Wargame-Creation Skills and the Wargame Construction Kit

Summary

The U.S. Naval War College (NWC) is developing an elective course on wargaming theory and practice, the first session of which will be in the Fall of 2002. This course is designed to elicit ideas for the advancement of the art and science of wargaming, particularly elements of wargaming that address current operational problems.

The NWC asked CNA to support their development of this course by analyzing the skills important for creating wargames, and comparing those skills to the training content of the elective course. In addition, they asked us to develop a wargame construction kit for use in the course. This kit was intended to provide students with a baseline and framework for practical exploration of the processes of creating wargames.

Our analysis of the skills associated with the creation of wargames identified six critical skills.

• Perspective
• Interpretation
• Research
• Analysis
• Creativity
• Asking questions.

We also characterized the different levels of skills that wargame creators might possess. Simply described, these are:

• Introductory: Novices in the field frequently base their work heavily on existing games. They are mainly concerned with modifying the values of the parameters and variables associated with earlier games.
• Intermediate: Journeymen in the field still base their work on existing games, but begin to make modifications to the systems and components of earlier games, and to the interconnections between the parameters and variables.
• Advanced: Experts in the field frequently start from scratch when they approach a gaming project. The master practitioner will first examine the gaming topic with a sense of how best to represent it, focusing only later on the details of the representation, and on the balance between old and new techniques to incorporate into the game.

The NWC elective is designed primarily for the novice in the field of wargame creation, but it touches also on the intermediate level of skill. It addresses the advanced level to a much lesser extent—not surprisingly for a survey course like this. The elective addresses the full range of tasks and skills associated with wargame creation, using a mixture of lecture, classroom activity (much of which is built around the use of the WCK to construct an in-class wargame), and independent research projects. The projects seem especially important. Although they do not require the students to create a complete wargame—indeed, such a task would be impractical—the projects do help tie together the individual tasks of wargame creation, and “fill in the blanks” associated with some of the less obvious elements of the process.

The Wargame Construction Kit, which we include in this paper, has the potential to play a useful role in the exploration of wargame concepts and how to implement them practically. We designed the WCK as an operational-level (that is, focused on a campaign or theater) distillation. A distillation has more detail and surface fidelity to the real world than an abstract game, but does not represent the detailed processes of reality to the same extent or depth as what might be classed as simulation. Nevertheless, the WCK does have somewhat more detail than other games to which the term distillation has been applied.

That said, the WCK is by no means a completely finished and highly polished system—though it is a workable one. Indeed, any problems or issues the players and instructors may have with the way we designed the system, although not intentional on our part, do have the benefit of serving to highlight discussions of game-design and development issues that will prove helpful to meeting the objectives of the course.

As presented here, the WCK is a tabletop, paper-and-cardboard game. We explored the prospects for using commercially available software to create a computer-based, online version of the game for possible use with distributed teams of players. We concluded that such a project is possible, but that the time and expense of carrying it out demand careful consideration. Simpler and less expensive alternatives may provide a high proportion of the value of such a system at a fraction of its cost.

*Originally published in December 2004, this paper was reprinted in December 2024.