General Responses
| Strategic Decision Making Training through Serious Games by natoguy - 19 Jan 12 - 19:29 |
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| M&S related technology advances occur often and provide opportunities to increase functional capabilities, performance and overall effectiveness. To assist M&S users in maintaining awareness of such M&S-related technology developments, ACT has instituted a process to monitor technology developments by others (technology watch program) and to conduct its own technology-development activities in key areas not addressed elsewhere. Well developed serious games which leverage the properties of games, digital games, and simulation appear to present opportunities for creating immersive experiential learning environments for decision making training. The games enable students to become active learners in a safe environment, but one which encourages them to take risks and explore the solution space, with the benefit of immediate feedback, and subsequent review of performance. Several Allied Nations are committed to the use of serious gaming as part of training regimes and will likely be using more games in the coming years. However, there appears to be no significant effort being put into the use of serious gaming for training at the strategic or operational levels. This is due in part to nations not conducting training as often at this level and the small amounts of trainees. As NATO focuses its training at the operational and above levels, there may be an opportunity to see immediate benefit from the use of serious games technology. ACT is seeking to use serious gaming as a method to support political level education and operational level training and course of action analysis (including mission rehearsal, decision support, and post-mission analysis) within NATO. ACT has formed a project team with HQ SACT, the M&S Centre of Excellence (Rome), the Simulation Team (University of Genoa). The Canadian Forces College (Toronto) is an observer. A study is now underway to determine if and how decision maker training at the operational and political level using serious games could be conducted with a preliminary analysis on the correlation between serious games requirements (i.e. hardware, graphics, interactivity, interoperability, storytelling and emotional involvement) and training context (educational audience, training purpose and available resources and time). As an education facility, the NATO Defence College (NDC) senior course instruction modules and exercise are an excellent target. I would be very interested to know of any models that are currently being used for political science education or for training at the operational level. Specifically models that seek to improve the decision making process. | |
| Strategic Decision Making Training through Serious Games by Tim Mahon - 20 Jan 12 - 12:15 |
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| A fascinating study and I, for one, will be very interested in learning whatever parts of it can be made public once completed. The issue of judgement training (not "how to shoot" but "if to shoot") is one that has exercised developers of small arms training for some time. The question of decision skills is one that is currently being addressed by developers of medical training solutions - providing trainees with the ability to make decisions that are crucial in battlefield triage, for example, rather than merely instilling treatment skills. In both these arenas, serious games technologies can and have made a difference. But I wonder whether we are yet fully exploiting the potential these technologies have to push the decision skills training potential further 'up' the hierarchical chain? Constructive training at a political and strategic level has been a Holy Grail for some in recent years. EADS produced their NetCOS (Network Centric Operations Simulation) federated system some years ago in an attempt to develop a system that could be used by strategic/political entities in planning, for example, responses to terrorist events during major public gatherings (such as the Olympics). But at the time that NetCOS was launched, the crossover experience that serious games could provide was only beginning to be understood. VBS2 and all its emulators, plus the significant number of companies now leveraging serious games technologies into tactical simulations, have more than proven their worth. But the effort referenced in the original message in this thread is certainly worthy of getting involved in a deeper discussion. Over to our members to contribute... | |
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