Gaming the GIG: A Brief Manifesto

Summary

This paper originated in 2004 with an idea by Dr. Sue K. Numrich, then a deputy director in the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO). Dr. Numrich suggested that senior officials associated with DMSO and the Global Information Grid (GIG) did not understand wargaming the way she had come to understand it through her contacts with the wargaming community. Dr. Numrich and DMSO became interested in using gaming to help members of the modeling and simulation (M&S) community understand the implications of the Global Information Grid for future military operations and for the M&S community’s ability to model and support those operations more effectively. Gaming is a potentially promising technique for exploring such issues. The nature of gaming, its strengths and weaknesses, and its relationship to operations and systems analysis is not widely understood within the M&S and the GIG communities.

*Originally published in September 2005, this paper was reprinted in December 2024.