The Wargaming Network is pleased to announce the launch of our 2020-2021 public lectures series on wargaming. The theme for this year is advancing wargaming as an academic discipline and will feature speakers who have made important new contributions to developing wargaming theory and applications.

Gaming has often been positioned as an art, in contrast to quantitative analysis which is framed as scientific. Framing gaming as an art makes it too easy to divorce game design from foundational research practices. It also rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means for inquiry to be "scientific". Ellie Bartels, the co-director of the RAND Center for Gaming, will explore different logics of scientific inquiry, and how gaming can support research within each. She will also discuss how these considerations shape an approach to game design that promotes traceability and transparency to generate credible findings.

About the Speakers

Elizabeth (Ellie) Bartels is the Co-Director of the RAND Center for Gaming and an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. She is a specialist in national security policy analysis gaming. Other research includes work on defense planning, force development, and measures short of armed conflict (including long-term competition, gray zone, hybrid warfare, and irregular warfare). Prior to joining RAND, Bartels was a senior associate at Caerus Associates and a research analyst at the National Defense University’s gaming center. Her PhD is from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where her work focused on how to apply social scientific practices to the design of games for policy analysis.

Ivanka Barzashka, Managing Director of the King's Wargaming Network, will chair the lecture.

The event is part of the King's Wargaming Network Public Lecture Series. The 2020/21 lectures feature speakers who have made important new contributions to developing wargaming theory and applications.