The Twentieth Century (Second and Third Generation)

  • US Naval War College
  • British and Canadian War Games of 1950s and later.
    • The British Army developed manual war games at the division level after World War II. In the 1950s the Canadian Army Operational Research Establishment reviewed gaming activities in allied armies and developed a gaming capacity based largely on the British model. One feature of the Canadian Army gaming was to gather players at regular intervals to collect what were called “Judgements and Insights”. This practice has continued to the present. It amounts to conducting a seminar with the participants to gain their insights on the operations just conducted.
  • Commercial Board Gaming
    • Avalon Hill is the name of a now-defunct game publisher that was the centre of the hobby gaming industry in the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Many of the old Avalon Hill games remain available.
    • Simulations Publications, Inc or SPI and Strategy and Tactics magazine succeeded Avalon Hill as the leader in the hobby war game market. James F Dunnigan started SPI partly to take over a failing magazine called Strategy and Tactics. SPI and S&T were dominant forces in hobby gaming through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Dunnigan has widely published on military topics. His Wargames Handbook, now in its third edition with the second edition available on the web, provides a good description of hobby gaming during the period of SPI’s dominance. Dunnigan has gone on from this start in hobby gaming to become a widely known commentator on military issues and on the professional use of war game methods. At his web site, Dunnigan has something to say about operations research.
  • “Hypotheticals”, “Crisis Games” and “Role-playing Games”
    • PBS Television. Public television has been airing seminar war games for more than two decades. PBS has used this technique in an educational mode to draw out the issues in many contentious topics. Many of the PBS broadcasts might better be called “Crisis Games” as there is no war and very little military involvement.
    • National Defense University. NDU’s Center for Applied Strategic Learning applies seminar war games in a variety of contexts. Those with little or no military context might better be labelled crisis games, as war in the conventional sense is rarely a dominant feature. An example would be Wargaming the Flu. Indeed CASL often uses the term “strategic simulation exercises” for many of their activities.
    • Dungeons and Dragons D&D), and other fantasy role-playing games have elements of seminar war games. Although D&D is set in a purely fictional world, and the intent is exclusively to entertain those involved, the commitment of the participants shows how appealing seminar games can be.



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