Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Between Ares and the Muses

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Between Ares and the Muses

by Ian Bogost February 24, 2004

categories: Political Games , Public Policy Games

Eimi d'ego therapôn men enualioio anaktos
kai museôn, eraton doron epistamenos

(I am first the servant of Lord Ares
and also of the Muses, familiar with their lovely gift)

-- Archilochus, 7c BC

Andrew Stern points out a Popular Science article about more DoD-funded military modeling of military and terrorist scenarios:

[the article] attempts to find a convergence between The Sims 2 and DoD agent-based modeling for predicting the actions of terrorists, including projects such as "Virtual Pakistan", "GI Agent" and the $100M "OneSAF".

The team at Moves [Naval Postgraduate School, who produced America's Army] is trying to model the behavior and thinking of terrorists by creating a series of computer characters to populate a model code-named Iago, after Shakespeare's arch villain. ... [They are] optimistic that before long [they] will produce a squad of intelligent, malevolent agents who will be useful in the running of complex terrorist scenarios.

The article even has Will Wright speculating on the Iraqi resistance.

This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to the Serious Games Summit at this year's GDC. I'm not too fatalistic (yet) about the military "taking over" all funded progress the games and interactive entertainment. However, all of us need to inject a modicum of self-irony into applications of game rhetoric (yes, I said rhetoric, not technology), not just as researchers or hobbyists but as world citizens.

For me, the issue boils down to a question of how the government makes game-based scenarios fungible as tools for international policy. To my great glee, the Popular Science article admitted that this is the main challenge for these simulations, despite an enormous $100 million budget.

It is no slam dunk, of course. Consider Will Wright's explanation of the Sims -- that the reality we ascribe to sim life is mostly a construct of our imaginations. Much more complexity is being claimed for agent-based models, and, of course, much more goes into the programming of sim politics. But it's far from certain that models of nuanced cultural and political systems -- foreign systems, embodiments of the other -- can be built.

Following Will Wright's comments (here and here, among others) about the role of imagination in sims, I have argued elsewhere that gaps and spaces in representation are the most important meaning-makers in games. Wright has his doubts that players -- command and control or policymakers -- can assemble useful conclusions from such specified models as "Virtual Pakistan":

It's fine -- not to mention great business -- for Sims players to have "the impression the model is a lot more elaborate than it is," but sim politics requires the opposite approach. "That wouldn't be acceptable in a sim war game, where real life and death are at stake, because players in the military don't necessarily have enough information to fill in what's left out," says Wright.

But, isn't this what goes on in military strategy and foreign policy all the time? We never have enough information to fill in what's left out, so we use that gap as a space of debate. In the simulations cited in the article, this debate is primarily military strategy -- battlefield tactics. What remains to be seen is how public policy and citizen debate can weave itself into this space. Is it possible for such debate to take place inside the military sims themselves? I'd like to think that, given $100M large to spend, the DoD might be willing to spend at least a fraction of it on introducing human reflection into these systems, rather than relegating them to a hand-wave and a foodnote. Any takers, Washington?