Monday 25 October 2021

Paddy Griffith's Game of War: Reflections on a Lifetime of Wargaming

 

Paddy Griffith’s wargame of Operation Sealion, at the British Army Staff College in 1974, was a ground breaking piece of research. It was a serious piece of academic research, using a wargame to explore a contested area of military history.

Paddy assembled a team of subject matter experts from Britain and Germany to run a wargame to explore what would have happened if the Germans had launched their planned invasion of Britain. To umpire and play in the game, he used combat veterans with senior command experience, including some who were involved in 1940. They included Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe ace. This is the story of that game, including previously unpublished material such as briefings, analysis, guidance for umpires and post-game reflections. Their conclusions about the outcome of the game, based on using a wargame as an academic tool, were unanimous.

“The resulting analysis of the Sealion Wargame is the most authoritative assessment yet produced of the prospects for this titanic and consequential hypothetical struggle.” Peter Perla

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


 

Saturday 10 July 2021

My latest book- Paddy Griffith’s Wargaming Operation Sealion

 The Game that Launched Academic Wargaming

 Paddy Griffith’s wargame of Operation Sealion, at the British Army Staff College in 1974, was a ground breaking piece of research. It was a serious piece of academic research, using a wargame to explore a contested area of military history.

Paddy assembled a team of subject matter experts from Britain and Germany to run a wargame to explore what would have happened if the Germans had launched their planned invasion of Britain. To umpire and play in the game, he used combat veterans with senior command experience, including some who were involved in 1940. They included Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe ace. This is the story of that game, including previously unpublished material such as briefings, analysis, guidance for umpires and post-game reflections. Their conclusions about the outcome of the game, based on using a wargame as an academic tool, were unanimous.

“The resulting analysis of the Sealion Wargame is the most authoritative assessment yet produced of the prospects for this titanic and consequential hypothetical struggle.” Peter Perla

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

A talk about this book is now available on YouTube  YouTube


 

Thursday 3 June 2021

 

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.