Weimar. The Fight for Democracy – at the German Command and Staff College

[LetsPlayHistory]

🎲 Yesterday, I had the pleasure to introduce a group of players of the WG CoSim at the iLab in Hamburg to "Weimar. The Fight for Democracy" and moderate the session.

📚 Players were excited about the historical theme and the elegant representation of political struggle during the Weimar Republic. Every decision has costs and often consequences that favor the player's opponents. The game captures the parties' characters and agendas, as well as the difficulties of steering a fragile republic through a period of internal and external crises, and hints towards why its enemies gained influence on the streets and in the parliaments. In that it is very topical today.

⏳Including introduction and banter, we managed to play two of a maximum of six turns in about four hours. Players who are familiar with the game will manage to play a turn in 1-1,5 hours. The mechanics are simple, what makes the game complex is the fact that the parties are asymmetric in their available actions and that many aspects integrate to various degrees at different times during a turn, which makes the benefit of a specific action often not immediately obvious.

👩‍🏫 We identified several approaches for using the game in professional educational contexts: 1) pre-construct a turn or part of it to represent a specific situation and limit choices if only two or four hours are available, or 2), as Thorsten Kodalle suggested, run it as a week-long course with one day of introduction, three days of two turns each and one day of recap. Players could be grouped and prepare input on historical context and events, argue in the role of the party they are assigned to, potentially even roleplay different posts within the party. After completion of each round, events and actions should be discussed and reflected upon by all participants.

📳 If you are interested in talking about games in education, the staging of the past in games or are looking for a facilitator for conflict and crisis simulations in the context of historic-political education, get in touch. Let's connect and have a chat.

[bayonetbrant]

That's really cool!

In terms of the audience, where were the players in their careers?
Were they all mid-career officers?
Late-career officers?
Were they all from the German military or were there any international students, too?  (There often are in the US service schools, but not sure about other countries)

I would assume they were likely knowledgable of the Weimar period of history, but I guess I've been around too many fellow Americans for too long to assume that folks know their own country's history

[LetsPlayHistory]

It was a mix of different ranks, Thorsten is lieutenant-colonel at the general staff, there was a captain, currently "youth officer" (propaganda guy who tries to lure youngsters into the army), a civilian teacher from the Bundeswehrfachschule where soldiers who are leaving service can acquire degrees, later a reserve staff officer and a lieutenant-colonel of the pioneers joined us. For this purpose all the officers were from the German military.

The atmosphere was mostly that of a semi-formal introductory game. However, it was indeed officially scheduled for the purpose of assessing the usability of the game for professional military/political education, thus we have discussed various aspects and possible approaches for successfully embeding it into courses.

Yes, everybody had at least a basic understanding of the period. I guess there is hardly a way around it in the German civil and military education system.

[LetsPlayHistory]

Yesterday, I've been to Hamburg again, this time once again for Neustart (and terraforming Mars), though. However, we did discuss usecases for Weimar over dinner. Today I had a call with Martina Fuchs (Spiel des Jahres, Fux und Bär) about how to potentially use the two scenarios and whether it could be worth to partly skript a specific situation. We are on it. I think I will start offer workshops to the Centers of Political Education, soon.