Nick, Peter and Fraser discuss the value of playing games and whether they can help you learn.

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the value of playing games in order to learn. So Nick, kick us off, what is the value of playing games in relation to learning?

Well it's interesting you should ask that because I've just come back from a conference called Connections UK which was organised by Graham Longley Brown and had war gamers, there were about 150 people there, people from industry, from military, government, academia and hobbyists and it was genuinely the most fun conference I think I've ever been to, it was great. The first day was actually just a mega game, it was a big game organised by Jim Wallman and Tom Moat and it was called War in Binnie and it was a 150 player simulation of a civil war which was sort of somewhere more or less in Africa, a fictional country in Africa, had players pretending to be the UN, had players pretending to be different factions, had people doing the military, had people doing political stuff and then the next day there were talks about psychology and the psychology of games and how games can be used for emergency and policy planning. Professor Rex Brynan at McGill University in Montreal gave a talk about what social science tells us about games. We got to play some games, I played a game designed by Andreas Hagman which was about the UK's cyber security strategy. There were discussions about how computers can support the playing of games, real world games, so how are games being used in the military to test doctrine and defence policy and then there were some discussions about the extent to which there are benefits in playing physical games. Stacey Pettyjohn from RAND gave a talk about how actually just physically interacting with a set of rules gives people a framework for discussing real world issues. So really good fun, loads of interesting stuff there, very much focused on the practical importance of games, the way that they are not just fun but that they can be used to teach us stuff. And so there were questions that were raised explicitly and implicitly about what does gaming do that's different from simulation or analytical modelling

and do you learn stuff when you're playing a game. Okay, so hold on, so there's a huge amount of information there. Let's break it down a little bit. First of all I know we're not here to talk about the conference, we're here to talk about playing games but still I want to talk about the conference a little bit more. So how many people were there? I think it was about 150. And so you said there was from different walks of life, so you had government there, you had just some hobbyists there. Yeah there were some people there who just you know were there because

they like gaming and board gaming. So it didn't have the feel of a big serious corporate conference? It had the look of a serious conference but you know being a bunch of gamers it was much more fun. Sure. And everyone's obviously got the same kind of nerdy interests

as well. Yeah I'm glad you used that word not me. And so just one other thing that interested me, you were talking about on the first day you played the Civil War game, how

did that manifest itself physically? Giant map in the middle of the room, so the Binnie room, Binnie was the country we were in, giant map in the middle with sort of area control, different parts, different states in this fictional country, military forces on the map. We had a few you know militia units with technicals and AK-47s. The government forces obviously were much better equipped and there were neighbouring countries who had you know mechanised divisions and things floating about. So giant map in the middle and then a lot but really the emphasis was all on player interaction. It was about trying to persuade other people to support your aim, trying to define what your objectives were in some sense because they weren't you know not clearly we were given an objective, we wanted to get rid of the president. That was our overriding objective. We also did other things, there were some groups we didn't particularly want to work with but really it was you know who could we help to marshal us in the pursuit of these aims.

Well I think the phrase in your element comes to mind and so okay and so one of the things you mentioned a couple of questions at the end there which were I don't know if you can remember them but it was along the lines of well what can gaming teach us or how you phrased it better than

I did. What did you say? Well I think you know can we learn from games? So now obviously that's a broad question. There are lots of different aspects to learning. You know there's the question of whether or not they teach us facts. Do we learn facts better playing a game? Then there's a question of do we understand systems better? So if we're playing a game about civil war do we learn something about civil war that is better than say studying it or reading books about it? And then there's the even broader question of does playing games actually improve our cognitive capabilities full stop? You know one of the things that you will hear people say is that you know playing games like chess makes you better at thinking about other types of

problems. Okay so we're asking lots of questions there let's answer them. So what's the answer?

I mean all that makes sense, that sounds sort of fairly commonsensical or certainly it does now but I appreciate what you're saying. There was a long period where rote learning was what was

believed to be the best. Yeah I think when I say we industrialized learning, the western sort of learning teaching model was more or less matured in Victorian era to churn out in volume people who were sufficiently literate and numerate to go and work in factories and join the army and man farms. So it's optimized for volume at a sort of low quality rather than a volume at a higher quality. And I think this is more important in the post-industrialist world where we are not so much needing people for manual jobs because they're going to be taken care of by machines. We are much more in a sort of ideas and information world these days where the winners are the people who have the best and most innovative ideas and are able to put

those into practice. Yeah okay so creativity and innovation in thinking innovatively. Okay so all that makes sense all that sound that's common sense but are there examples when it doesn't work when playing isn't useful? Because it sounds like if you're going to what we're saying is there are going to be situations if you're a cheater in later life when it's going to be useful if you're able to catch an antelope and so a great way of learning that is practicing by pouncing on your fellow cub right. That all makes sense and it like I say it sounds quite situational so are there times first of all when it doesn't work or do we not want to talk about that?

I mean I think the question is why does it work and again we're talking about lots of different levels it's pretty well. I'm not sure if that was the question. Yeah because in order to ask when it won't work we've got to understand what's happening. Okay when it does work so exactly what's happening. So let's put aside learning facts because I think that's pretty well established right if you're invested in a game you're you have attention you have agency you know you were going to you're going to pay more attention to the stuff you're doing which is why you know geography lessons did nothing for me but playing Risk means I know where Kamchatka is and I think most people really if they're asked to find Kamchatka on a map it's probably going to predict whether or not they played Risk ever. So put that aside the question is you know what are we learning about systems when playing a game and I here it really comes down to I suspect that it comes down to the extent to which the game you're playing maps onto some set of real world decisions. So you know there's a game which is very highly respected in which I think is really good fun called Twilight Struggle which is about the Cold War where your task is to try and essentially place influence around the world so that your ideology if you're the US or if the USSR wins and it has greater influence in across the world than the opposing ideology and there's lots of different strategies you can use to try and do that within the game. Do we learn about the Cold War from that right so as I've said we learn lots about facts we there are cards which cover things like the kitchen debates so you'll find out what that is and so on but am I as am I actually learning something about the decision problem that the US or the USSR face now and this is where the debate would come in do I have a greater understanding of why Kennedy behaved the way that he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis for example by playing this game and I think that's that I that is actually something you would need to know about the subject so the extent to which you're going to a particular game will teach you about a system is is really to do with the fidelity of that game to the problems faced by people within that system. So it's not the case that you know games will teach you about real world systems but it might be that a game will if it closely approximates that system so what you know something like a flight simulator is designed to be very very similar similar to real flying and and I don't think anyone doubts that that using a flight simulator gives you a

better understanding of how to fly a plane. Sure okay that makes sense so well give me an example for yourselves both Peter and Nick where some sort of game that you've played you feel has you know whether in your present career or or previously you feel that that has benefited you. Well in

in my previous previous jobs I've been involved in lots and lots of different military war game simulations they are they are greatly favoured in in military for training staff notable ones on the advanced staff course that all the senior officers go on in in UK forces they run a very large exercise over the course of well it used to be a week and possibly it goes between a week two weeks and it's a simulated environment where the staff generate a scenario it's a real world like scenario with lots of so that you can reuse real world information as background there are as a competitive element so you have teams that are in direct competition with each other and they have at each other and they attempt to win they attempt to fulfill their objectives on their side and I've been involved not as a player but as sort of staff helping generate serials and keep monitor the game and the you know aside from the sort of the the agency and the involvement the emotional attachment and the sort of the neurological effects that that has in terms of retention and being involved there are lots of other sort of fringe benefits that you get from from from games like this for example the the team working in things are reinforced and the ability to sort of tackle problems together and solve problems together is improved and also it means the instructors rather than sitting there in front of the class dictating information can take an outside view and spot where where people are performing well or poorly and intervene and and provide sort of more more useful feedback

okay but i want a concrete example where you say i do this better because of that well like i can throw in the example of a game that i've got called the hammer of the scots which is about the scottish wars of independence between william wallace and edward the first and and you know various other characters of the time i was playing that with a friend of mine who's also a former war gamer for government in the civil service club and a chap came over and asked what we were doing and i explained this scenario to him and he said this is just like afghanistan and you know essentially you have a a much a very strong force external force which is the english in this particular game who you know are invading scotland to quell a rebellion and at the same time you have the scots who start out very weak but have the advantage of additional mobility they have they have local support which turns out to be fairly crucial when you play the game now it isn't obviously a model of modern-day afghanistan but by playing that game from both sides a few times it gives you additional models with which to think about the real world to say okay well actually you know what kinds of asymmetry might we expect to see here to what extent is this a model and can i use that to think about what i need to do how do we respond to you know people to enemies where there's a great asymmetry of force and what kinds of tactics might we expect them to do to use now it's not going to give you a prediction about that but what it will give you is some ways of thinking about the problem which are a bit more structured

than just you know reading about it all this makes sense and it all i agree with everything you're saying but i still haven't heard a concrete example okay so go on more concrete example then

much of my sort of understanding when i was young when i was younger about the economics microeconomics of around businesses and towns and trade and how that stuff worked came from playing games like civilization and simcity which provided me with simple understanding frameworks for how things interact in these sorts of economic systems that i was then able to build on with real more real life information so i was sort of decorating these framework trees of understanding with additional information but had i not played those games i wouldn't have had this

tree to to flesh out but if you want a an example from really the real world the the uk ministry of defense uses war games to test its force structures so if we you know we we have some view as to what kinds of what kind of military equipment we might have what sorts of military forces we'll have in say 10 15 years time we use real world scenarios and they're played out in a war game and i've i was involved in generating one of those scenarios and i went to see what they were doing and in the scenario the the uk were trying to deploy forces along a road but you know it turned out that that road was much narrower and had less capacity than than it looked like from a map you know so that that tells you something okay well if we are going to deploy to landlocked countries we need to you know go and investigate whether or not our our logistic capabilities are up to scratch for those sorts of tasks that had a real world impact on

our policy okay great i'm satisfied um we need to draw things to a close but i feel we've only just scratched this i think we should do another podcast on this to sort of really delve into um the wargaming side of things and i think i'm interested yeah in in you know what can we learn from from playing i think there's more rich material here i know just to wrap things up my own personal example i know what i've learned from playing games which is mainly disappointment and how to deal with disappointments in life and i think a classic is i can't remember if i mentioned this on a podcast before but when i was a kid i really liked the the the comic um and annuals of warlord i don't know if you're familiar with that but there was a secret agent who was called lord peter flint um who was mild-mannered but actually you know a secret agent and um and him one thing that he used to say throughout all these comics when inevitably he defeated his his german nemesis was that um oh well you know no wonder that he's so upset because they never learned to play cricket okay and and for years i never really understood what they were talking about until i played cricket myself and sort of the disappointment of because cricket is a very harsh game because um who who cares about unless you're a bowler who cares about fielding it's just standing around for hours being bored um and your only moment of glory and having fun is going out to bat okay but that can be over in an instant and so um so it is a great

way to learn about disappointment in life picking up the disappointment thing i think that relates to there's an interesting neurological studies and maybe that's where we can go on next podcast but just to just as a teaser um the the the disappointment bit relates to sort of the uncertainty of the game and the gaming environment provides you with assuming you've got equally matched teams you know you can predict uh roughly uh what the probability of going to be of winning is but you don't know you don't know how well these other teams are going to perform against you so you don't your expected return on the reward whatever it is whether it's just the kudos of winning or some sort of prize is uncertain and it's been demonstrated that uncertainty uh in um in learning environments and and uh in sort of challenging cognitive tasks environments actually correlates to the amount of dopamine released in the brain so if you're if you're unsure about what's going to happen you're you're more aware you're more sort of tuned in and that's this is perhaps where the the the engagement and the emotional attachment comes from because why

people get addicted to gambling where there's exactly yeah but i think yeah i mean this is only a hypothesis but you know i think people people playing a game at least against another player might do something to uh alleviate the the sort of control bias that the illusion that we're in more control of things than we are and that's something which you you know we could perhaps look at in future as being a driver of um you know certain kinds of military decision errors uh the belief that we have more control over the outcome than we than we actually do um but that is only a hypothesis as i said this isn't something that's been very widely studied so okay there's definitely lots of

material here for future podcasts i think um and then to really wrap things up um i've played a board game with you nick which was twilight what do you call it twilight struggle twilight struggle and what i learned from that is i never want to play another board game with you because that game went on for hours two hours yeah no no no no no it no it was more like six hours and like it was two o'clock in the morning i just wanted to go home yeah and you were winning by that point and you said no no you've got to sort of see this through and it was it was so complex

that game um i think this is all a matter of relative if you think that i mean there are games that i know that that you know make twilight struggle look like noughts and crosses so

i like playing relative i like playing games with nick because he is it's just fun but um we never play the same game twice so i never ever have a chance of winning because he always has a slight advantage of knowing the rules okay um and so uh we've played we've played games on numerous games and i think we've played one game more you know twice and once okay there's definitely a

lesson in there somewhere that you know to do with it's all very well playing games but don't play with someone who knows how to play the game or or maybe that is the whole point that you know this person is really good at the real thing because they've been playing this game so often anyway that's a slightly bland conclusion from my side but anyway um we'll stop there thank you very much guys i enjoyed that um you've been listening to the cognitive engineering podcast with aleph insights with with nick hare and peter coghill thank you very much and until next time goodbye