Playing For Keeps

a tripartite exploration and clear explanations of that territory of intellect and action where game theory and computer technology fuse to not only predict but actually shape the future of us all and of our world as well

The men around the conference table had just received the news that their company's net loss was now hovering a banker's blink under $2,874,000, but they were not getting the least bit hysterical.

The chief rose to speak. A grizzled old fox who had survived countless board-room crises, he would certainly have a brilliant answer to the question in each man's mind: What do we do next?

"Beats the hell out of me," he said, tossing an accordion of data sheets onto the table. "I move we take a break."

"You have to be philosophical about these things," the chief subsequently explained. "After all, it's only a game."

Under ordinary circumstances, such heroic tranquillity in the face of disaster might have struck an uncharitable observer as verging on the unreal, if not the psychotic. In this case, however, the response was entirely appropriate. The men actually were playing a game. Theirs was no real crisis but an episode in a highly fashionable new training technique called gaming. In order to learn new business skills, they were pretending to be executives running an imaginary company.

Gaming, or simulation (the label preferred by old fogies who insist that games are only for children), is a way of teaching what might otherwise be unteachable--arcane arts such as how to run an oil refinery, plan an antiguerrilla war or respond to a nuclear threat.

Educational simulation owes a lot to war-game concepts that date back at least two centuries. Only in the past 10 or 12 years, however, has gaming become a fad in business and academic circles. Even so, there are already enough educational games to stock the greediest corporate or academic toy chest.

For bankers who want to learn how to get more bang for their advertising buck, there is Adman, invented by Dr. Clark C. Abt, 39-year-old creator of dozens of other simulations. In GREMEX (Goddard Research Engineering Management Exercise), NASA scientists and technicians practice managing space-flight projects plagued by money troubles, sloppy work, inaccurate blueprints and other evidently typical problems. Players of the Community Response Game, designed by Johns Hopkins University professor Michael Inbar, find out what it's like to deal with a catastrophe. There is even one game that teaches how to bend the truth effectively. It's called Propaganda.

A typical business gaming exercise very much resembles an extremely complicated form of Monopoly. The participants assume the roles of businessmen, public officials or other decision makers, just as Monopoly players pretend to be real-estate speculators. The real world is represented by a model, which may be a board like the Monopoly board, a program in a computer or merely a set of printed forms. The players manipulate this model, making decisions similar to those they would make in reality. In Monopoly, they buy and sell property, build improvements, collect rent. In a business game, they might allocate advertising, production and research budgets, negotiate loans, distribute dividends, pay taxes.

Periodically, umpires or referees score the results of the decisions and feed them back into the game, along with new information that will affect the course of future play. In Monopoly, this comes from the Community Chest and Chance cards: "Get Out of Jail Free," "Take a Ride on the Reading" or "Bank Error in Your Favor--Collect $200." In a simulation, this new information might consist of inventions, Government decisions or sales figures.

To a certain degree, the popularity of educational games results from the same kind of appeal that made Monopoly America's favorite board game soon after it was introduced in 1935. At the time, economics was the big bad wolf. The country was in the middle of a (continued on page 148)Playing For Keeps(continued from page 109) financial depression that affected everyone. Few people--if any--understood what had gone wrong; yet all wanted to know. Unfortunately, economics is an infuriatingly obscure science; even economists don't really understand it--in the sense of being able to make foolproof predictions, at any rate. The only way to learn the dynamics of the money market place is to live in it. Monopoly made this a little more possible for the ordinary citizen. By playing a simple game, even a child could experience some of the emotions and operations of the real-estate business. It was not surprising that just as many adults as children found Monopoly fascinating.

Today, the big bad wolf is decision making. In the years following World War Two, enormous national growth created an unprecedented need for administrators, executives and other leaders who could make all kinds of important decisions rapidly, confidently and, it was hoped, accurately. Particularly at the upper policy levels in government and industry, it was disturbingly apparent that the American economy was a remarkably complex animal, whose actions resisted control and defied managerial projection. The huge corporations--some larger than many national economies--were themselves incredibly difficult to manage. Because of this web of variables, unpredictables and ambiguities, the decision to make any move at all was almost always fraught with perils that could only be guessed at. It may have been significant that the ouija board was soon to edge Monopoly out of the number-one spot.

For those who needed something more scientific than the ouija board to assist them in making decisions, rescue arrived in the form of the computer, which could handle the bookkeeping involved in the billions of individual transactions that added up to the gross national product. Along with the computer came the science of operations research.

At the heart of the operations-research method is the concept of mathematical simulation. Executives of a large trucking company might want to know the most efficient way to expand the number and location of trucks, garages and men to handle increased business. The decision might ordinarily be based on trial and error, rough calculation, experience and educated hunches.

Using the operations-research method, however, the problem would be converted into a symbolic model that would describe the situation somewhat in the way that a recipe describes a cake. This model, or simulation, would be fed into a computer that would run through millions of possible combinations of the ingredients and pick out the mixes that made the best mathematical sense. From these, the executives would select the plan that made the best practical sense.

Sometimes it might not be enough to experiment with a mathematical model. In order to get a better picture of how human factors might affect a plan in action, operations-research analysts would create a model in which workers and executives could carry out, on a trial basis, many of the steps in the proposed new procedure.

It soon became apparent that simulation could also teach management decision making to trainees by letting them act out the roles of supervisors, administrators and other executives. In 1957, the American Management Association introduced the Top Management Decision Simulation, the first nonmilitary competitive business game. To role playing and simulation, A.M.A. added the element of competition, and the educational gaming technique was virtually complete.

Since the appearance of this kind of simulation, games have been created to teach skills as various as running an airline, programing a computer and playing the stock market. In college, students learn business management by playing a game that lasts an entire semester. High school students absorb civics lessons by acting out the roles of legislators, judges and administrative officials. Elementary school pupils compete as consumers and store owners to develop an understanding of the way prices are determined in a market economy.

The modelmakers go to great lengths to create the illusion of reality. In American Management Association's General Management Simulation, players are called upon to carry on the operations of a firm disabled by the recent death of its president. Each receives a four-page letter that begins:

Dear Fellow Manager:

All of us in the company were appalled and distressed at the sudden and untimely death of our president, Mr. Mose. By now, you have undoubtedly read in the papers how his heart gave out while he was pruning trees in his garden.

As Professor James Coleman of Johns Hopkins points out, training games are based on the premise that people learn best not by being taught but by experiencing the consequences of their actions. Participants make relatively realistic decisions and see the results almost immediately.

"Games tend to focus attention more effectively than most other teaching devices," Coleman wrote in the National Education Association Journal, "partly because they involve the student actively rather than passively. The depth of involvement in a game, whether it is basketball, Life Career or bridge, is often so great that the players are totally absorbed in this artificial world.

"Another virtue of academic games as a learning device," Coleman continues, "is that using them diminishes the teacher's role as judge and jury. Such a role often elicits students' fear, resentment or anger and gives rise to discipline problems. It may also generate equally unpleasant servility and apple-polishing. Games enable the student to see the consequences of his actions in winning or losing. He cannot blame the teacher for his grades.... The teacher's role reverts to a more natural one of helper and coach."

Games, says Coleman, help develop a player's sense of his own ability to control his future, rather than a passive acceptance of capricious fate. One U. S. Office of Education study indicates that performance on standard achievement tests is strongly related to how well a person believes he can succeed by his own efforts. Those who see themselves as doomed victims of forces beyond their control do poorly. This is particularly true among the disadvantaged. Simulations, it is hoped, will help overcome the crushing sense of personal futility that is endemic in the ghetto among those who have never been allowed to play the game of life unhandicapped by color, language barriers, chronic poverty, ignorance and all the other crippling ghetto ills.

Other important advantages of gaming are illustrated by CLUG, the Community Land Use Game, created by urban planner Allan Feldt. "The basic object of the game is to teach the fundamentals of urban economics and economic theory," says Feldt. "In doing this, the players make real-estate purchases, build and operate various kinds of businesses and engage in a limited number of other urban-development processes, such as providing utilities and setting tax rates.

"CLUG is a fairly complicated game," Feldt reports. "It takes two or three hours to learn the rules. You can, if you care to, use census data to build a city before the game starts, but we usually begin with an empty field on which we grow our own city." Designed for architects, community planners and urban officials, a round of CLUG can be almost as rough as a day at city hall. At first, most players tend to operate like robber barons, attempting to assemble private fortunes and power complexes. The result is turmoil and crisis, as transportation breakdowns and recessions appear. The need for compromise, negotiation and responsible planning becomes clear.

"The real purpose of CLUG is not to (continued on page 258)Playing For Keeps(continued from page 148) win," says Bruce Dotson, one of the game's promoters. "Players learn to understand how a city's functions interrelate at any given moment. But, unlike real life, the practical results of their decisions show up immediately." Perhaps more importantly, the game can be ended and a new round begun whenever things get too far out of hand. To a great extent, this is the central appeal of business gaming. The possibility that a trainee's errors will disrupt company performance is radically reduced.

If this is a vital consideration in business, where mistakes may be measured in dollars or markets lost, it is even more so in military science, where they are measured in human lives or even in national survival. It is not surprising, then, that simulation received its most intensive development and use in the military long before it was even thought of for civilian education. The concept of war as a game was articulated in the early 1800s by Prussian general and theoretician Karl von Clausewitz.

"There is a play of possibilities and probabilities, of good and bad luck," Von Clausewitz wrote, "which... makes war, of all branches of human activity, the most like a game of cards." Some 150 years later, it was said, "War is a game in which you choose up sides and kill each other." Today's training games for business and industry have evolved directly from games designed to teach peacetime officers the art of making wartime decisions.

The idea of using a game this way may ultimately be traced back to chess, which is believed to have developed from the Hindustani game chaturanga. The name chaturanga (four forces) refers to the four parts of a Hindu army--elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. In modern chess, these have become pieces symbolizing the forces of power in a medieval state--king, queen, bishops, knights, castles and soldiers.

According to ancient Hindu tradition, chaturanga was invented by the wife of Ravan, king of Ceylon, in the second age of the world, when the monarch's capital city was under siege. Evidently, her idea was that by experimenting with model armies on a model terrain, the king would be able to think up a plan for repelling an invasion.

No record appears to have survived of the outcome of this first venture into military simulation; but as early as the 17th Century, there was a war game based on chess. In the early 1800s, the German staff was using map games, with movable markers representing opposing forces, to experiment with war plans.

A strategic game devised in 1848 to represent a war between Prussia and Austria became a real war in 1866, and the Prussian army astonished the world by winning. Three years later, the Prussians took on the "invincible" French army of Emperor Louis Napoleon and won again. Prussia, armed with war-game strategy and Krupp cannons, was becoming a world power.

Understandably enough, generals and statesmen throughout the world began to take an intense interest in the Prussian Kriegsspiel, or war game. Today, the military continues to be a prime market for training games, ranging from Monopolog, which teaches Air Force logistics, to Politica, a simulation of a revolutionary situation in South America.

It is unlikely that there are many games more austere than Monopolog, in which, according to the Air Force's own description, the players manage "a simplified version of the complex Air Force supply system, comprising one depot and five two-wing bases which are phased in during the game. The player, in his role as inventory manager, must make management decisions each month on the following: (1) procurement of new parts; (2) repair of reparable parts; (3) distribution of serviceable parts among the bases. It allows students to experiment with Air Force supply and management."

Politica, designed by Abt Associates, centers on the problems of the Benevolent Republic of Inertia, a benighted mythical country located on the north-east coast of South America. Inertia, its geography, inhabitants and leaders are described in great detail in the materials supplied to the players at the beginning of each game. There is a complete history of the country, which is said to have been discovered by "Luysantserengiin Bymbodorge, a wandering 13th Century Mongolian monk...who left an account of a 'vile and foul-smelling land' which is almost certainly Inertia."

The 43 players, whose roles and power are spelled out in personality profiles, are led by El Caudillo, Inertia's Supreme and Benevolent Military Leader. In addition to El Caudillo, individuals represent the middle class, urban workers, slum dwellers, students, sugar workers, fishermen and the Sarakhanese sugar workers--Oriental immigrants who occupy the lowest rung of the ladder. The profile of Senora Dulcinea Cervantes tells the player:

Your husband, Don Carlos de Velasquez Cervantes, is the Inertian ambassador to the U. S. A. You voluntarily remained behind in Inertia, ostensibly to look after the vast Cervantes family holdings and to pursue your studies of Inertia's piratical past. In fact, you stayed because you are in the employ of Brigadier General Navarro, the head of F.A.N.G., the secret police, and are one of his most trusted and loyal employees. You were recruited by Navarro himself after the Second World War. He is an extremely charming man.

Politica is one of several games used to train military and diplomatic personnel. Other strategy exercises deal with higher stakes--nuclear war. Perhaps the most chilling are played in the soundproofed conference rooms of those beautifully appointed scholarly retreats known as think tanks. Resembling universities without students, think tanks are filled with top-level sociologists, economists, political scientists, nuclear Physicists and other experts, some from academic disciplines too new even to have names. Some are a permanent cadre; others are visitors. All are specialists in far-out thinking, which the think tanks supply to industrial, Government and military clients for a total of two billion dollars annually.

The most famous think tank is the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, set up by the Air Force in 1948 to provide a source of advanced ideas. An offshoot of Rand is Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute near White Plains, New York, where people think about the unthinkable--thermonuclear war. Gaming is a favorite think-tank technique. During lunch at Rand, resident intellectuals sometimes relax at a fast round of Kriegsspiel, complete with kibitzers who prefer to look on and comment rather than compete. After lunch, there occasionally are modern war games in greater earnest.

War games are played in a study area in the basement of the principal Rand building overlooking the Pacific. About the only clue that something important goes on in this suite of offices is at the entrance: a four-inch-thick steel bankvault door that can be locked after working hours to protect the classified source materials used in play.

There are two bull pens, each equipped to house three or four staff members. A 40-foot-long seminar room is furnished with blackboards, wall maps overlaid with acetate and a conference table for laying out charts and other working materials. Although the area has not been used for war gaming in the past year and a half, it can be converted in a matter of hours.

Sometimes, the arrangements are highly formal. Opposing teams designated Red and Blue meet in separate rooms. Information is passed back and forth through a rotating "Judas" door. Troop movements and aerial attacks are marked on maps. When casualties and damage have been evaluated, each team is called in separately and shown the results. The referees reveal the new options available and the cycle begins again.

The referees may decide that Red has lost some of its bases but no cities. Red must then decide whether to use its remaining weapons against Blue's missile sites or industrial targets.

Like other simulations, the Rand war games teach something about the elusive business of making complex decisions, but they also have more immediately practical benefits. Frequently, during the play, there are problems that have not so much to do with creating strategy as with executing it. Weak links are revealed. Holes are plugged.

In one game, Lieutenant General George Good, Jr. (U.S.M.C., Ret.), lost troops because allied soldiers who could not speak English were unable to call in air strikes by American pilots. Good subsequently helped invent the Taclator, a hand-held radio transmitter operated by numbered keys standing for soldiers, tanks and other targets. The Taclator could be used to signal air support without the help of an interpreter.

The approach typified by the gaming method has frequently come under fire by those who believe there is grave danger in reducing power situations to games, because the human element may be eliminated; and that if the elegantly rational solutions produced in this way are applied inflexibly, they will conflict tragically with stubbornly irrational reality. Those who use the simulation method are aware of this. The games are not expected to turn out completely skilled professionals but, rather, to provide the beginnings of a feel for the work, as well as an outline framework of the kinds of strategies, tactics and rules of thumb that are likely to pay off. Experience will fill this in with the kind of practical and largely intuitive grasp of detail that is unlikely ever to be expressed--or expressible--in any rational form.

There is a natural human tendency to forget, however, that most rules and systems work only if they are loose enough to accommodate unexpected but inevitable deviations. Refusal to face failure can result in disaster. It has been suggested that the bloody stalemate that followed the opening moves of World War One was partly caused by both sides' dedication to game-room strategies that failed to pay off on the battlefield. Similarly, today there are those who believe that the American predicament in Vietnam was compounded by the pentagon's unwillingness to admit that the reality of counterinsurgency has turned out to be different from the game of counter-insurgency.

Be that as it may, the games go on, and not without some benefit. Participation in them dramatizes the far-reaching and frequently unexpected effects of decisions that otherwise might appear to be relatively safe and uncomplicated. The intense pressure of play seems to enhance the production of novel insights, some of which occasionally have practical value.

From the psychological standpoint, war games appear to satisfy certain emotional needs. For one thing, they are fun to play. For the unusually gifted and creative thinkers who are attracted to Rand and to the Hudson Institute, they undoubtedly provide an extremely challenging from of entertainment. At a deeper level, war games seem to be a relatively harmless way of fulfilling the desire to play God that infects many men. By manipulating the destinies of fantasy empires, would-be supreme beings may possibly purge their obsessions. Certainly, at least, they learn that the job of running the world is likely to be considerably more difficult than they might have imagined. If all a man learns in the game room is humility, he has learned a lot.

Finally, a game of nuclear war can be a metaphor for externalizing the struggle between death wish and life wish that goes on relentlessly in every human soul. Herman Kahn calls the top rung of the nuclear-warfare ladder "insensate" or "Spasm war," an appropriate image for the suicide of humanity. Whoever approaches this level of the game is forced to realize that if he orders the final attack, he almost certainly ensures not only his enemy's destruction but also, inevitably, his own. The price of absolute power is death.

Unfortunately, there always seem to be people who do not understand this. They can hardly wait to play for real. Even so, it has been suggested that computerized simulations might eventually eliminate the necessity for actually waging physical war. In a 1967 article in Technology Review, George A.W.Boehm wrote:

World War One was fought with chemistry, and World War Two with physics....World War Three, If it ever occurs, may be fought blood-lessly with mathematics.

That is to say, both sides may agree to simulate the war, instead of actually launching missiles and sending troops into action. They will mathematically formulate strategies and counterstrategies and let computers do the "fighting" until a conclusion is reached. Then, figuring that their side cannot do much better than the computer, and the other side is not likely to do much worse, military leaders might be willing to abide by the electronic referee's decision.

It is not wholly inconceivable that two opposing general staffs will gather some day...for a morning's war at an international computer center. At preliminary low-level conferences, they will have already agreed on a computer program and, like attorneys at a pretrial hearing, stipulated essential input data. All that will remain to be done on the fateful morning will be to push the "start" button and wait for the computer to wage the war 10,000 times. We can envision one commander-in-chief pushing aside a sheaf of printouts that he has been poring over. "OK," he says. "You wiped us out 9327 times. I'll tell my Prime Minister to pull out of the Balkans. Now, how about a martini before lunch?"

"Though this setting is altogether fanciful," Boehm added, "the prospect of settling major international arguments by the outcomes of unfought wars is real. Indeed, it is not at all farfetched to suppose that, at this writing, the first phase of World War Three is being contested much along these lines."

Boehm wrote this article during our negotiations with the Soviet Union on the question of antimissile systems, in the course of which then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara presented a closely reasoned argument exploring the possible results of decisions to build or not to build various kinds of antimissile systems. His report concluded that neither side could benefit enough to warrant the expense of the race and is said to have had considerable influence on Soviet policy in the matter. This was, in a sense, paper war played for real.

Whatever the immediate prospect might be that governments will give up real war in favor of computer simulations, there is a certain amount of historical background supporting the belief that games can replace killing as an outlet for the human aggressive instinct. In Roman times, when the force of law was extended to millions of people among whom killing had been a favorite game, gladiatorial contests grew ever more popular as civilization increased. For the bulk of the population, killing became a spectator sport, rather than one in which they could participate. Boxing and bullfighting and football appear to be survivals of this practice.

The trend continues toward the elimination of all killing, whether by state or by individual. Capital punishment is becoming rarer and rarer, as one state after another gives up the practice. There was not a single execution in the U.S. last year. Before long, it is clear, capital punishment will be a curiosity of our barbaric past, gone the way of human sacrifice. Perhaps war will follow.

What is likely to replace it? It could be the same thing that replaced human sacrifice and cannibalism--a symbolic drama such as the Easter ritual, which is based on early pre-Christian rites in which tribal kings were killed to ensure the fertility of man, beast and crop. The sacrament of the Eucharist, in which wine and bread symbolizing Christ's blood and flesh are eaten, is a survival of even earlier times, when the sacrificial human victim was not only killed but eaten.

Already the nuclear-war-game drama is enacted almost every day by the intellectuals in our think-tank temples. All that remains is to invite the public to join them. Not long ago, viewers of WGBX-TV, a Boston educational station, participated in a foreign-policy simulation, The Most Dangerous Game. Volunteers in the studio acted out the roles of leaders and spokesmen of Transania (which stood for Russia), New Zenith (United States), Nordo (India), Inland (North Korea), Outland (South Korea) and Hamil (Red China). Periodically, questions of negotiations were posed to the television audience (representing the political elite), which was asked to phone in its suggestions.

"Transania generally followed their advice," reported journalist Laura R.Benjamin, who was on the Transanian team, "making them active participants in a real sense. And the television viewers got almost as involved as the players; the one time when their advice was disregarded, they phoned in and demanded impeachment of their ministers."

A similar war game was enacted on Australian television. In both Australia and Boston, the outcome was the same. After several weeks of indeterminate conflict, players and audience grew bored with peace. To those with any faith in the judgment of the masses, these nuclear war games will have proved terribly disenchanting. Free to choose at last, the civilians and their leaders, by accident or by design, consciously or unconsciously, chose war.

"The Most Dangerous Game ended with a moment of silence for the world that had been before the players brought a nuclear holocaust upon themselves," wrote Miss Benjamin in The Harvard Crimson. "As the TV cameras blinked off, I felt a curious letdown.... In four weeks, we had gotten no further than a large inconclusive war; and then, in one final week, we had brought the world to an end."

Fortunately, it was only a game.