 Autumn
Trip to DC & VA
A Tour of a Major US Modeling & Simulation Hub - October
2007
By Tim Carter (15 Jan 2008)
Last October the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC
got in touch with me trying to invite me to an event they
were doing called
Partners In Technology. They had been directed
to me by my friend Bruce Milligan, who runs the serious games
initiative of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in DC
(Bruce is a veteran of Avalon Hill, Microprose and others - I
know him from BreakAway where we worked together). I am the
Canadian serious game designer he knows. So anyway, I flew down,
crashed at Bruce's place (he and his wife have a charming
200-year-old home between DC and Baltimore) and then went to this embassy
event next morning.
Bruce spoke that morning in the Canadian
Embassy, kitty-corner across from the US Capitol building. He
has this funny story about FAS: FAS is
the organization that ran the Manhattan Project in WW2 - which,
of course, made the first atomic bombs. So he says to make up
for their guilt they've become involved in education ever since
(or something like that... he tells it better). The room was full of suits (except for myself),
nevertheless his humour was well-received.
The Canadian Embassy staff was rolling out
the red carpet for the Americans, and the Americans - in
particular a combined group of economic development councils
from Virginia - were rolling the red carpet out for we few
Canadian guests. The idea is to foster investment by Canadian
serious game companies in the US, and particularly Virginia.
There were 12 Canadian serious game companies, and myself, a
freelance designer (at this point).
Anyway, we wound up on a whirlwind tour, in a
small bus, of some modeling and simulation companies in Virginia
- first just across the river from DC, and then down to the
Norfolk, Virginia .
Snippets and memorable images from our
tour...
First Stop
We first took a brief tour of a major US
defense contractor modeling and simulation (modsim) company. Had
to pass security (show our passports), and be escorted. The
spokesman gave a typical US defence-industry-oriented video -
showing satellites gathering "sigint" then various bombers
firing missiles at enemy "ground assets" and what not. You see
that stuff a lot in American modsim promotional materials. I don't work in that
area - not because I can't (I know a lot about it, that's why Kaos Studios hired me
for
Frontlines), but because I don't have US security
clearance, and besides it's a pretty saturated market. (I'm
still open to doing stuff in Canada though.) But, anyway most of the
Canadians in our group had no focus on defence work.
(More on that later...)
Norfolk
Down the road to the Norfolk, Virginia area. Our
tour guide was excited when I revealed to her I had
done American Civil War re-enacting during my time in
Baltimore-Washington. Hey, I worked at BreakAway... it's staffed
with Avalon Hill guys... AH guys love history... and that whole
area is strewn with battlefields from the Civil War. To many
many people down there, even female corporate relations
professionals, the Civil War remains very alive. (I really need to
write an article on this experience.) So the highway we traveled
on, of course, had been crossed by Grant's or Lee's armies way
back when - as our tour guide pointed out.
Around Norfolk we visited the Virginia Modelling
and Simulation Center (VMASC), a huge facility - part of Old
Dominion University (ODU) - specifically built to do what it's
name says (you can lump serious game development in with mod-sim
- and they did use the term there - though old money and
institutional types don't like the "game" word, but it's merely
a semantic issue). The President of ODU is Canadian, and we all
attended a major party at her house. I found myself on a
riverside patio, sipping beer (they sip down there), and
quizzing a banker over what pandemic measures his organization
had implemented. Unfortunately, I was underdressed - in business
casual (hey, I'm a game designer, I thought it was okay...) -
everyone else in suits (again, old money).
I enjoyed speaking to the idealistic
conservative Southerners. There is hardly an idealistic conservative voice
in Canada - you have to drill into the military or Ottawa or
somewhere to find people who want to do things for their own
sake. There are many fiscal conservatives in Canada, but not the
idealistic type. Anyway, this opens up a whole can of worms, but
suffice to say in the media you always hear about those
structured, regimental types - churches, military, government,
whatever - who do bad or "corrupt" people, but you never hear the stories
of these same who do good and keep our society running (to
paraphrase the psychologist Scott Peck).
At the party, the President announced they were
unifying modeling and simulation with other schools of study -
economics, psychology, political science, et cetera. This is
precisely the way to go (any old-school game designer can see
this - certainly AH types) - whereas other institutions treat
game design as an extension of technology (a huge mistake;
somewhat akin to treating the art of writing as an extension of
printing technology).
Anyway, a local Virginia television station did
a report on our arrival. You
can see it here.
We eventually wound up in a Lockheed Martin's
research laboratory. The place looked like something out of a
movie (think of a "situation room"), with lots of glass, big
computer screens, huge prototype vehicles and so on.
(This makes sense because, as they informed us, the place was
designed by Disney's Imagineers [whom I've had the pleasure of
working with on a different project].) They let us play
with a simulator in which a team drives around in a Hummer in
a place like Iraq - the "game controller" was an actual Hummer
chassis, a heavy machine gun in the cupola (rooftop fire
position) and several M16 assault rifles, the weapons rigged
with realistic and loud pneumatic "rumble feedback" each time
you pulled the trigger. In the scenario we drove through a crowd
and some of my fellow Canadians opened fire on the people, and I
chastised them for shooting civilians (okay: yes, they were
merely in "videogame mode"...). After this demo, I asked
our tour guide - an ex-infantryman, now Lockheed sales - if most
of the training done in these simulators was to simply look for
suspicious objects on the roadsides (which might be bombs). He
looked at me for a second, said that was exactly true, but
his voice and eyes lost some of his "do-the-sales-job" tone, as
if saying to me "Wow... you get it..." Many grunts die
just driving around over there, as our own Canadian soldiers do in
Afghanistan - just trying to do mundane work like resupply
bases. It is a thankless job.
The Trip Out
Finally, we turned north to Baltimore. The rest
of my group was going to attend the Games For Health Conference
the next day, but I had to teach. (Besides, I've been to Games
For Health 3 times, and know a lot about it.) I was catching a
flight out from Baltimore-Washington International airport.
On the trip north we watched the movie
Wargames on the buses TV. We were tired.
During this time, it came out that some of our
group had political objections to military-oriented serious game
development - which I find pretty sad. To many Canadians the
military is just plain bad. Taking our freedoms and stability for granted, I would say - but also a touch of
cognitive dissonance. Many Canadians want us to scale back our
role in Afghanistan to a purely supportive one, ignoring basic
realities. Such as that building hospitals, schools and so on is pretty useless if the Taliban
then later blow them up, kill their staff or seize them.
So I guess I've revealed my political leanings here - well, I
guess I am for building schools, hospitals and so forth, and
then protecting them. One way to protect them is to project a
front of absolute determination - such as the British did toward
Nazi Germany in the early 1940s, until Hitler finally gave up
trying to bomb them into submission. Any crack in that front
encourages attacks and thus leads to unnecessary loss of life.
I've seen this dynamic play out over and over and over in the
many simulations and game scenarios I've attended and refereed - but if you've
ever been in a dangerous situation in real life (such as walking
down the street or in a nightclub), you'll experience the same
thing. What really underlies violent conflict is not physical - it's
psychological.
One of our tour said Afghanistan was the
"anvil of God" - a place with so much conflict for so
many years we could never hope to change it. The
depth of cynicism in this view I found appalling, but I didn't
voice it. Didn't want to fight. We might also say
rape or organized crime is impossible to stop - that no matter how
much we oppose it, arrest people for doing it, and so on,
somehow it continues to occur - so we might as well give up on
stopping it as well. But we don't. This retreat posture is a kind of passivity - a wishful
thinking for some magic solution to "make it
all just go away", and an assumption that if we can't find such a
clean, pat answer we should give up. It leads to
disaster. People always wishfully look for clean, pat answers to
messy issues
like this. Frankly, I don't even discuss things with them. Here
I don't trust the view of anyone who either doesn't work with
these things in the field, or hasn't played a good simulation of
them. If you haven't played a good wargame, I
don't think you can know what you're talking about over that
subject. The people with
the luxury to engage in political debate back here don't
understand the price - in blood - paid for them. When
you play a realistic wargame you pierce the veil - if only
briefly - of the military dimension, so get a sense of its
realities. If you happen to be in a double-blind wargame and
hear the opposing team, on the other side of the screen, arguing over what to do
next, that usually is a sign you're hurting them and should
keep attacking if you want to win. I have seen it time and time and time again, in
realistic scenarios I've attended as player or control, ranging from the
Civil War to WW2 to Vietnam, and so on...
Through a wargame you realize problems cannot be solved in the abstract (or through a lot of
talk). Rather, each large problem is a cluster of many small
ones - sub-problems, if you will - that have to be tackled individually. You build in baby
steps - success comes in dribs-and-drabs, not in sweeping,
press-the-magic-button proportions. People say we should
never go to war until things are absolutely clear - as if you
are buying a new house or taking a new job. But in any situation that has descended to the military
level (owing to the actions of this or that party), things are
never clear, and never will be. (In emergency medicine they have
a similar saying: By the time you make an accurate diagnosis,
the patient is dead. You have to act now without a clear
picture.) These situations are not
problems - they are dilemmas and ordeals. The only way to
"solve" an ordeal is to go through it - to run its gauntlet.
Designing a disaster response
game or a wargame, you soon realize there is no one single
factor you can get in your favour to magically make
it all better. There are, rather, many many factors. As game
designer, you have to find all these factors through research,
then integrate them through design. (Often you do it in cycles -
integrating key ones in early versions, then more in later
versions.) As player (learner, participant, whatever), your job is to
dig down and struggle to
turn
each one in your favour during the game session (learning them
one at a time, if necessary, until you get better and better);
and to not just give up if a few go against you. To be able, in
the end, to integrate your idealism with realism.
They dropped me off at BWI, and I took the
flight home to Toronto.
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