Day 4
Overall I thought day 4 went well and that there were several interesting talks, some rivaling the quality of the chats. The session was led off by a COL Boyd (not that Boyd) from the Joint AI Center who spoke about the state of JAIC's efforts...but I thought also offered some good cautionary language and expectation management on how AI can or cannot play into wargaming. Boyd commented that the Data and modeling for AI enabled wargaming doesn't exist (yet). Comments in the chat included Anne Johnson's observations that people needed to be cautious about data collection and curation and that not all data was transferable. Laura Bosco noted that the AI push highlights a rush to get to an answer before really reflecting on what the question should be. Dr Wong argued that we should worry less about trust in AI conversations...and worry more about overtrust.
Peter Williams' (AUS DSTG) briefed about wargaming influence and grey zone operations. It looked like a fairly complicated array of models looking at a bunch of issues across the DIME. There was a fairly healthy chat about whether we understand the nature of influence, with Dr. Wong warning of the dangers of mirror imaging western concepts of influence on non-western countries. Rex Brynen commented that influence is less like a button or a lever and more like pushing on a string. Dr. Wong dropped the mic on the chat with "Building a complex model on a phenomenon you don't understand is the 1,000% solution."
Peter Pellegrino gave an outstanding presentation offering a taxonomy for distributed wargaming (ie, how to do wargames in a socially distant way) in the current era. There was a lot here. He focused on the geographic spectrum, time separation, network classification, and different tools. He noted there was a real risk of the facilitator losing control of various clusters that he didn't have people "in" or overseeing. Great discussion about how the current era and distributed gaming could allow for better practices to game/model C3 friction. Kriegsspiel discussed by some. Also led to the handy quote "SME on SME violence." Stealing that.
Marc Gacy gave a very good presentation on Conscious and Unconscious Priorities in Referee Adjudication. His main areas of focus were on players, characters, story, world, and system. Some key personalities in the community were having issues with trying to figure out where to place the "sponsor" in the dynamic. For me, I found the end of the chat to be highly frustrating because the presentation seemed to be dismissed as relating to the hobby or entertainment areas because of the lack of discussion of sponsors. This is maddening to me, because it suggested that sponsorless games are not professional (this was implied strongly)...which is frankly obtuse and ignores the comments from Jacquelyn Schneider (Stanford).
The final sessions I attended were Turnitsa's talk on the Wargaming Process and Metrics for a Successful Wargame AND Sugden's Preparing fro ML... i flipped back and forth between the two.
Lastly, they had multiple working group sessions today. I sat in on the innovation discussion. That will be outbriefed tomorrow. Also, Dr. Wong is updating interested parties on the status of her effort to establish a network for women in wargaming. I'll sit in on that too.
