Wargaming - The game of war

How can a new technology or a product resulting from it be tested if it does not yet exist?

 

Instead of testing, we will simulate! However, turning to the world of simulation with ideas and feelings rather than values to feed the mathematical models is not so easy.

This is when “gaming” came to mind.

But how? With what? With whom? At what level? For how long? Without really knowing it, we have opened Pandora’s box of possibilities and alternatives that we should consider to build our environment of discoveries, our technological foresight ecosystem.

The board game

The New Techno War game makes it easy to simulate future systems integrating new technologies while stimulating discussions. The goal here is not to win, but to understand the strengths and weaknesses induced by these future systems in given tactical scenarios.

This serious game has been developed with the company Helvetia Games. A commercial version of the game is available in French, English and German.

Extensions

Delivery Drone
Drone Swarm
Intelligent shipping container
Autonomous vehicle

From the board to the screen

The transition to the digital world presents some intrinsic challenges but provides additional information on how the new systems could be used and potentially challenge current tactical procedures. Efforts are being undertaken to improve understanding of the following issues:

  1. What can we learn by generating all the possible outcomes of a scenario?

  2. What can a human learn by playing against an Artificial Intelligence (IA) ? How can we do this ?

  3. What kind of information can we present to the human player so that the human + AI tandem is better than the AI alone ? How do we present the information from the AI to the player?

Research in this field is carried out with Scensei GmbH an the Institut Dalle Molle for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA)

A digital companion

Interested in simulating what a “digital companion” could be in order to better understand how the cognitive bias of the player appears during the game, we developed a simple video game around the board game New Techno War.

The player embodies the soldier in the field. The challenge is to consider some of the initial situations created for the board game and to transform the game’s course into an educational narrative. In this way, we want to shed additional light on the issues raised by the use of new technologies.

Concept and methodology are carried out in collaboration with the company Oni3 (snc).