"Wargames are unrealistic realistic" Topic
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Last Hussar | 08 Jun 2014 3:14 a.m. PST |
I posit that we are too worried about "realism". We worry about how our Napoleonic lines manoeuvre. We worry about tank armour thickness. We worry about lots of minutiae that our 'real' counterparts wouldn't. If a Divisional commander orders his Napoleonic troops forward he tells his brigadiers what he wants. The battalion commanders take care of their formation. A tank squadron commander has 12-16 tanks to worry about. He doesn't care about armour thickness for a particular facing. I know there are reasons for being a bit more involved – games typically represent 2 levels down, and mechanics give you something to do – real C/O's have their hands full coordinating 4 units. But do we need the level of detail we often demand? Are they not just getting in the way of actually playing the game. If I shoot at a tank (as a Company C/O) what I need to know is 'Is it dead or still effective' Not 'speed reduced by 1 inch turn' – that just creates book keeping complications. Likewise I have been toying with ideas where a section is 'effective' or 'broken' (with a 'pinned' for temporary non effective. In their introduction to the British Army 1956 rules, used by the army for training, Martin Rapier and John Curry note the cursory nature of combat, and that terrain is 'good' or 'bad', but doesn't affect lethality of combat. Admittedly these are high level rules, but it shows that professionals concentrate on plans and outcomes, not the mechanics. There are games when 'Armour thickness at 60' to enemy' is relevant, where you are tank commander, or maybe a platoon, but most games go for size – we want the sweep, even for low level games. |
Last Hussar | 08 Jun 2014 3:27 a.m. PST |
(Internet problems when posting) |
etotheipi | 08 Jun 2014 4:26 a.m. PST |
Once more unto the breach, dear friends
A discussion of the type and volume of details in a wargame is meaningless in the absence of a statement of the intent of the wargame. The OP addresses that in parts
British Army 1956 rules, used by the army for training There are games when But answers to questions like "Do we need X?" really depend on what we are trying to do in the first place. Assuming, as miniature tabletop gamers, we are trying to provide a certain experience to players (as opposed to conducting doctrinal experiments, operations research analysis, or a myriad of other things), I think it is reasonable to decide what the pertinent aspects of that experience are, and ponder them a bit. Here are some aspects that I consider when writing: * How serious should the players feel? * What type of decision process should work well? * Which data (states of entities on the board) should drive those decisions? * What are the important player views of the battlefield? * How active are players in their own decisions (randomness)? * How active are players in other's decisions (collaboration/opposition)? * What is the standard for level of effort before the game? I generally don't address those in great detail (hey
a great meta-question, how much detail should go into specifying the bounding factors for detail in a wargame?), but do spend a lot of effort on the scope of the answers. Of course, there are other questions and some of these may not matter. Don't know if this navel-gazing would help anyone else, but it does help me frame my thoughts before the start. |
jwebster | 08 Jun 2014 12:13 p.m. PST |
I have been thinking along these lines Rules can be "bottom up" or "top down" – too many years spent as Computer Programmer/Engineer Bottom up rules create mechanics for specific actions that we know about – here is where armour thickness comes up. Top down rules focus on modelling the outcome of troop interaction So in my mind, what actually counts is how much fun the game is. e(pi) points are exactly on – it isn't the amount of detail that is important, it is how it fits the overall design john |
McLaddie | 08 Jun 2014 9:03 p.m. PST |
If a Divisional commander orders his Napoleonic troops forward he tells his brigadiers what he wants. The battalion commanders take care of their formation. What leads you to this conclusion? And 'take care of their formation' mean? Are you saying that the Division commander doesn't tell his brigadiers what he wants in the way of battalion formations? But do we need the level of detail we often demand? Are they not just getting in the way of actually playing the game. If I shoot at a tank (as a Company C/O) what I need to know is 'Is it dead or still effective' Not 'speed reduced by 1 inch turn' – that just creates book keeping complications. I guess that would depend on who 'we' are and the scope of the game. It does presuppose the designer/gamer knows what level of detail is 'realistic' and pertinent for the targeted level of command. I will agree that too often the detail is inappropriate, the idea being the more detail, the more 'realism.' Bad simulation design. And 'realism' has been tossed around without any real meaning when it comes to wargame design. Jim Dunnigan wrote in his Magna Opus back in the 1970s [and updated several times] that "wargames are realistic and some are very realistic" but never once does he explain what that means or how a wargame is 'realistic.' In their introduction to the British Army 1956 rules, used by the army for training, Martin Rapier and John Curry note the cursory nature of combat, and that terrain is 'good' or 'bad', but doesn't affect lethality of combat. ? Hmmm. terrain doesn't affect the how lethal the resultant combat is? So an eye for terrain isn't necessary? A simulation is effective when it portrays combat/history effectively, not by how much. |
TelesticWarrior | 09 Jun 2014 2:56 a.m. PST |
We worry about lots of minutiae that our 'real' counterparts wouldn't. If a Divisional commander orders his Napoleonic troops forward he tells his brigadiers what he wants. The battalion commanders take care of their formation. A tank squadron commander has 12-16 tanks to worry about. He doesn't care about armour thickness for a particular facing. Well, yes and no. A real tank commander would not be thinking about armour thickness in battle, because that consideration has already been adressed by the designers/makers of the Tanks. Similarly, whilst a gamer should not be worried about such things during a wargame, he SHOULD already have thought about such things during the game design stage. The type of weaponry that can/or cant pierce the tank should already be written into the code of a good game so that the gamers can concentrate on having a good time during the battle. For most gamers, having a good time largely depends on having fairly realistic parameters as the under-lying frame-work, and then making their tactical decisions based on those parameters. |
The Traveling Turk | 09 Jun 2014 1:19 p.m. PST |
I realized two things more than a decade ago. 1) That 95% of these discussions about war-game realism are really discussions about the relative merits of Process vs. Outcome. One guy thinks that a game is "unrealistic" unless it has a step or process for every part of a particular kind of combat narrative that he likes, so that he can game his way through it, step by step. Thus you get the games like Tobruk in which you keep track of tank shells, and you load the gun in the Gun-Loading Step, and aim the gun in the Aiming Step, and roll to spot the target, and roll to see where the shell hits, and roll to see if it penetrates, and roll to see what the effect is, and roll to check the crew's morale, and
. Meanwhile for another guy, it's perfectly fine to roll a d6, and hit on a roll of 5+. Bang, you killed the enemy tank. There was a thread on TMP last year in which a person was searching for his idea of the perfect Napoleonics rules. He listed various criteria, one of which was that rules must include "a real artillery opportunity fire rule." Now, I don't know if one can even make an historical case for "opportunity fire" in Napoleonic artillery, but unless the game had that step and process in its sequence, then it wasn't "realistic" for him. If you made the case to him that there was really no such thing as "opportunity fire" with cannons in 1800, I doubt that any amount of evidence or documentation would change his opinion. Nor would he probably care what the game designer's "intent" was. Like many (most?) gamers, he just wants to play through the sorts of activities that he wants to play through. Telling him it's not realistic or not necessary given the designer's intent, is beside the point. So in other words, to use your example: the player who wants to play through those steps of considering armor thickness and angle of penetration and type of shell, and so on
wants to do it. He just likes that stuff. He'll use the word "Realistic" to justify why he likes it, but that's not really what matters. What matters is that he just likes that stuff. 2. That gamers are rarely consistent or even logical with regard to where they place emphasis on which bits need to be realistic, and which bits can be total fiction.
Consider all of those "historical" games that let you build armies and then fight against your friend's army. They place great emphasis on getting these fictional historical armies "right." You are forbidden from including Bavarians in your French Peninsular army, for example (since no Bavarians were sent to the Peninsula.) You can't have an aggressive Austrian general, since the Austrian generals were notoriously cautious. You must choose between a Peninsular British army and a Hundred Days British army, since their structures were so different. And don't even think about having more than one Cuirassier brigade for your 1813 Prussians, since they only fielded four regiments. Then, after the game has devoted dozens of pages of rules to strait-jacketing you into choosing only those options that are historically defensible
you're free at last to take your 1813 Prussian army down to the club and fight against your friend's Ottoman army. It is one of the many strange examples of cognitive dissonance in historical wargaming: we all agree that you should not have more of Unit X than actually existed historically
yet you are free to fight against Opponent Y, in a match-up that never happened, and probably could never have happened. There was a thread about my game Longstreet a couple of months ago, in which a guy was showing photos of his game, and some jerk was giving him a hard time because his miniature fences were wrong. I'm not kidding: this guy was lecturing him about the freakin fences in his terrain. Did it matter that this was a fictional battle that never happened, between two armies that never existed? No, he apparently didn't care about that at all. He could wrap his mind around the total fiction of the armies and the battle and the outcome
but the fences need to be right, or it's not "realistic!" |
Zephyr1 | 09 Jun 2014 2:42 p.m. PST |
"There was a thread on TMP last year in which a person was searching for his idea of the perfect Napoleonics rules. He listed various criteria, one of which was that rules must include "a real artillery opportunity fire rule." Now, I don't know if one can even make an historical case for "opportunity fire" in Napoleonic artillery, but unless the game had that step and process in its sequence, then it wasn't "realistic" for him. " IIRC, the commander of some British artillery at Waterloo had Napoleon in his sights and asked Wellington if he could/should fire, but Wellington said No, that wouldn't be sporting. So yes, I'd say they "opportunity fire" back then, even if not always used
. ;-) |
McLaddie | 09 Jun 2014 8:57 p.m. PST |
1) That 95% of these discussions about war-game realism are really discussions about the relative merits of Process vs. Outcome. That's because 1. no one in our small hobby has developed a concrete, practical game design meaning for the term 'realism', and 2. that is the really limited extent of the conversations, Process vs Outcome, as though they were separate issues. The heart of the design challenges and realism aren't even addressed by that strange dichotomy. 2. That gamers are rarely consistent or even logical with regard to where they place emphasis on which bits need to be realistic, and which bits can be total fiction. That's to be expected when 1. realism is such a vague notion in design and play so, 2. it all devolves to personal 'feelings', something most often found at the opposite end of the spectrum from consistency and logic. Wouldn't you agree? so, why be surprised when
here was a thread about my game Longstreet a couple of months ago, in which a guy was showing photos of his game, and some jerk was giving him a hard time because his miniature fences were wrong. The jerk felt that realism was in the fences. What, he can't have that feeling? It's less logical or reasonable than having unhistorical fences in a historical wargame? Or should he then be lectured about the right to each his own? some cognitive dissonance there too
It is one of the many strange examples of cognitive dissonance in historical wargaming: we all agree that you should not have more of Unit X than actually existed historically
yet you are free to fight against Opponent Y, in a match-up that never happened, and probably could never have happened. It is only strange and cognitively dissonant if you believe there is some general, widely-accepted template for the logical and reasonable when it comes to historical recreation and 'realism'. Otherwise, it is all personal feelings and one approach is as reasonable as any other. Sound familiar? So, do you have some idea of a cognitively coherent game approach to fun and make-believe that we all share, could share, should share? |
etotheipi | 10 Jun 2014 2:39 a.m. PST |
So, do you have some idea of a cognitively coherent game approach to fun and make-believe that we all share, could share, should share? Not here. My approach has been to declare, up front, what the game was about, and to explicitly try to cover the major common things what it wasn't about. And yet, I still receive the occasional, "This game is worthless because it doesn't do this thing." I think this approach is human nature because it is safe for your ego to assert yourself through facts, which really can't be argued or criticized (if they are facts). It is not so safe to assert that the standards that make those facts relevant are based on your opinions, which are vulnerable. |
(Phil Dutre) | 10 Jun 2014 5:29 a.m. PST |
To wargamers that complain about the lack of realism in ruleset x, y or z, I usually ask: "Suppose we want to design a game that mimicks the challenges, decisions, the whatevers, of your current job. What do we need to do to make that game realistic?"
If the decision-making process of almost all jobs cannot be faithfully captured in a game, why would that suddenly be possible for the decision-making process of a battlefield commander? Wargaming was invented because men like to play with toy soldiers. We can be inspired by military history to provide our rules an aura of realism – and that is a good thing – but at the core, we are still playing with toy soldiers. Nothing more, nothing less. |
McLaddie | 10 Jun 2014 7:47 a.m. PST |
Wargaming was invented because men like to play with toy soldiers. We can be inspired by military history to provide our rules an aura of realism – and that is a good thing – but at the core, we are still playing with toy soldiers. Nothing more, nothing less. Actually, 1. That is not why wargaming was invented, though it is one reason wargames are played. 2. And take the toy soldiers away, and the thread question is still about the game system and design. The toys are just pretty markers.
Those are chess figures. I wouldn't say I am doing nothing more than playing with toys when I play a game of chess with them. If the decision-making process of almost all jobs cannot be faithfully captured in a game, why would that suddenly be possible for the decision-making process of a battlefield commander? Where did you hear that? Part of my career has been to 'game' the decision-making process of a number of complicated jobs in training people for the real world. I would have been out of work in a hurry if that were true. |
McLaddie | 10 Jun 2014 7:54 a.m. PST |
Not here. My approach has been to declare, up front, what the game was about, and to explicitly try to cover the major common things what it wasn't about.And yet, I still receive the occasional, "This game is worthless because it doesn't do this thing." I certainly agree with that approach. A design can only be judged on what it was designed to do, not what it wasn't meant to do in the first place. You don't criticize a Formula One design for not having enough trunk space. |
OSchmidt | 10 Jun 2014 10:24 a.m. PST |
Dear Last Hussar Ah-- you have grasped the basic inconsistency and fatal flaw in the game. Now you will be pilloried by everyone far and wide. Ten years ago I realized this and made my game which paid strict attention to the place where the player entered the game. In my 'Oh God! Anything but a six!" Rules, that position is as the commander of an army or the wing of an army (left, right, center) and therefore the only things he would deal with would be those questions and things that his real-life counterpart did. This you correctly delineated in your examples. The rest was completely thrown out.
So, all question of mounting, dismounting, limbering, unlimbering facing, formation, whether the sergeant has checked his section to make sure his men's flints were sharp, and all the other impedimentia that gamers love to make a fetish ov. If a general didn't order it, the player couldn't do it. Makes the rules wonderfully simple, with all the complexity at the right level and makes for a quick exciting game where we can have armies of 800 men or more (total on both sides) and get through the game in four hours. But your discovery will be hated for most gamers want to see themselves as a "diamond in the rough" as an undiscovered military genius, both at the Napoleon level and at the sergeant level and everywhere in between. They want the illusion that they can control EVERY little thing in the game, and therefore if they control it-- theyc an win Win WIN Win!!!!!!!!!! Seen it hundreds of times. "Why can't I break off the shot figures from my pikes and combine them into shooter squads and the pikes into phalanxes?! Answer "Because they didn't do that, from the scale fo the game the shot never ventured far from the pikes, that is, if there was cavalry about
" I'm commanding the 443rd SSMesskit Repair Battalion fo the Old, young, middle, over, under, around, and through Guard -- why don't I get a plus 25 to everything." |
(Phil Dutre) | 10 Jun 2014 12:25 p.m. PST |
1. That is not why wargaming was invented, though it is one reason wargames are played.
I assume we are talking about hobby wargaming? Granted, if we throw professional wargaming to train officers into the mix, we get a different beast. But that is not the context in which we discuss wargaming here. My apologies for the confusion. 2. And take the toy soldiers away, and the thread question is still about the game system and design. The toys are just pretty markers.
Yes, but miniature wargaming does survive exactly because of the toys. If system and design was the prime motivator, we would all have switched to computer wargaming by now. The toys and aesthetics do matter. Anyway, as much as I like miniature wargaming, I do think it is a suboptimal medium to represent "realism". Many discussions about realism in miniature wargaming are inherently constrained by the medium itself. Nothing much we can do about that. |
Repiqueone | 10 Jun 2014 12:40 p.m. PST |
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(Phil Dutre) | 10 Jun 2014 2:10 p.m. PST |
If the decision-making process of almost all jobs cannot be faithfully captured in a game, why would that suddenly be possible for the decision-making process of a battlefield commander? Where did you hear that? Part of my career has been to 'game' the decision-making process of a number of complicated jobs in training people for the real world. I would have been out of work in a hurry if that were true.
I might have been too quick in formulating my thoughts. I do agree that training games can be a valuable training tool when designed correctly. But – please correct me if I'm wrong – such games are usually designed to train aspects of jobs people are already involved in. In other words, they already know the context of their jobs, and are using training tools to become better at some aspect of their job. Is it really possible to train someone in becoming let's say a good general using only a miniature wargame when the only knowledge of the military that person has is through reading history books and watching movies? Also, "games" as used in training (business games,
) are very far removed from hobby boardgames and/or miniature wargames that are regularly discussed here. Yes, it's all called a game, but the purpose of these games is very different. Training games are not primarily designed to be a fun passtime, and hobby games are not primarily designed to train people in a particular skill useful for a profession. |
RDonBurn | 10 Jun 2014 3:15 p.m. PST |
Have you All forgotten that the hobby is Not about Real people--the divisional commander relays his orders to the brigadiers who pass them on to the company commandes to the platoons--this is real life--we use tin and plastic which neither moves nor reads nor thinks, therefore we must involve ourselves in the detail as the shots we fire, the damage caused, the movement, the formations are all abstracted in the worst possible way from reality--in reality, we would not roll dice to see what damage that artillery round caused--it would have happened in real life--we must invent a substitute to "show" the damage caused--the nice little cotton smoke and the hit markers--but the charts and dice must be consulted to determine the damage--and as to morale==well, in real life there's no morale chart--the troops will surrender on their own--where we must consult a table Reality in wargames is a huge oxymoron, that is, the ones that use the figures--those business games use real people who role play, as with the re-enactors, as with committee games with real people role playing--but the use of the figures, as primary, as the replacement for the real human beings, by itself voids the historical realism Indeed, the figures cannot change formation or frontage nce gljed to their bases--a usual WW2 infantry company would have a frontage of 100yds in the attack and 500 yds in defense, something that reenactors can do but figures not and those nice white Austrian uniforms do not go grey with powder after several volleys--the figures remain pristine--which applies also to WW2 So while I argue for hidden movement, limited intelligence, fewer encounter battles, more logistic factors, I radically assert that the games are fantasies because of the following piece of logic from Aristotle through Charles Doggson aka Lewis Carrol--If it was so it might be, if it were so it would be but as it isn't it's not ANY deviation from any historical event cannot be proven to be able to happen as it did not happen and thus all alternative histories or recreations of events are , well, Harry Turtledove nonsense. |
etotheipi | 10 Jun 2014 6:35 p.m. PST |
If system and design was the prime motivator, we would all have switched to computer wargaming by now. Being entirely formal systems (digital) computer games are more limited in those aspects than tabletop games. It is the same problem of perception that we have with detail in tabletop games. If your checkbook is not balanced, rewriting the transactions as one line per penny instead of one line per check will not fix the error, but rather create the illusion of more "detail". |
McLaddie | 10 Jun 2014 10:13 p.m. PST |
I might have been too quick in formulating my thoughts. I do agree that training games can be a valuable training tool when designed correctly. But – please correct me if I'm wrong – such games are usually designed to train aspects of jobs people are already involved in. In other words, they already know the context of their jobs, and are using training tools to become better at some aspect of their job. Phil: I understand. I think this is one area that really needs to be injected into hobby game design visa vie simulation design and player experience. What most folks appear to believe simulation games can and can't do is very confused and often just wrong. That and the fact that simulation technology hasn't been standing still since the 1980s. First off, you are describing coaching rather than training: knowing their job and simply learning to do it better. It is something that simulation games can do very well, but that isn't the only thing by a long shot. Many, many simulations are specifically designed to initiate and develop participant skills in tasks, jobs or challenges they haven't faced yet. It is far less expensive to train the participants in working in the new situation than having them learn by trial-and-error. War is certainly one of those situations. Having said that, some caveats; 1. There is no substitute for experience, but the closest thing we have is simulations and training. 2. Simulation training games can't create 'good' commanders. They can develop competent commanders, and with a lot of practice in a variety of simulations which can support a far more rapid creation of a good commander, business manager, teacher etc. There is a reason that Chrissy E. Lloyd started her career with one coach and six years into it had five. She certainly wasn't five times as bad at the peak of her career. The better she got, the more difficult it was to coach her to improvement. And the improvements became far less dramatic overall. 3. When you ask Is it really possible to train someone in becoming let's say a good general using only a miniature wargame when the only knowledge of the military that person has is through reading history books and watching movies?, that 'only' is the kicker. Can some one learn all the math and misc. knowledge they need to balance their checkbook from reading a book? Maybe. Did Napoleon learn all he needed to know about artillery from books and artillery school? He seems to have, considering his performance at Toulouse with no prior experience with war or sieges. So can *most* people learn all that is necessary to be a "good commander" from only a miniature wargame and history books? No. They can, however, learn a number of important skills and knowledge sets important to being an effective commander. Phil Sabin wrote a book called "Simulating War." He is a British professor training officers. He created a very simple game called "Block Busting", one of the games included in the book. In the book, Phil mentions that it was used in a training. At the end, the lead officer, a Col. Graham, stated that the game identified and challenged the participants with the same dynamics in Urban warfare he had experienced in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was that everything an officer needed to know about Urban warfare? Nope. Everything he needed to know about leading men in combat? Nope. It did develop tactical skills and strategies they would need in facing Urban warfare. Like Col. Graham, most officers leading newbies into battle in Iraq [both 1990 and 2003] said two things. 1. No soldier is fully prepared for their first engagement and 2. They were very glad that their troops had wargamed Urban combat. Effective simulations made a difference. Which means there was some 1:1 relationships between the simulation experience and the real thing. That is what simulations attempt to capture and do every day in a number of fields. That specific 1:1 relationship has to be designed into any effective training design, ANY simulation. Most all the hobby designers claim to have achieved that 1:1 relationship between some part of reality and their design. However, they are seldom ever specific enough to make it meaningful for the participants. Like the block busting wargame, the specific relationships have to be 1. clear for the participants for the simulation to work as a simulation for them [by guiding their pretending]. How? By providing the specific events, evidence, dynamics in the real world the design is recreating through artificial means. It isn't enough to say my design creates confusion and the fog of war by the chance draw of the cards. The specific history/evidence of that kind of chance and confusion used as the template has to be made overt. Most designers don't do that at all. They give 'design philosophy instead. That leaves gamers fussing over unhistorical fences and unrealistic realism because they don't know what specific history the game was supposed to offer in the first place. My professional opinion is that many wargame designers don't know either. Also, "games" as used in training (business games,
) are very far removed from hobby boardgames and/or miniature wargames that are regularly discussed here. While many in our hobby believe that, I am going to adamantly disagree with you there. It simply isn't true. Yes, it's all called a game, but the purpose of these games is very different. Training games are not primarily designed to be a fun pastime, and hobby games are not primarily designed to train people in a particular skill useful for a profession. Phil, do you know how many training designs become entertaining games? How many entertaining games are used by the military, business and education for training and learning? The mechanics are the same. The skills practiced are the same. The only difference is what the participants use the technology for. So von Riesswitz designs Kriegspiel for the SOLE purpose of training middle grade officers. He is surprised that they found it "entertaining." Two hundred years later gamers are still playing it for entertainment while most all wargames have very similar game components. How many SPI 1970s board games found their way into military training centers? How many wargame designers straddled both entertainment and military *serious* training during that time. Today, there are at least two computer game companies whose sole product line is taking Military training programs and re-packaging them as entertainment. The purpose of the simulation design, the technology doesn't dictate whether a participant will enjoy the experience of playing it. Different strokes for different folks. In my experience, simulation designers in entertainment, research and the military had a lot to teach me about designing training simulations for education and business. Simulation design is a technology whose purpose is to recreate, mimic, represent, act like aspects of the real world. WHY a particular designer wants to do this doesn't change how it can be done, what it must do to 'simulate': the technology. The same is true for game design. It is a technology. Just as miniature wargaming is a technology. That is a range of methods, terminology and skills needed and/or used to create a game. It doesn't matter if it is made for entertainment, training or research, it will still have the traits identifying is as a 'game' and the designer will use the same mechanic options and methods in creating it. Our hobby misses out on so much by believing that their mimiature wargames are 'very different.' Most of the seemingly unresolvable or deadend design issues like 'realism' or process vs outcome etc. are direct outcomes of that belief. |
etotheipi | 11 Jun 2014 1:49 p.m. PST |
[quotet]Simulation design is a technology whose purpose is to recreate, mimic, represent, act like aspects of the real world. Not real world, referent environment. That goes back to the purpose. The classic example is the Karate Kid. "Paint the fence" activities built the muscle memory the student needed without any parallel to the "real world" application. In fact, the lack of parallels to the real world was part of the effectiveness of the teaching strategy. The muscle memory built for the maneuvers was separated in the student's mind from the act of combat, thus allowing the philosophy of combat to be taught separately. The muscle memory for the moves was then not bound to any (false) world view of violence. Important when you want to mature the two things and bring them together. Which leads to the real important point. Simulations (wargames, computer assisted training, etc.) do not train people. Trainers train people. |
McLaddie | 11 Jun 2014 4:50 p.m. PST |
Which leads to the real important point. Simulations (wargames, computer assisted training, etc.) do not train people. Trainers train people. Trainers build simulations to train people. So
? It's semantics. Simulation participation is the training, just as the Karate Kid didn't need anyone there to paint the fence. The vast majority of simulations don't focus on muscle memory. Simulations are dynamic and programmed teaching strategies
among other things
engaging far more of the whole person. And there are a good many simulations where the participants learn the desired skills/information/dynamics in the simulation without trainer input during the process. Certainly simulations can and do work without a 'trainer' or guide present. |
McLaddie | 11 Jun 2014 5:12 p.m. PST |
ANY deviation from any historical event cannot be proven to be able to happen as it did not happen and thus all alternative histories or recreations of events are, well, Harry Turtledove nonsense. RDonBurn: You may think this is a situation unique to historical simulations, but it isn't. Most all venues, from research to business and engineering face similar challenges: Predicting deviations from past events that can not be proven at that time. Actually, Turtledove aside, predicting such deviations reliably are done all the time in both research and day-to-day applications. It nothing more than predicting future events based on past events [i.e. history]. Statistics are most often used establish the likelihood of an event occurring. What simulation designers have done is develop methodologies that CAN be proven to create reasonable predicting results in many behavioral arenas. When those methods have a proven high confidence rate, they can be used to identify "deviations from any historical event with equal confidence. It's done all the time, often with hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the simulation designer's ability to predict the results of things that have never existed before, or happened in the past and can't be proven to be correct until it's built or created. So, how often did the Napoleonic French infantry fight in line formation? What if the player decides that all French infantry in an army engagement will fight in line? [never done historically] Using those methods I mentioned, a simulation designer can have confidence in the answer
even though it never happened and can never be tested directly. Indirectly, the method for determining such things has been tested and proven extensively over several decades in many different arenas, where the available information has often been far smaller than found in history. I can understand if hobby designers don't want to bother, but that isn't the same as saying it can't be done. |
etotheipi | 11 Jun 2014 5:32 p.m. PST |
And there are a good many simulations where the participants learn the desired skills/information/dynamics in the simulation without trainer input during the process. Except, you just contradicted that
Trainers build simulations to train people So there is always trainer input. Trainers choose what to put in to a training technology and how to relate it to the material. {quote]the Karate Kid didn't need anyone there to paint the fence. No, but he needed someone there to tell him to paint the fence. And to tell him exactly how to paint it. And then he needed someone there to bring the lesson full circle. Otherwise, all Tom Sawyers victims would also be Karate masters, and would kick his ass for what he did. The vast majority of simulations don't focus on muscle memory. No lo contendre. The type of learning is completely irrelevant to the point. Picking muscle memory is just an accessible example from a source that most people are familiar with. If I had picked something obscure like Venus Flytrap teaching a kid about atomic structure to prove to him that he could learn (and should go back to high school), it would have taken several pages of text to set up and describe the scene. The transfer of learning in one context to another context is fundamental to human progress. Finding ways to present material so that students can (1) learn it easily, and (2) transfer it to another context. So
? It's semantics. Not even close to so. The type of simulation you are talking about (a formal system) is inherently meaningless, and devoid of semantic content. Semantics are only implied by the context that surrounds the simulation itself. We see this all the time when students loose the connection between the mechanism and what they are supposed to learn. We see it all the time in computer AI when a complex "brain" is shunted into a context the programmer didn't account for and it suddenly becomes "stupid". |
McLaddie | 11 Jun 2014 8:28 p.m. PST |
It is semantics to say simulations don't train people, trainers do. Not whether simulations have or don't have semantic content. It's like saying 'gamers don't play games, designers do'. The dynamics between the simulation and participants IS the learning experience, often devoid of trainer input other than the original design. As a trainer's tool, the simulation is teaching. We can kibbitz over how and where the designer is involved, but the simulation, if done right, will function as a teaching process without the trainer's input during that process. Certainly the trainer is the author and control when creating the simulation game design. Semantics are only implied by the context that surrounds the simulation itself.We see this all the time when students loose the connection between the mechanism and what they are supposed to learn. Uh, yeah. The 'context that surrounds the simulation' is whatever the simulation is supposed to be modeling. Without that information, the connection can never be effectively made. That is a real problem with hobby games too. [hence this thread question] You certainly have identified an important issue, but one of inadequate design and implementation causing that loss of connection rather than a simple semantics malfunction
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McLaddie | 11 Jun 2014 8:45 p.m. PST |
Phil wrote: Yes, but miniature wargaming does survive exactly because of the toys. If system and design was the prime motivator, we would all have switched to computer wargaming by now. The toys and aesthetics do matter. Phil: Sorry I didn't respond to this. Actually, miniature wargame rules and mechanics will always be different from computer wargaming. The two mediums offer different experiences, even though the basic simulations issues and even many mechanics are essentially the same, one with dice the other with software. I never said the toys or aesthetics don't matter, I said that if you take away the toys, the issues raised by the thread question is still relevant because it is about the game system and mechanics, not the toy markers, as important as they may be for the hobby. Anyway, as much as I like miniature wargaming, I do think it is a suboptimal medium to represent "realism". Many discussions about realism in miniature wargaming are inherently constrained by the medium itself. Nothing much we can do about that. EVERY medium is constrained when it comes to simulating reality. Ask a computer simulation designer what constraints they labor under modeling reality and be prepared for a long dissertation. The question is what things a table top game can simulate well and take advantage of those design benefits. Miniature wargaming is only sub-optimal if you are asking miniature wargaming to do something that medium isn't good at simulating. There is a reason that the military still uses miniatures in a number of its wargames, and it isn't the pretty toys. Miniature games provide simulation advantages a computer or even live wargame can't. |
etotheipi | 12 Jun 2014 6:37 a.m. PST |
We can kibbitz over how and where the designer is involved, but the simulation, if done right, will function as a teaching process without the trainer's input during that process. So, if I sent you a simulation of a Japanese Tea Ceremony, you would learn it by experiencing it? Most importantly, you would learn not just the "right" and "wrong" things to do by experiencing them, but also which environmental and contextual factors made certain actions "right" and "wrong" at different times? Realize in a real Tea Ceremony, you get pretty much no dialog or constructive feedback from the particpants. It's like saying 'gamers don't play games, designers do'. There's a big difference between those two use cases. In the training case, the training is selected and presented to the participants. In the leisure case, the participants choose the activity, independent from the provider. In training, how the simulation is executed is determined by the trainer. In leisure, which things to do, how to do them, which rules or effects to ignore are chosen by the participants. In training, an external standard defines success. In leisure, success is determined by the participants' standards (which are likely different particpant to participant). If you just allowed trainees to select things without guidance and execute them without feedback, they would certainly learn something, but not likely what they intended. Not to say that experiential learning is not possible; it's just not efficient. No one ever needed to learn to count, add, and subtract. Everyone in the world could discover these concepts on their own experientally, with not guidance from others on the experience. It would take as long as it took for each individual. Of course, some people wouldn't ever figure it out on their own (but could be instructed). And imagine how interesting it would be to communicate your concepts of couting to someone else who developed their own system. (I personally have found it amazing that any two cultures with different languages have been able to arrive at a (somewhat) common understanding.) |
McLaddie | 12 Jun 2014 8:39 a.m. PST |
So, if I sent you a simulation of a Japanese Tea Ceremony, you would learn it by experiencing it? Most importantly, you would learn not just the "right" and "wrong" things to do by experiencing them, but also which environmental and contextual factors made certain actions "right" and "wrong" at different times?Realize in a real Tea Ceremony, you get pretty much no dialog or constructive feedback from the particpants. I would say that would depend on how the simulation was designed
and how many simulations you used to do it. Then again, would a simulation be the best way to train that? I never said that simulations were the universal tool for all education. It's like saying 'gamers don't play games, designers do'. There's a big difference between those two use cases. In the training case, the training is selected and presented to the participants. In the leisure case, the participants choose the activity, independent from the provider. That might be a difference in why,/i> someone is involved, but the involvement--the process of play--is what is what I was speaking to. Simulations teach, entertain, train or enlighten through play, not through their direct interaction with the trainer/teacher/designer. In training, how the simulation is executed is determined by the trainer. In leisure, which things to do, how to do them, which rules or effects to ignore are chosen by the participants.In training, an external standard defines success. In leisure, success is determined by the participants' standards (which are likely different particpant to participant). If you just allowed trainees to select things without guidance and execute them without feedback, they would certainly learn something, but not likely what they intended. I don't agree with either premise. In a game design, whether for entertainment or education, the designer has specific experiential goals for the players. In both cases, the simulation elements are limited, the game play directed with very limiting rules for specific reasons, selected by the designer and incorporated in the design. And there are any number of simulations where the participants do select and ignore various aspects of the simulation. Actually, that is to be expected regardless, and those behaviors can be and often are incorporated into the simulation. Not to say that experiential learning is not possible; it's just not efficient.Everyone in the world could discover these concepts on their own experientally, with not guidance from others on the experience. Experiential learning can be far more efficient depending on the skills and knowledge to be learned. That is the value of simulations. And imagine how interesting it would be to communicate your concepts of couting to someone else who developed their own system. (I personally have found it amazing that any two cultures with different languages have been able to arrive at a (somewhat) common understanding.) I've had that experience in discussing simulation design across subjects, purposes and cultures. And it is possible because regardless of the goals, the task is similar: mimicking real world dynamics. |
etotheipi | 12 Jun 2014 9:00 a.m. PST |
I would say that would depend on how the simulation was designed Well, no. In many situations, the real world does not provide you insight and feedback on why things are right and wrong (and sometimes even whether things are right or wrong). This is essential for learning. The way you talk about "simulation", as a mimicking of real world processes, the learner would get no such feedback. If the training tool has an automated instructor avatar that provides that feedback, then: (1) that is not part of the simulation the way you define it (i.e., there is no instructor in the real world), (2) the content (what the avatar says) is a surrogate for the instructor, (3) the instructor has to tell the avatar what to say; it is just playback (even with AI behind it, it is just branching and sequeling playback). Experiential learning can be far more efficient depending on the skills and knowledge to be learned. That is the value of simulations. I think we are differing on the definition of "experiential learning". By EL, I am talking about free and unguided experience (whether real world or in a simulation). If I sit you down at a sim because I know where you are in your learning process and provide feedback afterwards, that would not be EL the way I am discussing it. If you just pick MOH off the shelf and play it because you have decided to learn about WWII, that would be EL. I've had that experience in discussing simulation design across subjects, purposes and cultures. And it is possible because regardless of the goals, the task is similar: mimicking real world dynamics.
I didn't say it wasn't possible. However, the base of common knowledge you are talking about is much larger than the one I was positing. I think this follows from the difference in definition of EL. I was talking about pure EL. |
OSchmidt | 12 Jun 2014 1:51 p.m. PST |
This is an interesting discussion but I am not convinced. My disbelief comes from my own job which is very much involved with simulation in a day to day basis. NOT creating simulations but using them in a real world environment. This, only one part of my job on a very low level is forecasting. That is forecasting the future sales of a product through past data, such data is 100% accurate. If you give my forecasting systems any series of data, the points of data varying only as the real sales of an item in the past. I can drop this into the hopper and depending on the data and the method give you FIVE different forecasts of what the sales will be depending on what the number of periods and points back you are using for your trend and deviation, the seasonality etc. For example, I won't go in and give you the background data, you don't need it, but the following prediction of the next 12 months of sales of Product X is taken as follows from my files. A simple least squares analysis 77 77 77 78 78 78 79 79 79 80 80 80 or a total of 942 will be sold in the next year. The data backing this up is 8 years of sales date. Or a more complex formula of exponential deviation with seasonality factor. 29 47 43 27 86 77 182 161 114 89 55 32 or a total of 942. Nice the one shows it as a simple trend which we can forecast in quarterly amounts and the other is a nice view of seasonality. Obviously the product is most in demand in July August and September, when he builds up his stock in the warehouse for this is A Christmas item that he ships to his various store locations starting in September.
Nice huh? Totally worthless. The customer is out of business and banged up shop last month. you will get NO orders from him this year. But the computer doesn't know that! Suppose on the other hand the customer is still in business, but you do not know that in three months he will suffer a catastrophic fire, or the president of the company embezzled the funds to cover his short calls in playing the market, or any of the other factors. Now remember, this is for whatever product you wish, after shave gift sets, electronic games, widgets, it is simply data from a transfer of objects and transactions of an economic kind which have no volition and will of their own. The after shave set has no mind of its own, no morale, no plans of its own, no ability of its own to avoid its own destruction, and therefore can be predicted (as I said granted it exists) with fair regularity. But this is quite impossible when the objects under study and analysis DO have plans of their own. When they have choices, morale, volition, emotions, fears and all the rest that is part and parcel of the daily experience of life. That is, the objects you are predicting may not want to act in the way you have assumed they will act. NOR do you have any way of adding to the simulation factors you have no way of knowing, like the company will go out of business, be burned up blown down, or taken over. Likewise if you are giving a flight simulator training session to a putative airline pilot landing at Kennedy airport, there is no way to put into the simulator that a mid-east terrorist is waiting in the marshes with a stinger. Traininng is good, simulators are good, exercises are good, but they have absolutely no more ability to predict the unknown or the unforeseen than the simple forecasting systems above. In fact they have less. This comes down to the crux of the post. Realism is impossible in any game or simulation, and therefore anyone who thinks they are predicting what will happen is merely applying his own prejudices and priorities to a situation and the methodology used has absolutely no relation to reality only to his prejudices and priorities. Now. We presently have 6,944 of the object above in our inventory because the President made a deal with the customer to build up our stock to get the order and sell it at a cheaper price and get more money, and ignored not only the demand forecasts, BUT ignored all the warnings that the customer was going out of business! Luckily for us the products were not shipped to their holding warehouses as was originally planned, where now that they are in receivership would have been sold at fire-sale prices and we would have gotten NOTHING as we were not the majority creditor in the bankruptcy. Total loss only $183,000 USD or so. For me it was all said by Von Moltke the elder who was not only a military theorist but a successful general who really made the first Blitzkrieg. "No play survives contact with the main force of the enemy by more than 15 minutes." and "Strategy is a system of expedients." |
etotheipi | 12 Jun 2014 3:04 p.m. PST |
But the computer doesn't know that! The computer doesn't know anything. It is a processor of formal systems and has no knowledge. It can only do what it is explicitly told to do. The fact that a least squares or expdev (modified) analysis can't predict that a customer is going out of business has nothing to do with the quality of the simulation or the nature of simulation itself. Totally worthless. Completely right. That leads directly to my point that it is not any property of the simulation itself that has value for any given use, but rather the choice of the person using the simulation that provides context. |
McLaddie | 12 Jun 2014 9:43 p.m. PST |
Well, no. In many situations, the real world does not provide you insight and feedback on why things are right and wrong (and sometimes even whether things are right or wrong). This is essential for learning. etotheipi: So in many situations in the real world, learning isn't possible? For the sake of argument, if that is true, your point is? The way you talk about "simulation", as a mimicking of real world processes, the learner would get no such feedback. With every decision, every action made, there are results in the real world [and wargames], expected and unexpected, which is the essence of feedback. Understanding can take a few seconds and an ‘aha!' or years of slow realization with many similar experiences. If the training tool has an automated instructor avatar that provides that feedback, then: (1) that is not part of the simulation the way you define it (i.e., there is no instructor in the real world), (2) the content (what the avatar says) is a surrogate for the instructor, (3) the instructor has to tell the avatar what to say; it is just playback (even with AI behind it, it is just branching and sequeling playback). The game, wargame or simulation system is all about providing conditions and ‘feedback' to each and every player decision. That is what simulations do. It is in essence an ‘automated environment', supposedly offering options and responding to decisions in a manner similar to the real world. The designer in creating the game is telling the ‘avatar' what to say! I think we are differing on the definition of "experiential learning". By EL, I am talking about free and unguided experience (whether real world or in a simulation).If I sit you down at a sim because I know where you are in your learning process and provide feedback afterwards, that would not be EL the way I am discussing it. If you just pick MOH off the shelf and play it because you have decided to learn about WWII, that would be EL. It's necessary to come to some agreement about terms when talking about technical design issues. I would say no, picking up MOH off the shelf is not free and unguided experience, regardless of what the player does. The entire system is nothing BUT a guided and less that ‘free' experience. It is purposely designed to be a guided experience. The player has to operate within that set of limits and decision directions simply to play the game. Now, a simulation can be an environment to explore and experiment in. That is one of it's advantages. That is true of any game. Players do it all the time. They charge a battery of guns with a battalion of infantry simply to see what happens, but what happens is within the decision-environment the designer created.
I didn't say it wasn't possible. However, the base of common knowledge you are talking about is much larger than the one I was positing. I think this follows from the difference in definition of EL. I was talking about pure EL. Experiential learning is always in context to something Free and unguided is simply the player's behavior within an environment, but the environment is neither. Players explore games ‘to see what happens' all the time, with ‘free and unguided play', but it is always 1. Within the limits and focus set by the designer's system and 2. For the purpose of learning that game environment. If you can see a way that isn't true for that player picking up MOH for a 'free and unguided' experience, I'm listening, because I don't see it myself. |
McLaddie | 12 Jun 2014 10:15 p.m. PST |
This is an interesting discussion but I am not convinced. My disbelief comes from my own job which is very much involved with simulation in a day to day basis. NOT creating simulations but using them in a real world environment. OSchmidt: We may not be talking about the same uses of simulations, but I'll go with it. Nice the one shows it as a simple trend which we can forecast in quarterly amounts and the other is a nice view of seasonality. Obviously the product is most in demand in July August and September, when he builds up his stock in the warehouse for this is A Christmas item that he ships to his various store locations starting in September. Nice huh?Totally worthless. The customer is out of business and banged up shop last month. you will get NO orders from him this year. But the computer doesn't know that! Suppose on the other hand the customer is still in business, but you do not know that in three months he will suffer a catastrophic fire, or the president of the company embezzled the funds to cover his short calls in playing the market, or any of the other factors. Now remember, this is for whatever product you wish, after shave gift sets, electronic games, widgets, it is simply data from a transfer of objects and transactions of an economic kind which have no volition and will of their own. The after shave set has no mind of its own, no morale, no plans of its own, no ability of its own to avoid its own destruction, and therefore can be predicted (as I said granted it exists) with fair regularity. ? Why are you blaming the simulation for not taking into account something that it obviously wasn't signed to predict? There are simulations that do predict such things. [As any insurance adjuster can tell you.]
But this is quite impossible when the objects under study and analysis DO have plans of their own. When they have choices, morale, volition, emotions, fears and all the rest that is part and parcel of the daily experience of life. That is, the objects you are predicting may not want to act in the way you have assumed they will act. NOR do you have any way of adding to the simulation factors you have no way of knowing, like the company will go out of business, be burned up blown down, or taken over. Has your company attempted to predict such things with simulations? Who told you that there is no way of adding such factors to a simulation? Likewise if you are giving a flight simulator training session to a putative airline pilot landing at Kennedy airport, there is no way to put into the simulator that a mid-east terrorist is waiting in the marshes with a stinger. ?Airlines do have simulators for just that kind of event as well as training in dealing with it to be then tested with simulators. Training is good, simulators are good, exercises are good, but they have absolutely no more ability to predict the unknown or the unforeseen than the simple forecasting systems above. In fact they have less. Really, less? How do you know that? What evidence do you have for that conclusion? This comes down to the crux of the post. Realism is impossible in any game or simulation, and therefore anyone who thinks they are predicting what will happen is merely applying his own prejudices and priorities to a situation and the methodology used has absolutely no relation to reality only to his prejudices and priorities. And you base this conclusion on? Simulations have design goals, and those that are used for prediction have specific things they predict. Regardless, they are 1. A system. 2. And as a system, it has very strict limits to what it can do, and certainly no more than what it was designed to do. If it was designed to predict how many clients will go out of business before the next supply cycle and fails, then it is a bad simulation. If it was never designed to deal with that issue, then it will always fail to predict your issue. 3. And as a system, it is garbage in, garbage out. It is totally dependent on the quality of the information it was designed around. When you say "NOR do you have any way of adding to the simulation factors you have no way of knowing, like the company will go out of business, be burned up blown down, or taken over." That is true in many respects. How can you recreate or mimic something you don't know anything about? However, simulation designers in a number of fields are doing just that right now. Just recently, astronomers couldn't figure out why neutron stars were slowing down at a particular rate. They had no explanation for it. They built a simulation and in running different parameters through it, they discovered the answer, an answer that they could test. Now. We presently have 6,944 of the object above in our inventory because the President made a deal with the customer to build up our stock to get the order and sell it at a cheaper price and get more money, and ignored not only the demand forecasts, BUT ignored all the warnings that the customer was going out of business! Luckily for us the products were not shipped to their holding warehouses as was originally planned, where now that they are in receivership would have been sold at fire-sale prices and we would have gotten NOTHING as we were not the majority creditor in the bankruptcy. Total loss only $183,000 USD USD or so. Glad to hear it turn out that way. It sounds like the simulation predicted what it was designed to and the simulation forecasts were ignored? That happens too. For me it was all said by Von Moltke the elder who was not only a military theorist but a successful general who really made the first Blitzkrieg. "No play survives contact with the main force of the enemy by more than 15 minutes." and "Strategy is a system of expedients." Oh boy did you miss his whole message. As a successful theorist and general, von Moltke: 1.Planned and planned and planned. 2.Was a great advocate of wargames/simulations in training and used them often for a variety of purposes. 3.Emphasized the ‘System' in "strategy is a system of expedients" far more than he did ‘expedients' both in his theories and in the field. 4.Felt that wargames did teach the relationship between planning and necessary expedients. So, in the end, did von Moltke toss out his strategic plan in 1870 and do something else, or did he follow it through to success in the most expeditious manner possible? I can't think of a better training platform than a simulation for ‘teaching' the relationship between the necessity for following a plan and dealing with chance and the unexpected, using whatever is expedient to achieve them. That is true for war according to Moltke, and I have found it true for business and a number of other enterprises including education. |
etotheipi | 13 Jun 2014 4:34 a.m. PST |
So in many situations in the real world, learning isn't possible? For the sake of argument, if that is true, your point is? I never said it was impossible. I said it was inefficient and prone to error. If it were more efficient and less prone to error than guided direction, we would have no schools because everyone would become an expert faster without them. Understanding can take a few seconds and an ‘aha!' or years of slow realization with many similar experiences. It's almost never 'aha'! See above. The designer in creating the game is telling the ‘avatar' what to say! My point at the beginning of the sentence is that there is no instructor in the real world process, so the avatar is not part of the "simulation" – i.e., the recreation of the way things are in the real world. By providing that type of feedback, you are no longer providing a simulation, the way you define it, you are providing direct instruction. It really doesn't matter whether or not that instruction is live of Memorex – it still is a required additional stimulus above that in the simulation (again, the way you define it, faithful replication of some aspects of the real world). The entire system is nothing BUT a guided and less that ‘free' experience. It is purposely designed to be a guided experience. The player has to operate within that set of limits and decision directions simply to play the game. This goes against your assertion that learning takes place in the interaction of the trainee and the simulation. I completely agree that the simulation itself is bounded and deterministic (even "random" bits are only a finite number of Markov paths), but the trainee is not. If everybody experienced the stimulus the same way, there would be no variability between in learning rates and comprehension. They charge a battery of guns with a battalion of infantry simply to see what happens, but what happens is within the decision-environment the designer created. That is a great example to contradict the assertion in this sentence. The player has to operate within that set of limits and decision directions simply to play the game. There is a difference between the input space provided by the simulation (which is fixed and finite for a computer), and the decision space of the participant. I could charge the artillery to discover what happens. I also could charge the battery because I know what is going to happen and I want to watch it. (This happens in kids playing video games with frightening regularity.) Or, I could charge the artillery batter because I wasn't paying attention to the surroundings and didn't realize it was there. The simulation designer provides me the input space and the algorithms of the dynamics to evaluate my choices. But he has no impact on how I arrive at the decision to provide those inputs. Certainly in some simulations, there might be an entity to provide you guidance on things to consider in your decisions (like an NCO in the above scenario), but that is not a universal. And there certainly is no simulation with an entity in it to cover all the possible guidance I might need. That would contradict your assertion (that I agree with and wish more people understood) that there is nothing in a simulation but what is put into it. In a real military training simulation, there would be an instructor to say something like, "You see, sir, you got so wrapped up in what your right flank was doing that you ordered your left flank to charge into an artillery barrage." We do this because, if the person made the error, it is somewhat unlikely (not impossible) that just providing real world feedback would necessarily explain to them what they did wrong. This leads to one of my great military simulation anecdotes. I was running a performance evaluation simulation. The commander had the situation in hand, engaged the threat outside the threat's capability envelope and took it out. After it was killed and the kill was verified through feedback in the simulation, the dead threat launched an attack at him and took him out. Utterly impossible. The commander got ticked off. Complained about the lack of fidelity in the simulation, and decided to walk out of the building (certainly not a response the simulation was programmed to handle! me, either). And he was completely right. There was no possible way the threat he had taken out could have attacked him at the point when it did. Which is good, because it didn't. There was another threat that he didn't detect because of the geometry of the problem. It was perfectly realistic for him not to have detected the threat, and perfectly realistic for the second threat to have provided the counterfire. Nobody in the simulation design "built in" that specific geometry for that situation. It was, however, legitimately inside the possible state space. Also nobody planned for that specific situation and that specific decision process. Not only was there discovery learning on the part of the participant, but also on the part of the simulation designers. We actually developed new tactical guidance based on this possibility. |
OSchmidt | 13 Jun 2014 5:40 a.m. PST |
No, we are talking about the same thing. Business simulations are sold all the time. I remember in one simulation it was billed with the promo that said about how difficult things like 911 would be to the forecasting and production of a company, and how if you use "We are truly Gog-like in our forecasting ability" system you would avoid that. When the salesmen showed up I went right for the jugular and said "So you predicted 9/11 did you? Why didn't you tell the government? They deumurred and said that wasn'twhat they were saying, and I quoted them their literature that, that was exactly what they said. They then admitted it was a lie for purely promotional reasons. "So we are starting this business relationship out on a tissue of lies." I then proceeded to tear their system apart in front of their own eyes. The anecdote is indicative. Much the same as how we hired one marketing research company to do some long term predictions and simulations on the market. They were glowingly confident till I said. "So you are so confident of your predictions that you will be willing to assume financial responsibility for any shortfall in your predictions?" Immediately the "Hammennahammenahammena's" began. Hype is hype and people who advocate such simulations as predictors of the future are charlatans and quaks and con men. That's why the "you bet your life" imposed on the simulators soon reveals how much of a group of charlatans they are. They are worse, they won't put their bacon on the line, but they expect the grunt and the average guy to play "you bet your life" with theirs. All simulators who try and sell their package as I have found in my experience, in government and out, do the same thing. They first establish what the prejudices and opinions of the guy who writes the check are and confirms their project to those. No, my friend it is YOU who don't know Moltke. He changed his plans all the time and he said also "No person who wins in war wins with the plan he started out with." Second, I simply refer you to history. We in America have been swallowing this swill from the think-tanks and simulators, the predictors and the prophets since 1945 and we have lost every war since then. Even the one shining example the two Iraq wars were won EXACTLY because as Moltke said, we wound up with different plans, and NONE of their simulations worked, as we are seeing in brutal fashion right now. Simulation and such has a use ONLY in training, but that use comes ONLY in inculcuating in a possible future combatant of the discipline and mind-set. This training is there for ONLY one thing. So that when the bullets fly and you are completely surprised by events the discipline, training, unit cohesion and pure bloody habit triumph in a completely unforeseen situation. That means your unit will have a better chance of surviving and recovering and holding on and eventually coming back and winning. That winning is NOT done by simulation but by the tried and true methods we have established over the years. Blow it up, burn it down, and machine gun the survivors, innocent or guilty. What Moltke said in essence can be condensed to three words "Opportunism, Flexibilty, Ruthlessness." As I said, we've been basing everything from business strategy to war to dating on simulations and the egg-heads since 1945 and we've been failing ever since. It's like engineering. I'm constantly called into meetings where Engineering is getting ready to debut a new product. They are all happy tongue with the bubbling news of their success. I walk into the Engineering lab and say "OK show me." It never works, what was working according to the happy tongues ten minutes before suddenly is dead as a doornail now. When I ask them I get the same "deer in the headlights" look I got from the marketing research people "I was working before!" with a plaintive wail that would do credit to the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Four hours are spent trying to coax the damn thing into life, but alas-- "Po' Jud is dead! dead! dead! dead!" Next meeting, once again there has been a glorious resurrection! Immediately followed by a visit of Otto to Engineering and GUESSS WHAT!!!! "Gee wizzers willikers, it was just working a minute ago." I've now taken to insulting them to their faces and saying "It's OK it must be my negative aura!" Anyone who believes a simulation will predict real life will get everything he deserves. And finally. the guy who prevented the stuff from getting shipped to the customer and saved losing the money was fired for not believing the data, which was proved to be fals. |
The Traveling Turk | 13 Jun 2014 8:40 a.m. PST |
To move this back to the subject of wargames and realism for a moment: I was thinking this morning about Napoleonic games from the 1990s. Back then it was fashionable to rate units on a linear scale with lots of levels or gradations. I think that "Empire" at one point had something like 18 different levels of troop quality. Those games were usually played with percentile dice, you could say that an "Elite" unit had a 72% chance of doing something, but a "Grenadier" unit had a 75% chance of doing it. All of the tables required to show this, all of the shades and differences of quality
all of this was very seriously handled, and advocated as necessary for "simulation" and "realism." Indeed, games that didn't have as many shades/levels of troop quality were usually pooh-poohed as being ahistorical or overly simplistic, or not serious simulations. I was always a bit curious as to what sort of "data" went into those decisions and how on earth it could possibly result in such precise numbers. Since a game unit represents hundreds, in some cases thousands, of men, and no two units had the same combat history
and of course a unit didn't even have the same men from battle to battle, since some men were killed or wounded or deserted, and others replaced them, and so on. For example, what sort of hard data would you use to compare the 2nd BN, 1st Regt. of the Chasseurs à Pied of the Old Guard to, idunno, let's say one of the Russian Guard infantry battalions in 1813? As gamers we're interested in how the units performed in combat, yet: - Their combat experiences are quite limited, and each one is a unique and distinct event. - The records of those experiences are incomplete, often with a very limited perspective, and in many cases are suspect regarding accuracy. - Those combat experiences might have nothing to do with the activity in the game that you want to rate the unit for. (For example, perhaps you want to know what the % chance is, for the Russian Guard BN to form squares and defeat a French cavalry charge
yet that unit never did actually get charged by French cavalry in 1813.) And here we're only talking about a handful of very famous units that got written-about. The huge majority of actions that most units engaged in, probably went totally un-recorded, and certainly not minutely analyzed. -- So even if you take the huge leap to believe that you could really create some sort of realistic simulation of human behavior from events 200 years ago, of which you have no personal experience or even complete data for
how on earth did you decide, specifically, that the Russians get a 72%, while the French get a 75%? That's a number, so
where did it come from? "Fudge" was a sort of Cardinal Sin back in those days, but the truth was: those guys in the 1990s were just pulling these numbers out of their rectums and dressing them up in fancy "Simulation" clothing, and treating them as holy scripture. --- In the past 20 years or so, I think that gamers have gotten much more laid-back about data and numbers and no longer see games as some sort of analytical tool. The use of dice, after all, makes a mockery of any attempt to nail down these game units to any sort of hard data derived from historical record. Rolling a die for a combat outcome is an admission that the outcome can't be known in advance. And if it can't be known – if you admit that the final outcome is unknowable – then it's much easier to say that a French infantry BN and a Bavarian infantry BN are "more or less the same" in game terms, because there's still that die roll. But for the guy who really must believe that the French should be 4.275% better than the Bavarians at Doing X, he can still play games that do that. I have no idea where he's getting that information from (and he probably doesn't either), but that won't matter to him. That's the reality that he needs, for whatever reason, in order to be satisfied with the game. |
etotheipi | 13 Jun 2014 9:59 a.m. PST |
- Their combat experiences are quite limited, and each one is a unique and distinct event. This is the key factor in my experience. Being able to identify and implement the things that have value for your applications and to weed out the ones that don't is the silver bullet for building your wargame. Often the guy who was really there believes everything he experienced has applicability to every future situation just because his experience is real. I certainly believed that until I had a return tour to the same combat zone in the mid 90's and realized that many of my past experiences were no longer relevant. Interestingly, this also led me to the realization that some other, seemingly irrelevant, experiences I had in the interim were highly relevant. The use of dice, after all, makes a mockery of any attempt to nail down these game units to any sort of hard data derived from historical record. Rolling a die for a combat outcome is an admission that the outcome can't be known in advance. I think there is a middle ground between the extremes of "everything is completely unpredictable" and "everything can be nailed down from historical data". Even in complex multi-dimensional situations. For instance, in the championship playoffs for [insert your fave activity here], there are definite favorites and definite underdogs. And even though underdogs can and do win the championship, it is infrequent (low probability, and low variability). On the other hand, there is a lot of uncertainty in the favorites will fare. And the more specific you want to be about the performance, the more uncertainty you will find. This is the principle that allows gambling on competitive events to work as a profit making business. You can get really good odds that an underdog will sweep the championships because the bookmakers know they will be walking away with your money many years in a row. |
The Traveling Turk | 13 Jun 2014 11:40 a.m. PST |
" in the championship playoffs for [insert your fave activity here], there are definite favorites and definite underdogs. And even though underdogs can and do win the championship, it is infrequent (low probability, and low variability)." Sure, but that's a very different thing from saying that the San Antonio Apocalypse has an exactly 8.7% greater chance of winning the championship than the Knoxville Knuckledraggers do. You suspect, based on watching those teams over the past few months, that San Antonio is favored to win.* But that's very different from being able to say definitively – with a number – exactly how much better San Antonio is. And yet that's precisely what wargames have to do, because we resolve everything with numbers. One of my favorite examples comes from 20th century naval games. You get all these statistics for ships: their chance of hitting at X, Y, and Z ranges
the effectiveness of their shells if they happen to strike Opponent 1, or Opponent 2, and so on. Often, those numbers are provided for ships that never fought against each other. For example: What are the "correct" odds for the Yamato hitting the Missouri, at dusk, at 19,000 yards, if the former is steaming 18 knots on a course of ABC, and the latter is steaming 15 knots on a course of ZYX, behind a smokescreen
. Games must be able to produce those sorts of numbers, constantly, or else there's no game. Yet there's no earthly way that anybody could claim "accurate" data input for those sorts of situations. I've spent some considerable time reading the gunnery trial results done by the USN in the 1930s, and those guys worked very hard to set up an unchanging scenario for each ship, in order to test results in some apples-to-apples way. Not to bore you with the details, but they set up a towed target that always sailed at a fixed speed and course, and always engaged at a specific range, and in daylight, and so on. In other words, the only thing we have that even approximates "data" on American battleship gunnery was based on a scenario that would never be replicated in actual combat. So: if I say that the Yamato should hit the Missouri on a roll of 16+ on a d20
and you say, No, it should be a roll of 9+ on 2d6
.
which one of us is correct?** And how do we know? As far as a game is concerned, either/neither of us could be correct, right? But regardless, we probably don't want the Yamato to hit anybody until it gets closer, because otherwise the game will end too quickly, and that won't be any fun. So we'll put the Yamato's chances considerably lower
there, that's better. Now the game works better with different ship-type matches and people can play for at least an hour before anybody sinks. -- * I'm not talking about the "odds" based upon betting, which are done after-the-fact and are simply an aggregate of other people's opinions. ** And then let's not even get into the next leap of magical thinking, in which we consider the length of the game-turn. We're calculating the chance of one hit, but what are the odds when the turn represents 10 minutes of real time, during which the ship fires several salvoes, and the enemy is shooting back? |
McLaddie | 13 Jun 2014 9:02 p.m. PST |
No, we are talking about the same thing. Business simulations are sold all the time. I remember in one simulation it was billed with the promo that said about how difficult things like 911 would be to the forecasting and production of a company, and how if you use "We are truly Gog-like in our forecasting ability" system you would avoid that.When the salesmen showed up I went right for the jugular and said "So you predicted 9/11 did you? Why didn't you tell the government? They deumurred and said that wasn'twhat they were saying, and I quoted them their literature that, that was exactly what they said. They then admitted it was a lie for purely promotional reasons. "So we are starting this business relationship out on a tissue of lies." I then proceeded to tear their system apart in front of their own eyes. The anecdote is indicative. OSchmidt: It is indicative of several things. You really have had some crappy experiences and obviously feel strongly about them, but as you say, Hype is hype
And there are charlatans that will sell you anything, claiming things for their product it can never deliver just to sell it. Military contractors, car salesmen and wargame designers, as well as simulation salesmen. I know of two wargame designers specifically who admit to the hype in one fashion or another. One designed a popular Napoleonic wargame with no intention of designing a ‘simulation,' but admits the publishers called it a simulation and rewrote the designer's notes to say so because it sold games. Another prominent designer has stated publically in many, many places that simulating on the tabletop is impossible, but none-the-less, he claims that players can simulate Napoleonic battles with his rules. Hype is hype. However, we don't then conclude that all military contracts are frauds, cars never work and all wargame designers are charlatans as you do simulation designers [lumping them together with those that sell them
and if you know anything about sales, and I am sure you do, you know that sales people don't necessarily understand or even care about the specifics the way the people who actually creating the product.] Yet, you conclude based on your run-ins with some sales people, or the designers themselves [?] that
people who advocate such simulations as predictors of the future are charlatans and quaks and con men. [This includes not only a good number of scientists but a large number of simulation designers who do predict aspects of the future quite successfully. To name a very, very few: 1. That Spirit and Opportunity would survive the Martian environment for 90 days and Curiosity would survive a year. Nothing has ‘survived' a year on Mars before. 2. Predicted successfully the paths a panicked crowd will follow in a soccer stadium and where the eddies and choke points will be, depending on where the panic starts even before the stadium was built. 3. Whether a multi-million dollar production process will work, though nothing like it has ever been attempted before and millions are riding on its success. 4. Predicting how galaxies will react when they collide, though a great deal was not known about such dynamics, being millions of light-years away. 5. I could go on with business management, educational and training ‘predictions' that have been done successfully. Yet, the majority of the missions to Mars have failed, regardless of the simulations. One burned up in the Martian atmosphere because someone failed to translate MPH to Kilometers per hour. What, all scientists are charlatans? Like anything man-made, simulations aren't perfect. Unfortunately, unlike cars and wargames, few people have had much experience with working simulations, particularly when the technology is advancing at such a rapid pace and many sell them like fads. It is easier to hype something that the customer knows little about. So you have folks with ideas about simulations that simply aren't true like
"But that's very different from being able to say definitively – with a number –exactly how much better San Antonio is. And yet that's precisely what wargames have to do, because we resolve everything with numbers." It's wonky conclusions like that, peppered with absolutes such as ‘exactly' and ‘have to'
or "All" that get in the way of understanding how simulations work in any practical fashion. You said, "That's why the "you bet your life" imposed on the simulators soon reveals how much of a group of charlatans they are. They are worse, they won't put their bacon on the line, but they expect the grunt and the average guy to play "you bet your life" with theirs." I have always guaranteed my work, ‘betting my livelihood' on the results. However, I won't make that claim before 1. I knew the quality of the information I was being given to simulate and, 2. Exactly what results and goals the client had for that simulation. If someone demanded that I guarantee my work before knowing those two things, I'd refuse. It's amazing how much bad information, or downright hype [read smoke and mirrors about what is actually going on in the business or school district] I have been expected to use [remember garbage in, garbage out] and how hard it is for clients to articulate exactly what they want, particularly when they have chosen to use a simulation because it sounds good, or it's the latest thing, or the salesman promised the moon.
All simulators who try and sell their package as I have found in my experience, in government and out, do the same thing. They first establish what the prejudices and opinions of the guy who writes the check are and confirms their project to those. Were you speaking to the simulator, or a sales rep? Of course, too much selling of most things including wargames is "establish what the prejudices and opinions of the guy who writes the check are and confirms their project to those." Right? No, my friend it is YOU who don't know Moltke. He changed his plans all the time and he said also "No person who wins in war wins with the plan he started out with." An extended quote might help here: "Strategy is a system of expedients; it is more than a mere scholarly discipline. It is the translation of knowledge to practical life, the improvement of the original leading thought in accordance with continually changing situations." The essay On Strategy (1871), as translated in Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings (1993) by Daniel J. Hughes and Harry Bell, p. 124 Apart from his commentaries on his campaigns 1866 and 1870-1, this is what led me to my understanding of his thinking on the relationship of expediency and planning in war at the strategic and tactical level
and why he and his staff spent so much time planning. Oh, and von Moltke is the one who established the convention of ‘blue and red teams' in wargames. [blue being the color of the Prussian uniform] Second, I simply refer you to history. We in America have been swallowing this swill from the think-tanks and simulators, the predictors and the prophets since 1945 and we have lost every war since then. Even the one shining example the two Iraq wars were won EXACTLY because as Moltke said, we wound up with different plans, and NONE of their simulations worked, as we are seeing in brutal fashion right now. Actually, if you read the accounts, the simulations that did predict the outcome of Vietnam and the current Iraq war and Afghanistan war were simply ignored and the simulations that catered to "the prejudices and opinions of the guy who writes the check
" This is much the same thing the Japanese high command did when wargaming the Midway campaign. When the American team won using very much the same strategy the US later won with, they simply re-wrote the rules so the Japanese won. Simulation and such has a use ONLY in training, but that use comes ONLY in inculcuating in a possible future combatant of the discipline and mind-set. This training is there for ONLY one thing. So that when the bullets fly and you are completely surprised by events the discipline, training, unit cohesion and pure bloody habit triumph in a completely unforeseen situation. That means your unit will have a better chance of surviving and recovering and holding on and eventually coming back and winning. Military simulations do ‘train' units to deal with surprise and the unforeseen. "That winning is NOT done by simulation but by the tried and true methods we have established over the years. Blow it up, burn it down, and machine gun the survivors, innocent or guilty." And yet, military men have repeatedly stated they are glad that their troops had training with simulations before they went into combat. And if simulations only inculcated discipline and a mind-set, then the military would have learned that long about and that would be the only thing they would be used for. It isn't by a long-shot. So, the military is that stupid? What Moltke said in essence can be condensed to three words "Opportunism, Flexibilty, Ruthlessness."As I said, we've been basing everything from business strategy to war to dating on simulations and the egg-heads since 1945 and we've been failing ever since. Uh, like the Iraq war? I don't think so. And no, everything has never been based on simulations. It's a tool, nothing more. It can be used badly, over-sold and simply abused. That doesn't change the value and uses of the tool, what it can do. It's like engineering. I'm constantly called into meetings where Engineering is getting ready to debut a new product. They are all happy tongue with the bubbling news of their success. I walk into the Engineering lab and say "OK show me." It never works, what was working according to the happy tongues ten minutes before suddenly is dead as a doornail now. When I ask them I get the same "deer in the headlights" look I got from the marketing research people "I was working before!" with a plaintive wail that would do credit to the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Four hours are spent trying to coax the damn thing into life, but alas-- "Po' Jud is dead! dead! dead! dead!" I'm confused here. So all engineers are charlatans too? Who exactly aren't the happy tongues? Regardless, please, do keep the charlatans honest. |
McLaddie | 13 Jun 2014 9:35 p.m. PST |
I never said it was impossible. I said it was inefficient and prone to error. If it were more efficient and less prone to error than guided direction, we would have no schools because everyone would become an expert faster without them. etotheipi: There are a large number of folks that say direct instruction [or guided instruction is among the least efficient method of instruction/teaching. For instance, retention of what is learned: Overwhelming research shows:
Practice doing [which would include simulations] would seem a better method if you want students to remember what they are learning. [retention being a vital component to efficient learning.] Lecture or direct instruction would seem to be the least efficient--at least for retaining information. Each form of instruction has it's benefits and weaknesses. Direct instruction has been use for the last century and a half because it is administratively efficient and offers the least opportunities for student misbehavior [Educators in the 1880s and the factory model of education emphasized those benefits] My point at the beginning of the sentence is that there is no instructor in the real world process, so the avatar is not part of the "simulation" – i.e., the recreation of the way things are in the real world. By providing that type of feedback, you are no longer providing a simulation, the way you define it, you are providing direct instruction. It really doesn't matter whether or not that instruction is live of Memorex – it still is a required additional stimulus above that in the simulation (again, the way you define it, faithful replication of some aspects of the real world). From a simulation standpoint and your idea of direct instruction, an environment of any kind is an instructor, giving immediate feedback. Any free and unguided experiential learning experience will be guided and only free within the constraints of the environment itself. I can have a free and unguided learning experience behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler, but you better believe the will be all sorts of 'guides' in place and that 'free' experience will be a rather limiting trial-and-error exploration. Lots of feedback. And very dangerous. A simulation of the same thing with the same approach is a lot less dangerous, expensive and just as educational in many respects. There is a difference between the input space provided by the simulation (which is fixed and finite for a computer), and the decision space of the participant.I could charge the artillery to discover what happens. I also could charge the battery because I know what is going to happen and I want to watch it. (This happens in kids playing video games with frightening regularity.) Or, I could charge the artillery batter because I wasn't paying attention to the surroundings and didn't realize it was there. Yeah, and each of those is an exploration and experience of the simulation environment. And each and every one of those choices is within, focused on, and limited by the game design. The player is exploring the game environment to see how it ticks. That is a normal aspect of learning and 'play'. The simulation designer provides me the input space and the algorithms of the dynamics to evaluate my choices. But he has no impact on how I arrive at the decision to provide those inputs. By providing a set of specific dynamics [along with a lot of other things] the designer does have an impact on how a player arrives at his decisions. Total control? No, but if the teacher of direct instruction thinks he has any more impact, the evidence of the last thirty years is all against him. In a real military training simulation, there would be an instructor to say something like, "You see, sir, you got so wrapped up in what your right flank was doing that you ordered your left flank to charge into an artillery barrage." We do this because, if the person made the error, it is somewhat unlikely (not impossible) that just providing real world feedback would necessarily explain to them what they did wrong. That is called a debriefing in simulation lingo. And what is interesting is how often in dialogue, you don't have to do the 'direct instruction'
The participant in discussing comes to that realization himself, which is far more powerful and memorable than being told. But note, that is after the experience and in much more in the form of coaching [how do you improve your past performance] than any direct instruction [which isn't feedback either, but rather telling the student what to learn.] A wargamer, in learning the rules of the game, will explore the mechanics in a 'free and unguided' manner, but what they are learning is what the designer's game system does and doesn't do, what environmental dynamics it creates. In other words, leaning what the designer wants to provide and not provide the gamer in the way of a simulation, learning, gaming, and/or fun experience. Anything else the gamer brings to the table will be influenced and guided by that set of rules. It's unavoidable. That is what simulations and games do. You wrote a summary of what your Easter Front 1914 game offered players in the way of a simulated environment. And you detailed some of the things it didn't provide. My free and unguided leaning of that game system is going to be highly directed and guided by your rules and mechanics. Best Regards, Bill |
McLaddie | 13 Jun 2014 10:21 p.m. PST |
I've spent some considerable time reading the gunnery trial results done by the USN in the 1930s, and those guys worked very hard to set up an unchanging scenario for each ship, in order to test results in some apples-to-apples way. Not to bore you with the details, but they set up a towed target that always sailed at a fixed speed and course, and always engaged at a specific range, and in daylight, and so on. In other words, the only thing we have that even approximates "data" on American battleship gunnery was based on a scenario that would never be replicated in actual combat. And, of course, the Navy knew that then, so why did they do it? What did THEY do with the information generated? Wouldn't that be relevant? So: if I say that the Yamato should hit the Missouri on a roll of 16+ on a d20
and you say, No, it should be a roll of 9+ on 2d6
.
which one of us is correct?** And how do we know? Do you mean exactly with precise percentages? As far as a game is concerned, either/neither of us could be correct, right? But regardless, we probably don't want the Yamato to hit anybody until it gets closer, because otherwise the game will end too quickly, and that won't be any fun. I would think you'd have to answer the first question, 'how do you know' before you ask more questions based on not knowing. So we'll put the Yamato's chances considerably lower
there, that's better. Now the game works better with different ship-type matches and people can play for at least an hour before anybody sinks. Happy day. So how long did it take for the Yamato to sink? That duration could provide an hour's play
* I'm not talking about the "odds" based upon betting, which are done after-the-fact and are simply an aggregate of other people's opinions. But you are. You are talking about predicting the result on an aggregate of data [other people's opinion] about match-ups [and the players] of teams that have never met. Yet odds are given of who will win, and the odds-makers win the majority of the time. Their odds calculations are based on statistics, past performances of players and other teams, indirect evidence and host of other things. And they're numbers, quantified predictions, but of course wargame designers couldn't possibly use that kind of methodology in designing a wargame because "that's very different from being able to say definitively – with a number – exactly how much better San Antonio is. And yet that's precisely what wargames have to do, because we resolve everything with numbers. You've got a choice, you have to find an answer to "
which one of us is correct?** And how do we know?" Or you can't or don't want to do the work, then ANY answer will do. Fantasy. That wouldn't be a problem except the vast majority of wargame design discussions like this one involve what the game mechanics are designed to represent of real combat, real battle. Relative few discussions are simply about fun mechanics without reference to what history is represented. So either you find a meaningful answer to 'how do we know?', [like the odds makers, who bet money on 'knowing'] or you relegate most wargame design discussions to a phenomenal waste of time or worse, a rather small, esoteric offshoot of fantasy gaming. In that case any factors for the Yamato are as good as any others as long as it's fun. Think of all the history you don't have to read to design or play whatever you want as it has nothing to do with our game systems or play other than ship and unit designations. Personally, I play wargames their designers place in one or the other category [history and sheer fantasy] and am fine with both. What I have problems with are the designers [and designs] that claim to be doing one while actually doing the other, claiming to have answered the question [How do we know?] when they believe it can't be answered
or don't bother to try.
which one of us is correct?** And how do we know?As far as a game is concerned, either/neither of us could be correct, right? So, Sam. If you can't answer the question of which one is 'correct' and don't see a way to knowing that [as you have stated for a long time now] Why in heavens name are you bothering to read 'gunnery trial results done by the USN in the 1930s' or anything else for that matter??? It obviously doesn't give you any data you can use. Just design a fun game and stop wasting your time, which I am sure is as precious as mine. Best Regards, Bill |
etotheipi | 14 Jun 2014 6:24 p.m. PST |
From a simulation standpoint and your idea of direct instruction, I didn't make any assertion about "direct instruction" vs simulation. There are a large number of folks that say direct instruction [or guided instruction is among the least efficient method of instruction/teaching. Every last one of those methods in the picture (and the studies behind it) requires instructor involvement. The instructor frames the learning objective and provides/interprets feedback. You said the student learns from the simulation without instructor intervention. an environment of any kind is an instructor, giving immediate feedback. All environments don't give immediate feedback. Most environments don't give you any feedback on everything that is happening; some of that information is important to learning. Yeah, and each of those is an exploration and experience of the simulation environment. And each and every one of those choices is within, focused on, and limited by the game design. The player is exploring the game environment to see how it ticks. That is a normal aspect of learning and 'play'. Once again, read the post you are responding to. I didn't say the choices were outside the simulation. I said the participant's decision process is outside the simulation. The simulation has zero control over how participants make their decision and interpret the resulting stimuli. If the goal of the sim (as you say) is to replicate the real world and its processes, do you assert that the real world always gives the people in it sufficient stimulus to understand what is going on around them?
But note, that is after the experience and in much more in the form of coaching [how do you improve your past performance] than any direct instruction [which isn't feedback either, but rather telling the student what to learn.] Instruction happens before the experience, too. I doubt very many people would be able to participate in a military wargame at all without up front instruction. But I agree with you about the coaching part. I never advocated direct instruction. I all I said, which you have come around to is that it is necessary for an instructor to frame the simulation experience for the student to learn in an efficient and accurate way. As opposed to this: The dynamics between the simulation and participants IS the learning experience, often devoid of trainer input other than the original design. As a trainer's tool, the simulation is teaching. |
McLaddie | 14 Jun 2014 9:06 p.m. PST |
I didn't make any assertion about "direct instruction" vs simulation. etotheipi: I know you didn't. That's not what I wrote. I spoke of your use of 'direct instruction.' I am the one who spoke of simulations and your idea of direct instruction
comparing and contrasting them. Every last one of those methods in the picture (and the studies behind it) requires instructor involvement. The instructor frames the learning objective and provides/interprets feedback. You said the student learns from the simulation without instructor intervention. That's right, during the simulation direct instructor involvement isn't necessary. His involvement is in what he has designed the simulation to do. There certainly are simulations where the instructor is part of the process. All environments don't give immediate feedback. Most environments don't give you any feedback on everything that is happening; some of that information is important to learning. Even that 'time lag in feedback' is information, feedback about when you get important information. The nice thing about simulations is you can design them to be an environment that does provide more effective/efficient responses and feedback. Once again, read the post you are responding to. I didn't say the choices were outside the simulation. I said the participant's decision process is outside the simulation. The simulation has zero control over how participants make their decision and interpret the resulting stimuli. And again, that isn't what I was saying. I was saying that by playing the game, a series of decisions, the simulation is controlling/directing how, when, where and why participants are making decisions. We aren't talking absolutes here, but certainly a significant amount, or the participant wouldn't be playing at all. Participant thinking is no less guided than direct instructor guidance. That is a research-based statement. If the goal of the sim (as you say) is to replicate the real world and its processes, do you assert that the real world always gives the people in it sufficient stimulus to understand what is going on around them? I am saying that simulations replicate parts of the real world and its processes chosen by the designer. I assert that the real world always gives feedback/stimulus about what is going on. Whether that is 'sufficient' for learning or not is: 1. Different for every person 2. An issue of what is judged 'important' and 'sufficient' 3. Why instructors and instructors are needed in learning and 4. Why simulations and games can be effective teaching tools, providing that sufficiency in a number of ways. Instruction happens before the experience, too. I doubt very many people would be able to participate in a military wargame at all without up front instruction. That all depends on what is being learned and how. Experience without previous instruction is what 'free and unguided' experiential learning is all about. There certainly are wargames where the participants are given instruction after the experience, particularly dealing with surprise and the unexpected. The context being that much more real when instruction begins. If you were in the military, you may have experienced some of that type of instruction: experience first, instruction later. What's the saying? "Mother nature gives the test first and then the lesson." But I agree with you about the coaching part. I never advocated direct instruction. I all I said, which you have come around to is that it is necessary for an instructor to frame the simulation experience for the student to learn in an efficient and accurate way. As opposed to this:The dynamics between the simulation and participants IS the learning experience, often devoid of trainer input other than the original design. As a trainer's tool, the simulation is teaching. I have said all along: a teaching simulation is nothing but a system the instructor uses to frame experience and the resultant learning. If I wasn't clear about that, I'm sorry. It is all a matter of where the instructor choses to 'frame the simulation experience' and how. As the simulation is an instructor-framed experience, the learning experience may or may not need more 'framing' outside of play. That decision is part of the art of teaching as well as the craft of simulation design. There are many, many ways to do it, and the only right ways are the ones that work to achieve the learning goals. Simulations are one very powerful way to do that, but not the only or best way, just a way depending on the learning targeted. For instance, a simulation probably wouldn't be a good platform for teaching the ritual procedures of the tea ceremony you mentioned. It would be a much better vehicle for teaching what you mentioned about the need to recognize and adapt the ceremony to circumstances, possibly during the the ceremony itself. Simulations are very good at teaching relationships within a dynamic situation. I wasn't suggesting you advocated direct or guided instruction, you wrote: If it were more efficient and less prone to error than guided direction, we would have no schools because everyone would become an expert faster without them. I was saying that depending on a whole host of things, direct or guided instruction isn't the most efficient method of teaching and never has been, though it has been heavily used as 'The Way' of teaching. Schools are for learning and there are many, many ways to do that effectively. In the last three decades we have learned more about the brain and human learn than the 10,000 years before that.[The 1990s was called "The Decade of The Brain" and now, for example, Scientific American has a separate monthly periodical dedicated to just brain and learning research] Regardless, teachers/instructors will always be needed. What they do and how they instruct will change and their expanding optioins will provide for more effective learning--simulations are one of those options. Simulations are tools, a technology for accomplishing certain things. They do some things very well and others no so well and some not at all. What I find in the hobby is a whole host of misconceptions and limiting thinking that gets in the way of what our games are supposed to do and can do. For instance, when Sam wrote: "But that's very different from being able to say definitively – with a number –exactly how much better San Antonio is. And yet that's precisely what wargames have to do, because we resolve everything with numbers." Who in the world told him that was true for simulations ane/or wargames? With that kind of belief, it is little wonder that he continually comes up short translating history into game mechanics. Or where did the notion of Process VERSUS Results enter the lexicon of wargaming when technically is means nothing. [Actually I do know, and it was about wargamers, not wargames, but still a pea-poor analogy.] Every single process in a game has a result and every single result can't exist without a process to produce it. So, how can those two parts be opposing components of a game mechanic? Non-sense. It doesn't tell you anything about game systems and how they work. Anyway. There is no One Way when it comes to effective relationships between designer/instructor, participant/learner and simulations/wargames. It is simply what works depending on the goals of the learning experience. There are methods, skills and tools that can be strategically applied to gain the most effective experience possible. That is where science, technology and art combine in learning and any other endeavor. Best Regards, Bill |
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