Wargames

The Wargame, by Sky News and Tortoise A recent podcast made by Sky News, find it on your favourite player. It details the players’ actions during a one day wargame, representing a Russian attack against the UK, and the British response. Overall I liked the gentle introduction to the setting and the terms - that this is explicitly aimed at the general public as an introduction to the format and/or the situation, rather than to a set of wise elders nodding sagely at each other while they all tut about the same things in unison. As you’d expect from a journalist with her experience, Deborah Haynes gives clear and timely explanations from the start - and never long enough to distract a more experienced listener. I liked the scenario - as good as it could be when you’ve brought everyone together for a subject-specific wargame, so players know they’re probably reacting to intentional prompts rather than a misunderstanding of innocent events. ...

I’ve written a couple of pieces in another couple of places: On the Milmud blog I wrote up my recent experience of using an online LLM to help me research relevant facts quickly, you can read that here. On LinkedIn I’m running a poll-based game about how an invented organisation should handled a potential cyber security issue, if you’ve got an account on LinkedIn you can participate here. Otherwise my latest episode of weeknotes, covering the last couple of years, are due out any day now…

From about July 2021 until June 2022 I played “Battle of Tuyệt Quá HởTấn”, one of the “Section by Section” games by Hearts of Oak. This was played online over WhatsApp and Google Slides. The setting is a small village during the Vietnam War. Both the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army are defending the civilians in the village, with American soldiers coming to interrogate them using four platoons from two companies. That’s about 200 hundred soldiers on each side. Before any pieces are placed on the virtual board, the game looks like the image below. The village to the North of the map, the darkest green is jungle, the light green is brush, the blue is paddy fields. ...

My previous week: Looking back on the previous week, I only realised that “playing as a team” was a common thread through the most significant and/or interesting events when I was putting together this weeknote. I watched a presentation by CrowdSec a “free and open-source collaborative IPS”. I need to experiment with the software, but I was impressed by the team behind it, and their approach to making something like this work while also keeping one eye on the business model. I’d be interested to hear from anyone using it, or with strong experience in how well crowd sourced threat intelligence works out. I took part in a couple of playtests of the Minimator game - operated as part of the work of the Research Institute of Sweden. This is a well put together game, probably aimed at policymakers, to explain basic concepts in how cyber defence and zero day markets work. There’s a lot of work gone into the game, and still a lot to do; but there’s definitely something in this and I’m optimistic about what the project will achieve in future. I was a sounding board for someone working through their career options, and they highlighted how much leading and being part of a team meant to them. I realise that aspect of work probably means more to me than I expected, my involvement in PlaySecure being the most obvious… but increasingly I find myself pushing to work with others before I’ve a fully formed idea. This has led to some promising concepts, but there’s also been many times that hasn’t worked at all after auspicious starts. At some point, but only after something has paid off, I should work out my “completion percentage” on ideas. Separate from that team based theme though, I watched Vivo; a delightful film, well paced, engaging, suitable for children if you’re up for “adult themes” and some definite peril. Not quite at the level of Hamilton... but still... definite peril...