"Reviving war-game scholarship at MIT" Topic

"ar games and crisis simulations are exercises where participants make decisions to simulate real-world behavior. In the field of international security, games are frequently used to study how actors make decisions during conflict, but they can also be used to model human behavior in countless other scenarios.

War games take place in a "structured-unstructured environment," according to Benjamin Harris, PhD student in the Department of Political Science and a convener of the MIT Wargaming Working Group at the Center for International Studies (CIS)…"

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Armand

Lincoln Bloomfield was a professor emeritus by the time I was there, so I never really got to know him and I wasn't aware of his foundational work. Eric Heginbotham and I were students together, although we both had much more hair.

At one point, MIT was a east coast hotbed of war gamers. MITSGS was an amazing place to be in the 70's, as any of you who made the pilgrimage to Walker memorial every Saturday will recall. We didn't really have the pro designers you found in NYC, but it was a place where games were monkeyed with, and tried out, and you could find just about any title you wanted in the collection. My understanding is that it went from being a wargame club, to a "tabletop game' club – with all that such entails. Someone told me the astounding massive wargame library had been 'very heavily weeded' hopefully that was just a rumor. But Some of the inventive games played there still have fond places in my heart.

Thanks

Armand