In late June/early July I road-tripped to the Connections Wargaming Conference at the Army War College (Carlisle Barracks, PA), along with visiting my mother, twin brother, and sister-in-law in Rock Hall, MD (I gorge on seafood every time I visit them). It priced out cheaper to drive than fly, but I think I’m getting too old to be driving 6 days round trip. My wife had to extract me from my Jeep with a crowbar when I returned home, and my lower back hasn’t been on speaking terms with me since. But I digress!
Although predominantly geared towards the Department of Defense, UK Ministry of Defence, and defense contractors, Connections also features civilian educators (such as this scraggly pigeon), entertainment game designers, and wargaming hobbyists. I attended lectures ranging from game graphic design to social science analytic gaming, the latter of which I’ll expand on in a future post. I also presented on running large classroom games (100 or more students), which I’m also delivering in workshop format at the Serious Play Conference in August (in Toronto). As mentioned in a previous post, Discord is my secret sauce for organizing and running large games, along with having roughly one assistant for every 25 students. So far, my assistant team has typically had a 50/50 split between teaching assistants and student volunteers.
Connections also features game demonstrations and social gaming nights, giving attendees ample opportunity to see new games in publisher pipelines and simply have a good time competing with fellow attendees, leaded or unleaded cold ones in hand.
Ethical statement: when I’m not political sciencing at Colorado State, I write for Mobius Worlds Publishing, a Littleton, Colorado-based roleplaying game design firm. Mobius’s tentpole products are Prowlers & Paragons: Ultimate Edition, a superhero RPG system, and Freedom Squadron, an “ode to GI Joe” setting using Pinnacle Entertainment’s Savage Worlds rule system (I make no personal profit from sharing the links).
At Connections I demonstrated a prototype real-world infantry squad tactical decision game using Prowlers & Paragons (P&P) core mechanics. Core mechanics are the fundamental rules that drive a game. For example, hands are Poker’s core mechanic, and dice modifiers are common RPG core mechanics. Although aimed towards superhero play, the rules can easily be calibrated for human-level performance: think military units, first responders, and experts such as medical, cyber, intelligence, and diplomats. In another future post, I’ll discuss core mechanics, let alone the importance of matching the right core mechanics to a classroom game’s learning objectives.
I’ll go out on a limb and assume that most political science classrooms don’t need to model infantry squads to match course learning objectives. Still, they could model individual political decision-makers in tense crisis scenarios that require immediate decisions.
This was my third Connections and I highly recommend it. The conference welcomes educators with open arms–to wit, I met a college curriculum designer with no military background who was there simply to learn how to integrate games in his curriculum design process. Maybe I’ll see you next year!
Speaking of which, I hadn’t planned on attending APSA 2024, but I received a last-minute invite that I couldn’t turn down. The invite was related to this blog, which you’ll hear more about in a future post. That’s three posts I owe you!