Public health practitioners respond to a wide variety of disease events.   Professional games place responders in situations where they face the decisions, conflicts, and challenges that they would experience in a real event. Playing professional games can help everyone understand the complex, inter-agency, challenges that often come up during these situations.

In this book we describe how to design professional games for disease response.  We cover all forms of disease, from chronic and non-infectious diseases to bio-terrorism events.  We intersperse discussions of game design with examples of games, from games on mental health services to naturally occurring infectious disease outbreaks.  In addition we discuss aspects of disease response that you need to understand in order to avoid common pitfalls in designing these games.

Professional game designers are often called upon to design games that involve disease outbreak.  Public health professionals can find themselves playing in, or sponsoring, games on disease response.  Both groups can benefit from an understanding of the basic concepts of game design, disease response, and gaming disease response.

The book is available direct from Amazon 

This book is the first of a new series, each volume explores a particular area of warfare through the use of wargames. Each game has been crafted to examine different aspects of the conflict. Playing these games, along with reading the supporting designer’s notes, aims to help the reader actively develop their understanding through experiential learning. The goal is to help them develop a deeper understanding than from just reading primary and secondary sources about the war. Reading memoirs and commentary is essential, but so is making command decisions, such as looking at the conceptual map of the Falkland Islands and pondering how close to move the British aircraft carriers to the land action. It is in this space that wargaming rules supreme in the taxonomy of interactive learning techniques.

This book contains four games:

Game #1: Matrix Game- where it is possible for the wider conflict to be resolved without a land battle on East Falklands.

Game #2: The Falklands War: Task Force Commander- looks at the decisions made by the Royal Navy to support the amphibious landings and subsequent advance to Stanley. It is essentially a game about naval risk management.

Game #3: Battalion Commander- explores the land battle; often decisions in the planning stage set out the path to subsequent success or failure.

This includes a sample scenario the Battle for Goose Green

Game #4: The Falklands II (1984)- was a professional wargame designed Paddy Griffith about a potential second Argentine invasion several years after the Falklands War. It includes a detailed model of Cold War air combat. The game demonstrated that a second Argentine invasion would initially be successful.

The book is published by the History of Wargaming Project as part of ongoing work to document the development of wargaming.       

The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming the 21st Century New book

Co-authored with Nick Drage, this is an exciting new handbook covering the emerging battles in cyber space.

Cyber security is one of the big challenges of the 21^st century. Failure to meet the threat can have major consequences for the individual, a company, an NGO or a nation state. The cost of cyber crime is in the billions of pounds per year. Cyber wargames are an essential part of the training cycle, education and operational analysis needed to rise to meet this threat.

This handbook aims to fill a gap in the training for cyber-attacks and cyber warfare. By providing worked examples of different types of manual cyber wargame, including aims and objectives for each, it provides a basis for the reader to understand the potential range of games on offer. It also helps educate clients about the different types of cyber wargame available and can help them procure the right type of game in order to meet their needs.

Cyber wargaming combines two complex fields:  wargame design and cyber operations.  This handbook is full of examples of such manual games. It includes examples of:

     Network attack and defence exercises

    Committee games

    Company and state level games

    Example of a Matrix Game

    Analysing the cyber security space using Confrontation Analysis

    Media Wars: The Battle to Dominate the Information Space

    Attack Chain modelling

The book is full of additional information for the reader, such as how a cyber conflict might develop or what the key decisions C-Suite leaders need to consider when faced by a sustained cyber attack.

www.wargaming.co

 

Lessons from a pandemic game

In May 2019, I was the lead umpire in a game about a pandemic in the UK. The game was a committee game, largely free kriegsspiel. The decisions made in the game reflected those being made in the current situation in the world and are not that interesting. What is perhaps more interesting were the wider decisions in the game. 

The Welsh government used the opportunity to get a better settlement from the UK government, the Scottish declared independence in the belief London could not retain control and Russia threatened the Baltic Republics; intending to seize them while nato nations were fully tasked with the pandemic.

Of course, games are not predictive; wargamers use the shared experience of the game to explore the potential.

However, now we are in a real pandemic, the possibilities of real world scheming in Cardiff, Edinburgh or Moscow are now looking less like some wargame fantasy.

New Book: It Could Happen Tomorrow! Emergency Planning Exercises for Health Service

After four years hard work, the Project has now published another book on serious games. this time bringing together some of the best practice in using games to help prepare health services for emergencies. Written by Russell King, it is the first book in this area.

 

Blurb from the back cover:

 

"Russell King has been a career health service manager and teacher across Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Manchester and London, specialising over the last 10 years in emergency planning and management, and collaborating with academic institutions in reviewing the broad range of activity in health emergency management in the UK.

 

Since the year 2000, there has been a heightened awareness of the need to apply emergency management and business continuity techniques to essential national infrastructure and commerce. Going back much further than that, hospitals have been prepared by formal plans to receive sudden and large numbers of patients as the result of major incidents. Russell King's retrospective review of exercises that he has written and moderated over the last 10 years is not only a historical review of preparation for catastrophe over that key time, it begins also to answer questions about the true value of exercising for disasters for senior managers and places the discipline of exercising within a wider systems planning context.

 

Contents include exercises on responses to natural disasters, a pandemic, a wide-area sporting event of world attention, as well as hints and inspiration for a wider range of exercises on supply chains, general business capacity, one-off unusual challenges, and receiving dignitaries in the aftermath of challenging events. The aim of the exercises is to give a realistic but economic method of exercising which will take a minimum of time and not disrupt day-to-day functioning of the organisation. Concise and simple explanatory notes are provided for non-health care and non-UK audiences so that the breadth of utility of these techniques can be taken up and used by a broad audience.

Useful for beginners and advanced practitioners, Russell King's account of his work in this field has been prepared in collaboration with the History of Wargaming project. "