Wargaming Weekly #046: Is this global wargaming community the most important pillar of the NATO alliance?
My debut interview, with Major Edward Farren (co-director at Fight Club International)
You might remember from Wargaming Weekly #044 that it was Major Edward Farren (co-director of Fight Club International) who nudged me to try the Readiness micro wargame.
“There aren’t many games that help explain the realities of military readiness to civilian audiences—especially policymakers. This game (which involves no combat) is designed to show what happens when expectations outpace what the system can realistically deliver, and how even well-intentioned commitments can run into the limits of people, equipment, and time,” he highlighted.
Furthermore, Major Farren is currently serving as a British Army Exchange Officer in the Canadian Army so he really puts the “international” in Fight Club International.
Well, I decided to nudge him back with an interview request to share more about this global wargaming community that he co-founded with Colonel Arnel David (the U.S. Army Colonel leading Task Force Maven at NATO to deploy Project Maven, the Pentagon’s flagship AI initiative that uses machine learning to rapidly analyze data and identify threats).
That request has now successfully panned out into my first ever Wargaming Weekly interview!
Forgive me, Father for I have broken the first rule of Fight Club…
If you are interested in joining or supporting Fight Club International, please follow this link: https://www.fightclubinternational.org/join-and-support
Rwizi: How exactly does Fight Club work? How does one join? How often do members meet? Physically or online?
Edward: You can join by applying on our website, approval grants access to member only pages of our site and an invite to our master discord where we coordinate and share ideas. Physical meet-ups are rarer but national chapters exist to enable people within countries to self-organize.
We try to attend a couple of key conferences such as Connections, DSEI, IT2EC, DSET where members run games. One of the ironies is that we have had people try to tell us about Fight Club not realising we are Fight Club members.
We do a townhall at the end of each year to round out what we achieved and signal the direction of travel for the next year
Rwizi: Digital wargaming vs. manual wargaming: is this a debate worth having or is it just a distraction? How is the Fight Club community navigating this divide?
Edward: It’s click bait – they both have strengths and weaknesses. I think you could say that a lot of defence wargaming is boutique complex analogue and not widely available, takes weeks to play and conducted by greybeards. Likewise, a lot of defence simulation was often graphically behind the curve, limited to its original software builds and not able to represent the modern environment and platforms. So what we want is accessible analogue and digital games that are easy to get into, give rapid feedback to improve players, educate on themes and create exploitable data.
We’ve got an analogue games page where we have our homegrown crop of games that help attract people. These are all available free to anyone who signs up as a member (which costs nothing).
We use a number of digital games, many by Matrix Pro Simulations but also plenty from other developers. I do want to stress that being a member of FCI doesn’t mean you need to own 40 digital games to participate…
Overall, the simulation medium is less important than the wargame design which is what decisions are the players making and how they are immersed in the scenario. I’ve seen million dollar digital games fail because the players weren’t immersed in their roles and $10 analogue games succeed because the players were engaged and really acted out their personas.
Hybrid is often the answer – one of the games we use, Command, can render thousands of entities in huge detail – this is far too much for a human to cogitate so we found that players planning on an analogue map with traditional counters as a way to get round this.
Rwizi: Just like in many fields, AI is the hot topic in wargaming. How’s Fight Club embracing it? What are you excited about? What are you wary of?
Edward: Yes and we are trying to be a pioneer in this space. A lot of what people say is AI is just a LLM, often without sufficient training. We know this because we tried it ourselves.
We ran an AI jam with some members discussing how we could use AI in our future activities. Here are some of the examples below:
More tangibly we ran a matrix game called Persian Predicament using an LLM to support the design, execution and analysis. There is a free report you can read about it.
There are ethical concerns and security concerns such as escalation bias by LLMs – where is all our data going and is it profiling the human inputting it? The whole world is struggling to get a healthy relationship with AI and wargaming is no different. Personally I fear that too many new wargamers ‘default’ to AI/LLM use rather than learning about game design through self-study and iterative failure. The more I see LLMs taking the role of facilitators the more I worry we are losing that critical skill.
Rwizi: Micro wargames. Are they worth the heavy design effort they require given their typically low replayability? How’s Fight Club embracing them?
Edward: I think they are a great gateway game but as you say people quickly tire of them and want to move onto the next thing. We’ve only made a couple and to be fair the danger is you add more and more to them until they are no longer a micro game. We do want to encourage more people to have a go designing a micro game.
Rwizi: What is Fight Club currently tinkering with?
Edward: We’re running a tournament Russo-Ukraine war using Combat Mission: Black Sea (CMBS) where teams of 4 will co-plan and co-execute 3 mirror matches against opponents set in 2022 scenarios. The winning teams will progress to an urban finale set in Mariupol.
We are also discussing running a matrix game set in Europe regarding Grey Zone Warfare using the War Paths software and we have a company looking at digitizing our gateway game Take That Hill! into a more accessible app. Lastly, our space wargame primer Sweeping Satellites is getting published by Dietz Foundation around Christmas time.
Rwizi: What is Fight Club doing specifically to bring the younger generation (especially Gen Z) into wargaming?
Edward: Gen Z are an untapped fountain of potential but their generation is struggling to make an impact in many facets of modern life. New members are asked if they are Gen Z and if they declare it they are added to a private channel in the Discord.
One of our young superstars Charlie Bradbury is leading a Gen Z mentoring scheme to match up Gen Z’s with other members willing to give their time and expertise. We are keen to run a webinar specifically for Gen Z’s perhaps with Luke Miller as a guest (after listening to his episode on The Convergence podcast by the Army Mad Scientist Laboratory). Check out what Fight Club Turkiye, one of our chapters, is doing with a young female team.
Rwizi: What is the biggest achievement so far at Fight Club that you’re most proud of, and why? What is the biggest benefit that members highlight getting out of Fight Club?
Edward: I think our webinar series with 25 full length episodes and 4 mini PME game design webinars really sets us apart from a ‘casual gaming club’. I think we offer that mix of serious discussion and creative play that you don’t often get in the same mix. As to what the members get out of Fight Club I think this is a very unique experience and no two members are going to give you exactly the same answer.
We often joke that everyone knows 5 wargamers who know 5 wargamers who know 5 wargamers and so on. Fight Club links these small pools together so that people can access more ideas, more games and supercharge their learning or game design.
If you are trying to start out in wargaming/simulation in defence it can be super daunting and the examples with jobs are often over 50 and almost exclusively analogue gamers. Fight Club is a fantastic way to soft launch into the field and get practical experience before that all important first hire.
Rwizi: If Fight Club disappeared today, what would this mean for professional wargaming?
Edward: I think it would be a great loss. There isn’t really anywhere else that we can see which is an open sandbox the way Fight Club is. Being extremely humble I don’t think that many people know we exist but for over 2,000 members we have certainly changed the game in their lives. When you map that across the very niche number of employed wargamers in the West that could be quite a large statistic.
Rwizi: What are your top 3 countries that do not yet have a Fight Club chapter that you feel should already have one, and why?
Edward: Australia – they do lots of wargaming so this is more about harnessing that power into the wider network. France – a key NATO ally and again, plenty of wargamers. Poland – this country has really become a powerhouse in Europe and understands the threat only too well.
Rwizi: Where would you like to see Fight Club 5 years from now and what’s the biggest hurdle in the way to that destination?
Edward: On a more sustainable footing with dedicated money coming in so we can pay for members to attend conferences as game facilitators without a second thought. This would also mean we can provide seed funding for game design and publishing. More physical meet-ups in the USA, UK and Europe which then supercharges networking and collaboration. Running a more modestly priced wargame design course for those trying to start out in wargaming.
[INTERVIEW ENDS HERE]
Once again, if you are interested in joining or supporting Fight Club International, please follow this link: https://www.fightclubinternational.org/join-and-support
PS: I’m currently open to content marketing and/or game co-designing gigs (for defense, academic or business wargaming projects) as a part-time remote freelancer i.e. 10 – 30 hours per week. Please feel free to reach out to me via X or LinkedIn to book a free consultation call. Like the Gen-Z kids like to say… lemme cook!
Lastly… what’s that over there in the Business Corner?
Anduril, the poster child of the nascent American defense startup scene, has released their EagleEye headset with a really cool tag line: “Superpowers For Superheroes”
And according to their General Manager for Warfighter Systems it can be leveraged for, amongst other things, virtual wargaming.
Yours in hex,
Rwizi.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha is a freelance wargame researcher, analyst and designer. With a background of over 10 years in B2B marketing, Rwizi is also a Co-Founder, Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Lupiiya Books - the social finance app that is gamifying both accounting and fundraising for African startup founders and small business owners.
