At the Intersection of Simulations, Gaming, & the War Profession

[josh]

The sub-fields of Behavioral Finance & Cognitive Heuristics have developed a catalog of examples/principles where people typically make sub-optimal decisions or inferences. It’s possible to translate most of those examples to various sorts of military decision-making/reaction scenarios. There might be interest in developing that as a teaching tool.

[josh]

As a child, I had an illustrated book on the history of the American Civil War which included double-page color illustrations of some synthetic scene representing every major battle. The links below are not identical to that book, but they illustrate the kind of views that were used. The memory of those illustrations stuck with me, even though I am not a big war fan. I feel like it would be an intriguing feature to be able to generate comparable scenes from timepoints in wargame simulations.

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/battle-of-chancellorsville-1863-royalty-free-illustration/1153583650?adppopup=true&uiloc=thumbnail_similar_images_adp

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/battle-of-chickamauga-1863-royalty-free-illustration/1153344728?adppopup=true

The pictures are not quite literal or perfectly realistic, but we can argue that they are effective visual communication to help give a sense of what was happening around a given point in time & space. Both space & time are warped to enhance communication. The space warping is near field detail + large scale context. The time warping is a compression of meanigful + transition gestures/activity into a single timepoint. A user interface could allow the user to specify how much of each type of distortion they would like to include in the rendering.

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