"If you are looking for a real simulation ..." Topic

Try this:
link

This documentary tells the story of fearless(?) men who venture into the wilderness to participate in real-life wargames – in search of the ultimate thrill in their lives!

Real weapons, hot ammunition and endless Adrenaline are what these participants are looking for.

The risk? Losing everything – Death.

Wolfhag

A bit foolhardy for my tastes …

Not to give away all the thunder from one of my wargame design classes, but "One of the worst simulations of war is war."

This is the bumpersticker saying (I hate bumpersticker sayings, but I acknowledge their usefulness in communication.) leading to the discussion that every battle is unique. The "same force" early war is not the same force late war. Or one day one and day two of the battle. Or at 0700 at 1100 on the same day. The same goes for the "situation".

The key for a military analyst (and if you're a wargamer, you conduct military analysis) is to recognize what is relevant about one situation and how it does (or might) apply to another instead of taking it for granted that if something happened, it is relevant, likely, and worth inspection.

Wolfhag hits the key bit for scenarios design – the event, independent of what is represents, provides the participants what they want.

The idea that it is "real", beyond the above discussion, takes me back to a (post-shark?) Happy Days episode where Fonzie is dealing with his own inability to deal with a colleague who is in a wheelchair. As I remember, it's not a big feel-good-crapfest as it could have been, and reasonably made a few good points. Anywho, the Fonz challenges the colleague to a basketball game where he is also in a wheelchair. The response is along the lines that Fonzie gets in the chair voluntarily and can leave or stay by choice, which doesn't make it "the same". The key point is the colleague is looking for fair and reasonable treatment, not sameness. That's a harder thing to do, which IMHO makes it a more worthwhile thing to do.

I would offer that voluntary participation and some degree of ability to leave such an event makes it very different in the important parts of context than my voluntary participation in war.

Still, it's likely very good for adrenaline rush, and if that's the type these people want … have at it.

Etotheipi!

Outstanding response.

Well said, Sir!

TVAG

I posted this to see what type of response I'd get from people. Hopefully, you watched it to the end if not….

I'm a very skeptical person. I had my future wife's fingerprints run by the FBI to see if she had anything in her background I should know about, everyone should.

I admit I was pretty much fooled by the video. Why? Because in military intel and psyops (I worked at one of those three-letter agencies) to fool your adversary you project an image or situation he is predisposed to already believe. If he thinks you are weak you'll have a better chance of making him think you are weaker than you really are but not stronger. That's just how the human mind works and why intel gets politicized when low-level analysts looking at raw data tell their leaders something that is true but they refuse to believe. It happens very often.

Maybe I found it somewhat believable because I could picture myself doing something that stupid, it would not be the first time for me. I mean I did join the Marines and volunteer for the infantry – enough said.

I think this video fooled me into thinking it was real mainly because I already had a pre-disposition to believe that Russian's are capable of this behavior based on some of my military experiences and the hazing their military goes through. I even thought it was plausible that someone would go into a live-fire firefight with some hillbilly armor duct-taped to him. I'm embarrassed at my level of gullibility and I have seen 9mm rounds penetration and I should have known they'd penetrate that "armor". However, the visuals, details, and people were so believable I was fooled.

Another way to psyop people is to interject the falsehoods with know data that is believable and know to be true. If intel is mostly true the human mind will most likely classify it as true, that's how false intel can be successfully injected.

For me, this video shows just how strong and believable the visuals of a miniatures game is to get the participants to "believe" that they are experiencing something that is true, the same as VR goggles. I've played games where the miniatures and terrain were museum quality and the rules completely lame (in my opinion) but the 12 people that took part had a great game.

Maybe this helps explain the reason for the popularity of some commercial games that sell models and rules.

Maybe a game designer's real goal is to psyop the players into thinking the game delivers a level of reality using visuals and rules the players already have a predisposition to believe is a true portrayal of combat.

Wolfhag

game designer's real goal is to psyop the players into thinking

The term is marketing.

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FYR: I didn't watch the video. I don't like the security posture of the site.

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On the other topic, I've done a lot of work on methods to mitigate cognitive biases for the military and various three letter agencies. No matter how much we work and train not to commit these biases, we still have a hard row to hoe.

I believe part of that is because it was an evolutionary advantage to make certain types of decisions rapidly, whether they were long-term optimal or not.

For example, let's say my meta-cognitive pattern matching on which valley has a bunch of predators in it has a high false positive rate (I avoid valleys without predators often), but a low false negative rate (I rarely foray far into valleys with predators). So, the error doesn't really impact survival unless the false negatives are so high we start to starve to death. Cognitive bias comes in when I believe that I am right because we are successful.

There is a direct application to this in aeronautic (and many other types of modern) emergencies. Usually, in such an emergency there are a decent number of acceptable answers, and we have trained the over and over into the heads of the participants. Also, often one of the common bad choices is to delay action. So choosing an acceptable rapidly will save the day, even when the option chosen was not "the best".