Mentioned in Dispatches Season 9 Ep 2 ~ Games vs Sims

16 September 2022 ~

OK, so Rocky picked a fight with his recent analysis of Harold’s latest, the Flashpoint South China Sea game, that sprawled across multiple Twitter threads.  That naturally led to a variety of discussions about “games” vs “sims” and of course, we weren’t going to let the opportunity go to waste, and promptly dialed up Volko Ruhnke for his first ever appearance on Mentioned in Dispatches, and we also brought along Dr James Sterrett, because he’s been losing the “games” vs “sims” argument to Brant since 2007 or so.

Don’t forget, you can always catch up with past episodes on the “podcast” tab of our site.

This isn’t one of our longest podcasts, but we certainly pack a lot into it, with Volko making some great points about simplification, James explaining how models become interactive, and Rocky adding the all-important qualifier of “to me” to just about everything.

We covered a lot of links, so here they are:

• Thematic? A look at Flashpoint Series Volume 1 from GMT Games
• The Twitter reaction to the preceding article
• Mentioned in Dispatches, Season 5 Episode 13 – What Is A “Wargame”?
• Games & Sims for Training & Learning (video)
• Costikyan’s article that Brant keeps citing (PDF)
• Games and Sims for Training and Learning (Brant’s Battle Lab column)
• Games and Sims for Training and Learning, II (James’ Battle Lab column)
• Dunnigan’s book with the below quote (badly paraphrased by Brant)

A wargame is a playable simulation. A conflict simulation is another name for wargame, one that leaves out the two unsavory terms, “war” and “game.”

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