Cyber Wargaming by Frank L. Smith III;Nina A. Kollars;Benjamin H. Schechter;

Author:Frank L. Smith III;Nina A. Kollars;Benjamin H. Schechter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Pedagogy

In educational settings, the more engaged participants are in a learning activity, the greater the chance that lessons will be received and retained. Engagement can be generated by activities that require active participation, rather than passive absorption, and contain a sense of fun.32 Indeed, according to Dan Rea and colleagues, fun activities are not only an instrument of learning success but also “learning satisfaction.”33 Reinforcing this point, Bob Stremba and Christian Bisson note that “the idea of using play as a valid form of pedagogy has been substantiated by many scholars.”34 In studies of serious games, students having fun has been linked to “higher interest in the subject matter.”35 Fun also offers opportunities to overcome reluctance to participate in “long, complex and difficult” learning processes, several of which are described in this book.36

One complement to playfulness in learning is humor. Humor is perhaps most simply understood as that which “is actually or potentially funny, and the process by which this ‘funniness’ occurs.”37 According to Jerry Palmer, it is also dependent on a “playful state of mind” shared between humor maker and audience, which means that humor shares a core characteristic of playfulness as defined by Salen and Zimmerman.38 Humor is a fundamentally human trait; Simon Critchley goes as far as to suggest that Huizinga’s homo ludens argument was erroneous, and that instead “we are homo ridens, laughing beings.”39 Academic debate notwithstanding, playfulness and humor appear inextricably linked to the human condition.

Humor has been recognized as an important element in several pedagogical fields.40 The same is true for ludology.41 Humor even appears in security studies; as Carol Cohn finds, it can be a prominent tool—be it wry or perverse—for managing if not dulling the gruesome parts of imagining war.42 However, humor is almost entirely absent from the literature on wargaming. Many foundational books in the field rarely if ever refer to the subject.43 Perhaps this omission is further evidence of the uneasy relationship between playfulness and professional wargaming. But it is still strange. Studies in adjacent fields such as pedagogy and technology, cited above, show that humor can break down barriers between players and games, and between students and teachers, while increasing participants’ engagement. There is good reason to suspect similar benefits for educational wargaming, even if this possibility has been understudied to date.

I have seen first-hand that players’ engagement, emotion, entertainment, and humor can serve as vehicles for student learning through cyber wargames. I have also grappled with potential trade-offs, as described in chapter 2, between players’ engagement and other values, such as contextual realism. Despite these dilemmas of design, I argue that the educational benefits of engaging play are well worth the effort.

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