Conferences

Coding Medieval Worlds, exactly that. I had the pleasure of attending Coding Medieval Worlds recently. The description from the event’s website is a great summary: “Coding Medieval Worlds is a workshop series that brings together game developers and historians. Run as a fully online forum for discussing shared problems and ideas, CMW has had attendees from almost every part of the world discussing the issues of representing and encoding medieval themes into historical and medieval-fantasy gaming.” ...

This is a list of my thoughts on the particularly valuable points from the Georgetown University Wargaming Society (GUWS) talk: “Based on Mechanics & Theme: Synergies in Game Design” by Damon Stone. You can watch the whole thing on their YouTube channel. ( if you do watch it, there’s literally a couple of pauses due to intermittent connectivity; but they’re not a big deal, and are well handled by all ) GUWS event on July 7th 2022 Provoked thoughts: GUWS is pronounced “goose”?! ...

I worked: I attended DSET - an online military training conference. It was good to see them go hybrid, although I found their chosen platform Hopin disappointing. The event was well handled by Ruddy Nice Limited, especially the issues such as intermittent connectivity and an emergency alarm in the middle of the very first session. Similarly I was at CPCF 6, the Cyber Physical Convergence Forum. I was particularly impressed by Helen Sutton of Dataminr and their presentation, and the emphasis on selling through demonstrating knowledge rather than hard marketing. And also impressed by the overall aim of the event to be hybrid, even with a relatively small space representing the physical side of the event. CTG Intelligence is worth keeping an eye on if you work in any part of security. ...

As fifty percent of my readership complained about the breathless bulleted format I’ve been using, which is a very fair point to make, I’m experimenting with different formatting this “week”, although I’ve much less material. Considering how I create these blogs I should be able to generate an index easily, so it’s trivial for people to see if there’s something of interest each time. ( A newsletter that does this really well is the tl;dr sec newsletter, the format actively encourages picking and choosing the sections relevant to you, I aspire to do the same. ) ...

A summary of what I’ve done over the last month or so. I attended: I went to a Sarah Le-Fevre event where Nick Kellet demonstrated some aspects of his new product, Deckible. It’s an interesting idea, putting card decks on your mobile device, especially the aspect of making card-decks as accessible to everyone in the same way that Spotify does for music. Using an app doesn’t replicate all of the functionality of a card, but there were good demonstrations of the audio and video capabilities. It was interesting to see what the technology is capable of, but I’m not sure these are card-decks now, but also I’m not sure they’re not. Also I was reminded of this tweet thread, and many recent conversations about interfaces and form factors. As per the military trainees in the picture below, while surrounded by laptops, sometimes you need a pen and a shared map to make sense of the environment: picture courtesy of Jim Dawson on Twitter I was in another meeting of the PlaySecure organisers. We decided on ticket prices and discounts and some other administrivia. Follow this for the conference details and we’re using Papercall for content submissions. Ostensibly the conference is about game-based methods to improve decision making in cyber security, but anything related to game-based methods for training or planning will be welcome… especially anything half-complete that would benefit from audience feedback, or something unusual that won’t fit in elsewhere. ...

Last week I appeared on the Circuit Podcast, describing the benefits of wargaming in all forms of security practice. I had a sales call that meant I didn’t get the work, just due to me not being the right fit. However the customer thanked me for being “candid”; which is now my favourite descriptive term for my approach behind “external security brain”. I attended some of another CTG Intelligence conference, always interesting to hear what a different aspect of the security industry has to say. I attended the second set of 44Con talks; I was disappointed that this game was cancelled but I’m seeing more and more signals that there’s a strong future in cyber wargaming. It was a particularly busy week, so I combined a business meeting with James Bore’s open office - I like to think that worked out well, and useful conversations were had. I was one of the members of the Control Team for “Last People on Earth”, a megagame set in the 1st century, working with Stone Paper Scissors. I enjoyed watching the third week of the NFL season, although my team were disappointing.

Last week I attended two days of the profesional wargaming conference Connections UK. This was well done, very interactive, with the team figuring out online problems as they went. More engaging than I expected, with some useful and interesting contacts made to take forward. I attended the Fourth Annual Managed Security Services Forum London MSS London. An interesting event to dip in and out of, especially with the reoccuring theme of building relationships and trust between all the parties involved. Also, as cliched as it might be, that the evolution of Managed Security Services is a journey in developing those “soft skills”, rather tnan focussing on technical ability. I also spoke at MSS London, that panel might be online in future. But if you’re in Cyber Security and have limited time, I have to suggest you check out Megan Gooch’s presentation instead, she made many excellent points based on her experience in counter-terrorism. Me looking thoughtful at MSS London I enjoyed watching the second week of the NFL season, although my team managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. After falling down a “gas lift” hole last week, this week I spent far too much time trying to find a piece of hardware that will support quad displays for VGA over DB15 on a single monitor, more to follow…