The present and future of wargaming

Danny Crichton:

Rwizi, thank you so much for joining us.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

Thank you, Danny. It's a pleasure to join you.

Danny Crichton:

So you've launched this publication called Wargaming Weekly on Substack, and I mean over the last couple of months I've been reading it. It's been very exciting. You're covering this extremely niche part of defense policy planning and strategizing. I'm curious, how did you get into this field? Because it's not something that you sort of stumble upon easily.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

It's especially peculiar given my location. I'm literally in Uganda, East Africa, and here I am having a lot of opinions about what the DOD should do all the way on the other side of the world. I would say my story of wargaming goes all the way back to my high school days. I don't know if any of you attended a Catholic high school.

Danny Crichton:

No, no Catholic high school for me, good old public schools, American public schools. So they're decent when the lights turn on.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

Well, so I had the blessing and the curse of attending a Catholic high school.

Danny Crichton:

Exactly.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

But I would say, arguably, the best Catholic high school in my country, St. Mary's College Kisubi. Typically, with Catholic high schools, you develop a double character. So you have the character that you present to the school administration and your parents, and then there's who you are with the students. So for me, my naughtiest adventure as a student was when I started and ran an underground casino.

Danny Crichton:

That'll get you rapped over the knuckles by the sisters pretty hard.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

Oh, for us it was the brothers. So looking back, it was a really, really risky adventure because if I had been caught, it would've been automatic expulsion. But the reason why I did that was because in our leisure time, we had a bunch of guys who used to play cards, but I was never good at cards. So I wanted to have something that everyone was at a level playing field on. So I figured if we could start playing poker, which none of us understood, we'd all start from zero. So I went to the school library, picked up a few encyclopedia, bungled my way through the rules, got a bunch of my friends to buy into joining me on the weekend. I was the dealer, they were the gamblers. I would basically guide them through my understanding of the rules, and we had this little weekly underground casino going.

So that was my beginning of games and rudimentary game design because we were not really playing proper poker, but it was our version of poker based on my understanding. So fast-forward, a few years later I have dropped out of university. I am working as a B2B marketing writer on Upwork. This was just a few years after the 2008 crash. So the zero interest rate phenomenon was in high-

Danny Crichton:

Zerping away.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

It was zerping away. So remote work was picking up. So I was making money, good money as a B2B writer, working remotely all the way from this side of the world, working for companies all across the world. Basically built a career out of that. Once again, fast-forward about 10 years later, and I met my most interesting client to date, the Octalysis Group. They're basically, I could say one of the top, if not the top, gamification consultancies in the world, led by Yu-kai Chao, who's basically the face of the company. He went viral a few years ago with his TED Talk about gamification, but he has his business partner, Joris Beerda.

So they hired me to do some SEO content writing for them. That was regular for me. But when I started doing the research for these blog topics that they were assigning me, I was very intrigued because on the one hand, I was learning about how games could be serious, could be serious work, not just mobile. Before that, all I could think of was mobile games, all like I said, casino games. But here I was seeing how games were being applied in apps to make them more engaging. And for me, that was especially interesting because at the time I had been developing a FinTech app with a few friends of mine, and we had hit this wall of trying to figure out how to make it interesting.

So it's accounting meets crowdfunding, and as you can imagine, that's boring. No one wakes up and is like, "Hey, I want to look at a spreadsheet." So we found that even when we had built an app that was functional, even us ourselves as the founders, we couldn't get ourselves to use it because it wasn't engaging. So getting this work from Octalysis was well-timed because it alerted me to the possibility of using gamification for this app. And at the same time, I was now learning about how games can be more than just games.

So at the time, Joris, who was my contact, used to give me assignments. He would say, "Okay, I need content on gamification in healthcare," and I would research that. I need content on gamification in finance, and I'd research that. So eventually I asked him, "Why don't we do something about gamification in government?" And he was like, "We're not really interested in that because we are not interested in government clients because their procurement process is lengthy and what have you." But for me, it stayed in the back of my mind because I was like, "If gamification is being applied in all these industries, I'm sure there's someone who's applying it in government."

So one day on my own volition, on my own research time, ended up typing something like gamification in government or gamification in policy. And that eventually led me to discover RAND's Cold War, nuclear war gaming. And that blew my mind on so many levels because in my mind I was like, "These people were playing games about the end of the world, the most serious thing in the world, and they were figuring it out through games." So when I discovered that, that led me into the Georgetown University wargaming Society's YouTube channel, which I can say is pound for pound the most comprehensive online database of wargaming knowledge, professional wargaming knowledge. That was back in 2022.

So initially, I was just watching one webinar after another. About 10 webinars in, I was like, "I think I need to start taking notes." So I went all the way back to the top, and now I was taking notes in my little notebook. Before I knew it, that little notebook was filled up to the brim. I got a second one. And so every week I would make time because like I said, I still had to do my content writing. I still had to work on the startup with my friends, but I always made time to watch a webinar or two or three a week.

So now fast-forward to 2024, last year. I had a bit more time on my hands. AI has kind of killed the content market that I've been working in. At the same time, my startup no longer needs me as hands on as it needed me, so I had way more time on my hands. And I had now reached a stage of my knowledge consumption where I felt like I needed to give back. I've been consuming and consuming and consuming. I need to give back somehow. And if you go to my oldest, my really oldest newsletters, you'll see that I was really just stumbling. My initial thought was, "Let me just curate. Let me just create a weekly breakdown of buckets of wargaming information." I didn't even know what exactly I wanted the newsletter to do, but I knew I had this idea to give back to the wargaming body of knowledge.

And at the same time I had gotten this vision for Wargaming Weekly. It just sounded good. I literally came up with the logo in three minutes in Microsoft Paint. I started writing, and then I had this thing in me that it's imposter syndrome. I was like, "Okay, you're not a war gamer if you're just reading and writing about it. You have to play some games." So I looked up. I was like, "I'm not going to be able to afford these games," most of the commercial games, let alone being able to ship them all the way to Uganda. So I figured, okay, let me see how I can maybe get some mobile games.

Unfortunately, I found that Twilight Struggle had recently been made a mobile game. So I downloaded that and then I discovered Sebastian Bae's Micro Wargames collections. That's my go-to for games. And then eventually I was like, "Okay, you're not really a war gamer if all you're doing is writing, reading and playing. You have to design." And then so I started working on this idea that had been in my head for a war game design about Uganda's heads of state. Yeah, sometime this year I put that out. And then I also put out a second game called African Election, but it's more of a solitaire business war game. So for me, this journey is me feeding my imposter syndrome and trying to prove to myself that I'm a war gamer, and I keep moving the bar.

Danny Crichton:

I think when I hear this story, you were playing poker or a version of poker all the way back in high school. And our original thesis for our original, quote, unquote, "manifesto" for risk gaming, I have a whole section about how much I hate poker, and I hate poker because people know the rules of the road. They have strategies that are lined up. They've memorized. They're really professional folks, and we've had World Champion Series of Poker, Annie Duke, on the podcast who's talked about her own career as a poker player. But you have these strategies that are built into the game. You repeat them in different formats or whatever. It's a little bit like playing tennis or anything.

To me, the power of war gaming is really to say, look, you are confronted with entirely new situations, totally novel environments each time. The reality is as we fight a war, as you compete in any conflict, and that doesn't have to be literally military to military, it can be in business, it can be in any place that has a competitive arena, the challenge is you're always going into the future. You don't know what's next. You don't know what the tactics are. Technology is always changing, which means there are entirely new ways of competing that didn't exist five, 10, a hundred years ago. And so to me, poker is always this static game where the rules are fixed and you're just trying to optimize your own play as opposed to any form of actual human competition where the rule book can be entirely replaced.

And to me, that is the power of war gaming and your own evolution when I hear the story of saying like, look, you started as a, I guess you dubbed it in an underground casino, but this idea of an underground casino at your Catholic high school. And now you're sort of seeing, look, there's such breadth here. There's so many different domains, there's so many different tactics. Just a couple of places you mentioned, when I look at RAND versus Sebastian Bae's work versus even Twilight Struggle, I mean, Twilight Struggle is a grand strategy game covering the Cold War. Sebastian Bae has a couple of different games, a lot of focus on the Pacific Theater, very, very different focus. There are other war games focused on logistics, whatever the case may be. And so I just love the diversity that comes out of this category beyond what you get in the poker world.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

I have to say, I quickly realized that I was actually not that good at poker. I was just as mad at it as I was at cards that I was trying to replace. But I love being a dealer. Yeah, I think the only casino game I'm good at is blackjack, to be honest, but that's because it's kind of mechanical. But anyway, what you said about war gaming is true. When I initially entered war gaming, I thought, "Okay, here's a nice small niche that I'm going to be able to understand and cover within at most six months." It felt like it won't be that big, but I've quickly discovered that it's huge. There's so many branches to wargaming. I have realized that I am going to have to find my own nice corner and get comfortable there and enjoy it and give up on trying to eat the entire wargaming world because I can't.

I quickly discovered there's commercial wargaming and professional wargaming. So now I've kind of veered more towards covering professional wargaming. But even within professional wargaming, there's military wargaming and there's business wargaming. Within military wargaming, there's all these branches of educational wargaming, analytical wargaming. For me, it's just a never-ending curiosity chronicle that I keep pursuing. And like I said, I am lapping my way through and just continuously fighting the imposter syndrome, but as a fuel to keep learning, to keep playing, to keep designing, and most importantly, to give back to this body of knowledge that has really, really inspired me.

Danny Crichton:

Look, I've been to a number of wargaming conferences over the last couple of years as we built out risk gaming and built it into a franchise. And one of the things I will say is I do think that there's this opaqueness, this lack of transparency that makes the field seem much more complicated and much more cloistered than it really is. There's really no need for it. I mean, ultimately, what the point of these games are, and I'm remembering a podcast we did, I think it was last year with Kelly Clancy who wrote a book on chance and the history of gaming in human history. But humans have, there's evidence of games that goes back thousands of years.

And one of the reasons for this is we're always trying to confront the unknown. We don't know what's going to happen in the future. We like dice and chance because it tempts fate. We don't know in the same way in real life that we don't know what's going to happen next, we're essentially Kelly Clancy's title, Playing with Reality. We're essentially playing with reality. We're trying to understand and come to grips with the fact that we don't know what's around the corner.

And so when I think of these games, yes, the commercial wargaming market, the professional market, stuff that the Pentagon does that's classified, that's behind closed doors, they're all part of the same spectrum, different goals, different motivations. And I think if you get into professional designing, there's always this question is who's your customer? And that shapes a huge amount of what you're trying to do in terms of building a game. But on the other hand, all of it's the same. Whether you're targeting business, military, diplomacy, whatever the case may be, whatever domain, the goal is to try to help people make better decisions under uncertainty.

And the degree that we can do that, the degree that we can scaffold those decisions and say, look, you can't shoot missiles this far because they don't have that range. Or you think that this would happen superfast and that's not going to work because logistics don't work that way. That's what the games are trying to imprint and help people figure out.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

For me, my mind is blown by the fact that games, which are the silliest thing, literal child's play, are being used to investigate the most serious topics of our time, war, nuclear annihilation, natural disasters, how should we be governed? It's really coming full circle, like the most silly thing meeting the most serious thing in this synthetic environment and it making sense at the end of the day. It makes perfect sense, but when you step back a bit, it's really hilarious.

Danny Crichton:

Well, I mean, look, one of the biggest challenges, I still get this on a very regular basis. It's like, you are paid to make games with this level of pure... You would understand because you went to a Catholic high school. You can't have fun because it's a serious topic. And I have a completely different view, which is for adults, the reason we have play, and I mean just in the last couple of weeks in talking to a couple of different, very long-term professional game designers, the reason we use play is it allows us to explore experiences that otherwise we have no creativity to bear on. It opens up the aperture for us to say, look, I'm a CEO, I'm a general, I'm whatever leader I want to be. What decisions are possible? Can we imagine a different world in which we are able to conduct our mission or not?

And without the element of play, you're back to an essay and a couple of bullet points. Well, we shall do X, Y, and Z. And part of play is to say, well, actually there's a lot of things you can do. It's an infinite board. It is a little bit like trying to play chess and you're just reading books all the time. And then you actually play and you sort of realize, oh wow, I'm playing against someone. That person can do stuff in response to me and therefore, it's dynamical and not static. And play gives us the ability to sort of be flexible and do interesting stuff there.

And so I have to defend it a lot. I still have to defend it. I think it's built in. There's absolutely no way to have fun when you're talking about war, but it's not to say you should be flippant about the subject. Obviously, there's real consequences to some of the decisions that come out of this. But on the other hand, if you want those decisions to be the best, the ones that improve people's lives the most, having the creative flexibility of mind and be able to confront them I think is critical.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

I've noticed that. In my research, I've noticed that a lot of wargaming articles, at least currently, are about trying to convince people that, hey, it's okay to play a game to investigate these things. A lot of wargaming articles are about advocacy, trying to get people to get over the predisposition to think this is too nerdy, this is too unserious. I look forward to a time when more wargaming articles are about the technicalities of wargaming than advocacy, but it feels like currently we have to work through this initial stage where it's just about convincing people that, hey, we need to be wargaming again. We used to do this, and it's okay that it's nerdy and it's okay that it's a bit silly, but it works. It needs to done.

And for me, that's interesting because I thought it would be a given. I thought that for me, being a latecomer to the field, I would find that everyone already understands it, but it feels like there's still a lot of work to be done convincing people.

Danny Crichton:

I think it's also a case where, so one is people are predisposed to be against play. That makes sense. Understand why. I think you can do it. The other challenge today is with so many threats, risks going on around the world, with so much operational intensity right now, the economic system is going through massive throes right now. You see the same thing in defense, geopolitics. You go on down the list. People are overwhelmed with the number of decisions they already have to make. And we try to, it's not so much even designing the games, actually getting people to show up.

Generally speaking, we do fairly well. As you move up the stack, as people are more senior, they tend to be more strategic, therefore they have much more interest in doing things that help them make strategic decisions. But being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company today, I mean there's an overwhelming agenda to do. And one of the biggest challenges we just face is this constant struggle of saying, "Look, you have to take four hours, pull back a little bit, try to comprehend and synthesize a lot of the stuff that's going on within the game experience, and that's very valuable. But when you are sitting down and it's quarterly results, and there are new tariffs that just got announced this afternoon and your supply chain just got massively altered, it is really hard to say, "Look, there's a crisis every single second. How do I take time away?"

And on top of that, how do I explain to my staff, "Oh, everyone, I'll be back. I'm going to go gaming for a couple hours. I'll see you at five." It's hard, right? We're not at a strategic time in the sense that people are taking the moment to really think. They're in an operational executive time where they are making quick decisions as rapidly as possible, trying to stay ahead of all the stuff that's going on around the world.

And so look, if you look at the history of wargaming since it's genesis in the 1800s, the reality is it seems to go up and down based on the number of crises in the world. The last kind of search for the Pentagon was sort of late Obama years around 2015. Robert O. Work was a big benefactor and patron of wargaming across the defense community here in the United States. And then when he sort of moved on, there was really no one to pick up the torch. And so now it's in recess. And a lot of institutions that would normally fund this are kind of in reverse, but someone else will come up and then suddenly strategic thought will come back into the fore and then people will need games again. So there's just a natural ebb and flow that I think is unfortunate but natural.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

It really is unfortunate because I think we've now gone through enough of those booms and busts to figure out that this is something that should probably be more of a flat line or flat rising line. I think it's kind of counterproductive to keep going through this building and destruction of knowledge/awareness/practice. And that's one of the things that I talk about in my newsletter, the need for the cultural shift for wargaming to go really mainstream. And people have written about this, the need for a pipeline of war gamers, but that will have to be all across society from academia to even just regular life.

I envision a society where war games are so infused in regular life that they're even part of dating life. I mean, we are talking about fertility rates. People should be going on wargaming dates, people should be watching wargaming TV shows. That's how proliferated it should be, such that obviously there'll be a lot of noise and some people who don't belong there, but that will make sure that everyone who belongs there finds their way there, one way or the other.

Danny Crichton:

The block that I've seen over 10 years is people don't want to learn new rules. That is the friction point. This is the poker problem, or chess, but poker is a better example where people like memorizing the rules so they can just show up and just start playing as soon as they get into the place. You play tennis, you play poker, whatever the case may be. When you do wargaming, you don't tend to play the same game 500 times. The point here is life is really complex and complicated. There are thousands of different subject matters to potentially game and to understand.

It's a little bit like saying, imagine if your reading style was similar to how most people game. It would be I bought one book and then I read it for 15 to 20 years and then that's it. I'd never read another book in that entire period of time. That would be insane. People read many books because they want to understand different things. But when we look at gaming, people say, "No, no, I don't want to learn new rules." I don't want to have to learn this new environment. I don't want to learn this new era. I don't want to learn logistics versus, I don't know, war fighting versus financing of capital infrastructure for the defense industrial base or whatever the subject may be. And so it's just really hard to adapt across all those, I think.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

But I do believe it's worth the effort. Unfortunately, I am noticing a lot of efforts in different directions that are all aimed towards making it more institutionalized, more mainstream, more effective, and I think that's all good.

Danny Crichton:

Well, we've had a lot of success recently is with the rise of artificial intelligence, and I don't even think I've really written about this as comprehensively as I should, but we've had a lot of engagement around universities thinking about the future of in-classroom education. So in a world in which you have LLM, large language model bots, I can basically do a lecture through ChatGPT. I can learn, I can write. So what's the purpose of a classroom experience when you have a personalized tutor that's built into your computer?

And I think increasingly, we have talked to a couple of different universities, but people are increasingly seeing gaming as an experiential part of learning that could really transform the classroom from this sort of dry rote lecture, one to many kind of education model that frankly dates back to the Greeks and Plato to one where you can say, "Look, imagine a 20-person wargaming scenario played live in a classroom over three to four hours that helps you understand the complexities of logistics in the 21st century." And now you're getting beyond just reading some books. Now you're getting into the actual dynamics in the dynamical system that actually takes place in the real world. So you're actually helping people understand the real world much better while also competing much better against the substitution effect of ChatGPT in the classroom.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

I've also noticed that. I've noticed some people even doing it for high school students. Clint Warren-Davey in Australia, funny enough, he teaches at a Catholic high school. I've seen him teach war game design to his high school students, teaching his high school students history using war games. And I can't tell you how jealous I am. I wish I had had even a sliver of that back when I was 16.

Danny Crichton:

A week or two ago, we posted an episode with Ian Curtiss, one of our wargaming designers, and Pius, who's a professor over in Lithuania, and he's also pioneering, using their wargaming lab, these exact type of approaches. And I do think not just in the US, not just in the military academies and the service academies and the war colleges, but you're seeing this all throughout, particularly higher education in the US and globally. And I do think it's a movement. So I am enthusiastic for the opportunity here. I think there are a lot of people who are interested in it. I hope it filters down even further into high school and K through 12, but I do think people want these sort of experiential learning opportunities.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

And like you said, with AI, now more than ever, we need analytical thinkers. And I don't think we're going to get those without games. I don't think there's anywhere around it. So the sooner we can introduce games into the classroom, I see a lot of people doing research on game-based learning, game-based education, likes of, I've seen, is it Jeremiah McCall? I think the sooner we can get students interacting with games in their education cycle all the way up to university, the better.

Danny Crichton:

Now I'm curious because I mean, one of the things you've been doing with Wargaming Weekly is you've been reviewing a lot of games. You play them, you play them with friends, you review them. I'm curious about some of the patterns that you're seeing because I think I actually spend so much time designing and having to actually do the work of building these and building the events, I don't always get a chance to do the panorama sweep of everything that's going to be published. What's been interesting to you in some of the games that you've played recently?

Rwizi Rweizooba:

I have to clarify that I haven't yet played any of these war games with friends. I've only played solitaire. Here's what I can tell you. Because I've mainly played micro wargames, that's what I can confidently talk about. I think micro wargames are really a huge game changer as far as wargaming goes because they compress the entry point. They make it easier for someone who's new to wargaming to experiment with wargaming. One, a lot of them are solitaire games. So just like me, if you're in situation where maybe your friends are in another city, you can pick up a game, print it out, cut out the pieces and start playing. Because they're designed to be completed within 20 to 30 minutes, it doesn't feel like a huge commitment compared to the typical game whereby you would have to spread it out over a huge table and commit two, three hours of gameplay. And we are also talking about an hour of preparation.

Because they provide such a low threshold to entry, I think they're going to be great for getting more people into the pipeline. So I've seen Sebastian Bae has about three collections of micro games. Fight Club has a collection. Even the Georgetown University Wargaming Society has a collection of its own on its website. The Women's Wargaming Network has a micro game design that they're planning to do later this month. I would say in the wargame design space, the micro games are really picking up, and I think people are starting to see their value, especially as far as educational wargaming goes.

So like I told you, I'm a civilian, startup founder/B2B marketer, but every micro wargame that I have played has taught me something about the military that I probably wouldn't have picked up any other way, not from watching a bunch of documentaries, not from reading a bunch of PDFs. But playing a micro wargame once, twice, thrice, I'm able to get into the mind of a practitioner and be like, "Oh, so these are the problems that you actually face, and these are the sacrifices that you have to make." So I think now for the people who are actually serving in the different militaries, these micro wargames will be great.

I think especially, given that now one of the big trends is people are trying to get war games down into the lower echelons, because traditionally wargaming has been for generals and up. In fact, I've come across several podcasts where people talk about that soldiers usually meet their first war games as majors or colonels. So there's now this drive to get wargaming down to the platoon level, to squad level. And I think micro wargames are going to be perfect for this. They can literally fit in soldiers' pockets and they can be played in very compact spaces in very short spans of time. So I think for educational war games, wargaming in particular, micro wargames are going to be great.

Analytical wargaming, I still have to endure the big, long war games, but I think educational wargaming will really benefit from micro wargames, especially if they can be digitized as mobile games, like what Playdeck has done for Twilight Struggle. So I'm imagining if someone got one of these war game collections and made a mobile app where someone could log in and play this game in 10, 15 minutes, if there's someone else who's online, they can have a match. If there's no one, they can play against an AI bot. Micro games, both physically and digitally, will be huge going forward.

Danny Crichton:

We've only built interactive games, and mostly because for us, risk gaming is an opportunity to meet people, bring people together, convene, etc. I do think you bring up a very important point though, that if you want to learn strategy, if you want to learn how to improve your own decision-making, obviously it's always best in my opinion, to have opponents because human opponents help you sharpen. Human opponents are more likely to come up with strategies you've never seen before, original compared to AI, original compared to an algorithm.

But at the same time, if you're just learning something from new for the first time, there's absolutely no reason why you need to start with an interactive game. A solitaire game that allows you to actually get into it, to actually focus on it, to do it at speed, at whatever speed you're comfortable with, is a unique experience. And it's something that we have not really done in the past or haven't really thought about. But I am intrigued because the biggest challenge for us is always convening that group of people together. How do you get some congressmen and CEOs all in the same room at the same time? Huge pain in the ass, quite frankly. If people were actually willing to play and do it in a solitary fashion, then you potentially have the ability to enhance the thinking of hundreds of thousands, millions of people potentially.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

On the business side, I think given that these CEOs are usually short of time, I think there's an opportunity for business micro wargames to make a splash as well, whereby you can say, "Okay, you don't have a lot of time, but at the beginning of this one-hour meeting, can we play a quick 20-minute micro wargame about our supply chains?" And then that can guide the conversation of the meeting. Or maybe at the end of the meeting to give you something to think about beyond the meeting. So I think there's an opportunity for micro wargames to also enter the business world.

Another design trend that I have noticed is commercial PME war games, so professional military education war games. Traditionally, it's the military that gets commercial war games and tries to use them for their officer training. So for example, Mark Greenwald at the US Army Command and General Staff College, I've seen him use commercial war games like Race to the Rhine, Race to Moscow, Root, as part of the course that they offer their officers there.

But now there's this trend where it's going the reverse way, whereby games originally designed for professional military education are finding commercial success. And the biggest example of this of course, is Sebastian Bae's Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific, which has, I guess in music terms, we could say it has gone diamond. It has found huge commercial success. It has been translated into multiple languages. I think I've seen a German translation, Japanese translation. It's having expansions. There's now Littoral Commander: Australia in the works, Littoral Commander: Baltic in the works, I believe even Littoral Commander: Space Force. So that trend I think is also a very interesting one to watch because now it's really the bridging of the two worlds, the commercial world and the professional world, whereby hobbyist war gamers will now have access to higher fidelity war games.

The hobbyist war gamer is the ultimate LARPer. So they're trying to LARP as close to reality as possible, and these PME war games are perfect for that. While at the same time, these PME war games being able to find commercial success means that they have optimized for better playability, which in turn makes them more attractive to lower echelon service people who usually wouldn't either have the opportunity to play these games or wouldn't even feel compelled to play these games because they're not fun. But now they have games which are both fun and can deliver the professional military education they need.

Following in the footsteps of Sebastian Bae now is James Buckley of Sapper Studio, who has recently published Battlegroup Clash: Baltics. So this is the commercial version of the Battlegroup war game system, which was developed for the British Army by Vedette Consulting. It's basically the Littoral Commander of the British Army. And I think we are going to see more and more of this whereby war game designers in the PME world are able to develop a game that has the high fidelity for professional military education, but enough playability to find commercial success. And I think that's going to be amazing because it's going to enable more people from the hobbyist world to enter professional wargaming and also even for the professional gamers to have better products to work with.

Danny Crichton:

Look, I said it earlier, I think that there's an artificial distinction here, and the idea that something is better by being hard to play to me is actually a sign of just a bad product. You can have tremendous intellectual depth with a game that is very easy to onboard. These are not contradictory concepts. And I do think that you're starting to see folks who are starting to realize, oh, just because you don't have to spend six hours memorizing a rule book doesn't mean it's not sophisticated, right? We are getting past this status games and some of this opaqueness that I said earlier to open this up and say, look, it's just as useful for people outside as it is inside. There doesn't have to be this distinction.

And honestly, it's publications like yours that I think are sort of popularizing and saying, "Look, there's a whole spectrum here. You can play them solitary, as groups, as otherwise." You can play them in the military, outside of them. They're applicable to all these domains. Why make a distinction? And that leads to my last question, which is, you've been publishing Wargaming Weekly for a while now. What's sort of next for you? Are you just going to continue reviewing and testing different games? Do you have motivations? What's sort of next?

Rwizi Rweizooba:

Yeah, so like I told you earlier, for me, Wargaming Weekly is a continuous series of fighting my imposter syndrome. And like I told you initially, it was you're not a real war gamer if all you're doing is consuming. You have to put back something. Then I moved the goalpost to you have to play. Then I moved the goalpost to you have to design. Next, I feel like I have to work in wargaming. So what I want to do next is do some kind of consulting work in wargaming, whether it's business wargaming or military wargaming. That's what I hope eventually wargaming weekly leads me to. But even if that doesn't pan out for me, as long as I am playing games every week, I am watching wargaming webinars every week and writing about wargaming every week, I'll be happy.

But that aside, I obviously want to be able to implement the things that I have learned from wargaming, the game design principles, the strategic thinking principles back to my startup, Lupiiya Books, such that we can achieve the things that want to achieve in the FinTech world using these unique lessons that I have picked from the wargaming world, which is not a place that most FinTech founders look. So I'm hoping this will be our unfair advantage down the road, that one of the founders of our startup has this in-depth wargaming knowledge, whereas the rest of the FinTech world has regular startup knowledge.

Danny Crichton:

Exactly. Well, look, I mean, that's our edge too, is we're trying to always seek edges with risk gaming, to find edges against our competitors in the exact same way. And so couldn't agree with you more, but I know we're almost up on time. So Rwizi, thank you so much for joining us and making Wargaming Weekly such a tremendous publication.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

Thank you, Danny, for having me. And thank you too for the work you're doing with risk gaming. I haven't yet had the chance to play Ian Curtiss's games, but I really hope eventually when I manage to get my friends to sit on one table, I hope I'll manage to bully them into playing one of those games because they really look interesting. But I think you're doing great work with risk gaming. I love that you even coined the term risk gaming because I think it makes wargaming more palatable to people who are a bit turned off by the war part. So kudos to you too.

Danny Crichton:

I appreciate that, and I look forward to hearing your story. But thank you, Rwizi, for joining us.

Rwizi Rweizooba:

Thank you.

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