, provided that a) the range of the technique is at least as high as the difficulty of the challenge, and b) the technique card matches at least one of the intelligence aspects of the crisis (political, military, economic, and/or weapons, as stated before). The difficulty of the crisis determines how many successful techniques are needed to defuse that crisis, so for a three-point crisis card you'll need to play three techniques that aren't countered by Reality Checks. If you play a technique on a crisis successfully, but it's not enough to defuse the crisis, then it stays "in play" until additional techniques are played to reach the challenge's difficulty. This means that, during confrontational play, another player could steal the crisis that you'd only partially solved on your turn.

A selection of technique cards

You can download the original (heavily-redacted) materials released by the CIA here (PDF, 104 pages), or there are vendors online that sell games based on it, such as my version which came from Techdirt and Diagetic Games. And if you want a peek at some of the other games the CIA has developed and used as teaching tools, this article is pretty interesting.