Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

> there is almost no one who would not understand, “It’s fourth and ten—we have to punt.”

One problem with heavily using sports, gaming, and war analogies to talk about strategy is that the discussion starts to make no sense at all to people who aren't interested in those things but who do care about strategy.

But I guess if you're the Modern War Institute at West Point, you know your audience pretty well, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Completely disagree. Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details. Logistics and support are absolutely critical to any kind of force projection. Politics and morale are also essential for success. Hardly any games even attempt to expose such critical details. Because of this they end up putting emphasis on speed and formation that may be removed from what is possible or what might be reasonably certain to work. Possibly the best thing that games offer is the ability to contrast with the many details of any conflict.

"Implicit learning is “nonepisodic learning of complex information in an incidental manner, without awareness of what has been learned.”

If I am terrible at online competitive games, does it reflect my poor implicit learning ability on strategy?

> Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details.

Well, yes. That's what this blogpost is about.

American sports do NOT have ties: Baseball gets an extra inning, Football goes into overtime. Etc. etc. As such, American strategy is "win or lose", because these games influence our decision making skills and our behavior.

It is the imperfection of games, and how these "imperfect games" apply to our psychology that the article is about. Because American ideology is "win or lose", we are unable to comprehend situations like, say... Afghanistan (where there is no such thing as "win" or "lose").

That "win or lose" mindset is brought upon us and reflected upon Baseball, Basketball, Football, and other games. Our culture creates our society, and that culture and thinking seeps into our strategic thinking of wars.

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Its wrong, but it happens. Because so many of our soldiers play Football, the effects of Football strategy and football analogies grossly affect our thinking of war. Probably to our detriment (but probably beneficial in some circumstances).

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The game of Go, is the big Chinese game of strategy. Warlords and generals from the past 3 millennia have played the game of Go. Surely this has also affected Chinese war and strategy?

Many of Sun Tzu's sayings about war are just as applicable to the Go board game. As such, it is clear that the game of Go has affected war-strategy. The "Beat" of offense, defense, sacrifice... its all there in Go. Its very fundamentally different from Football or Chess, and therefore its easier to see how it influenced Chinese style thinking (contrasting against American / Football style thinking).

In the game of Go, there is "win" or "lose", but its really a reflection upon the territory you gained or lost. Games of Go are often decided by +/- 20 points (ex: I have 180 points an the opponent has 160 points, in a hypothetical Chinese counting game). Because I have more points, I "won".

But this style of game might be better at understanding the grayness that goes into "win" or "loss"... at least better than Football or other games. Especially because in Go, there are positions (ex: Seki, Ko, etc. etc.) that locally are ambiguous, you really can't say who "won" a Seki or "won" a Ko by looking locally. The global-effect of the position really makes the "win" or "loss" mindset irrelevant. (Usually the defender likes Seki, usually the attacker likes Ko. But... its complicated and really depends on the board state)

A Seki, by Japanese counting, is a local position where ZERO points are awarded to both players in the Seki-area. Nominally this is a tie on the win/loss scale, but you can imagine that forcing this "zero points" situation can be beneficial to one player or the other. So if we are to look at the local position and say "win" vs "loss", the words just don't make sense. Its a seki, its neither a win nor a loss. You'll have to look at the whole board, and the history of all the moves to see which player really benefited from it.

Perhaps a Chess-player would call a Seki a zugzwang: the only way to win is to not make a move (but in Chess, you're forced to move every turn, while in Go, you're allowed to pass your turn). Since Seki positions exist in Go, and because Go is popular in China (and ancient Chinese Generals), but not popular in the USA (and this "Seki" position really doesn't come up in any of our games), you can imagine that the Seki-position will affect Chinese Strategic thinking, but not necessarily American-Strategic war thinking.

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The blogpost asks: will "respawn" in MOBA, Call of Duty, and other modern video games change the psychology of the next-generation soldier? Or is the "respawn" mechanic going to allow the next-generation soldier to better come to terms with death? (a concept that's completely devoid in Football / Baseball). Is the "pretend death" of respawn-based gameplay a good or bad thing to our individual psychology / understanding of war? Who knows, but in 30+ years or so, when today's generation grow up to be the next-generation of generals and war-leaders, we can almost certainly see Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Starcraft, or DOTA references in the Presidential War Room.

This is largely a blogpost about how these games are imperfect at understanding war. But we humans keep using games as war analogies for some reason, despite their imperfections.

One of the first games mentioned is Hnefatafl. According to Wikipedia, "The only variant of tafl where a relatively unambiguous ruleset has survived into modern times is tablut."

> Tablut starting position: lighter "Swedes" start in centre; darker "Muscovites" start at the board's edges. Based on Linnaeus' sketches reproduced in Smith (1811).

Oh those Muscovites! While the article focuses on strategic lessons, it seems that games are also a medium for passing down historical ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games