"Connections UK Conference" Topic

Here is the link to the activities: link

Connections UK: Connections UK is the premier professional wargaming conference in the UK. Similar to Connections USA.

Purpose. To bring professional wargame practitioners together to share and spread best practice.

To quote Professor Phil Sabin (King's College, London): 'the trouble is at present that there is too little awareness of what other individuals are doing, and we are losing in terms of mutual support and the sharing of good practice.'

Aim. The aim of Connections (UK) is 'To advance and sustain the art, science and application of wargaming'

LinkedIn Group. We maintain a LinkedIn Group here
link

Dates. The 2019 dates are Tuesday 03 to Thursday 05 September 2019. Bookings: Bookings are currently closed.

Location. King's College, London.

Downloads: link

Wolfhag

It was an excellent conference.

I took the role of the UK's Prime Minister in the megagame, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Sounds very interesting.

However this "wargaming" is probably quite different to what most gamers consider war gaming. ie a pleasant pastime using miniatures/models with bags of fun, thinking and socialisation being the main aims.

Wargaming to me is getting out nicely painted figures and models. Then using some pre- written rules to moderate dice rolling and moving soldiers . All within a couple of hours on a table top. That is what i experience when attending a wargames club.

The above conference is more about considerations of war than having a game? Maybe it should be called war studies, rather than war gaming. It is a parallel activity to miniature gaming.

Not too sure about what I have said here but it seems the same word is being used to title two quite separate activities? Other's thoughts?

The premier wargaming event in UK is Salute, with Historicon being it's equal in the US. Professional war-game practitioners would be those who write rules that people buy and use to game with their friends.

Please don't take this as negative , just trying to keep things clear.

The above conference is more about considerations of war than having a game?

No, there are many wargames actually played during the conference.

Professional war-game practitioners would be those who write rules that people buy and use to game with their friends.

No. Professional wargamers are those who are paid (by the likes of the MOD and DSTL) to design and play wargames for a living. I know several of them.

Connections was started by Mat McCaffery as a meeting of state of the art wargaming with developers, designers and publishers from the commercial field and systems developers of computer simulations for the DoD.

PDF link

I attended the one in 1994 at Maxwell AFB. Jim Dunnigan, Al Nofti, Joe Miranda, Big Time Software (Jim Rose?) and Lou Zocci were there too. Also attending were representatives from various foreign militaries and Hollywood special effects people. Dunnigan mostly sat to the side on a laptop trading foreign currencies. I don't recall any miniatures people attending, almost all board gamers.

There were presentations by people like Col. Joe Warden who explained his planning for the Iraq air campaign and gave an analysis of the strategic bombing of Europe in WWII. They also spoke about how they used off the shelf GMT's game "Korea 1995" but with different counter values. There were several talks where you needed a clearance and mine had expired. Most were about simulations for logistical planning operations.

We also got to evaluate the US Army Brigade and Battalion computer simulation. A team of civilians beat a team of Army officers at their own game by making a rush down the side of the screen.

The special effects people from Hollywood took questions most about running PsyOps and deception operations using current special effects technology. They theorized that they could make a fake video of Madonna dressed in a bondage outfit with a naked Saddam bent over her lap with a baby pacifier in his mouth and Madonna spanking him with a riders crop. The special effects guys thought they could project the video onto low hanging clouds over Baghdad using planes or drones as a way to get the people to depose Saddam. This is all true. Some guys from JPL answered questions about launching satellites and weapons platforms into space via a static cable that stretched from the surface of the earth 200 miles up. In the evenings we played several board games.

I hope to attend the US Connections next year as I have a team putting together a proposal for some simulations for the military.

Wolfhag

Martin Goddard,

There is a Games Fair on the second day where participants have the opportunity to play wargames. Most of these have been developed as training aids for the militay, but there are a smattering of others that hobby wargamers would easily recognise.

This year I ran one which had previously been played at COW and by Sheffield Wargames Club. The participants included ex-military, civil servants, students, and academics.

This conference is about wargaming for professionals … but the people leading much of the development are hobby wargamers. If you look at the photographs of the conference, you'll see quite a few people that you recognise from COW and WD.

The military (and governments) are using wargaming to train, to teach, and to plan. Russia, China, the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are all using wargaming … with the UK doing its best to catch up.

What I have described may not be hobby wargaming, but it is still wargaming … and still uses many of the techniques set down in the original Kriegsspiel.

However this "wargaming" is probably quite different to what most gamers consider war gaming. ie a pleasant pastime using miniatures/models with bags of fun, thinking and socialisation being the main aims.

Not too sure about what I have said here but it seems the same word is being used to title two quite separate activities? Other's thoughts?

Martin: The wargaming is very much the same, as is the fun and socializing. The difference is that wargame design is what folks are thinking about.

It does put a different spin on the events and creates that difference you sense in the activities.

You see the same issue in any number of game discussions on this TMP list--even though the list here is about game design. Often wargamers will not see the topics and discussions here as being part of the 'fun' hobby--and even counter what wargaming is about…because it is about designing games rather than 'just' playing them.

Looks like I do not agree with anyone here. Not a problem. I can cope. I hope you have fun with your type of activity and i will continue to enjoy my type. Shall we end it there (probably not I suspect).

I hope you have fun with your type of activity and i will continue to enjoy my type.

Martin:

Okay… No problem. I don't think anyone was asking you not to enjoy your 'type' of fun.

I know that when I started designing games and simulations for education and training purposes, my experience playing games was different. The same is true when I started writing novels. The experience of reading other authors' works changed…

Raph Koster wrote a great book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design and there is an entire chapter on "Different Fun for Different Folks." He also has a chapter The Problem with People. Among other insights, he writes about game designers:

Basically, game designers suffer from what I call "Designeritis." Thye are hypersensitive to patterns in games. The 'grok' them very readily and move on. They see past fiction very easily. They build up encyclopedic recollections of games past and present [and have a similar game collection], and they theoretically use these to make new games…But they usually don't make new games because their very experience, their very library of assumptions, holds them back.

…Creativity [original work] comes from cross-pollination, not the retention of the same ideas. By making gaming their hobby, game designers are making an echo chamber of their own work.

What you are seeing here on this list and the Connections conferences are those efforts at 'cross-pollination.'

Another reason you might be seeing this as 'another type of activity.'

Enjoy your type!