WPenner's Blog

There is obviously a hierarchy to news, and it is changing from what we think of as traditional, mainstream, or legacy to new media, social media, and decentralized media. What is less obvious is that for those who seek the greatest insight will increasingly play games.

Media Hierarchy & Competitors

Stop me if you've heard this before, it's hardly a new idea. Depending on the depth of analysis you want from media, there are different sources which cater to informational needs. Radio, tv and newspapers serve up our the daily buzz. Magazines look a little deeper and academic publications deeper still. Books go the deepest. Each of these media types has emerging competition based on digitization.

Daily Media

The traditional news media, of print, tv and radio, focuses on the daily churn of events. Little to no analysis is possible in the rush to publication. This has been true for decades, but the 24/7 nature of cable news pushed the publication cycle to even greater vacuousness by requiring ever more content on ever shorter deadlines. The immediacy of the format produces a creative race to the bottom for increasingly sensational as salacious stories.

The primary competition of these forms of traditional media is currently social media, where citizen journalists, or just interested parties, post the news faster than a professionally employed journalist is able.

Magazines

For those who seek greater depth of understanding, the next source of news was the magazine. Instead of the daily reactionary churn of news, magazines often take a 1-week to 1-month view, providing time to analyze situations, consider diverse perspectives and write longer pieces. The deeper analysis often leads magazines to be focused on a particular aspect of the news, rather than trying to cover every aspect broadly. Examples of the focus and depth include the Economist, Popular Science, and Wine Enthusiast.

The principal source of competition for magazines are blogs, video channels, and newsletters which dedicate themselves to a single topic. Despite considerable amounts of dross, these literary outputs also produce extremely high-quality analysis, often done by industry insiders, available either free or for a price.

Academic Publications

For those who seek greater depth than even magazines can provide, there are intellectuals who produce academic journals, think tank reports, and policy position papers. The timescale for these intellectual works focuses on information between months and years old. Professionally published works often have some sort of journalistic standards requiring fact checking or peer review to keep the standards high.

The open source scholarship movement and the decentralized science movement are the chief competition for these intellectual efforts. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) like the AthenaDAO, use crowd sourced, funded, and community controlled interests to drive scientific research into issue related to topics the community deems important.

Books

Finally, there are books, which aggregate information on a timescale of years to millennium. The benefit of books is their depth of information on an extremely selective topic. Books are the hardest to write and to get published by a professional publisher. They require extensive research and organization of results before going to press. Publishers push for the information in books to be as accurate as possible and historically employ people to double-check information, proofread and edit.

The obvious competition for professionally published books is self publishing, which has been around in many forms for decades. Anyone can put their book up on Amazon, Apple Books and a host of other digital stores. There are plenty of printers who can print either a single copy or thousands of hard- or softcover books for a fee.

The Need to go Beyond Books

Some people need to go beyond an intellectual understanding of events because they need to react to them. These include, but are not limited to, the military, politicians, and business people. Their plans and directions require more than just knowledge of the facts or a detached interest in differing views. They must understand and make decisions which impact other people's lives, livelihoods and well-being.

Human decision-making mostly derives from two sources: experience and emotion. Sales people have long recognized that people "decide emotionally and justify rationally." What we think of as "intuitive" is mostly our brain using well-worn pathways to guide emotions and thinking to similar results as before.

Wargames Applied Broadly

The military has used wargaming since the 1960s to improve the experience of different levels of military commanders in hypothetical situations to inform decision maker's experience and emotion. Though far from perfect, early results in the US immediately showed how powerful these simulations could be. Wargames became increasingly massive and spread across many days, with participants from every military branch and many international partners getting involved.

Wargames also moved into political thinking. Governmental departments use wargames to explore and better understand how situations might develop. Wargaming of a Covid-like pandemic before 2019 leads some to suggest that Covid was planned. In a sense, it was: different groups considered their reactions ahead of the actual emergency. In that sense, wargaming is a form of Louis Pasteur's "…chance favours only the prepared mind."

What we inevitably discover after planning is Clausewitz's , "No plan survives first contact with the enemy", which points to the chaos which inevitably happens when two or more opposing forces meet. We cannot control the chaos, only our choice of reaction to it. Which is why, although planning is far from perfect, not planning is a disaster!

These observations and experiences led to introducing wargaming beyond the military and political into the worlds of academia and business. This version of wargaming commonly includes elements of competition, macro-scale economic factors, and political or sociological forces. Given how games in business and academia don't involve war, except as a metaphor, participants prefer the name "serious games". "A rose by any other name…" and "by their fruits…" naturally apply.

Here in Canada, Rex Brynen, a Political Science professor currently at McGill University, runs a blog called PAXsims.¹ The blog help coordinate an international effort to use wargames for the cause of "peacebuilding". By exploring simulations of conflict and development, they expect to better understand how to move towards peace.

The Dado Center in Israel does something similar, using historical data to play out possible scenarios. ² They then use the results to take actions in the present to avoid the negative results and move towards the positive results envisioned by the gameplay.

Final Thoughts

Planning is a uniquely human trait. Although other animals foresee the consequences of their actions to some extent, humans use their brainpower best when they think through multiple scenarios and use what they learn to improve their lives. We do this all the time, usually intuitively.

Humans also want (sometimes desperately) to know the future. To which Peter Drucker would say, “You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.” To create the future we must go beyond just knowing facts about our present and past. Nor is it sufficient to create mathematical models in the mode of psychohistory from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. We must have a experiences which help us make better emotional (a.k.a. intuitive) decisions about it.

The wargames which help us better understand, emote and plan will become increasingly important to creating our better future.³